| Got to Do It Every Day

Mark Covert ends his streak.

them on YouTube, the ones where someone constructed an unbelievably

elaborate arrangement of dominoes, perhaps in a spare room, a basement, or maybe a garage. The ones where thousands and thousands of dominoes collapse into each other in precise order, sometimes folding back into each other, sometimes splitting, allowing two rows to collapse simultaneously before eventually reuniting into a single column diving along until the final domino falls.

Those videos are fun and easy to watch. They rarely last more than a minute, and that should lead a viewer to wonder about whomever it was who spent how long—days, weeks, months—thinking of how those dominoes are to be arranged, what sorts of creative patterns they can be set into, spacing them precisely, carefully setting them close but not too close to each other lest the collapse begin too soon, maybe running out to KMart to buy another set of dominoes (who has thousands and thousands of dominoes lying around the house, after all?), only to destroy the entire creation in a few seconds.

Similarly, you’ve heard about streak runners, people who really mean it when they say they run every day. Maybe you’ve read Runner’s World Daily or at Letsrun.com in December when there’s a little piece announcing that Ron Hill has extended his running streak—which began on December 20, 1964—for another year. Maybe there was a piece in your local paper about someone in your area who is about to complete 10 or 15 or 25 years of running every day. Perhaps the author of that piece cleverly distinguished between people with running streaks and practitioners of the old ’70s fad of running in public wearing nothing but shoes. There was probably some “gore story,” a tale of running when some sort of disease or injury made doing so seem insane at best and impossible at worst. You might have wondered what your longest stretch of uninterrupted running days was or why someone would run while in a cast or with a 100-plus-degree fever or in an airport lobby or through a hurricane. If so, consider the similarities between the streak runner and the creator of the domino lines. Each has slowly and painstakingly constructed a thing that generally did not require great effort

Vien seen the videos, maybe on your local TV news. Maybe you’ve seen

to continue but that could be destroyed in a tiny, tiny, fraction of the time it took to create. And there is no going back. You cannot set one or two of the dominoes back up and re-create what you just knocked down, and you cannot make up for not running on Monday by running twice on Tuesday.

The secret origin story

On July 23, 1968, Mark Covert’s family had just returned from a vacation and he went for a 15-mile run. Over the next 13 days he did two runs of that length each day. On July 23, 2013, he ran three miles. Hundreds of people ran with him. Some had flown to his hometown of Lancaster, California, to run with him. Most were local runners. Some were former teammates. Some were runners he coached. Some of the run was videotaped. There was a sort of party afterward. That’s on video as well. Mark’s comments began, “I promise that I used to run faster than that.”

On July 24, 2013, he did not run at all for the first time in 45 years. The longest running streak in the USA had ended. During those years he ran after having a knee scoped and on a cruise ship in the Caribbean during a tropical storm. “The crew was betting on when he’d go overboard,” his wife reported. There was a day when he mentioned to his father that he was feeling sick and that he was thinking of not running. His father promptly told him to get into the family car and then drove him five miles from their house, made him get out of the car, and drove home, leaving Mark to maintain his streak with a five-mile run while sick.

Like many, perhaps most, American high school boys, Mark thought he would play football. But at Burbank High School in the 1960s, the football coach had players work out with the cross-country team to improve their stamina. California then had a three-tiered system in which football players exhibiting less potential were assigned to “B”- or “C’-level teams

A happy ending for Mark Covert
after 45 years on the road.

while bigger, faster, more athletic players went to the “A” level. Mark was too small and slow to make the A-level team, but he did well at running. He decided he would rather be a varsity cross-country runner than a B football player. Asked how good a high school runner he was, he answers, “Not good at all.” His high school coach, Frank Kallem, had his runners doing a lot of miles, often in twicedaily installments. Covert loved the hard work and got to a point where he had run on 100 consecutive days. That got him thinking that maybe he could run every day for a solid year. Once the yearlong streak was in place, the “domino effect” took over. Why have a day off when you really didn’t want or need one? One year down, 44 to go. He ran twice a day during the summer. His parents told him that as long as he was running seriously, they didn’t expect him to get a summer job.

“Not good at all” still got him a two-mile in 9:27 before graduating, a time better than all but a handful of US high school runners can manage. But in those days it was a fairly big handful who went faster. College coaches were not lining up with scholarship offers, so Mark set off to run at Los Angeles Community College, a two-year school where he was coached by Laszlo Tabori. Not coincidentally, a teammate at LACC, Jon Sutherland, has succeeded Covert as the American runner with the longest unbroken running streak, recently passing 45 years of daily runs.

The Hungarian Revolution

Historically, other nations have been to distance running what Ethiopians and Kenyans are today. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, Mexicans were looking as if they might rival the Kenyans as the fastest distance runners in the world. Arturo Barrios set the 10,000-meter world record, and Mexican marathoners like Rodolfo Gomez, Andres Espinosa, and German Silva were winning major marathons. The Finns of the 1970s— Viren, Vasala, Vaatainen, and others—followed Arthur Lydiard’s New Zealanders to the top of the running world, and the 1920s version of the Finns—Nurmi, Kolehmainen, Ritola—had done the same. In the 1950s a group of Hungarians coached by Mihaly Igloi worked their way to the top of the distance-running world. Sandor Iharos held world records at 1,500 meters, 3,000 meters, two miles, 4 X 1,500-meter relay, and 5,000 and 10,000 meters, and Istvan Rozsavélgyi had records at 1,000 and 1,500 meters. Tabori was part of that group, becoming the third person ever to run a mile in under four minutes.

Igloi had represented Hungary at 1,500 meters at the 1936 Olympics. By 1950 he was coaching runners. Distance training prior to World War II usually involved less hard running and less overall running than is common now. It was commonly believed that running was too stressful and that the amount and intensity should be limited. By 1950, under the influence of runners like Emil Zatopek and coaches like Igloi, that idea became outdated. Igloi’s athletes trained twice a day and did

interval work in most of those sessions. Bob Schul, winner of the 5,000-meter gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, was trained by Igloi and said that he usually trained for an hour and a half in the morning and two to three hours at night. Igloi’s Hungarians were expected to do very well at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, but that was the year Hungarians revolted against their Soviet-backed puppet government. After initially agreeing to negotiations with the rebels, the USSR changed course and launched a full-scale invasion, sending more than 31,000 troops and 1,100 tanks. More than 700 Soviet soldiers were killed, as were more than 2,000 Hungarians. The fighting was going on as the Hungarian Olympians were in Melbourne. Undoubtedly distracted and weighing the benefits of defecting against those of returning home, their performances were less than anticipated. Igloi, sponsored by Sports Illustrated, which undoubtedly sensed a good story, eventually came to the United States, as did Tabori, who continued to compete and train under Igloi, who managed to find work coaching running clubs and turning US distance running, which historically had been weak internationally, into a world power. In addition to Schul, Igloi coached Max Truex to the highest Olympic 10,000-meter finish to date of any US runner, sixth at the 1960 Olympics, and Jim Beatty to the first sub-four-minute mile run indoors. He took a job as Greece’s national coach in 1970 and finally returned to Budapest after the fall of

<4 Covert (#579) shows the form that made him an All-American at Cal State Fullerton.

communism until his death in 1998.

Tabori, a Hungarian expatriate, could not compete internationally for the United States and would not be named to any Hungarian teams. He competed in open meets in the USA, but his international career was over. He also turned to coaching and largely replicated Igloi’s interval methods at both the Los Angeles Track Club, where he coached Miki Gorman and Jacqueline Hansen to Boston Marathon wins and also to a world marathon record in Hansen’s case, and at Los Angeles Community College.

Tabori’s athletes worked as hard as Igloi’s had, though Igloi’s runners usually did interval work at both of their daily runs and Covert says he never had to run two interval sessions in a day. He ran twice nearly every day, covering more than 600 miles in many months and over 6,000 miles a year. And he continued to run every day.

“T knew I wasn’t that good. But I did think that if I worked really hard, maybe I could run some decent times and beat some good people.”

Prime racing years

Mark got good enough that Cal State Fullerton offered him a cross-country and track scholarship when he was done at Los Angeles Community College. Fullerton, now a Division I school, was in the NCAA’s College Division then, the predecessor of today’s Divisions II and III. But it was something of a distance powerhouse, with runners doing massive mileage. Two of Covert’s teammates, Doug Schmenk and Dave White, were running 170- to 180-mile weeks and had respective marathon bests (yes, college runners in those days sometimes raced marathons) of 2:15 and 2:17. Fullerton won the College Division cross-country championship in 1971, but the previous year was an even better one for Covert

as he was the individual champion in the division. In those days, top finishers from the College Division meet were allowed to run in the University Division (Division I) Championship, and he placed 16th, collecting All-America status, following that a few days later with a 17th-place finish at the AAU cross-country championship, which at the time was run in late November, a few days after the NCAA meets. He brought his three-mile time to 13:45, worth roughly 14:14 for five kilometers, and his six-mile to 28:08, approximately 29:08 for 10 kilometers, and qualified for the 1972 Olympic Trials Marathon in Eugene, run in conjunction with the track and field trials. He hung with Frank Shorter and Kenny Moore, the first- and second-place finishers, for much of the race before eventually fading to seventh place with a time of 2:23. Asked what he considers his best race, he mentions the three cross-country races and the Olympic Trials Marathon.

“People seem to think of me as a marathoner because of the streak and all the miles I ran. But I was really better at the 15- to 20-kilometer range. I ran tons of miles but my long runs were usually only an hour and a half to an hour and three quarters. I didn’t do the two-and-a-half hour runs you need for really good marathons.” His fastest marathon is 2:21.

Tf you ran in 1972 or before, you most likely did it in shoes from either Puma or adidas, though increasingly a Japanese shoe called “Onitsuka Tiger,” now Asics, was penetrating the US market. At the Eugene Trials that year, a new company was offering free shoes to runners. It showed Mark a racer that he liked, and he wore it in the marathon. None of the first six finishers wore the new brand, so Covert holds the distinction of being the first runner ever to finish a race in Nike shoes. After graduation he would go to work for Nike in a store in Southern California. He has maintained a relationship with the company ever since and has been inducted into the Nike Hall of Fame. In later years he began sending out an annual updating of his annual streak mileage totals, always mentioning not only the total of number of miles he had run but also the total he had run in Nikes. “They’ve always been great to me.”

He raced seriously through his early 20s, racking up the sort of mileage that was common among serious racers of the day, more than 5,000 miles most years with a few topping 6,000. But the sport was an amateur one then, and the business of making a living eventually reared its head.

After the peak

Mark’s relationship with Nike got him a job in one of its Southern California stores for a time. He did a few other jobs in those years as well, trying, as many runners at the time did, to fit work into his training and racing routine. He passed up an opportunity to manage the Nike store because the time required would have taken away too much training time. Eventually, though, he got married and needed