National Post (National Edition)
Meet the man who has run every day for 40 years.
TORONTO MAN HASN’T MISSED A SINGLE DAY, NOT EVEN WHEN HE WAS HIT BY A CAR
Back in the early 1990s, Rick Rayman phoned home one weeknight to tell his wife he’d be late to dinner. His 10-mile training run was going to take longer than usual, the Toronto dentist and marathoner explained. He’d just been hit by a car. The driver was inching out of a hospital parking lot when he bumped Rayman in midstride, knocking him to the pavement and bruising his left hip.
“It really hurt him,” said Rayman’s wife Marsha. But when her husband finally dragged himself to the dinner table, he made only one concession: tomorrow’s run would be slower, too.
Another day many years ago, a nasty flu bug overcame Rayman and his entire family during the Christmas holidays. The kids were bedridden, getting up intermittently for the sole sake of vomiting in the bathroom. Marsha didn’t leave the couch. At one point, Rayman roused himself from his own stupor and told her he’d return shortly.
“He went out, went for his run, came back, got back on the couch, and that was it for the day,” Marsha said. “That’s the only thing anybody did.”
Five Decembers ago, the Rayman house lost power in an ice storm that paralyzed Toronto. Downed trees blocked anyone from driving on their street. Even fitness junkies would have been forgiven for skipping exercise.
Rayman, though, wouldn’t have forgiven himself. When he and Marsha checked into a downtown hotel to wait out the tempest, he went for an underground jog in a city hall parking garage.
“He had a run,” Marsha said. “He did it.”
As of this month, Rick Rayman, 72, has run every single day for 40 years and counting, the longest active streak in Canada and one of the 25 lengthiest on record anywhere in the world. He runs with death-and-taxes certainty through back kinks and knee tears. When he and Marsha drive or fly somewhere — to one of the 365 marathons he has entered, for instance — he runs before dawn, and before any possible travel snag can derail his claim to fame. When it snows, he runs in cleats.
Rayman is in a vaunted echelon in the international streak running community, a wrinkled but spry medley of accountants, lawyers, professors — including Rayman, who today wakes at 5 a.m. to run before he heads to work teaching dentistry at the University of Toronto — and other everymen who have devoted much of their adult lives to jogging at least one mile (or 1.6 km) every day without fail.
Rayman doesn’t scrape by on streak running’s barest baseline requirement; his daily minimum is 30 minutes on the road. On Dec. 10, 1978, he started running every day for the fun of it and to stay in tip-top shape. Exactly 278 days in, CBC host Brian Williams, a neighbour and patient, shouted out his streak on national TV, a cherished memory even though the celebrated sportscaster referred to him as Rick Raymans.
Last Monday, Dec. 10, was Day 14,611. Reaching the 40-year mark won him praise from fellow streak runners, all of whom have their own stories of grinding through illness and injury — and their own motivations for wanting to do so.
“Some of the toughest runs have been on the day after finishing 100-mile ultramarathon races and on expeditions,” Derrick Spafford, a Yarker, Ont., endurance athlete and coach whose run streak will hit 29 years on Christmas Day, wrote in an email. A few months ago, Spafford prolonged his streak by running on Arctic terrain during a 105-kilometre trek over Baffin Island.
“There are usually a handful of days each year that I sort of dread getting out the door for a run,” he said, “but I always feel better after getting back for having done it.”
To celebrate hitting the 40-year mark last week, Rayman invited a moustachioed dietitian named Steve Deboer to stay at his home overnight and run with him. Deboer, who works at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, has the world’s third-longest active streak at just over 47.5 years.
“I ran through a kidney stone in my 40s and a broken ankle in my 50s,” Deboer, 64, said in an email. “My dad ran until he was 85, so I would like, God willing, to surpass that.”
The all-time gold standard in streak running is 52 years, 39 days, a mark British Olympic marathoner Ron Hill set before heart pain finally forced him to stop last year at age 78. The longest active streak belongs to retired music journalist Jon Sutherland, a Californian who has run every day for 49.5 years — often in the morning, distressingly few hours after getting home from a hard rock or metal show.
“We (runners) all share the task, the suffering, agony and satisfaction of accomplishing something significant,” Sutherland wrote in an email. “Roger Bannister summed it up perfectly. ‘Runners are nice people, those who run longer are nicer!’”
Four decades in, Rayman can’t foresee ending his streak any time soon. His hips and legs feel good, though refusing to ever rest can make running laborious. In his younger days he finished marathons in fewer than three hours; it now takes him that long to cover half the distance. On occasion he’ll give speeches to crowds of marathoners and urge them to take a day off every now and then.
“I say, ‘Don’t do what I do,’ ” Rayman said.
Rayman ran 13 marathons in 2018 and is heading to Miami for his next one in late January. Marsha will be there with him, as she has been for 47 years of marriage, and as she was on a recent Mother’s Day in Sudbury, Ont., when she stood with a handful of volunteers in a surprise snowstorm to make sure nothing went wrong as he navigated that city’s marathon.
She was there, too, when he felt down one day a couple of years ago, wondering if the torn medial meniscus — a knee injury that would debilitate most people — he’d been suffering through was an adequate reason to call it quits.
Instead he gritted his teeth and left the house. After all, Marsha had pointed out, he was already dressed.
“He just needed a push out the door,” Marsha said. “I don’t think he was really considering not going.”