Covert Marking Time With His Feet of Endurance : Streak: Now 42, he has weathered the elements, illness, injury and surgery, running at least three miles each day for the past 25 years.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and Mark Covert was at wit’s end in September of 1982.

He was trying to keep alive a streak of running at least three miles a day, a streak that had endured for 14 years.

A month earlier Covert suffered a broken bone in his left foot after jumping over a snake on a routine run. As the snake slithered away unharmed, Covert writhed on the ground in pain, sure that his foot was broken.

X-rays confirmed Covert’s fears, yet he still managed to run three miles daily for the next four weeks by taping up his foot, lacing on a pair of construction boots to immobilize the injured area and shuffling around the track at the local junior high school.

The nine-minute-per-mile pace was painfully slow for someone who finished seventh in the marathon in the 1972 U.S. Olympic trials, but Covert wasn’t complaining. The streak remained alive.

The streak was not out of danger, however. Calcium deposits began to form around the broken bone in Covert’s foot. The deposits made running excruciatingly painful, and Covert was ready to bid adieu to the streak before he came up with a last-ditch idea.

He cut a hole in his new running shoes where the nylon was pressing against the broken bone and, presto, the pain was gone.

“I went out and ran and it didn’t hurt,” Covert recalls with the amazement of someone who had just been cured of a chronic illness. “I was healed and the streak lived on.”

*

The Streak.

Say those words to a baseball fan and Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941 comes to mind.

Mention it to a basketball fan and the Lakers’ 33-game winning streak during the 1971-72 season pops up.

Bring it up with a track and field aficionado and he recalls Edwin Moses’ 107 consecutive victories in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles from 1977-87.

For Covert, it means running a minimum of three miles a day, every day, for a quarter of a century.

Of course, this streak is strictly unofficial and hinges on the honor system. However, Joe Henderson of Runner’s World magazine has become the unofficial record-keeper over the last decade. According to Henderson, Covert’s streak is the longest in the United States and the second longest in the world.

When the streak began on July 23, 1968, Covert was a 17-year-old graduate of Burbank High who was looking forward to his freshman cross-country season at Valley College. Today he is a 42-year-old father of four and coaches track and cross-country at Antelope Valley College.

When the streak began, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were fresh in the minds of the American public.

“I never envisioned this when it started,” Covert said. “When you’re 17, thinking about being 42, let alone running every day until you’re 42, is not something that you spend a lot of time contemplating. . . . I think once the streak got to 10 years, though, there was going to have to be a pretty good reason at that point not to go out and run.”

Covert, who has kept a training diary since he was a sophomore in high school, says he has logged 106,336 miles during the streak, which will reach 9,131 days today. That’s an average of 4,253 miles a year, 354 miles a month, 81.5 miles a week and 11.6 miles a day.

As impressive as those averages are, they have dropped during recent times, as Covert has averaged a paltry 3,000 miles the last five years.

The streak had a modest beginning.

Covert was nearing the end of his freshman cross-country season at Valley--which he capped with a victory in the state junior college championships--when he noticed that he had run for 100 consecutive days. That prompted him to try to go a year without missing a day.

“One year turned to two,” Covert said. “It gets to two and you’re thinking, maybe you can get to five. At five, it’s pretty ridiculous, but you go, maybe you can get to 10. And by 10, I had heard of Ron Hill’s streak and it just kept going.”

Hill, sixth in the marathon for Great Britain in the 1972 Olympic Games, has a streak which began on Dec. 21, 1964, but there is some question about whether it is still alive.

The latest issue of Runner’s World reports that the 54-year-old Briton had a toe operation in the spring and the next day hobbled a mile on crutches in 23 minutes. Although that is far slower than normal running pace, Hill claims it was enough to maintain his streak.

“That’s getting out of hand,” an amused Covert said. “That’s getting ridiculous. Does that mean that if I break both my legs, but push myself around in a wheelchair for three miles that my streak is still alive? I don’t think so.”

Tom Fleming, one of the top marathoners in the nation in the mid-1970s and Covert’s friend, agrees.

“In that case, the streak is taking over the runner,” Fleming said of Hill. “The runner is no longer in control of the streak.”

Some might say the same about Covert, considering the outrageous things he has done to keep his streak intact.

Covert, the 1970 NCAA Division II cross-country champion for Cal State Fullerton, says the broken foot in 1982 was the greatest threat to his streak, but there have been other close calls.

* In 1980, Covert and his wife Debi took a Caribbean cruise.

Covert ran three miles on the ship’s 110-yard track each of the first two days of the trip, but a storm forced the ship to battle massive swells the next day. While most passengers stayed below deck to wait out the storm in the safety of their cabins, Covert went up top to get in his workout, spending half the time running up a steep incline as the ship rose on the front of a swell and the other half going downhill as the ship descended.

“The crew was taking up bets on when he was going to go overboard,” Debi said.

Added Covert: “The crew was all watching real carefully. But I got the run in.”

* Later that year, Covert contracted flu that left him so dehydrated that he was hospitalized and given two liters of an intravenous solution.

His condition had barely improved several hours later, but he suddenly recovered when a doctor suggested he stay overnight for observation.

“I popped right up when I heard that,” Covert laughs. “I said, ‘Get me out of here.’ The first thing that went through my mind was if they keep me here overnight, the streak could be in jeopardy. What if they decided to keep me here for a second day? Somehow, I didn’t think they were going to let me go out and run.”

Although Covert still felt “like death warmed over” the next morning, he went out for a three-mile run. Debi followed him in a car and after the odometer hit three miles, Covert collapsed into the back seat and spent the rest of the day at home in bed.

“We lived up on a hill and I was stumbling down the street at the start of the run,” Covert chuckles. “But I made sure I ran when it was dark so no one would see me. It was terrible.”

* In 1981, Covert had a wisdom tooth removed. Although he was heavily sedated with a wad of cotton stuck in the hole where the tooth had been, he managed to get in one of his three-mile streak savers, as he calls them.

Debi again followed him in the car when he ran for the next few days, although Mark says things weren’t that bad.

“The doctors were real concerned because they were afraid that the stitches might come loose from the jarring,” Covert said. “But things turned out OK. There was a lot of bleeding from the stitches, but other than that, it was OK. That was relatively minor compared to some of these other things.”

* In 1987, a hemorrhoid attack that required surgery was the last great threat to his streak.

Covert awoke early one morning in excruciating pain and informed Debi that she had to take him to the hospital, pronto. As Debi was getting her things together, she noticed that Mark was in his running attire and lacing up his shoes.

“This was at like 4 o’clock in the morning,” Covert said. “She asked me, ‘Where are you going?’ And I said, ‘Well, before I go to the hospital, I have to get my run in.’ ”

Covert did, and later that day, he underwent surgery.

“It hurt real bad for the next few days,” Covert said. “I was in a lot of pain, but I survived.”

Debi, who met Mark in 1977 when he was coaching at Valley College, admits that the streak is an obsession with her husband, but she is supportive and admires his dedication to it.

“I’ve never known him not to run so it’s just part of our lives,” she said. “I married a distance runner and I married him when the streak was already going so it was just part of the package. It wasn’t like he got up one day and said, ‘OK, I’m going to start this streak.’ ”

Debi also cites the streak’s benefits, saying it has kept her husband in superb physical shape.

“It’s so neat to be married to someone who will always be fit,” she said. “He has the body of a 19-year-old and it’s really amazing to me that he’s as fit as he is at his age. He’s hardly ever sick and that’s amazing to me. To have four kids and to teach and coach college kids and never get sick is simply amazing.”

Fleming, the marathoner who met Covert at a U.S. Olympic Committee training camp at Washington State in 1970, describes his friend’s streak as “incredible” and “mind-boggling.”

“I once went two years and two months straight without (realizing) it,” Fleming said. “But as soon as I realized that, I took a few days off. I just figured I needed a break after all that time.”

Although Covert discourages the athletes he coaches from getting caught up in running streaks, he admits that there were times when his body could have used a day or two off.

“Running is what I do,” he said. “I get up in the morning and I go run. If we have to leave the house at 5 or 6 in the morning because we’re going to go somewhere, I get up and run at 3 or 4. I mean, it’s something I do and look forward to doing. . . . When I run by myself, it gives me an opportunity to get out and think about a lot of things and I enjoy that. I look forward to that. There’s not days when I get up and think, ‘Gee, if I didn’t have this streak, I wouldn’t go run.’ That’s never happened.”

Those remarks do not surprise Fleming.

“I use to tell Mark that I was into going, but he was into going forever,” Fleming said. “I love running, but Mark’s enthusiasm for it is just at a whole other level.”

Although Covert admits that his zest for running every day probably shortened his racing career at the elite level, he has no regrets about maintaining the streak. He says that there were times during the early to mid-1970s when he was hampered by injuries that probably would have cleared up in a month or two with rest. Instead, he continued to run and the injuries took much longer to heal.

“When I was younger and racing a lot, my attitude was that I was going to be tougher than anyone else out there,” Covert said. “No one was going to out-tough me or out-strength me. They might beat me, but they were going to have to run hard that day. The streak was part of that attitude. The streak was part of the mind-set you built up about yourself.”

The bottom line is that he relishes running hard.

“One thing about all of this is that I like to train,” he said. “I like going out and feeling like I’ve done something. When I’m hurt, and not able to run hard, I really don’t feel good.”

Covert does not spend much time worrying how the 100,000 miles he has run will affect his body, but he admits that there already has been considerable wear and tear.

He quips that he feels like a “crippled man” when he rolls out of bed each morning, adding, “It takes me a while to get all the kinks out of my body.”

That ritual provided members of Covert’s Antelope Valley cross-country teams with some humorous moments during summers past when they gathered in Yosemite for the Marauders’ training camp.

If the team was going to run at 6:30 in the morning, Covert would rise at 5:45 so he could walk around and get warmed up.

“At a lot of the camps, the kids would sit in their sleeping bags and laugh at me as I walked around,” Covert says. “They viewed it as a cheap form of entertainment. They’d see me all hunched over and tight and they couldn’t believe this old guy was going to be able to keep up with them on the run.”

Given the price he has paid, can the streak go another 25 years?

“I’m not sure,” Covert said. “At this point, it is a big deal to me. I don’t know what it means to other people, other than they think Covert is a little wacko. But at this point, it’s something that I’ve had with me longer than I’ve had my family with me.

“I don’t run as fast as I used to. I run (a 6 1/2-mile-per-minute pace) instead of 5:30, but the streak has enabled me to feel relatively young. That’s something that running does, it makes us feel good.

“And for me, it lets me dream and think about the future. And that’s a neat thing. A lot of people in today’s world don’t get a chance to dream, they don’t have time. And I think when you stop dreaming, you get old.”