10 years running, Bill Hutchinson finds inspiration at every turn
Bill Hutchinson, wearing his trademark orange hat, rounds Elliott Circle on Feb. 8 during a group run to celebrate his 10 straight years without missing a day.
Bill Hutchinson reached 10 on Thursday — that’s 10 straight years of running at least three miles, every day, without a single day of rest.
It’s known by his friends and followers as The Streak, and the reason we can trust Bill’s word on this self-verified accomplishment is he’s not claiming 15. Append a giant asterisk if you offer him congratulations on 15 years. The Streak would be approaching that somewhat more impressive milestone if he had not fallen asleep, one night in February 2014, after simply forgetting to run that whole day. However inadvertent, the gap required him to reset the counter to zero.
Now, on this unseasonably warm winter morning some 3,652 days later, he was rounding the eastern curve of Elliott Circle, a quarter-mile loop between 59th and 58th streets near his home in Wauwatosa. Bill informed his group of running buddies that the mileage counter on his watch had reached three. Cheers rang out.
And then we all kept running, around and around that circle. This was not unusual for Bill.
You must know Bill, right? Doesn’t everyone? You should. After all, he and his frequent running partner Chris Ponteri are the “local legends Bill Hutchinson and Chris Ponteri,” according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Chris still sometimes playfully argues with Bill over whether the Journal Sentinel should have put Chris’ name before Bill’s.
You might know Bill from his antique-car-and-historic-building-obsessed Instagram account, @mkejogwalker, where he posts photos of interesting things found on his runs. Those things include the artifacts that make up an ever-expanding collection of toys, coins, silverware, tools, bullets and the other stray items discovered on the pavement, which he retrieves and pockets. “I collect those,” is his common declaration to companions.
Bill’s photo of a snow-covered Buick Riviera that he posted to his Instagram account, @mkejogwalker.
You also might know Bill if, like him, you are in recovery. Bill has been clean and sober for nearly 29 years, even longer than he has been running. And you might know Bill if you deal with insurance. He works as a claims adjuster, traveling around the Milwaukee area and sometimes all over Wisconsin assessing structural damage from fires, shootouts and other calamities.
I’ve known Bill for a little more than two years, since he joined me and Ponteri on a run in October 2021. I had been interviewing Ponteri for a story. They both now regularly crash the weekly morning runs that me and a few other East Tosa guys started during the pandemic.
You should know Bill. But if your paths have never crossed, leaving you oblivious to his so-called legendary persona, here is a desultory introduction to the legend and his 10-year streak.
Bill is 54. He runs every day, but he never stretches, either before or after. How does he avoid injury? “I’m very lucky, that’s it. Dumb luck.”
Bill likes the color orange. Orange running shoes, orange hat, orange neck gaiter, orange watch band, orange anything else he can incorporate into his ensemble, though not always orange shorts.
Bill runs in shorts. Always. Even on frigid days when his friends call him a fool and worry about his survival, or at least worry about his exposed skin’s resiliency to frostbite.
Bill is a conversationalist. An attentive listener, certainly, and he also likes to talk. That is a trait he shares with Ponteri, and much of their talk on long runs takes the form of good-natured insults. Thankfully, for them and for us, we all happen to enjoy listening to their chatter.
Let’s talk a little more about Bill. (Sorry, Chris.) Bill has a family. That would be his wife, his adult son, his teenage daughter and a dog. Bill admits that his running obsession can sometimes be a “point of tension” for his family, especially when, even by his extreme standards, he starts “overdoing it.” What does overdoing it look like for Bill? How about the year early in the pandemic when he topped 4,000 miles? Then, a year later, he topped 4,000 again. He has since scaled back his mileage, at least little bit.
So, yes, possibly overdoing it. On days like that, Bill says his wife may lament that the family has to settle for “leftover Bill.” Needless to say, their bonds of matrimony, though grounded in love, do not require her to love her husband’s 10-year streak.
About that streak: Bill is ranked 544th in the United States (21st in Wisconsin) out of nearly 3,000 runners on the leaderboard at runeveryday.com, a website maintained by the United States Running Streak Association. Bill, ever the history buff, lists his town of residence as “Hart’s Mills,” the 19th century name for what would become Wauwatosa. He documents every run of The Streak in hand-written logbooks. He has filled up 15 such logbooks so far. This inspires a vision of a day in the distant future, after he has exited this world, leaving his logbooks behind.
“I picture my descendants coming across this pile of books — and just throwing them away.”
Bill fell ill with COVID-19 during his running streak. Twice. That forced him onto the treadmill for several days to complete his minimum three daily miles. Yes, treadmill runs count, according to United States Running Streak Association.
The association, however, only requires members to log a single mile a day to be listed on its leaderboard. When Bill started streaking, three miles seemed a more suitable daily goal. “I never felt like a mile was a run,” he says.
Bill doesn’t drink alcohol anymore, but he drinks coffee. Clarification: “I consume a lot of coffee.” He doesn’t eat beef, more as a personal choice than to boost his running performance. Otherwise, he follows no special nutritional plan. His main goal in eating is to not eat too much. Weight can slow you down.
Forget about The Streak for a minute. You should know that Bill is fast.
Most of his miles meet every definition of conversational pace, but then sometimes, when you are on a long run with Bill, he fades back, absents himself, disappearing for extended stretches. You can safely assume he stopped to take a photo of an old car he spotted or some unique sign, architecture, mural or lawn ornament, or because he spotted (“I collect those”) a rubber duckie, wrench socket, shotgun shell casing or playing card on the pavement. Then, just when you think he has lost sight of the group for good, there he comes again, speeding back into the thick of it.
If you are leading the pack for a mile or two, you may find Bill next to you keeping pace, even nudging you a little faster than you had expected to go. You’re left panting; he never breaks stride or sentence.
Final, conclusive evidence: the Trailbreaker Marathon.
Bill runs the race just about every year. His performance in April 2022 practically defied gravity. I ran the half marathon that year, on a miserable day, dampened by wet falling snow on the Glacial Drumlin Trail in Waukesha. With conditions so cold and sloppy, I and likely most others were happy just to retreat to our cars afterward and warm up. When I later saw Bill’s finish time, my jaw dropped.
“William Hutchinson, Hart’s Mills, 3:12:53.”
The rest of us had merely finished. Bill had qualified for Boston.
That said, the Boston Marathon doesn’t much interest Bill, and he rarely travels so far from home. On Thursday, he was happy to be running his favorite circle, celebrating his 10-year streak with the likes of us. Our motley group of cheerleaders included the runners known as Starman, Bard, Jimmy V and Matty J and the one named Chris whom Bill is liable to call “that [expletive] Ponteri.”
When he’s not running in Wauwatosa and Milwaukee, you’re bound to find Bill extending The Streak in small-town Wisconsin. He sometimes laces up his running shoes during his down time from work.
And then there was that particularly memorable run in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Bill: “I got chased by a bear, for real.”
Ponteri: “It was the only speedwork he’s ever done.”
Bill again: “Got the masters 100-meter record.”
Tagging along with Bill on Thursday, I was in the middle of my own accidental streak. Three days straight running with Bill. The previous day, our East Tosa running group celebrated him during a five-mile cemetery run. The Streak, he revealed on that run, “started as an insurance plan against my own propensity to sloth.”
Like any runner, he still sometimes struggles with motivation, especially on days immediately after he has completed one of his numerous marathons and ultramarathons, both official and unofficial. But as he sees it, the benefit of The Streak, its core motivation, is that it makes running an easy decision. He will run. Period.
Bill Hutchinson loops Elliott Circle with his frequent running partner Chris Pontieri.
A day after our celebratory group run around Elliott Circle, I wanted to catch up with Bill once more, to round out my reporting for this story — his story and the story of The Streak. We defaulted to another five-mile cemetery run.
He shared more about his original reasons for becoming a streaker. “I was having a hard time staying committed to running. I would go for stretches, you know, four, five, six days of ‘I don’t feel like it.’ And then I’d get out of shape, it doesn’t feel as fun. So I decided I would try to do it every day.”
That was about 15 years ago. He also told me more about the last time he MISSED a day. His streak at that time was an already impressive four years and counting. Then he woke up one day and headed toward the basement to get ready to run. The moment he hit the top of the stairs, he said, he realized with horror what he had done — or rather what he hadn’t done the day before. At that moment, “it was this wave of panic.”
Damn.
His first thought was, “how am I going to fix this?” Eventually, he had to face the hard truth. “It’s over.” He self-reported to a few friends and then told the the United States Running Streak Association to change his streak from “active” to “retired.” He also decided to take a couple days of rest.
On Feb. 9, 2014, he started running again. He hasn’t stopped since.
Apart from extending The Streak, there’s plenty that motivate Bill to run. He enjoys exploring some of the Milwaukee neighborhoods (pause for photo) that he remembers first visiting as kid with his father, a retired Milwaukee police officer. He enjoys occasionally spotting cars from the 1970s and 1980s (pause for photo), the ones that motored down these streets in his younger days. Collecting pavement artifacts (photo, photo) started as “more stuff to look forward to, the thrill of the hunt,” he said. “It then somehow became like a weird little art project I guess.”
The art is sometimes grim. The bullets, all too plentiful, and he and Ponteri once came upon a discarded handgun in the street. Chris to Bill: “Do you collect these?”
The fitness benefits of running are obvious. “I will also say that running really really helps me spiritually,” Bill says. “It helps me emotionally.” And then there are the people. “I’ve been able to tap into this wonderful community of runners.”
Bill also has a few hundred dollars in change, all the money he has salvaged from his runs during The Streak. Someday he plans to donate it all a charity. The We Got This community garden is high on his list.
That’s what you might call good motivation.
Bill and I eventually made it back to our starting point. I was honored to have joined him on his 3,653rd run in a row. We both had to get back to work and said our goodbyes. Legend though he may be, Bill isn’t often interviewed like this, certainly not while running, and he signed off with a gentle laugh, “I could talk about myself all day!”