This is a very interesting article and I highly recommend reading it! Thank you Laura!
When Ken Young returns from his afternoon run on July 6, 2010, he will become a member of the tiny top category of Running Streakers. The man will become a Legend-- one of the very few (increasing the membership from three to four) who have persevered to maintain a daily running streak for forty years.
Ken is listed by the USRSA as a 68-year-old Software Developer in Petrolia, California. And he himself agrees that labels such as Retired Atmospheric Sciences Professor, community volunteer, Buddhist, idealist promoting local self-sufficiency, and statistician-by-nature are acceptable (his love of numbers and service to the running community converge in his website for the Association of Road Racing Statisticians-- www.arrs.net -- which lists worldwide records in elite distance running for over 100,000 races and more than 30,000 runners). But, he says, "The only thing I really am, is a runner." Through thick and thin, illness and health, injury and wholeness, gorgeous weather and conditions from hell, he has run at least a mile daily-- and averaged 8.3 miles per day-- since July, 1970.
What makes him run? "Beating people racing. It really is a big motivation. Our local running club, Six Rivers, has a Grand Prix series, where you are classed into five-year age groups. Last year, nobody in the 65-70-year-old group ran the requisite six races, so all I needed to do was stumble through to be top in my category. But this year, a new guy entered the age group, and I have competition. It keeps me honest; I need to rest, train well, and run every day-- because I don't want him to beat me!" When he began running, Ken put in 15 miles a day. In 1969, he began to log over 2000 miles each calendar year, and has not backed off from that number; in 1970 he made running a daily commitment. "It's about setting and achieving goals-- I am very strong on discipline, which you need if you're going to do something like this. Everything in my day revolves around running. There is no structure to my life other than the discipline to get that run in."
Ken's original motivation for running was personal. "It provided connectivity in my life," he explains. "It's one of the few things I've done every day for 40 years. There have been days I haven't eaten or slept, so other than breathing... it's running. It ties all my life together."
As a lover of mathematics, Ken keeps a logbook noting daily, monthly, and yearly totals and averages, and readily reels off his numbers. By the end of 2009, Ken had run a total of 124,732.4 miles. For the past five years, the average has been about 2200 miles annually. "Right now I'm working on six miles a day, but the minimum to continue the streak would of course be the officially required one mile. I try to stay away from that minimum. But after 40 years, I am having to back off, let my body recover, and try to race better. My goal is 186 miles for May; I only did 156 in April. If I did 166.6 miles per month, or 5.5 per day, that would be 2000 in a year."
His milestones include a Boston Marathon where he achieved a PR of 2:25:41 (32nd in the race, which got him a Boston Medal). Ken's 40-mile record is 4:08:31 on the track; he broke the previous U.S. track record for that distance, which was held by Ted Corbitt, who ran for the U.S. in the 1952 Olympics Marathon. Ted's record of 4:35 was "not a slouch record; so I was pretty pleased with that one." At the time, in 1972, Ken was the ninth-fastest performer in the world for 40 miles.
In 2001, Ken passed the 30-year mark for the longest span of time winning ultra-marathons. On the 16th of May, 1971, he won his first, a 30-mile track race, at 3:11:57, and about 9 years ago (3 Nov 2001), he ran in the Freshwater to Bridgeville (Humboldt County, California) 40-mile ultra-marathon. It was here that he damaged his muscles to an extent still felt today.
The price of such success is, of course, a lot of pain and a lot of running in the rain. The question, "What were your three most challenging days in sticking to your daily streak regimen?" elicits such memories. "Early in the '70s, I had a stomach flu. I remember trying to figure out how I was going to get the run in between visits to the bathroom. You feel a little better just after losing it... I would lie down, get dressed in bed, get to the bathroom, and have to repeat the lie-down breaks between nausea attacks. Once I got running, I felt a little better, and managed to get my three miles done-- my minimum at the time. By the time I got back, I felt sick again, so I went back to bed."
In October of 2003, Ken suffered a major injury while running. He puts it plainly: "I was a klutz; I tripped and fell!" He fell onto his hands and broke both wrists into a nightmare of tiny-bone fractures and crumbles. Since he only had another quarter-mile left to get in his minimum (the one time he only went the single mile), he ran on to a nearby restaurant, where they called the local doctor, who drove him into town, an hour and a half away, to the hospital. Surgery could not be done immediately, so Ken returned home, but not until after midnight, and next day resumed his running with the broken wrists, putting in 1.1 miles at 5 a.m. He had the complex operation later that morning (Day 2), managed to get home by 5 p.m., and on the third day again fit in his 1.1-mile run. "The hardest were Days 2 and 3; every step hurt because of the wrists. I have steel plates in each wrist because of that misadventure."
"But there have been days more difficult than that," Ken confides. "One day all my muscles were giving me fits. They got to the point where they bound my legs up so badly I had trouble putting one foot in front of the other. It took forty minutes to go one and a quarter miles!" But, needless to say, he went. "I thought that I would not even be able to run one step, let alone a mile. My leg muscles and knees were killing me. I found that I could run up and down (lift a leg and let it down) and that I could do this so that I was not in contact with the ground at one point in each 'stride.' By leaning forward, I could actually advance the 'lead' leg by about six inches. In race walking, a requirement is to maintain ground contact at all times, i.e., no 'lifting.' Since I was 'lifting,' I concluded that I was NOT walking and hence, was managing some form of 'running,' as in jogging very slowly."
His tenacity sometimes provided for humorous rather than painful situations: One time on a three-hour layover in Osaka, he was unable to leave the airport without the hassle of clearing customs again. So he found an open area to run around and estimated distance run by the time taken, managing to do his three miles. He ran thirty or forty laps around, chatting with the Japanese, who were amused by the crazy antics of the gai jin. Foreigners aren't expected to conform to Japanese standards, so nobody was offended. Another airport, this one in Atlanta, Georgia, on a 3 a.m. layover, saw him and his wife of the time running 10-minute miles on the underground walkway connecting concourses, while the security camera tracked them and a loudspeaker repeated, "No jogging in the tramway, no jogging in...." Finally they headed up to the main level, where they were quizzed by security and asked to produce their ID's and tickets.
Carrying on as Ken does at the age of 68 requires an enviable basic level of health. Ken maintains a pure diet. "If I can't ID where my food came from, I don't eat it. I like whole foods-- fresh real foods." As founder of his community's annual all-local-foods potluck, and living in an area where year-round gardening is possible and widely practiced, he generally has an easy time finding such foods-- often from his own yard. There are a couple of exceptions: "I do like mixed nuts, especially pecans; and a favorite snack is V-8 and pecans. I eat saltines before running to
absorb stomach acid and have something in my stomach while running that will not cause problems."
As far as supplements go, he takes Vitamins A, the B's (especially important: megadoses of niacin, which aside from general health and energy, is recently credited with curing, i.e. reversing the effects of, Alzheimer's), C, D, E, and calcium and magnesium. He also ingests the spice Turmeric every day. It's an anti-inflammatory he swears by (it is also known as a preventative for Alzheimer's Disease). He never takes Advil or other pharmaceuticals, and never even aspirin. Nor does he take any energy supplements before a run, or anything specifically to rebuild damaged tissue, other than the Turmeric. He uses DMSO topically as an anti-inflammatory rub, and is a firm believer in its benefits.
Ken eschews yoga, as he once torqued his joints in that practice, and is not of a temperament to do anything passive that takes the time yoga seems to require. He does stretch regularly and for the past year and a half has undergone trigger-point therapy twice a month. That's where the practitioner "presses like hell on the knots." His recent path to health is basically working toward a return to smooth functioning after the ultra-marathon of 2001, where he "trashed" his legs; all the muscles were torn up. He is still recovering from this, nine years later. Running was a torture for most of the decade, though walking didn't seem to hurt. "The Bridgeville 40-mile was probably the last straw in a long series of abuses to the muscles. It was a month or so after this race that I started having great difficulty moving my legs to be able to run a ten-minute mile. Now that I understand what the problem is, I can see how that Bridgeville run contributed. Basically, virtually every muscle in my legs has multiple knots (semi-permanent spasms) which shorten the muscles, making it difficult to stride out. Walking was fine because I didn't have to stretch the muscles as much. The therapy is to work out the knots from the hips to the toes."
But this January, his right leg was freed up, and between his recently more measured approach and temporarily decreased distance/time expectations, and the trigger-point therapy, he anticipates gradually being completely released from tightness in the near future. "My therapist is now working on basics, rather than simply addressing acute issues. It will be several more sessions before I am rebuilt, and then I plan on maintenance once a month to keep the same thing from happening again."
Ken describes his daily running ritual thus: "I usually walk over to the Post Office in the early afternoon; come home and stretch for less than a half hour, then go run. I come home and eat some V-8 and pecans, and apply the rolling pin to work out the knots. But I won't do that forever; it's just a temporary solution."
Such a running ritual is one of the only regular occurrences in a life pulled in many different directions by community service obligations and an active, alert social and spiritual conscience. Ken enjoys his reputation as a nitpicking statistician, an old curmudgeon ready to correct your figures, who stops at nothing to achieve his competitive goals. But anyone who knows him sees that his motivations manage to serve both his own growth and that of his community, be it the local economy and culture, the international running community, or the community of souls known as humanity. We are lucky to have him here in Petrolia.
~by neighbor Laura Cooskey, who knows Ken through his activity with the Mattole Grange, the Mattole Valley Historical Society, the Mattole Self-Sufficiency Project, the Mattole Valley Community Center, etc.
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