I disagree. "Retire" is applied to every athlete who stops focusing on their sport and moves on to another career. DBELCO spent a number of years fully concentrating on running and basing every single lifestyle decision on what effect, if any, it had on his running. That meant every single day for the most part he woke up with the primary purpose of training and competing. If you relocate to an area for training purposes, hold off marriage and family, and take any part time or full time job to support yourself as long as it doesn't interfere with training, then you are a full-time runner, probably of which there are only 100 or so (I'm just throwing that out) in this country. THen when you stop competing seriously you are therefore "retired".