Sounds like an Onion Headline

Bay man hasn't missed a daily run in 25 years — and is as passionate as ever

By LEE BERGQUISTlbergquist@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Aug. 8, 2006

John Chandler had been working on a puzzle with his daughter when an incredible blast of noise went off in his left ear.

Words came out in a jumble, and despite his garbled protest, his wife called 911.
Chandler was having a transient ischemic attack - a mini-stroke, a warning that a full stroke could eventually follow.

But on his way to the hospital in December 2003, Chandler wasn't thinking so much about the strange things happening to his body as he was about the fate of his running streak.

"See," he recalls saying to himself, as he recounts the story with obvious relish. "That's why I like to run first thing in the morning, because if you have a stroke later in the day, you got the run taken care of."

Today, Chandler, 51, a financial planner from Whitefish Bay, will have run every day for 25 years. He estimates he has run more than 54,000 miles since the streak began in 1981.

When he started, the hit song that summer was "Jessie's Girl" by Rick Springfield. Newlyweds Prince Charles and Lady Diana were on the cover of Time magazine.

Chandler kept running despite a second mini-stroke. Months after his first episode, his motor skills went haywire again. This time he was standing in front of the bathroom sink and kept dropping his toothbrush.

He also hobbled for months on a broken ankle.

In 1992, a sympathetic doctor changed the time for surgery to remove a kidney stone so Chandler could squeeze in a run and keep the streak going.

And then there was the night when he ran through his neighborhood as his wife, Mary, was having contractions. He would circle back every few blocks to see if the bedroom light was on - a sign that it was time to go to the hospital.

Chandler has also weathered the usual assortment of colds and flu that force most exercise junkies to take off a day.

I remember talking to him at a Cub Scout meeting last winter. He looked ghostly pale, a shadow of the energetic dad I had come to know from Cub Scouts and serving together on the board of our neighborhood day care.
His back had been killing him. He had been sick for 50 days, missed four days of work and had lost 10 pounds on his whippet-thin runner's frame.
"I don't know how much longer I can keep this up," he rasped as a gym full of boys darted around us in overdrive.

What he meant by this, he later told me, is that he didn't think he could be sick and keep running for three or four more months. If it dragged out that long, he would have to quit.

Welcome to the world of the streaker.

Some athletes burst upon the scene with a sizzle and flash, and then like human fireworks, they burn out and are never seen again. Others are imbued with a special kind of staying power. Among runners, there is a subculture that runs every day, year after year, and implausibly, decade after decade.
'Part of my persona'

"Obsessive-compulsive?" asked John J. Strumsky Jr., president of the United States Running Streak Association, who has his own 22-year streak. "That's fine, you're right. I think then you have to take the definition to the next level. There can be two types of obsession or compulsion. There can be positive obsession, or there can be negative obsession."

Strumsky said most of the runners he's met are healthier and more disciplined than the population at large.

The streak is "something that has become part of my persona," Chandler said, "I guess the way some people wear a certain hat or drive a certain car."
When Chandler broke his ankle in 2004 - an injury he sustained, of course, while running - he dialed back to one mile a day. That is the minimum legitimate run in the eyes of the running streak association.

His personal standard had been two miles, but he has averaged more than six miles a day during much of the streak.

"I love to run - most days," he said. "There are some days that I will come back and Mary will dutifully say, 'How was your run?' And I'll say, 'I didn't feel like a runner today.' "

But such days are few. His passion for running is, well, much the way a lot of Wisconsin carries on about the Packers.

He remembers his first race, in fifth grade. He can show you the parking meter near the Summerfest grounds that is exactly a quarter-mile from the finish of Al's Run. His eyes glisten when he describes how Alyssa Beste, a junior at Waukesha West, where Chandler is a part-time coach, nipped another girl by less than a half-second to win the 3,200 meters at the state championship in June.

His best marathon time (from memory): 2:37:37 at the Lakefront Marathon in 1984.

When his pulse registered an ultra-low 45 beats per minute after his first transient ischemic attack, a paramedic explained to another that Chandler was a jogger.

An affront, even when you're sick. "I'm a runner," he mumbled in protest.
The streak began in graduate school in Madison when Chandler checked his running diary and realized he had run every day for 10 days.

"Then it turned into two weeks, and then two months and then two years," he recalled.

Now he describes the streak as this "intriguing little toy," and to keep it going, he plans out his runs a week ahead. He does most of his running at 5:30 a.m., at lunchtime and on Sunday mornings with a group of other runners.

The day after he broke his ankle, the orthopedic surgeon who examined him, a friend from college, wanted to know if he still had that "silly streak" going. But the doctor didn't veto going for a run.

He could barely put weight on it, but by 8 p.m. on a windy, rainy night in December 2004, he was getting on his running clothes. His final hurdle, however, "wasn't getting to the track," he said, "it was getting past Mary."

Did she object, that time or after the mini-strokes?

"Absolutely not," she said. "I just didn't feel like it was worth it."

She describes her husband as "your basic Type-A personality . . . and you pick your battles and this is what he wanted to do."

Yet because he's disciplined, Chandler's daily run is worked around the family, she said. The couple have a son who is 7 and daughter who is 5.

Mary Chandler, who is not a runner, and her husband have met good friends through the sport, and she said it has enriched her husband's life in ways few people experience.

"Running is John's passion, and I've been blessed by it," she said.
Longest streak in the state

In the rarefied world of streak running, Chandler is jogging in the middle of the pack.

He has the longest running streak of any Wisconsin runner, according to the streak association, based in Millersville, Md. But he ranks 61st nationally. No.1 is Mark Covert, 55, a contender in the marathon for the 1972 Olympics and track coach at Antelope Valley College in California.

Covert took over the top spot on July 29 from Bob Ray, a retired mail carrier from Baltimore. Both have streaks that go for more than 38 years.

Ray quit because he had rolled up the kind of mileage - 100,000 by his estimate - that sends cars to the junk heap. His once featherlike stride had disintegrated into a painful amble.

He can still move

Though Chandler has had flare-ups with his lower back, feet and legs, he doesn't believe that running has caused any long-lasting physical problems.

He takes a blood thinner to reduce the chance of another mini-stroke. He wears orthotics in his running shoes. And he visits a chiropractor for an occasional adjustment.

He runs about a minute a mile slower than he did when he was 40. But he can still move. He recently kept a 6:16 per mile pace at the Firecracker Four, a four-mile race in Hales Corners.

"On an average day, I don't notice that I feel any different than 10 years ago," he said. "In a way it's kept me young."

And what would happen if it all ended?
"Would I survive? Absolutely," he said.

"Would I be the same person? Yeah.

"But there would be a certain something missing."
From the Aug. 9, 2006