The Streakers

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2010. If you asked me the best runner I’ve ever known personally, I’d ask what you mean by “best.” In terms of honors won and times run, I would call it a tie and go with the gold medalists: Frank Shorter and Joan Benoit Samuelson. Everyone has heard of them.

But if “best” means the runner who has run the most, and most often, for the longest time, I’d name someone you might never have read about until now. That’s Mark Covert. He’s the most consistent and the most single-minded runner I’ve ever known.

Now the running coach at Antelope Valley College in southern California, Covert was a college student himself during the 1972 Olympic Trials (where he would place seventh in the marathon at age 20). We met at a McDonald’s, both because runners still paid their own way to the Trials then and because runners didn’t worry as much about their diet then as they do now. Mark let drop offhandedly that he hadn’t missed a day’s run in almost four years. He had become a streaker, running style.

With us at McDonald’s was Tom Fleming, a future 2:12 marathoner. He and Covert were competing to see who could go the longest without taking a day off. Mark said later, “When I was younger and racing a lot, my attitude was that no one was going to out-tough me or out-strength me. They might have beat me, but they were going to have to run hard that day. The streak was part of that attitude.”

In 1976 we both joined the same tour group to the Boston Marathon. The good luck of the draw made him my roommate, in a hotel where the air-conditioning failed on the infamous “Run for the Hoses” weekend.

Mark ran with the leaders until the heat got to him. Dropping out was a blow to the competitor in him but no setback for the streaker. This bad day still counted as a run day. By then he’d gone nearly eight years without skipping one.

In 1988, as the streak reached 20 years, I first wrote about him in a magazine article. Multi-sporting and cross-training were in vogue by then, but he ignored these trends. He had no time for or interest in doing anything but run.

“I don’t swim, I don’t bike, I don’t stretch, I don’t lift weights,” he said. “I just run.” He didn’t run for his health or (since ending his career of national-class racing) to win races. He now ran mainly to keep running. He was, by his own proud definition, a “monoathlete.”

On the streak’s 25^th anniversary Mark told reporter Mike Butwell of the Los Angeles Times, “At this point it’s a big deal to me. I don’t know what it means to other people, other than they think Covert is a little wacko.” How wacko? You be the judge.

He once ran on the pitching deck of a cruise ship caught in a Caribbean storm. “The crew was taking bets on when he was going overboard,” recalled Mark’s wife Debi.

Another time Mark was hospitalized with a severe case of flu. When a doctor told him he must stay overnight, he recalled, “I popped right up and said, ‘Get me out of here!’ “

Covert ran on a broken foot, suffered in a mid-run leap to avoid stepping on a snake. “I taped up the foot with an Ace bandage and [wore] a heavy construction boot, and shuffled three miles in 25 or 26 minutes. But I got my run in.”

In perhaps his most cringe-inducing episode he ran right before and the day after hemorrhoid surgery. “I was in a lot of pain,” he said, “but I survived.”

The rules for streaks are set by each streaker. Covert sets a three-mile minimum for himself.

When he heard that British runner Ron Hill, who claims a streak dating back to 1964, crutching a single mile in 27 minutes the day after a car crash broke his sternum, Mark said, “That’s getting ridiculous. Does that mean if I break both my legs but push myself around in a wheelchair for three miles that my streak is still alive? I don’t think so.”

Covert’s streak stood at 27 years when I wrote about him in the book Better Runs. He said then, “There are no days when I get up and think, ‘Gee, if I didn’t have this streak I wouldn’t go for a run.’ That’s never happened.”

And it still hasn’t. His streak passed 15,000 straight days in 2009 and reached its 42^nd anniversary a year later. These aren’t token runs either. For the life of the streak he has averaged almost 9½ miles a day, or 66 a week. His record mileage for a year is 6265 (17 per day).

Approaching his 60^th birthday in 2010, Mark reported that he was “down” to 50 miles or so per week. “I am running about 55 minutes to 80 minutes each day except for the days my teams have meets; then I only get in 30 minutes or so.”

He added, “I have not had any real problems keeping the streak going the last few years. I did have shoulder surgery last spring, but that was not a big deal. I just ran with my arm in a sling for a week or so.”

Though the junior-college runners he coaches mix their activities somewhat, he remains a committed monoathlete. He said, “What I told you in the 1980s is still true. I don’t swim, bike, stretch, do bounding drills or plyometrics. I have lifted weights now and then, but usually there are several years between sets.”

A better way to describe Mark Covert than the best runner of my acquaintance is that he’s the purest. He didn’t become a runner so he could spend his limited training time doing something else, including taking days off from running.

Later. A chronic foot ailment ended Mark Covert’s running streak at 45 years. He then became a “streaker” as a bicyclist.

(Photo: Mark Covert, the king of American running streakers.)

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Personal Records, Run Gently Run Long, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, The Running Revolution and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

The Oldies

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2010. “Age Unlimited” was the title of this program the day before the Royal Victoria Marathon. We three panelists talked about what hardly anyone in the audience wanted to think about, but everyone who hung around this sport long enough would become: older and slower.

My stagemates, Rose Marie Preston and Ken Bonner, would each run their 30^th Royal Vic the next morning. Rose Marie told of never being injured, and Ken said he seldom had. They agreed this was because they had run less and cross-trained more as they’d aged.

I spoke last and had the least to say about my recent marathons. They numbered just three in the decade about to end and just one – ever – in Victoria. I have been injured, lots of times in almost every way known to sports-medical science. I don’t cross-train, which might help explain the previous sentence.

So I yielded to Preston and Bonner to advise about training and racing at an age when injuries come faster and healing is slower. When my turn came to speak, I gave but one tip about making peace with age. That was to make friends with the watch. Or put another way, Don’t let the old times haunt you.

One of the best features of running is the personal record. No one can set it for you or can break it but you.

And for runners with more than a few years on us, one of the worst features for runners is also the personal record. It stands as clear and objective evidence of what we once could do and never will again. The permanent PRs will taunt you if you let them, which I don’t.

I’m proud of my old PRs, but no less proud of the personal worsts that fall (or rise) today. I once ran a faster marathon than almost anyone in the Victoria meeting room. Now I am slower than almost anyone there. If I let slower times shame me, they would have driven me from races long ago.

I’m no more ashamed of the PW than I am inordinately proud of the PR. The PW might mean even more to me.

My fastest time came at 23, an age when we can get by with almost anything and we take everything for granted. The slowest came in my latest marathon, after life had kicked me around for another four-plus decades. I take nothing for granted anymore, not even my next marathon.

We’re given about 10 years to improve our times, no matter when we started running. What then? I look to one of my early and lasting heroes for an answer.

Johnny Kelley won twice at the Boston Marathon and finished second many times. By the time I first interviewed Kelley, he was the sport’s elder statesman. His most memorable line spoken then: “What you keep doing after you’ve done your best racing is what really counts.”

For him it was continuing to run long after his PRs had passed. He kept going, and inspiring generations of younger runners, into his 90s. He judged success not by the stopwatch but by the calendar.

One way to keep time from haunting or taunting us is to ignore it. But that’s hard to do now when instant Internet results-reporting leaves no place to hide from inquiring minds, including our own.

Another way to play tricks with time is to renew the PR list every so often. National records account for age difference with listings by 10-year, five-year and even single-year increments. This should give us permission to do the same with personal records.

My way of making peace with time has been to run with it instead of against it. Except in races, which are rare these days and growing rarer, I rarely check the distance or pace. I just run by time periods – 30 minutes, one hour – and let the miles pass unnoticed.

I’ve long sung the praises of by-time running, giving every possible reason except the best one now, which is: Minutes and hours are the same length today that they were in 1964 when my mile took the least time, and in 1967 when I finished a marathon the soonest.

Later. I'm back to going by miles now, which are the same length now that they've always been. They take longer to finish, but those extra minutes don't haunt me when left off the books. Only the combination of distance and time reminds me too much of fast days long past.

(Photo: Johnny Kelley in one of his later-life races.)

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Personal Records, Run Gently Run Long, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, The Running Revolution and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

The R.K.

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2009. Dave “Roadkill” Johnson picked up that nickname early in his career with the U.S. Forest Service, where he worked as a wildlife specialist. One of his tasks was postmortem exams of highway casualties within the forests. To ease confusion in an office with two Dave Johnsons, one became Roadkill. He kept the name, even after the other Dave moved on.

R.K., as I always called our Dave, became a friend 20 years ago when he first invited me to the Walker North Country Marathon in northern Minnesota. He had founded this race, setting a pattern of bringing events to unlikely places. This one resided in a town of 1100 within the Chippewa National Forest.

The next assignment took R.K. and his family to the Tongass Forest on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. You couldn’t find a spot much more remote for a marathon than the town of Craig, population 1200. To reach it from the Lower 48, you first must fly to Ketchikan and then catch a ferry or a single-engine float plane to the island.

When he first told me, “I want to start a marathon here,” I stopped just short of saying: Yeah, right. Do you think runners will travel here? I didn’t say it but thought it.

Doubters didn’t deter him. In 2002, I was one of the travelers to the Prince of Wales Marathon. About 40 marathoners ran that year, including R.K. himself. He admittedly hadn’t trained enough for it. But he showed the same confidence that he would finish this race as he’d demonstrated in starting it as an organizer. He finished.

He invited me back for the next year, when megamarathoner Bob Dolphin and his wife Lenore were the special guests. Each year thereafter the POW race flew in a speaker from the Lower 48 – including Dick Beardsley and Priscilla Welch. I’m sure that R.K. picked up much of the cost himself, since sponsorship is scarce on the island.

A few more years passed when we seldom saw each other but connected often by phone and email. By now he had taken to calling me “Coach,” as in his coach. Never have I had less success getting a runner to follow a program.

He downplayed a big life-event, his small stroke a few years ago. He said nothing about it unless asked. When he wasn’t talking about ideas to “make Prince of Wales bigger and better,” he was promising to “get more serious about my own running again.” He never quite kept that promise to himself, but running was always about more than himself.

He ran two Marine Corps Marathons, still undertrained, as a way of honoring his father. The elder Johnson, now in his mid-80s, had served in the World War II Marines. At his first DC race he was greeted as a returning hero. The next year R.K. arranged a family reunion there. Both of his and Pauline’s sons and their wives are long-distance runners.

In 2007, I was with R.K. at Dick Beardsley’s marathon camp in Minnesota. When he heard about Dick’s other camp venture, in Iowa for high school runners, he said, “We need to do that in Craig.” We knew better by now than to say, or think: Yeah, right.

He pulled off such a camp in grand style the next summer, drawing about 50 kids to his hometown (some traveling as long as 18 hours by ferry). He planned to make of “bigger and better” next time – also longer, with two extra says. Kids from the Iowa camp even plotted a trip to Alaska.

The god that R.K Dave was devoted to had other plans for him. In January, I heard from Jan Seeley of Marathon & Beyond that “R.K. Johnson passed away this morning.” He was only 59.

This news hit me hard, and left me searching for the few visible mementos of him. One was his final email, sent within the past two weeks. He started by reporting, “Our younger son and daughter-in-law let us know they are expecting, after seven years of marriage and being told that neither could have children. What do doctors know?”

He ended by saying he’d taken “a little time off from running, but I’m starting again with the new year. Now I have to start planning for running camp.”

My reply that day was too hasty. I thought we’d talk again soon, but you can never count on that. Now I’m left with the memories of this good friend, of mine and of the sport.

Later. On our final visit R.K. had handed me a photo that showed both of us at the start of his Prince of Wales Marathon. With it came a handwritten note that read:

“This is one of my most prized possessions. I’m entrusting you to keep it for me until I finish my next Boston Marathon. Then and only then do you have to give it back.”

I can’t do that now. All I can do is tell his story here.

(Photo: “R.K.” Johnson, chief benefactor of the POW Marathon, from its start until his end.)

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Personal Records, Run Gently Run Long, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

The Country

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2009. Ask me to name my favorite marathon and I can’t pick a single race. Instead I list a handful, each for a different reason: Boston because it’s Boston, Royal Victoria because it’s like going to Europe without leaving North America, Napa Valley because its vineyard vistas are intoxicating, Big Sur because of its spectacular meeting of water and land, and Avenue of the Giants because it runs through a cathedral of redwoods.

These five stand out from several dozen marathon courses I’ve run, and at least twice that many more visited without going the full distance. Note that all but two (Boston and Victoria) are mostly or entirely rural. All except Boston are midsized to small, with none of the other four topping 3200 finishers in 2008.

Marathoning today is largely citified. Urban races offer the size and services that runners have come to expect. Attractive as escaping to the country might sound, few runners will go there if it means giving up the big-city goodies.

Few rural areas have the sponsors, volunteer corps or publicity machines that attract runners by the thousands. But country races, small in field and sparse in amenities, do exist. They offer their own attractions to runners who’ve made the big-time rounds and now want something different.

I did my early running on country roads because the boundaries of my tiny hometown wouldn’t hold all the running I wanted to do. Most of my early races traveled the countryside too, because cities (Boston excepted) wouldn’t think of closing their streets for a few runners.

Out of town has always seemed to be my proper place to run. But you didn’t have to begin running ages ago to like out-of-the-way places.

None I’ve visited is farther out than Dave “Roadkill” Johnson’s Prince of Wales (POW) Marathon in Craig, Alaska. Having never run the full course, only a relay segment, I can’t honestly call POW a favorite of mine. But it’s one of my most memorable marathons, an example of small being beautiful. Rural too.

My wife Barbara and I knew we were headed somewhere different when we started the last leg of our trip to the first running of POW. Our plane into Ketchikan, Alaska, landed less than 20 minutes before the one to the island would take off.

“Will that be long enough to grab our bags and make the connection?” we asked. “They’ll wait for you,” we were told.

A van then took us down to the water, where sat a single-engine float plane. The lone pilot, who doubled as baggage handler and flight attendant, wore well-used jeans and work boots.

Five of us filled the plane, which looked like an airborne version of a 1965 Chevy pickup. Pilot Kevin gave his one-sentence safety lecture before starting the engine, which drowned out all further talk.

During descent the front-seat passenger mouthed the word “bears” as he pointed downward. There in a garbage dump were several black scavengers, finding their evening meal. (Later we would park here, at what the locals call the “Craig zoo,” and laugh at a bear sitting at the wheel of a doorless car.)

We would find this island the perfect spot for a runner looking for something different. POW is definitely that. It isn’t even Alaska as you might think of that state. This isn’t icebox country. The deep south of this state looks and feels more like British Columbia with its mild temperatures, frequent rains and spectacular coastal waterways. Picture Vancouver Island, without the city of Victoria.

This marathon is decidedly rural. It starts at a wide spot in the road, 26 miles from Craig. Sharing this spot that that first year of the marathon were a picked-clean deer skeleton and the remains of an abandoned car. Wolf and bear sightings are common along this road.

Water nearly surrounds the finish area. On race days the bald eagles floating overhead outnumber the marathoners down below. Whales carry on their own springtime ultradistance event in a nearby channel.

About 40 marathoners ran the first year. I couldn’t remember the last time every finisher was called forward individually at the awards party to accept applause and a medal (along with a bottle of Advil).

I left town knowing almost all these runners. Those living or traveling here wouldn’t want it to grow much. They can find “big” plenty of other places.

I found Prince of Wales nostalgically familiar. It took me back to a time when most marathons were smaller, quieter, friendlier and farther out of the way.

Later. Sadly, POW race founder Dave “Roadkill” Johnson himself became the subject of a story soon after I’d written the piece above. It’s now the next chapter.

(Photo: The country roads of the Prince of Wales Marathon that finishes in Craig, Alaska.)

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Personal Records, Run Gently Run Long, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]