Graphic Design Professor Knits While Running Marathons

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories, and we love telling stories of interesting accomplishments here on Our American Stories. And we mean interesting, by the way, and the broad range of what the word interesting means. And no matter how odd, by the way, in fact, the odd are the better here in Our American Stories. We love that about America too. Our weird passions, our weird hobbies. Today we have a story from the man who holds the record for the longest scarf knitted while running a marathon. He or he is with his story.

00:00:45
Speaker 2: I’m David Babcock. Many people know me as the knitting runner. I don’t usually call myself that. I’m a father, a husband, a university professor of graphic design, and I don’t think of myself as a celebrity. I’m just a pretty normal guy that is known for doing an unusual combination of two very normal things. Both knitting and running came about the same time, and that’s how they got mashed up together. I was hitting middle aged, and I found that my metabolism had slowed down significantly. I knew I needed to exercise. I had tried running before, but whenever I ran for too long or too repetitively, my knees and ankles had really hurt. I think that it hits a lot of people. So I was working on ways to do running that wouldn’t injure myself. And at the same time, I have a general practice of trying to learn new skills, and I’d recently picked up crochet and knitting. So it’s kind of a funny combination of these things take time, and there’s not time to do a lot of running that takes hours and hours, and sitting down to do knitting or crochet takes hours and hours. So when you try to learn too much in a tight time, you find that there’s not time for both. You have to prioritize one or the other. So it’s kind of a strange mix where I figured out how to have time for both at the same time. I’m a designer and an artist. I don’t usually worry too much about the boundaries on those things. I like to call myself a maker so that it encompasses anything. If I decide something needs making, then I’m the one who’s going to learn how to make it. I love learning new skills, how to do things for me. The entry was more of a need. I needed a hat, and I had a student of mine that made me a hat, but it wasn’t exactly perfect for my needs. So I found myself looking at this hat thinking, well, you know, I can do this. I can learn how to do this. I can make this better for my needs. My grandma there, you know, of course, knew how to knit and crochet, and you’d think that I would have learned from her. But nowadays it’s, or back then even it was, it’s YouTube is everyone’s grandmother. So I got on YouTube and tried to learn how to crochet, and I was able to figure that out and make my own hat. And then I figured out, well, I can make a better hat if I learned how to knit. So I taught myself again through YouTube, how to knit. It just seemed like a natural skill to learn. It’s like, well, why doesn’t—why doesn’t everyone learn how to knit and crochet? Everyone needs a hat, so they should learn how to make their own. And so with learning how to run, learning how to—how to make running not hurt, how to make it work for my middle-aged body, I found that the best way to do that was to run kind of like they say, barefoot, running in a very flat style. So instead of picking my legs up and throwing them down and all the jarring that did on my knees. I figured out that if you take little steps and try to land flat and gentle as if you were barefoot, and some of my first efforts I actually tried barefoot and then worked up the socks and water socks or whatever really minimal shoe I could do. And in doing that, it’s, it’s kind of funny how it changed how I ran, so that instead of bouncing up and down as I ran, I was running really smooth, and it was just kind of weird, like, oh, this is, this is different. I’ve never run this way before. So all the ideas that I had about what running was about, you know, just pumping your arms and all that vigorous motion, it changed into something that where I could breathe easier, I could talk easier, and my hands were more stable, like I wasn’t swinging my arms in big ways. I thought, well, if my hands are stable, I’m a person who does things with their hands, what can I, what can I do with my hands while I’m running? While I’m spending this hour or two on the road trying to not think about how tired I am, and how far I have to go and how I want to stop and lay down? What can I do that would distract me? So what if I actually did some of my crochet at the same time? So I did start that immediately. My first experiment, you know, I like to do tests and slowly figure out a problem. So my first experiment was: Can I hold my hands really steady as I run? So I think my first run I basically just put my two hands in front of myself and touched my fingers together and tried to figure out: Can I run and keep my fingers in a stable position? So that worked. Then I think I actually tried carrying like a little cup of water. Can I run without spilling a cup of water?

00:05:29
Speaker 1: And that worked?

00:05:31
Speaker 2: So I prepared a run where I had a tiny crochet hook because that’s what I was working on at the time, and a little bit of really thin tread, and I started running with that, and it kind of worked. But of course there were some weird problems. I wasn’t perfectly flat, so it’s kind of hard to see where the holes were, and my hands were getting sweaty, and the string, the yard I was using, started to get knotted up, and then I was really frustrating to try to get the knot out of the string. So it’s basically a failure the first time I did it. But I didn’t want to stop there. I didn’t want to stop in the middle of a problem. So eventually I landed on something that worked. So, having solved the crochet while running question, I thought, well, what about knitting while running? Because I had also learned how to knit recently. So I went through that series of experiments and figured out basically how to do it. And it was kind of a confluence of this problem to solve and this problem to solve and being curious if it would work, and not really self-editing, not saying, ‘Oh, that’s, that’s silly.’ Why would anyone try to do that, but just hey, you know, it’s a problem, it’s there, it’s a question, it’s a curiosity. It sounds fun to me. So I didn’t really advertise what I was doing to people, but of course my family knew what I was doing, and my wife—her first response is, ‘Well, are you being safe while you do this?’ You know, obviously she doesn’t want me to do anything that would hurt myself. She’s used to be doing kind of creative and crazy things, and, of course, supportive of that, I reassured her it was safe. I did have an early, an early accident that taught me how to be more safe. I was running along a road in the countryside, and there were big potholes in it, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention. So I did step into a pothole and I just went straight down. But the knitting needles were—when I knit, they’re held across my body. They’re not pointing directly at me. That’s a really weird knitting technique. I don’t know if that would even work. So I was fine. I didn’t stab myself with a needle, but I did scrape up my hands, and it was embarrassing. I think I even hit my forehead too, because my hands were so busy I couldn’t catch myself. So I figured out, ‘Okay, yeah, obviously I’ve got to pay attention.’ I’ve got to keep an eye on the road, keep an eye on the knitting. And it becomes kind of a double-focused thing. You kind of, like, you keep one eye eighteen inches in front of you and the other eye scanning, you know, the three feet in front of you. My first public race was a local half marathon, so there would have been maybe one hundred runners, and I felt pretty nervous being in public for the first time with my knitting stuff out, and I didn’t know what people would think. And not that it matters a whole lot, but when you’re doing something different, it’s a weird mix of I hope no one looks at me and I hope someone looks at me. And you want to be recognized, you’re doing something different, but you don’t want to be embarrassed by it or scrutinized for it. You just kind of want to do your thing and have people quietly notice and appreciate it, and you don’t always get that. At the end of the race, I think my family was there to take pictures with what I knitted, but there wasn’t any news media or anything, so very quiet things like, ‘yes, I did this,’ and maybe I emailed a couple of family members. I might have put it on a blog, but it’s still a very private thing.

00:08:53
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to David Babcock, the knitting runner, tell the story of how you became this, but in the end, we learned that this is his passion. When we return, we’re going to hear more from David Babcock and his remarkable story of merging his love of knitting and running into one activity here on Our American Story. And we return to Our American Stories and to the story of the knitting runner. We’re talking, of course, about David Babcock, who’s been sharing his story of how he combined these two passions to, in the end, solve a problem, and it was just something he was curious about. I love that he calls himself a maker, because in the end, this country’s filled with makers of all kinds, in every variety, and we celebrate them all here on this great show. Let’s return to David Babcock’s story.

00:10:09
Speaker 2: So when I was first experimenting with crochet and knitting while running, I had, of course, the question, ‘Well, as I’m trying to do this, is there anyone else who’s tried to do this before?’ And is that going to help me figure out how to do this? So I went online and it didn’t take too long to find Susie Huer. She has a blog called The Extreme Knitting Redhead, and in that blog she talked about her knitting while running a marathon in the London Marathon and getting to get in this world record for this. I thought, ‘Oh, oh, that’s cool.’ So yes, there are people who have done this, and there’s actually a Guinness record. That’s cool. So I guess this is worth doing. So I didn’t give it too much more thought beyond that at the time, and I continued to do my own thing and figure out what works for me. And it wasn’t until in 2009 I had taken a trip to New York City, and coming up out of the subway, I just happened to come up in Central Park at the end of the New York City Marathon, and I was just floored. I was totally inspired by seeing all the runners there. I had just barely started running in earnest myself and seeing all those runners just giving it. They’re all—all body types, all abilities. It moved me to tears. I thought, ‘Well, I’m just so impressed with what they’re doing.’ Could I ever run a marathon? Could I do that much? So I had set a goal at that point to run a marathon, and I ran my first marathon in 2012, and I did it. It worked. I was able to do a marathon under four hours, and I felt really accomplished. And at that point I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ve done it.’ That’s my goal. I had this dream that I could do a marathon. I’m done. That same year, after I had run the marathon, my brother-in-law decided he wanted to run a marathon, and he was going to come to my city and run it with me. So I’d already run a marathon, I didn’t have anything to prove myself, and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just run with him, help him finish or run at his pace.’ And we had done a test run together, and he was a lot slower than I was, so I thought, ‘Oh, you know, this is going to be an awful marathon if I’m running really slow.’ It’s just hard to run slow when you think you can do better. So I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is the time where I could take my knitting while running up to a more public level to actually do it during a marathon.’ So that made me look back at Susie Huer’s record, where she had done it during the marathon and gotten a Guinness record. So I thought, ‘I wonder if I could actually get the Guinness World Record for doing what she had done.’ Could I do better than that? The process of getting a Guinness World Record is really tough. It’s in many ways harder than doing the thing itself. So I’d figured out how to knit and run, but figuring out how Guinness works and following all their requirements, that was really tough. So it took me months and months to just get the application going and figure out what it was that I had to do following all the parameters. But it worked out that I was able to do the Kansas City Marathon with my brother-in-law and have that be my record attempt. I still hold the Guinness record for the longest scarf knit whilst running a marathon. There, Susie Huer. When I knew I was going to potentially break her record, I wanted to make sure that I did it for the right reason. She had originally done her Guinness record as a way to raise awareness and funds for Alzheimer’s research. So when I knew I was going to attempt the record, I made sure that I was connected with the Alzheimer’s Association in the US and doing some fundraising for them, and whenever I had the chance with media interviews, I wanted to make sure to mention that because it was so important that what she had done to be amazing was not about herself. It wasn’t about what awesome things she could do, but it was about refocusing people on something that mattered to her and something that deserved attention and a little bit of focus for the fundraising. So I tried to do that as much as I could. So Guinness had several requirements, technical requirements for the scarf. One was the size of the needles needed to be a US size 15. The number of stitches across needed to be thirty stitches; straight needles, thirty stitches; and the pattern is what’s known as a garter stitch. With those requirements technically for the knitting, and then the marathon had to be an official license marathon, and you had to finish under six hours. So it’s a balance of those things that needed to be figured out. The slowery run, the closer to that six-hour limit, the more time you have to knit. I had my brother-in-law running with and a special knitting witness that could verify that I was doing real knitting, not finding some weird way around it. And I had a camera strapped to my chest, a GoPro, so I could have the whole thing videotaped without any interruptions. It was all documented. I had rigged up several different bags, so I had one fanny pack on my front that held a plastic bag with a pre-wound ball of yarn in it, and I would just feed it out of that bag into my hands. And then I had another fanny pack behind me that had the other balls of yarn that I would do so I, after I finish one, I could reach back and put the new one in the front bag. And as the knitting got long enough, I had to secure the scarf so it wasn’t just waving around or tripping me up. So I had looped it with some paracord and carabiners onto the waist pack that I had so it would be secured. And as I ran, it got so long I ended up winding it several times around my body. It totally enveloped my upper legs so you couldn’t even see my legs, and so by the time I ended, it wasn’t going to be mistaken for a scarf that someone was just wearing. This thing was huge, huge. It’s like maybe two feet wide, so not a normal scarfing with. And then over twelve feet one in three-quarter inches was the official measurement. We had two knitting experts and an official measurement expert. They laid it out on the pavement to measure it. They were careful not to stretch it, and I encouraged them to make sure they measured from the shortest dimension, not the longest dimension. And that’s the size we got. And it was almost double what the previous record had been, and my time was a little bit shorter than the previous record that Susie Huer had done, so it worked out great. It was a great success that first record year in 2013. That same fall, I went to New York and was on The Weather Channel, talking to them about knitting and running, and they asked if I was going to run the New York City Marathon, and of course there wasn’t time to get into the race then, but I did end up the next year, 2014, running New York City Marathon—different race, different requirements. I couldn’t use knitting needles because of security concerns, but I ended up doing some finger knitting there. I invented a new wave of knitting so I could do twelve stitches, and I did double knitting with that with words and a scar, so really intricate stuff with just my hands and no tools. The next year after that, I did another New York City Marathon with finger crochet, so I gained no tools, but I made flowers off of yarn that I had wrapped around my arms and gave out the flowers as I ran, with reminders about Alzheimer’s. And I think that maybe that same year or the next one, I did a giant crochet doily in Kansas City Marathon. And one of those years I also did a finger knitting half marathon, so I had several races for several years. Then it was just kind of like, ‘Okay, I’m done, this is over.’ I don’t need to do this anymore. The marathons are hard on a body. I don’t really consider a marathon to be a healthy thing because of how I end up at the end of the race just exhausted and dehydrated, and so I wasn’t really interested in doing too many more marathons. It’s interesting how things live on the Internet. They don’t really go away, things like this interview popping up. It’s kind of funny that the same month, I’m scheduled now to go to Rome and participate in a reality TV show where they want me to knit while running on TV on a talent show. So I’ve been training again, making sure I can easily run and easily knit at the same time, and it still works. But it’s different in that the spectacle level is increasing, my personal risk of embarrassment is increasing, so it’s kind of a new challenge. I don’t think of myself…