Ken Brown was born seventy-four and three quarters years ago in Keene, New Hampshire. Until Ken was born, Keene was best known for its annual fall Pumpkin Festival memorialized in the Guinness Book of Records for a display of 5,000 carved lit pumpkins. Ken’s father was an auto mechanic and his mother “did factory work”. The family moved around New England where work was available with Ken and his younger sister attending seven schools in their twelve years of primary and secondary education.
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Ken being pulled by his motherKen, who has less body fat than Don McClellan, started his exercise program at age ten. Not into team sports (Ken alleges soccer had not yet been invented in New Hampshire), he learned to “speed climb” trees and would hang off limbs. A older passer-by challenged him one day to do a pull up, so he did and continues to do so even today, frequently hanging upside down for extended periods of time. He gained strength by moving rocks onto the many rock walls that were prevalent in rural New Hampshire. As Ken became a teenager, he cut wood for the family and others to heat with during the harsh New England winters. Ken would “fall” tall black Burch trees, then drag them to where he could “buck them up” to use a bow saw to cut firewood length pieces.
Ken’s first foray into running was participating in a 1977 Memorial Day five-mile race in Connecticut. Ken trained and dieted for sixty days in preparation. At age thirty-four he finished seven hundred out of eight hundred participants. He followed completing a half marathon three months later with a significantly improved time, and then participated in the 1977 New York City Marathon. Ken ventured to Chula Vista, California in 1982 to compete in a three hundred-mile six-day race. On arrival, he learned that the course was two hundred laps around a one quarter mile tract per each fifty-mile increment.
Ken’s brother in law and sister in 1988 moved to Lynchburg, Virginia to attend Jerry Falwell’s ultra conservative Liberty University. Ken tagged along and landed the job as superintendent of grounds for Liberty. Ken later moved to Texas where he worked in the same capacity for a large personal estate. Ken began his love of real “tree work” while in Texas. Meanwhile Ken’s parents self-deported to Florida when they retired. Ken’s sister and brother in law followed to Florida while Ken settled in Tucker, Georgia. Ken liked Tucker because “it was in the middle of nowhere, any way you looked!”. As Tucker grew, no-where became Snellville, GA. Ken and his first wife produced four children. She passed away in 1991 and Ken remarried a year later. Ken has always been able to earn a good living doing lawn service and tree trimming. This avocation almost came to an end in 1998 when Ken fell out of a tree breaking all “his ribs and shoulder on one side”. Ken fell so hard that the fall knocked his cell phone thirty feet from where he fell! Ken learned of a twelve-hour run at Stone Mountain while healing. Unable yet to run, Ken walked thirty miles in the twelve hours.
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Ken began to run the Grand Prix Races that Will Chamberlin would direct in the Athens and I-20 corridor west area in 2002. That year he ran seventy-four series races. Most of his races now are on the Dirty Spokes series as he prefers trail runs and long-distance challenges. The good news is that Ken weighed 145 pounds with a twenty-eight-inch waist in High school, and currently carried 157 pounds with a thirty-inch waist on his 5-foot ten-inch frame. He wants to lose two pounds! The sad news is that his widowed ninety-four-year-old mother, who was living in Florida with Ken’s sister in home bound hospice care, and passed away on July 24th. The caring person that he is, Ken was there for her!
Bob checking out from the back of the pack. Watch for the profile of North Georgia’s Donna Presley, and the profile of Jim Merritt, another unconventional runner.