Running: Delco man looks to 44th Boston Marathon

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 - 06:02 PM

On a golden Sunday morning in Springfield, Delaware County, just as he has done for nearly five decades, Neil Weygandt checks his watch, tugs his white cap, and starts to run.

On a golden Sunday morning in Springfield, Delaware County, just as he has done for nearly five decades, Neil Weygandt checks his watch, tugs his white cap, and starts to run.

"I'm a little beat up," he says, his halting stride betraying the stiffness in his hips. He settles into a determined shuffle. "I get a little looser after I get going," he says.

Keeping going is something that Weygandt has done better than almost anyone else. In a monumental feat of durability and tenacity, the Drexel Hill resident has managed to complete 43 Boston Marathons in a row - the longest consecutive streak in the nation's premier road race.

Even dedicated marathoners, a population known for obsessiveness, shake their heads in wonderment.

"How the hell can a guy on the same day in April for 43 years be well enough to run a marathon?" said Ed Osler of Collingswood, a friend of Weygandt's and one of the Philadelphia region's pioneering distance runners. "You can't predict when you're going to be sick, or injured, or just not be in shape to run a marathon that day."

Today, under the punishment of all those miles - easily more than 100,000 lifetime, he says - Weygandt, now 62, believes his body might finally be starting to break down.

But he's not willing to hang it up, not yet. He hasn't even seen a doctor about his hips because he's afraid of what he might hear. "I keep putting it off," he says. "You know how runners are."

For a skinny kid who wasn't much good at ball sports - "I only made the baseball team because my father was the coach," he said - the realization that he had a talent for long runs was a pleasant surprise. Weygandt was top man on his Haverford High cross-country team in his senior year and went on to run at PMC Colleges, the predecessor to Widener University.

Sometime in the early 1960s he saw his first road race - a small band of men lined up alongside a road. "Some of them had potbellies, but they were fast," he said. "It looked like they were having fun."

He became friends with people such as Osler and the late H. Browning Ross, who helped create road running as a sport here. Back then, everybody thought they were nuts. "You'd get catcalls," said Ed Dodd, another longtime friend of Weygandt's. " 'Who stole your horse?' 'Who's chasing you?' "

Running shoes were leather and hardly cushioned, more like bowling shoes. Osler ran in Hush Puppies. The early Philadelphia marathons were 30 or so guys, doing loops around the river and, since nobody closed off streets for races, dodging traffic at stoplights. Water stops were whatever you could cadge from spectators, Weygandt said.

"We were really odd back in the '60s, just totally off the planet," Dodd said. "Nobody did stuff like this or could see the point of doing stuff like this." Eventually Weygandt and his friends began pushing past the 26.2-mile marathon distance. They tried training runs from Collingswood to Atlantic City, trotting along the White Horse Pike, and began staging 100-kilometer and 24-hour races.

"I found I had a talent for it," said Weygandt, with a shock of white hair and a mild, almost distracted manner. Underneath his thick black glasses, though, his blue eyes flash with intensity. "I guess I've always been sort of a loner. So much of it is mental. I could deal with it; a lot of people can't."

For years, Dodd organized a six-day race - the winner was whoever could grind out the most laps on a cinder track along the Cooper River. Weygandt won it in 1988, with 452 miles - an average of more than 75 a day.

"During the six-day runs I would hallucinate at times from the lack of sleep and all that running," he said in a no-big-deal tone. He shrugged: "I think everyone gets that."

He won a 24-hour race in 1982 with 133.8 miles and, with another runner, set an offbeat record: most miles in a 24-hour relay, just short of 200. "You never wanted to be close to Neil at the end," Dodd said. "You knew it would be a very hard end to the race - and he would probably beat you."

Weygandt's first Boston Marathon, in 1967, was the first year a woman ran, entering using her first initial; famously, a race director tried to rip off her number. Weygandt, running well ahead of the commotion, learned about it afterward.

He kept showing up year after year, running through 100-degree heat and lashing storms, as the field grew from a few hundred to thousands and then tens of thousands. Most of those years, he wasn't just jogging along, either: he finished in 2 hours and 50 minutes or under 20 years in a row.

Weygandt has managed the streak while completing dozens of other marathons, and about 90 ultramarathons. He shows up at countless shorter races, just happy to be there, competing, with his friends. "You know, for Neil, this running is really the major event of his life," Osler said.

Weygandt, who lives in a Drexel Hill apartment cluttered with running memorabilia, has worked as a social worker for the Department of Welfare and, for 10 years, selling athletic shoes, sometimes only part time. He spent years taking care of his aging parents before they died.

His income is Social Security and whatever he can earn from driving old people around, but his clients are dying off, too. "I'm still looking for the right career," he says wryly. "I don't think I could do a job where I had to do a lot of small talk all day. That isn't me."

He was married once to another runner, but it broke up after two years, in part because she was courted by a top track club from New York and he wasn't. "I was jealous of her, I think that was part of it," he said.

His older sister, Betty Davies, said she wished her brother had spent less time logging miles and more time building another sort of life. Once, she said, she walked up to Dodd during one of the six-day races and told him: "What you are doing to these people ought to be against the law."

"I really don't understand it. I never will," she said. "I don't understand my brother. He's a sweet, kind person. He'd do anything for anybody," she says. "I'm proud of him, but I just think he took it too far."

For Weygandt, though, it's felt like a rich life: friendships with great runners, the exhilaration of pushing up against the body's limits. He also met his longtime girlfriend through running.

Now, with the streak, he's become marginally famous in running circles; there was a feature in Runner's World magazine and newspapers, and his picture in this year's Boston Marathon program. He even has a few fans on the course, people who look for him and yell every year.

"Fifty would be nice," he says. Beyond that is the record of 58 finishes (though not consecutive) set by Johnny A. Kelley - though Weygandt's not expecting to make it that far.

On his run this past Sunday, pushing slowly up a hill along Rolling Road in Springfield, he talked about how some of his old pals were starting to fall away. Dodd started hurting and switched to biking. Another running friend, Harry Berkowitz, died after he was hit by a car.

"I really miss him," Weygandt said. So Weygandt runs on, with the same economical stride, fighting the dull ache in his hips and the drag of all those miles. Quitting would be in some way letting down his friends, even the missing ones - the other crazies who were there at the beginning, running all those miles just for the fun of it.

And, if he needs more motivation, there's always Bennett Beach of Bethesda, Md., who has run 42 consecutive Boston Marathons.

"I want to keep one ahead of him," Weygandt says.