Ted Geist estimates he's covered the same stretch of road in Rockford Park more than 3,000 times since he moved to Wilmington, Delaware, in 1984. For years, he’d log miles there at lunchtime with a crew that convened daily at the downtown YMCA.
Geist retraced his steps on the morning of October 4. This time, though, was far from the norm.
To celebrate his 70th birthday, Geist ran 26.2 miles while about 50 family members and friends—some of whom he’d long lost touch with—joined him on foot or on wheels for portions of the run. The event was aptly dubbed “Ted’s Marathon.”
“I’m on a runner’s high,” Geist told Runner’s World earlier this week. “I’m a lucky guy. I’ve got great friends and great support. Life is good.”
The celebration was a fitting for Geist, who has been glued to the sport and its tightknit community since he ran his first marathon in his late 30s on a whim.
One day in the spring of 1983, a colleague suggested they run the Chicago Marathon that fall. Geist regularly played basketball and baseball, but he never tried running.
“I told him, ‘You’re crazy. There’s no way,’” Geist said. “And he said, ‘Well, that’s the whole idea.’”
So Geist agreed to sign up.
He bought a book about how to run a marathon and started with a one-mile run. After five or six months of training, he graduated to 20 milers. Come race day, however, “I had no clue what I was doing,” said Geist, who finished in 3:55. “I probably should’ve run a couple smaller races first to get the feel. But I was hooked.”
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Over the next six years, Geist dropped his marathon time down to 3:15.
“Within a year, I was a part of the lunchtime group, a long-distance Saturday running group, and I did track workouts two nights a week,” Geist said. “It was a super way to meet people and do something you enjoy.”
But like a lot of eager runners, he lost control training for PRs and Boston Marathon qualifiers. This would lead to a back injury so painful it felt like a heart attack, Geist said.
He took a year and a half hiatus from running before a friend connected him with a podiatrist, who was also a runner.
“At that time, when you got hurt, you got orthotics,” Geist said. “He took a look at me and said he thought he could get me back into running. But he said it would be different, that I wouldn’t be a competitive runner. He said, ‘You’re going to run for fun, and you’re going to enjoy it more.’”
To get him back up and running, the podiatrist put Geist on a training program—one that he still uses 25 years later.
“He said, ‘You’re never going to run two days in a row, you’re going to cross-train, you’re going to have a good attitude, and you’re going to do these exercises,’” Geist said.
The prescription made running fun again.
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Geist’s passion for running eventually rubbed off on his children. When his 60th birthday was coming up, he ran the Philadelphia Marathon alongside his son, Ted, Jr.
Then when he was 63, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a type of cancer that affects the blood cells, and endured chemotherapy treatments and a stem cell transplant to fight it.
Geist vowed to run a marathon while he was on chemo. About 18 months after the stem cell transplant, Geist ran the Delaware Marathon in 4:53:55.
For his 70th birthday on August 1, Geist wanted to run a marathon. But because of the probable hot weather and limited options, Geist opted to run 26.2 miles on his own when temperatures were more favorable, reported Delaware Online.
Geist “gave a shout” to family, current running buddies, and long-lost training partners to see if they wanted to join him on October 4. He recruited his friend Joel Schiller, the operations director for the Delaware Marathon, to design the route.
With the goal of allowing folks to hop in and out of the run, Schiller created a course that involved running one loop once, then a second loop three times.
Ted Geist, Jr., Schiller, and Craig Conover, an owner of a local running store, completed the entire distance with Geist. (Conover rode a bike loaded with supplies.) Throughout the morning, the rest of the group took turns running, walking, or riding with Geist.
“I had my best friend who is handicapped there, and he was out riding his three-wheeled recumbent bike,” Geist said. “There was also a woman who I ran with for years who came out. We know she had cancer and hasn’t been around for a while. She actually ran, and that made my day.”
In fact, there wasn’t a mile that went by that Geist didn’t spend reminiscing.
After the run, there was a party complete with a cake that read “Happy Birthday Ted…still running after all these years!”
For his 75th birthday, Geist doesn’t know for sure what his plans are, but he said he’d love to run a marathon with one of his six grandchildren.
“I’ve probably been in five or six different groups over 30-plus years,” Geist said. “It’s corny, but running is not about me. Running is about us. It’s about getting your buddies together.”
