Overcoming Adversity Swimmingly
Boyd Sigler is a competitor, not a quitter.
From newspaper article in Louisville Courier-Journal Neighborhoods/City Oct 31/Nov 1, 1984
By Grace Schneider, Staff Writer
[Article written after Tom had broken his leg and was doing rehabilitation, at age 69]
Boyd Sigler has often brought up the rear in cycling and road races, but he’s a front runner when it comes to fighting adversity.
Sigler, 69, a long-distance runner and two-time triathlon competitor, hit a skid in his daily cycling and running routine when he broke a leg in a cycling accident last May. But he is proof that injuries can’t keep an active man down.
Sigler recently completed a 50-mile lap-swimming series at the YMCA on Third Street. And he is pedaling an hour a day on a stationary bike to regain his strength and flexibility.
“That kid ran across the country with one leg. If he can do it, I can.” said Sigler, referring to Fairfield, Conn. native, Jeff Keith, a one-legged man who is running across the country to raise money for the American Cancer Society.
Sigler’s daily workouts are short and easy compared with his former training. The retired insurance underwriter, who lives in the West End with his wife, Ethel, has run every Mini-Marathon since the 13.1-mile race began 11 years ago.
And he holds the record in his 65-and-older group for the Metro Marathon and the Ultra-distance Classic, the 50-mile run between Frankfort and Louisville.
His wrinkled face and broad-shouldered, 6-foot frame have been a common sight at 10,000-meter and other distance races around the county.
In 1982, he drove his car 2,000 miles and ran 4,000 miles, Sigler said. Part of that mileage was built up while training for a marathon in New Orleans.
He ran six miles in the morning around the Shawnee Park area. Then he’d come back and put on a backpack and run another 5-1/2 miles to work downtown. Lunch hour found him running another six from the Louisville Athletic Club, at 430 W. Muhammad Ali Blvd., across the Clark Memorial Bridge and back.
He’d run home after work – another 5-1/2 miles – and cap it off with an easy five or six miles in the evening.
His dogged dedication to his workouts resulted in some gentle ribbing, according to Bill Peterson, a fellow distance runner and senior citizen record holder.
“People would kid him about the fact that he would run and walk to the race site. He was never too fast, but he was great in long-distance races,” said Peterson, of Winding Road in southern Louisville.
Once, on the way to a 10-kilometer race at Long Run Park in eastern Jefferson County, Peterson picked up Sigler running along Shelbyville Road; he had already run about 10 miles.
Several years ago, they both ran the 50-mile Ultra-distance Classic. The next day, Peterson was standing on the sidelines at a two- or three-mile race and saw Sigler run by. “I could hardly walk after that thing. After fifty miles, you’re pretty sore. But darned if he didn’t run that race,” Peterson said, laughing.
Sigler’s fascination with fitness took hold when his daughter, Susie, and a friend began running in the late1960s at the Shawnee High School track to prepare for college athletics. He went along to keep an eye on them.
Ms. Sigler recalled that her father sat in the bleachers and watched for about a week. Then he began jogging. Soon he was entering races and becoming a long-distance addict.
Sigler says he enjoys the camaraderie of running as “much as the sport itself.”
He likes the way runners complain about their injuries and downplay their excitement about races. “After the race you ask them how they did and they’ll say, ‘Oh, not too good.’ It’s an interesting social event,” Sigler said, smiling.
Three years ago at his daughter Susie’s suggestion, he added swimming and cycling to his exercise programs and entered two triathlon races, combining legs of swimming, running, and cycling.
“He’s one of those people who just keep on plugging,” said Ms. Sigler who lives in Crescent Hill. Last year at E. P. “Tom” Sawyer State Park, Ms. Sigler, a teacher and coach at Sacred Heart Academy, won the woman’s race. And her father received a plaque, swimming trunks and a pair of goggles for winning his age group and being the oldest finisher.
He took training rides often with friends from the area Wheelman’s clubs and was looking forward to a good summer of riding and running when he turned too sharply on a gravel-strewn asphalt road on the 100-mile Tour of the Scioto River Valley ride, a round-trip tour from Columbus to Portsmouth, Ohio, last May.
He ended up with a break high in his left leg, and doctors had to reattach the bone with metal nails and screws. A week after he returned home from a three-week hospital stay, he hitched a ride to the YMCA and started swimming laps.
“I told the doctors they can’t treat him like most older men. He’s a lot more muscular than a lot of others, ” said Sigler’s wife, Ethel.
During the first weeks, he got into and out of the pool by taking his crutches into the water with him.
The YMCA’s long-distance lap swimming program “helped me stay with it”, he said.
But returning to running might not be so easy. “My running is zilch,” Sigler said. In addition, it hurts him to ride his moving cycle and “after a block it loses its novelty.”
But Sigler is still reaping the rewards of his running career, despite his present injuries. His name was picked in a drawing at the four-mile Run for the Sun downtown last March for a free five-day windjammer cruise in the Bahamas.
“Well,” Sigler said matter-of-factly, “I guess I’ll try some snorkeling.”
