How to get fit: Quentin Valentine of Essendon, Australia’s Forrest Gump, ran every day for 36 years

LIKE the movie character Forrest Gump, Melbourne’s Quentin Valentine just decided to start running one day in 1982 and he’s run every day since, clocking up more than 130,000km. But now his streak is over.

THE YEAR of 1982 was a big one; Olivia Newton-John’s Physical topped the Billboard charts, the Dalai Lama visited Australia, the Swans moved to Sydney, and on the back streets of Canberra a group of runners came up with a challenge that would last more than 30 years.

Quentin Valentine, then aged 32, his brother and a friend, were out for a jog in their then- hometown when they devised a friendly challenge to see who could run a minimum of 5km, every day, until just one man was left running.

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Quentin Valentine is 68 years old and recently ended a phenomenal running streak of 36 years and 6 days. Picture: Rob Leeson.

One of them lasted a year, the other ran for three, but Valentine kept going for 36 years and six days, covering the distance around the world more than three times for no other reason than to test his strength of will.

“People think I’m addicted but I wasn’t, I didn’t particularly like it,” Valentine said.

People talk about that endorphin high when they run — I never got that,” he said.

“I had this streak going, so I thought I’ll keep doing it until I can’t.”

The only rule was that the daily run had to be at least 5km, but Mr Valentine exceeded that minimum regularly, competing in endurance races and marathons the world over.

He doesn’t know how far he’s run over the decades, but it’s likely he ran an average of 10km a day, at the bare minimum, or 131,640km over 36 years.

Valentine estimates he wore out at least 100 pairs of shoes over the years. Picture: Rob Leeson.

Through rain, hail, and blistering 49C days, at 2am in the morning before a flight, and through multiple injuries, Mr Valentine ran every day.

In 1983, he ran the Burra to Broken Hill Wheelbarrow relay race that recreated the trek of miners to the newly discovered Line of Lode.

In 49C heat, he and three teammates took turns sprinting for 10 seconds while pushing a wheelbarrow containing 40kg of items miners took with them from Burra to Broken Hill.

The relay race spanned 368km over five days. It was the hardest thing he’s ever done.

But it wasn’t all medals and crossing finishing lines.

Forrest may have run 15,000 miles across America, but Quentin Valentine ran at least 131,640km or 81,800 miles, in his 36 years of trackwork.

One morning, Mr Valentine slipped his feet into runners that he had left outside, and was bitten by a spider.

But he ran anyway.

His foot swelled up so much he couldn’t fit it in his shoe the next day.

Instead of taking a day off, Mr Valentine cut slits into the sides of the shoe to widen them and used makeshift shoelaces to secure his foot.

And on one dark, winter morning, running through the Maribyrnong River Trail, he fell into a construction pit.

“I could tell I had hurt my leg but I could keep running, so I did,” he said.

Later that day at work, he felt his pants growing tight down one leg.

“My leg blew up to twice its size.”

But yep … the next day he ran through it.

Mr Valentine only stopped the streak because of an agonising knee injury.

“It was making a sloshing noise like running in wet gumboots, but I kept running.”

He didn’t visit a doctor, which in hindsight wasn’t the best idea, he said.

“The fluid eventually went away, (but) I probably ran the risk of clotting in the brain.”

While many runners spend hundreds of dollars a year on the latest wearable technology to track everything from sleep and steps, to calories and heart rate, Mr Valentine always ran ‘naked’ — a running term for gauging pace with feel and not relying on technology.

“I always time my races with a stopwatch but that’s it,” he said.

He wears unassuming shorts and T-shirt, no Lycra, no compression gear and for all the far-flung trails he’s run on, the 68-year-old’s favourite place to pound the pavement is the back streets of Essendon.

“In the end it was just to get the thing done. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about where I was running,” he said.

While his track record of running through injuries would cause most people to cringe, a knee injury earlier this year sounded the death knell on the almost 40 year streak.

In June, Mr Valentine visited his physiotherapist and was told to get orthotics to help with an ankle injury. But then he started getting knee pain that was too intense to walk through, let alone run through.

On the morning of Wednesday, June 27, barely a few metres from his house, he hobbled home unable to run.

“I thought I’d wait and see how it felt in the afternoon,” he said.

But it was no better a few hours later, so Mr Valentine decided it was time for the challenge to end.

“I wasn’t devastated but I was disappointed.”

He had no goal to reach, other than going for as long as he could. And he did.

At almost 70, with more than 36 years of consistent running behind him, Mr Valentine isn’t particularly proud of his lifelong achievement.

“It could be a world record, might not be, I don’t really care.

“The only thing that got me out there was the streak. But that’s over now, and I don’t feel I have to get back into it.”

But once the knee heals, it’s time to start exercising again.

“I think I’ll just do something regular to keep my fitness levels up. No extreme challenges.”

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