Schedule for November 2009

    Then ask Gerald Barney, of Swanton. Three-plus decades into his running career, he could write a one-page runner’s guide with seven simple syllables: “Get out the door. Stick with it.”

    That philosophy – along with an admirable, consistent determination – earned Barney the course record among 65 to 69 year olds at the grueling Mt. Washington Road Race in 1999. His time was 1:34:59. He was 65.

    “It didn’t mean much,” Barney said Thursday, in his gentle, soft-spoken manner. “Records are just something that someone else is going to break. I just like to run. And I like to race.”

    Today, at a young 75, Barney will run back up the mountain. He is one of two Vermonters to hold a Mt. Washington record; the other is John Pelton, of West Rupert, who broke the record among 60 to 64 year olds in 1999, with a time of 1:24:32.

    “I’m a little apprehensive,” Barney said. “But I think I’ll make it up there.”

    The Mt. Washington race is like stretching the steepest part of St. Albans Hill for 7.6 miles and then running up. The course has an average grade of 11.5 percent, with extended sections of 18 percent. The last 50 yards is a 22 percent climb to the finish. Walking is expected. Downhill doesn’t exist.

    The course is almost 5,000 vertical feet from start to finish. The race motto?

“There’s only one hill.”

Barney isn’t shooting for a Mt. Washington record this time; the top is his goal. The record-holder among 75-79 year olds is Howard Kellogg, of Holderness, N.H. His time in 1991 was 2:01:51.

    On June 1, to prepare for Mt. Washington, Barney ran the 8-mile Whiteface Mountain race in 1:48. That course has an average grade of 8 percent.

Annually, 900 world-class runners are picked from a lottery to run Mt. Washington. Barney ran it from 1996 to 2000, when an Achilles injury earned him two surgical procedures; it has been his only injury since he started running in the 1970s.

Barney was 43 then and weighed 180 pounds. His daughter, Kelly, and their neighbor, Eli Hakey – both young teenagers – wanted to run a mile from their homes on the Missisquoi River, in Swanton Village. Barney walked some of the distance.

Kelly and Eli never ran again. The next night, Barney went for another 1-mile run. Then another. And another. In three months, he shed about 30 pounds and has weighed a wiry 150 ever since.

He started racing immediately and, just a year into the sport, he ran a marathon – 26.2 miles – with a time of 3:30 in his age group, which qualified him for the prestigious Boston Marathon.

“I’ve been running ever since,” he said. “Really, I just wanted to do it to get in shape.”

Barney’s running resume contains: 600 races, 28 marathons (four in Boston), 49 half-marathons, and a 50-mile race in Essex Center, in 1980. He was almost 50 and finished in less than eight hours.

Barney is a member of the New England 65 Plus Runners Club and its Hall of Fame. He is a snowshoe racer. He competed and placed in all five track events at the 2006 Green Mountain Senior Games. And he hits the gym thrice weekly.

He keeps a handwritten log filled with all his races and times.

“I know some of my times,” he said, “but a lot of them I don’t know.”

His best: a 1:18:09 half-marathon in Manchester, Vt., in 1982. He was 52 and ran under a 6-minute mile.

Today, Barney posts an eight- to 8 ½-minute pace for short races, and close to a nine-minute pace for longer ones. Age-adjusted – say, if he competed in the 30-to-34-year-old age group – he would run about a six-minute mile, said Dick Thompson, an avid runner from Swanton.

Thompson, 62, and Barney race nearly every weekend during the summer, in Vermont, Maine, Canada, New Hampshire. All over. Thompson said Barney is a “celebrity” in the running circuit.

“When others talk about his longevity and his running skills, he is quick to point out that he doesn’t consider himself to be that old,” Thompson said. “He is the youngest 75-year-old I know.”

Barney – ever so humble – shrugs off the awe and reverence he fields because of his age and accomplishments. Praise embarrasses him. Slightly.

“I don’t think much of it,” he said. “It’s just something I do.”

Barney runs for two reasons: personal challenge and social interaction. Thompson called him “gifted” and “dedicated.” Thompson remembered that, at one race, a runner said he didn’t push himself that day. Barney commented: “When you go bowling, do you try for gutter balls or strikes?”

Thompson never forgot the analogy.

“He has always been my running hero and mentor, and he is one of my best friends,” he said of Barney. “One thing I’m still learning from him is don’t make excuses when you have a bad day, just accept it and move on. …

“Gerald is truly one of God’s finest human beings. There is so much to learn from him about running and life, that I feel like I am still his student.”

If James Brown was the Godfather of Soul, and Neil Young is the Godfather of Grunge, then Gerald Barney is the Godfather of Run.

Will he ever stop?

“No,” he said. “Unless I’m forced to.”

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