It’s Never Too Late to Begin

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

 

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO BEGIN

 

At age 65, Kansan Waldo McBurney began running. When he was 88, he started running competitively.

In 2003 at age 100, McBurney won four gold medals in the World Masters Athletic Championships in Puerto Rico. He not only won medals, he broke the world record for his age group in the 100 meters and in the shot put. He broke a U.S. record in the 5,000 meter race-walk.

Waldo McBurney, who lived in Quinter, must have been quite a guy. I would’ve liked to have met him. He was born in 1902 and he passed away in 2009.

I learned about this man recently when Terry Lessig sent me the audio version of McBurney’s autobiography, “My First 100 Years: A Look Back from the Finish Line.”

Lessig, of Phoenix, heard about McBurney in a 2006 CBS news story about the (then) 104-year-old Kansan who had just been named the oldest American worker. McBurney was a beekeeper at the time, having let go of some of his other labor-intensive jobs.

In 2007, Lessig traveled to Quinter and recorded the author reading his book.

McBurney and his siblings were raised on a farm near Quinter. He tells about farm and household chores, about going to school and to church, and about family life.

“When I thought my older brother, Edwin, was unfair with me I had a quick way of setting him straight,” McBurney said. “That was by sinking my teeth into his shoulder. That controlled him. But my mother interfered. She gave me a knife and sent me out to the peach trees to get a switch to use on me. I felt punished all the way out there and all the way back, especially when I got back. My mother’s method of punishment must have worked. I haven’t bitten anyone for over 90 years.”

When he was a teenager, his father had a stroke. His dad recovered fairly well, but to ease the workload the family moved to a smaller farm near Sterling.

McBurney’s uncle was a medical doctor and chiropractor in California and so his father spent some time there recovering from the stroke. When his father returned, he brought with him a 1912 book by Alfred W. McCann called “Starving America.”

“Starving America” was about nutrition and malnutrition. McBurney’s mother read the book aloud to the family.

Because of his father’s stroke and with the encouragement found in McCann’s book, McBurney gained a strong interest in nutrition. Like many farm families in the early 1900s, they raised most of their own food, and McBurney loved gardening.

He graduated from what is now Kansas State University with a degree in horticulture. Over the years he kept studying nutrition and he centered his meals around fruits and vegetables, whole grains and beans. McBurney said he had abstained from tobacco and alcohol his entire life.

In addition to running and nutrition, McBurney discusses other factors that may have led to his longevity. He cited faith in God, hard work, rest, stress management, family, marriage and a positive attitude.

McBurney believed in keeping the Sabbath. In Kansas, qualifications for the National Senior Olympics were held on Sunday, so one year he traveled to Tulsa where he could qualify on a Saturday. Another year he went to Pierre, South Dakota to qualify.

In his races, McBurney was disappointed that there weren’t more people to run against. “It is easy to win gold medals when one has no competition in one’s age group,” he said.

“I ran for fitness and because I enjoyed running,” McBurney said. “Entering races turned my fitness into sport and that gave me extra incentive to keep up the program, and I needed that when it was easier to lie in bed than to face a cold wind.”

McBurney was an ordinary guy, a hard-working Kansan, who achieved great things because he took care of his health and didn’t see age as a limitation. He put on running shoes when he was 65. He hit the road and he kept on going.

“My First 100 Years: A Look Back from the Finish Line,” the audio book by Waldo McBurney is available at www.audiobookman.com.

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Copyright 2012 ~ Cheryl Unruh