Rounding the corner on his 100th marathon
73-year-old ready to run toward his goal
EDMONTON • If he can find a can opener when he wakes up Aug. 19, Ken Davison, 73, should finish his 100th marathon with a grin.
“When I began running marathons in the early ’80s, I ran out of energy at about the 30-kilometre mark,” says the retired automotive mechanic.
“Family physician Dr. Harvey Sternberg suggested I try downing a can of Campbell’s French-Canadian pea soup with toast the morning before a 42-kilometre marathon.”
Davison began rising at 4:30 a.m. on race days to consume a can of the nutritious soup and found himself running strongly to the finish.
Marathons went well, until Campbell’s discontinued the soup. “I was again worried about hitting the wall towards the race finish,” says Davison
“But I recently walked into a store in Millet, south of Edmonton, and saw they had 10 cans of the soup. I bought them all. I’ll be up at 4:30 a.m. before Edmonton’s marathon.”
Davison, who has logged many sub-3:30 marathons, had never set a target of 100 marathons. “But when I got to 80, I realized it was an achievable goal,” he says.
He played soccer in his native Belfast, played in Edmonton when he arrived in 1967 and began running when he met a group of runners training in Rundle Park.
“I ran my first marathon in Kamloops in the early ’80s when I was 35 years old and that was nearly my first and last marathon.
“Not many stores sold running shoes in those days and I ran in tennis shoes. My feet became totally covered in blisters and I finished in considerable pain.”
But he continued training and decided to run one more marathon — and became hooked.
Davison has run all of Edmonton’s 25 marathons, except one when he withdrew because of injury.
A favourite memory is running the 2001 Las Vegas marathon when it was so hot many runners threw their jackets over barbed-wire fencing around a prison.
“Guards put a stop to it when they saw a great deal of clothing caught in the barbed wire,” says Davison. “They were afraid prisoners could climb the fence without a scratch.”
He’s run the Honolulu marathon seven times and loves the race because of the celebratory atmosphere, such as fireworks after the heat-avoiding 5 a.m. start.
Davison loves the camaraderie of the Fort McMurray marathons and has completed the race there 14 times, often driving and sleeping in his car overnight.
He ran the 1989 New York Marathon and enjoyed being cheered on by thousands of fans. “I was lucky to see myself crossing a bridge in the race on television that night,” he says.
Davison returned to Belfast to complete his 99th marathon and says it went well, unlike his first marathon there two years ago when he was visiting family and spontaneously entered the Mourne Way Extreme 26-Marathon.
“I was about 11 kilometres into the race when I slipped on a rock while crossing a stream and heard a snap,” he says.
“I took my shoe off and found two toes lying off to the side while the other three were straight.”
He hopped over to a fence, twisted sheep’s wool hanging there into string, bound his broken toes to his good ones and carried on to the finish line some 31 kilometres away.
Running Room founder and president John Stanton expects more than 5,000 competitors to applaud Davison’s determination at the Edmonton Marathon.
“His grandkids, Graysen, 9 and Munroe, 7, will run the last 100 metres with him,” says race organizer Stanton. “And he’ll be wearing the 100-race bib.”