Longest Us Streaker To Hang It Up |
Longest Us Streaker To Hang It Up |
catch22 |
Mar 22 2005, 02:59 PM
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#1
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Dedicated Member Group: Away Posts: 2985 Joined: 29-October 04 Member No.: 1172 |
Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2005 05:36:01 -0800
Subject: longest US streaker to hang it up From the Baltimore Sun. Finishing kick near the road's end -------------------- Putting his foot down, Bob Ray plans to end a 38-year streak of daily running. By Michael Reeb Sun Staff March 14, 2005 Bob Ray isn't ready to hang up his running shoes, but next month, for the first time in more than 38 years, he just won't be putting them on every day. "You could keep on going, but the older you get, the greater the chance that it's going to stop in the middle of nowhere," Ray said about his streak of running every day since April 4, 1967. "It's like trying to cross the desert on a half tank of gas." Ray, who lives in Perry Hall, plans to stop his daily running on April 7 - his 68th birthday - in what is believed to be the second-longest running streak in the world and what has been sanctioned as the longest such streak in the United States. His decision to stop fits neatly into an amazing array of numbers that he has amassed: 13,860 consecutive days, 114 pairs of shoes, 49 states he has kept his streak alive in, 18 marathons and 99,876 miles. Detailed record-keeping and careful planning will allow him to end on another milestone number. "Instead of stopping it on the anniversary date of my streak," Ray said, "I'm going to stop it on my birthday. On April 7, I will be 68 years old, and on that day I'll stop the streak at 100,000 streak miles." To do that, he had to curtail his running from the 52-mile weekly total he had been logging. "If I would have continued the mileage I was at, I would have hit 100,000 streak miles back in February," he said. The streak began innocently enough when Ray - then a U.S. Postal Service carrier in Hamilton, now retired - began running occasionally with a trio of women during his lunch break. "They were probably in their mid-50s to early 60s, except the youngest one who must have been close to 50," he said. "I actually would be delivering mail and would see them out there running. I just happened to be running with them one day when one of them said she had run two weeks without missing a day. I thought to myself, 'Now, isn't that something.'" Before long, his daily running had acquired legs of its own. "I didn't have any intention of starting a streak," he said. "It didn't start out that way. It started out to see if I could run two weeks straight. After two weeks, I did a month. After a month, I did two, then four and six and by a year I was hooked. "Once I hit a year, I wanted to see how long I could keep it going. I didn't call it a streak back then. A streak was doing it in the nude. That's what the college kids did." But the streak became a constant in his life, through good times and bad, through a variety of trying conditions. It wasn't that he hadn't run before - he had been a miler at Kennard-Dale High School in southeastern Pennsylvania and had run a 4-minute, 18-second mile in the Navy. It was just that running had now become a part of his every day, and like the anchor leg of a relay race, it summed up who he was as a runner. "The roughest time was keeping it from my first wife. She didn't like me doing it," said Ray, who was divorced in 1985. "We lived in Waverly, and I worked in Hamilton. I would run during my lunch break. It's something I never talked to her about." Like any athlete who regularly trains outdoors, he also has been challenged by nature in all its fury and has run through heat advisories, natural disasters and blizzards. "As you get older, the roughest thing you have to face is the elements, and as you get older, they start getting to you more - or at least to me they have," Ray said. "Usually it's an electrical storm or the ice, because, as you get older, once you go down, it's harder to get back up. And then, all of a sudden, you find yourself on the side of the road and someone says, 'Stay down. Why don't you stop running?' It's easier to tell a priest to stop praying." He has had to make concessions to age and attrition, though. His last marathon was the 1995 Northern Central Trail Marathon, which he dropped out of at the halfway point. "The guy I was running with was trying to qualify for Boston and was 2 1/2 minutes to the good [of qualifying]. When I dropped out, he said, 'Hey, how can you do this?' I said, 'Go on. I'm going home to propose,'" Ray said about his future wife, Cindy, whom he married in 1996. He doesn't race anymore, having stopped that part of his running on Oct. 18, 1997, when he won the 60-and-over age group of the IND 5K. "I thought, 'Hey, this is a good time to stop racing. I'm just out there jogging now,'" said Ray, who maintains a four-mile daily minimum. ("It takes me two miles just to get warmed up.") For anyone who doubts the veracity of the streak, Ray simply says, "Meet me at my doorstep at 7:30." The streak is generally recognized as the second-longest in the world to that of British Olympic marathoner Ron Hill, who began his on Dec. 20, 1964, and is sanctioned as the longest in this country by the United States Running Streak Association. Ray's wife, Cindy, said about the end of the streak: "I knew it was going to happen; until recently, I just didn't know when. I said to Bob, 'Make it an easy day to remember.' It never really concerned me at first, but then he would tell me, 'I had to jump out of the way today. Somebody was driving down the curb lane and they were really on the curb.' "He's had some close calls with all the road rage out there, and it really makes you nervous." Ray plans to run six miles on weekdays and four miles on weekends through the end of the month. "Going into April, it'll just be a series of seven days and four miles [a day]. That'll bring it right out to 100,000 streak miles. "I'll still go out and run when I feel like it. But there'll be days when I just go out for a walk." -------------------- Longest U.S. running streaks Runner, City, Age, Starting date 1. Bob Ray, Perry Hall, 67, April 4, 1967 2. Mark Covert, Lancaster, Calif., 54, July 23, 1968 3. Jon Sutherland, West Hills, Calif., 54, May 26, 1969 4. Jim Pearson, Mead, Wash., 60, Feb. 16, 1970 5. Kenneth Young, Petrolia, Calif., 63, July 6, 1970 30. John Roemer IV, Parkton, 44, Nov. 1, 1978 42. Layne Party, Towson, 45, Jan. 1, 1980 64. John Strumsky, Millersville, 64, May 23, 1983 71. Matt Mace, Arnold, 44, Sept. 29, 1985 77. Ray Lorden, Parkville, 50, Oct. 31, 1989 82. John Roemer III, Parkton, 66, Aug. 1, 1990 100. Margaret Sherrod, Millersville, 49, June 2, 2000 Source: United States Running Streak Association; as of Dec. 1, 2004 "The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it."
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad. " "You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. " George Bernard Shaw |
Akhtar |
Apr 23 2005, 06:57 PM
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#2
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Dedicated Member Group: Members Posts: 2295 Joined: 26-June 04 From: London Member No.: 568 |
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catch22 |
Apr 23 2005, 09:19 PM
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#3
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Dedicated Member Group: Away Posts: 2985 Joined: 29-October 04 Member No.: 1172 |
NON-COMPREHENDO
"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it."
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad. " "You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. " George Bernard Shaw |
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