His heart says go

By Nancy Shohet West

Ronald Kmiec of Carlisle once said it would probably take a coma to prevent him from going out for his daily run.

Last Thanksgiving, it almost came true.

Kmiec had joined about 2,500 other runners at the Feaster Five Road Race in Andover. For Kmiec, a 5-mile course should have been a piece of cake; he typically ran 30 to 40 miles a week, and a month earlier had completed the Bay State Marathon in Lowell in a time of 4 minutes 3 seconds, which qualified him to run the Boston Marathon for the 35th time.

He hadn't missed a day of running in almost 32 years. The 65-year-old is a "streak runner" as defined by the US Running Streak Association, whose members are committed to covering at least one nonstop mile every day of the year.

Kmiec's streak began on Nov. 28, 1975. According to the official Streak Association registry, that makes him the streak-running record holder in Massachusetts, several years behind the nation's top streak runner, a California schoolteacher who will hit 40 years of daily running in July.