Buzz Gagne likes to poke fun at himself.

I discovered that he doesn’t deserve it.

He says he’s round, shrinking, achy and old, but the record book shows he’s dynamite with a javelin, throwing it farther than anyone else ever has for his age bracket – 70 to 74 years old – when it comes to national track and field competition.

Stocky and strong with finely tuned technique, Gagne won the gold medal at the National Senior Games in Birmingham, Ala., last month.

“I had some really good competition,” Gagne told me Thursday at a soggy Memorial Field. “There was someone from North Carolina who was good that I was able to beat.”

When I got back to the office, I chose to do a little research, looking to add some clarity, context and legitimacy to this retiree from Concord.

Titles are fine, but I wondered how big the Birmingham field was, thinking that, perhaps, as a senior athlete Gagne had beaten only one or two others to claim this championship. And maybe his winning distance wasn’t really all that impressive.

Maybe this really wasn’t a very good column idea.

It was.

I went to the National Senior Games Association website. Gagne beat 18 competitors, including that guy from North Carolina, a fellow named Sanford Stoddard. Gagne threw his javelin 47.76 meters, or 156 feet, 8.31 inches, an American record, beating Stoddard by more than 6 feet.

And there’s more.

I looked at a younger age bracket, the one for athletes in the 65 to 69 division. An athlete from Los Angeles won that national championship, checking in at 150 feet, 8.66 inches.

Yep, once again, about 6 feet behind our local boy.

So then I looked at the 60-64 division, just for kicks. A thrower from Pennsylvania took that title and beat Gagne by almost 10 feet, as he should have.

From there, though, all 16 competitors, each five to 10 years younger than Gagne, finished with shorter throws, with the second place finisher, someone from Virginia, a whopping 7-plus feet back.

That’s a column. The one about the assistant track coach at Merrimack Valley High School who ran track at his Massachusetts high school, but got really serious more than 30 years later, as a senior competitor.

“The man is a world-class athlete,” said Bob Mullen, Merrimack Valley High’s longtime head track coach. “He gets better all the time with age. The man continues to excel with techniques of throwing the javelin, using hips and shoulders.”

For Gagne, the backstory, the dramatic stuff, goes back a long way, to the Vietnam War, where he served as the crew chief on a helicopter gunship. He took some shrapnel in what he preferred to call his upper, upper back thigh.

He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2011. He said his midsection felt “like having an animal inside of you trying to scratch his way out.”

And while his illness put the brakes on his senior athletic career somewhat, it came nowhere close to stopping it. Gagne did yoga and stretching exercises, then jumped back in.

“I lost all my core strength and it really hurt to throw,” Gagne told me. “I threw hard and I just doubled over, and it took about one full season before I could throw without pain.”

The doctor told him he was cancer-free after Gagne won the javelin title at the 2015 National Senior Games in St. Paul, Minn. In all, the 5-foot-8, 213-pound crackle of thunder owns 11 USA Track and Field championships in senior javelin competition, and perennially sets national records while competing in the National Senior Games.

He appreciates his success, telling me, “It’s still mind-boggling to me. My joke was that when I won a few championships I thought all of the good guys must have retired.”

They haven’t. Gagne just happens to be beating the heck out of everyone.

And his contributions go beyond places like Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where Gagne will compete Sunday in the USA Track and Field Masters Championships.

He brings his skill to the track at Rolfe Park, where he’s been coaching the Merrimack Valley High team for 11 years. Mullen could barely contain himself when asked about his assistant, giving full credit to Gagne for developing state champions like Ashley Dlubac, John Lindonen and Chris Bohi.

He had no idea who he was adding to his staff 11 years ago, when Gagne volunteered to help.

“When you bring someone on, you want to ask in a polite way what you know about the javelin, and you don’t want someone to know more about it than you,” Mullen said. “But it took about 10 seconds to know he knew more than I did, and boy, have our results taken off through the years thank to Buzz. His fingerprints on New Hampshire track and field are quite significant.”

His fingerprints are everywhere on the national scene as well.

He wasn’t done packing Thursday for his trip to Baton Rouge when I called, and he had a two-hour drive to his girlfriend’s house to catch a plane Friday for this weekend’s meet.

And it was raining and cold outside, not exactly a good time to meet at empty Memorial Field for an interview and photo shoot.

But Gagne came anyway, carrying his javelin and wearing shorts and a T-shirt that read, “Stronger after 65.”

He’s new to the 70-plus age division this year, and said, wearily, “I’m not really looking forward to going to another age group, believe me.”

Neither is the competition.

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