Fast times conquer fast foods

by Ben Smith of The Journal Gazette

OK. So maybe what we need is someone to shame us.

Somewhere out there in this New Year, Resolute America is rising at the bleary hour of 6 a.m. to hit the gym. It's running, it's lifting, it's sweating like Nixon's upper lip. It's riding mechanical thingies toward some distant horizon where titanium-alloy pecs cavort happily on a field of waving yogurt.

We, on the other hand, merely ride the couch toward mammoth vats of chips and salsa. Our pecs and abs are one awesome land mass; tiny climbers regularly ascend the difficult north face to plant their national flags and wave merrily toward Nepal.

Clearly, abject humiliation is called for here.

Joyce Hockensmith, come on down.

She is 50 years old, a third-grade teacher at Highland Terrace Elementary in New Haven, and probably (at least from our vantage point atop Mt. Dorito) not quite sane. Here is what she says, for example, about the time she ran seven marathons in five weeks: "You start to wear down at the end a little bit with that pace."

Well, yeah. Like, no kidding.

Joyce Hockensmith is not kidding, at least about this running stuff. Since her first marathon a decade ago, she's done 135 of the things. Last year she did 23; in 1996, 33.

"That was really a few too many," she says. "I got caught up in getting this second time finished."

By "second time," she means, "second time around the country." Hockensmith belongs to a group of like-minded - Nuts? Enthusiasts? - called the 50 and D.C. Club, whose expressed purpose is to run a marathon in every state plus the District of Columbia. Hockensmith has made the circuit twice. Only one other woman in the United States has done the same.

"Unfortunately," Hockensmith says wryly, "this other woman is about 12 away from finishing the third time."

Being either highly motivated or scarily obsessed, Hockensmith would like to get to three times, too. But it ain't easy. Some states have just one marathon a year. Others have conflicting dates or the next thing to it.

This means that Hockensmith, who has only weekends and summers free, spends a lot of time making flight connections. On three occasions, she even did two states in one weekend: Louisiana and Texas, New Hampshire and Maine, Georgia and Alabama. "That's when it really gets crazy," she says. "Hawaii and Alaska are in the summer, so that's good. But Washington and Oregon are almost impossible to do in a weekend. "Getting to some of these places and back is sometimes harder than running the marathon."

But she does it, Cholesterol Boy. She does it. And so can we.

This is a woman, after all, who didn't start running until she was 32 years old. Who used to answer people who asked if she'd run a marathon by saying "Do you know how far that is?" Who said she'd just run one, when she was 40, so she could say she did it.

That was 134 marathons ago.

"When I first started out, people were saying, 'Oh, you should only do two marathons a year,' " says Hockensmith, who trains 30 to 40 miles a week. "At one point I can remember early on, they didn't even think women should do this."

"I think if you're really racing them hard, it's different. We run them, but part of the thing is to run them and enjoy them. Doing this through this group, I've met people all over the U.S. That's the really neat part of it."

See? Marathoning your way across the USA is not only good for your arteries, it's good for the heart they run through. And so Hockensmith runs on - "I guess my next milestone will be 150 marathons," she says - and leaves us with an object lesson for the New Year, and a few words of wisdom.

"If you do a couple (marathons) a month," she says, "you keep yourself in pretty good shape."

A couple a month. Hear that, Mt. Cheese Puff? Rise and walk! Lift that land mass off the couch right now and greet the New Year like Peking Man, upright and in motion!

Oh, my God.

Those poor little climbers.

Ben Smith is a writer for The Journal Gazette. His columns appear Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

PUBLISHED: FRIDAY JANUARY 9, 1998