ERNIE CHATMAN RUNS THE NUMBERS: Thirty years of running logs. A daily running streak for 15 years. And the big 5-0: In Hawaii on Sunday, he'll complete his quest to run a marathon in every state.
By DAN DEWITT
Published September 14, 2006
[Times photo: Edmund D. Fountain]
Ernie Chatman of Brooksville has completed marathons in 49 states. The Hernando High School cross-country coach heads to Maui on Sunday for his date with destiny.
BROOKSVILLE -- Check Ohio off his list, Ernie Chatman and another coach jumped in a car one Friday night after softball practice at Hernando High School.
"It took us 16 hours and 15 minutes to get to Cleveland," said Chatman, 56, who has coached and taught physical education at Hernando High for 34 years. "We went out for a little jog when we got there. The next day, I ran the marathon and actually ran pretty well, 3 hours, 12 minutes. Then we turned around and drove back. Got home at 5 a.m. Got an hour's sleep and went to school."
The jog on that Saturday in May 1999 preserved a daily running streak that Chatman has since extended to more than 15 years.
Ohio was No. 6 in his quest to run a marathon in every state. He hopes to make it 50 on Sunday in Hawaii, where he will linger only slightly longer than in Cleveland. He plans to fly to the island of Maui on Friday, race Sunday and return Monday to prepare for his school's upcoming cross-country invitational.
Chatman knows this seems obsessive: the preoccupation with lists and numbers; exhausting himself for a 50 States Marathon Club finisher's T-shirt, which, as members joke, is worth only a few bucks but costs more than $30,000 in travel expenses.
"We all laugh at Ernie," said his wife, Linda. "We all think he's nuts."
Except that Chatman doesn't sound crazy. He talks like somebody who has pulled off something special - somebody who has managed, along with working and raising a family, to squeeze in a whole other life.
He remembers the unreal strength he felt cruising through sub 7-minute miles late in his Alaska marathon and the awesome views of the high plains during the Montana race. As he describes it, the trip to Cleveland has more in common with On the Road than Rain Man.
"I know it doesn't seem like it to most people," Chatman said, "but to me this is just a lot of fun."
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When Chatman started running in the 1970s, completing a single marathon was an awesome feat, he said. As it became commonplace over the years, runners had to do more to make an impression.
Now, about 300 runners have finished marathons in all 50 states, said Tom Adair, president of the 50 States Club. One member, Ray Scharenbrock of Milwaukee, has completed the 50-state circuit eight times and is closing in on No. 9; another man recently finished 50 marathon-distance runs in 50 states on 50 consecutive days.
"It does seem there are more people doing extreme things," said Amby Burfoot, winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon and executive editor of Runner's World.
But they usually do them very slowly, Burfoot said. Most 50-staters, for example, care only about finishing races and often walk part of each one.
Chatman's best marathon, on the other hand, is 3 hours, 11 minutes and 10 seconds, which he ran in Alaska. He has finished most of his other races in less than 3 hours, 30 minutes. This easily places him in the top 5 percent of 50 States runners, Adair said.
In addition to his running accomplishments, Chatman has been inducted into the Florida Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame for his success as a baseball, cross-country and girl's softball coach. He served as Hernando's athletic director for nine years and has been a member of Brooksville's Red Mule Runners club for 28.
"What hasn't he done?" said Chuck Boldt, a running friend from Spring Hill. "He's been the glue that's kept the club together. He's always extremely organized with everything he does, whether it's a high school race or a pitching clinic or refereeing a basketball game. Every kid is important to him, every event. They're just as important as his own streak and his own races."
Chatman has also "been a great husband and great father," his wife said - as long as she gave him freedom to run.
She and the couple's three adult children will join him in Hawaii.
It will be only the second vacation in family history. The first was at a running camp in Boone, N.C., where Chatman had taken his cross-country team. Dining out with her husband is almost unheard of, she said.
"We've all learned that life in our house revolves around Ernie getting his run in," said Linda Chatman, 53. "That's the price of being married to a fanatic."
Chatman is not registered with the U.S. Running Streak Association, but if he were, his streak of running every day for more than 15 years would be the 97th longest in the country.
It is the third such streak he has maintained since he began running. The first, which lasted almost a year, was in jeopardy after his youth baseball team finished a late game at a 1981 tournament in Mississippi. At 11:30 p.m., he persuaded an assistant coach to drive along an unfamiliar road for 5 miles, so Chatman could run in the headlights.
He celebrated one of the peaks of his coaching career, Hernando's cross-country state championship in 1997, with a late-night run through Brooksville after returning from the meet in Jacksonville.
He did the same the following year, after a disappointing second-place finish.
More recently, he was walking up the stairs to bed after a busy day with a strange feeling of having left something undone.
"Linda was already asleep, but for some reason I just didn't feel comfortable. Then I thought, 'You know what? You haven't run. You need to get out there and get busy,' " he said.
He slipped into the bedroom, changed into his running clothes and went for another late-night run.
"It's a matter of self-discipline," he said. "You just don't want to give in to the temptation of not doing it."
He had run only a handful of marathons, when, after finishing the Ocala race in 1998, he met a group of 50-staters. He immediately became inspired and began mapping out marathons he could run the upcoming year.
"I told Linda, 'I think I'm going to do this.' And she said, 'You're crazy,' " he said.
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Chatman acknowledges running has sometimes distracted him from his duty as father to three children.
"I didn't pay as much attention to the kids as I should have when they were younger," he said. "Linda did a great job of that."
Later, though, sports brought him closer to them. When they were in high school, he coached them all in either cross country or softball.
His eldest daughter, Erin Sullivan, 27, ran a marathon with Chatman in Dallas in 2000. His son, Bret, now 19, ran a half-marathon in Idaho as a 13-year-old while his father ran the marathon.
But even when the children had other things on their minds, Chatman ran. Since 1976, he has kept running logs in a succession of freebie bank calendars. The entry for Dec. 14, 2002, records the finishing time and the mile splits of a 5-kilometer race he ran that morning.
It makes no mention of his daughter's wedding that day.
"They knew I was going to run it. I don't think it was a problem," Chatman said in the trophy room of his home in Brooksville. "Hold on, I'll ask her."
He then rushed outside to call to Sullivan, who lives nearby and happened to be out for a jog with her husband, Addison. She walked in looking like a testament to a good and healthy upbringing: well-spoken and with a washboard stomach like her dad's.
"I just told him that if he could be there at 7 p.m. to walk me down the aisle, that would be fine," she said of his race on her wedding day.
"No feelings hurt."
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The pictures, medals and trophies in Chatman's converted garage mark not only his achievements but the passage of time.
The oldest photos, from the 1960s, are in black and white; the color has faded from the ones taken in the 1970s and '80s. Baseball uniforms go from loose to tight to loose again.
But through the years Chatman looks eerily unchanged - lean, with thick blond hair, prominent ears and a serious expression.
The drive for youth, his wife said, motivates him more than he admits. Both of his parents died at age 52 and he was determined to live longer and healthier than they did.
"I remember his father once bet him he would weigh 200 pounds by the time he was 40 years old," she said, laughing at the idea. "If he gets to 160 he just freaks out."
Chatman avoids red meat, fried foods and sodas. And though he runs every day, his training runs are shorter than most marathoners' - seldom more than 10 miles.
Maybe that's why his knees and hips are pain-free. He cured his only serious running injury, a partly torn Achilles tendon, with magnets, he said. He doesn't believe in colds because he has never had one.
"I haven't been sick in 15 years," he said.
On a recent afternoon, his cross-country runners began to gather in the carport at Chatman's house, having walked the few blocks from the high school. Chatman was dressed as they were, shirtless and in running shorts, looking just as slim. Other than a few wrinkles and some gray in his hair, he seemed almost as young.
When a sudden rain began to fall noisily on the aluminum roof, someone asked if they would still run.
