Steve DeBoer started running in 1968 because he wanted to make his high school basketball team. He got cut. He kept running anyway.
On Sunday, June 7, DeBoer marked day 20,411 of his consecutive-day running streak with a 55-minute jog through Rochester alongside friends and family, ABC 6 News reported. That works out to 55 years without missing a single mile.
“Back in 1968, I thought, ‘I’m going to get in shape for basketball.’ So I started running,” DeBoer, 71, told the station. “And then I got cut from the basketball team and thought, ‘Well, running’s not that bad. I’ll just keep running.'”
The streak now ranks second-longest in the world. The minimum to keep it alive is the same minimum every streak runner observes: one mile a day, no exceptions, no excuses.
DeBoer has not made many. KAALTV reported that he has run through Minnesota blizzards and even kept the streak going while hospitalized for pneumonia. Whenever the temperature climbs above freezing, he runs without a shirt.
A goal aimed at the moon
The next number on DeBoer’s list is bigger than the last one. He told ABC 6 News he wants to cover the distance between the earth and the moon, roughly 238,900 miles, before he turns 80. That gives him about nine years.
For context, a daily mile across 55 years already puts him past 20,000 miles at the bare minimum. The longer training runs and races he has logged over that span, the kind extreme streak runners often stack on top of the daily one-mile rule, push the real total much higher.
Ahead of his 50-year mark, DeBoer published a memoir titled Traversing the Tundra: Running the Race Set Before Me, a half-century account of waking up and lacing up.
What streak culture looks like
Streak running rewards stubbornness more than speed. Some of its best-known practitioners are not elite athletes. They are people like Mark Bauman or the Floridian who racked up 730 half marathons in a row, who refused to take a day off and let the discipline become its own identity.
DeBoer fits that mold. The basketball coach who cut him in 1968 set off a streak that has now outlasted seven U.S. presidencies, several pairs of every shoe model he has ever worn, and the running boom itself. And at 71, he is still adding to the daily total most runners his age would consider unreachable — a reminder for anyone starting later in life that the clock is not the obstacle.
Sunday’s celebration was modest by his standards. Fifty-five minutes for 55 years, run with the people who have watched the streak grow.
Then, presumably, he was up the next morning for mile one of day 20,412.
