Hill’s odyssey comes to an end after epic 19,032 days
Heart problems end his running days for now, but the 78-year-old vows he will return
BACK in 1964, The Beatles topped the Christmas charts with I Feel Fine. That week, Ron Hill began a remarkable odyssey that has seen him run at least a mile every day since – defying flu, falls, cancer surgery, a foot operation, and a fractured sternum – to compile a streak of 19,032 consecutive days (52 years and 39 days) the longest by any athlete in history. He covered more than 162,000 miles – sufficient for more than six circumnavigations of the world. Until last Saturday, when he felt anything but fine.
“I thought I might die,” he told me yesterday. Gripped by a fierce chest pain, he struggled to complete a single mile at little more than walking pace: 16 minutes 34 seconds. “But I am quite stubborn, so I finished.”
The following day, however, Hill’s shoes stayed in the cupboard. The textile chemist told website Streak Runners International that it was over. “I have been having heart problems and have been waiting for some time now to have the problem diagnosed and hopefully rectified,” he said.
He was in hospital yesterday for tests, but expects to have to wait a couple of weeks for results. “They told me I might end up on a ventilator, so I am waiting for these results,” he added, speaking from his home near Manchester. “They asked me about the pain. I said I’d run 2:09 for the marathon, so I know what pain is all about when I feel it.
“That’s all I have been doing for the past three weeks. My heart started to hurt. But I carried on – it was downhill. Over the last 800m the problem got worse and worse. I thought I might die, but I just made it to one mile. I checked on my GPS. There was no other option but to stop. I owed that to my wife, family and friends plus myself.
“My son drove me to the hospital, and I was in pain just walking from the car in the grounds, and they kept me in overnight then let me out.”
Famous in his pomp for racing wearing a string vest, Hill, now 78, is an iconic figure to successive generations of runners, and not just for his durability and irrepressible determination. He competed in three Olympics, won the European marathon title in 1969 (on the Athens course that destroyed Paula Radcliffe), and Commonwealth gold in Edinburgh the following year. In 1970 he also became the first Briton to win the Boston Marathon, taking three minutes from the course record. He set world bests at 10 and 15 miles, and 25 kilometres. He took the first from Ron Clarke (one of 19 the Australian held) and the other two from Czech legend Emil Zatopek.
Hill’s winning time in the 1970 Commonwealth Games (2:09.28) is still the Scottish all-comers’ best, just as the time of Jim Alder, the Scot who finished second (2:12.04), still remains the Scottish native record. Yet Hill was denied even greater honour. His 1970 time in Edinburgh had been surpassed only by Derek Clayton (Antwerp, 1969). But that course was subsequently remeasured and found to be short, causing the Association of Road Racing Statisticians to disregard Clayton’s performance, and Hill now features in