April 25, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Professor David Babcock shares his inspiring and quirky story of how he earned a Guinness World Record for knitting the longest scarf while running a marathon.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories, and we love
telling stories of interesting accomplishments here on our show. 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 are weird hobbies. Today we have a
(00:32):
story from the man who holds the record for the
longest scarf knitted while running a marathon. He or he
is with his story.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
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
(01:06):
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
(01:27):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:33):
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.
(02:56):
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
(03:16):
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
(03:36):
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,
(03:57):
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
(04:21):
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 esier, 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
(04:42):
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 test
(05:04):
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.
(05:25):
Then I think I actually tried carrying like a little
cup of water. Can I run without spilling a cup
of water?
Speaker 1 (05:29):
And that worked?
Speaker 2 (05:31):
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
(05:51):
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?
(06:13):
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,
(06:36):
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
(06:56):
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.
(07:17):
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 kitting 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
(07:39):
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
(08:03):
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
(08:24):
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,
(08:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
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
(09:39):
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,
(10:01):
and we celebrate them all here on this great show.
Let's return to David Babcock's story.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
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
(10:34):
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 continue to do my own thing and figure out
what works for me. And it wasn't until in two
(10:57):
thousand and nine 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
(11:18):
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
twenty twelve, and I did it. It worked. I was
(11:41):
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.
(12:03):
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,
(12:25):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:07):
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 marathon. There Susie Huer.
(13:28):
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,
(13:49):
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 a out 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.
(14:10):
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 fifteen. 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
(14:32):
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's
running with and a special knitting witness that could verify
(14:56):
that I was doing real knitting, not finding some weird
way around it. And I had a camera strapped to
my chest a go pro, 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 plastic bag
with a pre wound ball of yarn in it, and
(15:17):
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
(15:38):
para cord 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
(15:59):
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
(16:21):
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 Hure had done, so it worked
out great. It was a great success that first record
year in twenty thirteen. That same fall, I went to
(16:42):
New York and was on the weather channels 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, twenty fourteen,
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
(17:05):
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
gain 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
(17:28):
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 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
(17:50):
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
(18:13):
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
(18:37):
it's kind of a new challenge. I don't think of
myself as a performer or as a celebrity. I'm kind
of a behind the scenes do something, let someone see
the work. But I believe in when there's an opportunity
for something, to go ahead and follow the opportunity without
self editing and saying oh, that's not me, or I
can't do that, or there's no way that that fits
(18:59):
who I am, but instead take the opportunity to say, oh, okay, fine,
I'll do a television interview even though that horrifies me.
I'll perform in public even though I'm really shy. I'll
knit while running even though it sounds really silly and
makes no sense and has no purpose. But I believe
in following those opportunities or those questions and just scene
(19:19):
where it leads. So there are big time gaps in
between some of my activities, but as they keep coming,
I'll still do them. And I don't know Susie Hue
or she's older than I am, and she's her. I
think her record was at an older age than I did.
So there's still if there's some competition to me still
(19:40):
as you know, maybe if I can still run as
old as she is and still running. She's a great
role model in so many ways. So there's still some
fight left in me. There's still some knitting to be
done and some races to run.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And what a beautiful and lovely soul. Twelve feet one
in three quarter inches long, almost doubles the previous record,
shatters the previous record. The story of the knitting runner,
and that's David Babcock's story. A real beauty here on
our American stories
And we continue with our American stories, and we love
telling stories of interesting accomplishments here on our show. 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 are weird hobbies. Today we have a
(00:32):
story from the man who holds the record for the
longest scarf knitted while running a marathon. He or he
is with his story.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
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
(01:06):
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
(01:27):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:33):
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.
(02:56):
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
(03:16):
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
(03:36):
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,
(03:57):
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
(04:21):
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 esier, 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
(04:42):
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 test
(05:04):
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.
(05:25):
Then I think I actually tried carrying like a little
cup of water. Can I run without spilling a cup
of water?
Speaker 1 (05:29):
And that worked?
Speaker 2 (05:31):
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
(05:51):
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?
(06:13):
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,
(06:36):
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
(06:56):
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.
(07:17):
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 kitting 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
(07:39):
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
(08:03):
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
(08:24):
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,
(08:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
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
(09:39):
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,
(10:01):
and we celebrate them all here on this great show.
Let's return to David Babcock's story.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
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
(10:34):
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 continue to do my own thing and figure out
what works for me. And it wasn't until in two
(10:57):
thousand and nine 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
(11:18):
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
twenty twelve, and I did it. It worked. I was
(11:41):
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.
(12:03):
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,
(12:25):
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
(12:45):
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
(13:07):
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 marathon. There Susie Huer.
(13:28):
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,
(13:49):
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 a out 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.
(14:10):
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 fifteen. 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
(14:32):
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's
running with and a special knitting witness that could verify
(14:56):
that I was doing real knitting, not finding some weird
way around it. And I had a camera strapped to
my chest a go pro, 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 plastic bag
with a pre wound ball of yarn in it, and
(15:17):
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
(15:38):
para cord 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
(15:59):
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
(16:21):
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 Hure had done, so it worked
out great. It was a great success that first record
year in twenty thirteen. That same fall, I went to
(16:42):
New York and was on the weather channels 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, twenty fourteen,
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
(17:05):
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
gain 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
(17:28):
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 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
(17:50):
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
(18:13):
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
(18:37):
it's kind of a new challenge. I don't think of
myself as a performer or as a celebrity. I'm kind
of a behind the scenes do something, let someone see
the work. But I believe in when there's an opportunity
for something, to go ahead and follow the opportunity without
self editing and saying oh, that's not me, or I
can't do that, or there's no way that that fits
(18:59):
who I am, but instead take the opportunity to say, oh, okay, fine,
I'll do a television interview even though that horrifies me.
I'll perform in public even though I'm really shy. I'll
knit while running even though it sounds really silly and
makes no sense and has no purpose. But I believe
in following those opportunities or those questions and just scene
(19:19):
where it leads. So there are big time gaps in
between some of my activities, but as they keep coming,
I'll still do them. And I don't know Susie Hue
or she's older than I am, and she's her. I
think her record was at an older age than I did.
So there's still if there's some competition to me still
(19:40):
as you know, maybe if I can still run as
old as she is and still running. She's a great
role model in so many ways. So there's still some
fight left in me. There's still some knitting to be
done and some races to run.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And what a beautiful and lovely soul. Twelve feet one
in three quarter inches long, almost doubles the previous record,
shatters the previous record. The story of the knitting runner,
and that's David Babcock's story. A real beauty here on
our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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