Don Dickinson, 80, will be easy to spot at the 21st RunSedona marathon event on Saturday, Feb. 7.
The Verde Santa Fe resident ordered a custom T-shirt for the 10K run that reads “75,000 miles” on the front, and on the back, “makes three times around the world,” he said. The last mile of the race will mark Dickinson’s 75,000th mile logged since he began running in the mid-1970s.
“I started running at the very beginning of the running boom with the Jim Fixx book. It was a huge book back in the mid-’70s between that and the Nike waffle trainer it started the running craze,” Dickinson said. “And part of the book was to keep track of your mileage. Once you start keeping track and you recognize what a large part of your life it has become, you perpetuate it.”
“Self-discipline is a key to success in damn near anything,” he said. The consistency also pays off over the 35 marathons that he has completed. He noted that, because of his age, he often wins by being the only competitor in his age category and offered a broader life lesson: “You win by finishing.”
Dickinson relocated to the Verde Valley in 2012 with his wife, Anna, the couple met in 1987 and have remained happily married since 1990.
“Standing at 5’6” and weighing 128 pounds, Don boasts an impressive track record of maintaining excellent physical health without any hip or knee issues,” according to a RunSedona press release.
Though he was doing a 10K every other day until he had to recover from an illness in October, he had to take 12 weeks off before getting more miles of road under his feet.
“Once you get past the initial drudgery and pain of it, it becomes quite a pleasurable event,” Dickinson said. “Two miles is kind of the threshold when the endorphins start to kick in, and you can start to what I call disassociate, where you can run on autopilot and you can free think. Running burns up more calories than any other exercise except cross-country skiing, per minute of exercise …. If you can get past two miles regularly, you will really start to understand why people run.”
Dickinson said he uses that time to also help solve artistic and professional problems that he is currently tackling
“The two things that I’m doing in retirement are writing [advertising and communications] textbooks and doing artwork,” he said. “I’m writing a textbook and I come to a point where I can’t get through it. By the time I get back from my run, I will have figured it out. And the same thing with my art. If I come upon something I can’t move forward with, by the time I get back from my run, I’ll probably have figured it out creatively.”
A Portland native, Dickinson sold his interest in an advertising agency in 1995 and spent a couple of years doing consulting work before joining Portland State University in 1998. He retired in 2012 as director of the advertising management program in the School of Business.
But Dickinson’s new year’s resolution is to find a place to sell his artwork of small painted wood sculptures.
“I have a number of different [artistic] subjects,” he said. “I take patterns off of Indian blankets and what they call ceremonial robes, chieftain blankets. I’m very symbol and pattern oriented. Anytime I see an interesting symbol or an interesting pattern, I record it, and then try to figure out how to make a painting out of it. Some of them are Southwest based. But more and more … they’re things that I found in my international travels.”
He can often be found working through artistic challenges during his “five-mile revelation” while running throughout Verde Santa Fe, he also frequents the Cottonwood Recreation Center, running near the airport and through the Cottonwood Ranch Del Webb neighborhood. Or along lower Red Rock Loop Road, parking in Elmerville and running out to State Route 89A and back, covering five or six miles.
“When the brain gets full of warm, well-circulated blood, you can think in a dimension that you can’t when you’re just sitting there,” Dickinson said. “Since I pass the two-mile mark, if I had a problem that I needed to solve, I would go out and take a run, and by the time I got back, I’d have at least one good idea.”
He also might need to long a lot more miles for thinking since he is also on the board of the Verde Valley Humane Society in Cottonwood, and the organization is looking at a huge capital program to up to triple the number of kennels.
“We’ve already had a plan review session with the architects, who are going to come back with a revised plan here shortly,” Dickinson said. “[But] it’s going to be a slow process, probably a couple of years.”
My goal is to “just to stay healthy and continue to enjoy the benefits of running [but] maybe at slightly lower level,” Dickinson said. “But when you run, you also do a lot of other things that are health driven, diet and mental health wise, etc. It isn’t that you’re just a runner, you’re taking a lot better care of yourself.”
For more information about RunSedona and road and trail closures, visit runsedona.com or call during the race weekend call the hotline at (928) 362-0749. The races run from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. beginning on Navoti Drive near the Sedona Emergency Department of Verde Valley Medical Center.
