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Champion man profiled in Runner’s World
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Facing a health crisis, Ken Smith went on a strict weight-loss regimen and was inspired to start a regular schedule of full- and half-marathons.
CHAMPION
At 250 pounds, Ken Smith was ready for a change.
He wanted to go back to feeling like a kid again — a 150-pound, fleet-footed baseball player at Champion High, notorious for his speed on the base paths.
But it wasn’t so much what he wanted — it was what he needed.
“When that dream dies and reality hits, you start to get less active and become just isolated altogether from any kind of exercise,” Smith said.
An incident that happened in December 2007 ensured that the nurse practitioner would drastically alter his lifestyle.
“I was dictating a note after I saw a patient in the office,” he said, “and my back suddenly went out. I hit the floor, had to crawl to the back room and had to get a fellow physician to get me off the ground.”
In the days following, he saw a back doctor who gave him chilling news.
“He said that for every pound on my stomach — it’s three pounds on my back. My back just couldn’t handle the strain of my obesity anymore,” Smith, 52, said. “Plus, it wasn’t a very good professional thing to preach weight loss and a healthy lifestyle to colleagues when I was as big as I was.”
Smith was “sluggish, inactive, and couldn’t really move — with no desire to move, honestly.”
What started out as walking on the treadmill at a 3-mile an hour pace turned into a light jog after about a month. And in that time frame came goals, aspirations and … teasing.
“Within the first week, I told my wife that I wanted to run a half marathon,” Smith said. “She laughed, I laughed, everybody thought I was crazy running a half marathon at 250 pounds.”
Crazy or not — there he went.
Smith bought books, increased his time, speed and length on the treadmill, “and I made it up to 5 miles per hour and thought, I’m really going to do this.”
“But what needed to happen was for someone to come up and say, ‘oh Ken, are you losing weight?’ That’s all it took.”
So a noticeably slimmer Smith and his wife, Audrey, boarded a plane to Miami for the ING Half Marathon — a mere 51/2 months since he first started working out.
“That was my first anything,” he said, running it in an hour and 54 minutes.
Since then, he’s run 11 marathons, seven more half marathons and a handful of triathlons. He ran in his third Boston Marathon on April 18.
“If you would have told me I’d be doing this a few years ago, I would have laughed at you,” Smith said, still, oddly enough, with a smile on his face.
He’s gone from eating just one meal a day — super-sizing everything — and being able to eat a whole pizza in one sitting, while washing it down with a two-liter bottle of pop to the same routine of a healthy meal plan. Starting off each morning with raisons and dried cherries mixed with oats, Smith eats a protein bar for lunch with a hearty dinner consisting of either pasta or salmon and he only drinks water or a light Muscle Milk.
“My diet has basically been the same thing since I started this,” Smith said, “and I’m still fine with it.”
His days usually begin around 4 a.m. with a 14-mile jog before work. In the evening, he’ll go about 8 miles around the trail by his home in Champion. He also swims nearly 1.6 miles a day in training for an Ironman competitions. This summer, he has planned on participating in four triathlons.
At the 2010 Boston Marathon, Smith struck up a conversation with Tish Hamilton, a co-editor of Runner’s World magazine. He briefly told her of his story while they were riding on a bus to the starting line. Awestruck, she promised him the publication would detail his journey from spacer to racer. Smith appeared in the April edition of Runner’s World with before and after pictures and the captivating details of his transformation.
“Everything with me is completely different — everything is new,” he said.
“It’s indescribable how great I feel and I would love for others who want a change to get up and try it — the results will be amazing.”