By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
“If you want to be successful, you really have to surround yourself with great people.”
Runner, coach, and teacher Keith Madaras shared that bit of wisdom Saturday morning after completing a run marking 100,000 lifetime miles.
And the 40 or so people he was addressing were among those people who have helped him along the way to achieve that milestone.
They included fellow “Sandbaggers,” that group of his running buddies, supporters, student athletes, and family.
“This is for all you guys who were there for me helping to get to this point,” he said.
Madaras has the paperwork to back up the 100,000 lifetime miles achievement. Some of his logs were spread out on a table outside the Pemberville American Legion Club where Saturday’s run ended.
Five members of the Perrysburg High team that Madaras coaches huddled around one the books.
“That’s crazy the amount of work he does,” said Frankie Matthews. The young athlete noted Madaras did a cool down lap at a faster pace than they run when training hard.
Racing, though, was not the mission on Saturday morning. The dozen or so runners who accompanied Madaras on his jaunt through his hometown stayed in a tight pack as they navigated the traditional route of the Pemberville Five Miler.
That race, which Madaras has directed for decades, would have been held next weekend if it weren’t for the pandemic.
Madaras said he thought about marking his milestone during the race, but reconsidered. He didn’t want to make the event about him.
So, he planned to do a low-key run with friends sometime late July.
It was his family, he said, who surprised him by making it more of a “spectacle,” complete with invited news media.
His son Chris and his wife, Janet, thought with all the negative news surrounding COVID-19 it may make a refreshing good news story, Chris Madaras said.
Were it not for the pandemic, he added, it may have been even a bigger deal. “We had to scale it back.”
Running is in the Madaras DNA. Duff Madaras, Keith’s father, is a long-time cross country and track coach. His father, known, as “Big” Duff, was a three-time letterman in track at Bowling Green State University, and is in the school’s athletic hall of fame.
Keith’s younger brothers Jodie and Kevin have also run, and his sister, Lindsay, is a marathoner. She’s scheduled to run a marathon in Antarctica in 2023, completing a cycle of running marathons on every continent.
His mother, Tekla, is a nutritionist, and his uncle David Madaras ran at Ohio Northern and serves as a track and field official.
“I’ve been blessed always to be around athletics,” Keith Madaras said.
He doesn’t remember not running, so those 100,000 miles don’t include the distance put on before he started keeping track as a freshman at Eastwood High. He graduated in 1987.
His parents, however, have clearer memories.
Duff Madaras remembered his eldest son was 5 running a lap around the track at Liberty Center where Duff was coaching. He would have run more, the father said, but they had to get the meet started.
“He was the Energizer Bunny,” Tekla Madaras said.
Madaras traced the spark of his commitment to running to an intro to running class he took when he was in seventh grade with his uncle, Dave Michael, at BGSU. He ran, his uncle walked, he said. He hasn’t stopped running.
His coaching career started right after he graduated from BGSU, when he was a volunteer assistant coach. Then he started to coach at Eastwood, where he still teaches anatomy and physiology – with plenty of examples from running.
He coached at St. John’s before joining Perrysburg.
But he was encouraging other runners before then.
His brother, Jodie, who has tapped into that energy as a song and dance man and musical creator and producer, recalled an incident from when he was a sophomore at Eastwood.
He felt he was running the best race of his life, and all of a sudden toward the end, he felt a wave of energy at his back.
“You’re doing great,” said a voice over his shoulder. It was his brother. That made the younger Madaras really confident. He was running ahead of his brother, a senior.
As it turned out, Keith had already won the race, and circled back to give his brother encouragement.
Keith Madaras said Saturday: “I don’t know how many more miles I’ll run, but I won’t give up.”
