Wednesday, 01 July 2009

• The Man Who Never Ceases to Run

  
  Kwon running in Long Island Marathon (May 09)
  

  I am a runner and a health fanatic. I go to bed around 11 p.m. at the latest and wake up at 6 a.m. sharp every morning to go to the gym. I start my cardio by running three to four miles on a treadmill following up with a 30-minute weight training. I try not to skip the gym unless I'm REALLY sick or have early meetings to go to. Many people are amazed by my rigorous schedule thinking I've been living like this my entire life. But the funny part is, I haven’t. In fact, back then, the last thing I wanted to do on earth was to go running. But, thanks to this extraordinary runner, my whole life has changed.
  

  His name is Yi-Joo Kwon, a 63-year-old Korean, who is the founder and the president of Korean Road Runner Club (KRRC) of New York. When you first see him, he may look no different from other average men in his age, but wait till you hear his stories about running.

  Kwon wasn’t a runner himself and had hardly done any exercise at all. He was 5 foot 1 inch and weighed about 180 pounds back then. But after he was diagnosed with diabetes in 1996, he started exercising and adapting healthy eating habits. As a result, he lost about 50 pounds, and gained a goal—to run a marathon.

  After few years of training, he had completed his first marathon in Yonkers in 2000. Since then, he has done about 80 marathons, including the Grand Slam of Ultra running. The Grand Slam includes four 100-mile marathons and is held in four different states every month from June to September. So far, he has completed two of them: the Vermont 100-mile endurance run and the Western State 10- mile in California, taking about 27 hours or so to complete each, and of course, that is without stopping.

  But that's not it. He wakes up at 4 a.m. and runs for more than two hours, about 10 miles, around his neighborhood in New Jersey before heading to his work in Queens. When he comes back around 9 p.m., he eats dinner and goes to bed by 10 p.m., no matter what. According to his wife, “Since 2000, he has never skipped a single day of running except for the days when he had marathons.” Though his family sometimes thinks his running is too excessive, they have a lot of respect for what he does now and appreciate his hard effort and improvement in his health.

  He has three goals in his mind now. He wants to finish two other Grand Slam Ultra running, complete 100 marathons, and finally wants to run 3000 miles from New York to San Francisco in 100 days.

  Has anyone motivated you to pursue a healthy life style? Do you have an exercise role model?

  • 2:11 PM
  • 508 Views
  • 28 eProps
  • 13 Comments