CAP 10K CLUB
Running in all 40 of the Capitol 10,000s
When you stop and think about it, 1978 was a long time ago. The Dallas Cowboys were coming off a victory in Super Bowl XII. Jimmy Connors won the U.S. Open that year, Bjorn Borg won Wimbledon, and Bill Rodgers won the Boston Marathon — the second of his four victories in the race. And riding the wave of the first big running boom, the Statesman Capitol 10,000 was born. Nearly 3,500 joined the fun, and four decades later, a hardy few have gone on to run in every Cap 10K since.
This year, the 31 of them who are left will enter what’s informally known as the “400K” club once they complete Sunday’s race.
Kenneth Hausmann, who owns an insurance agency in Austin, remem- bers the first Cap 10K.
“I was 20 years old and in a ‘jogging’ class at Southwest Texas State,” Hausmann said. “Coach (Henry) Hawkins said that anyone who could run the Cap 10 in 55 minutes or better would get an extra 10 points on the final grade, plus you would earn a (race) T-shirt.
“I thought I would win the race, and I was worried I wouldn’t know which way to go if I was winning.”
Hausmann needn’t have worried. He came in 666th. He stuck with running, though, and became quite fast, eventually recording a top time of 32 minutes, 19 seconds on the original course, which years later was found to be about two-tenths of a mile short before it was remeasured and certified as being 10 kilometers (6.2 miles).
Hausmann realized he was serious about his Cap 10K streak in 1983, when he had surgery on his Achilles tendon.
“I was going to do it on crutches, but I asked the doctors to cut off the cast a week early so that I could walk the race,” he said. “They took the cast off, and I walked the Cap 10K in close to two hours.