96 and still running

Bill Benson, 96, a Valley Stream resident for 64 years, is closing on his goal of running in 1,000 races.

Micah Danney/Herald

Benson ran track at Ohio University in 1941. He is third from left in the back row.

Micah Danney/Herald

• 
• 

Bill Benson was 60 in 1979 when he told his wife, Annette, that his clothes seemed to be shrinking.

“She said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with your clothes. You’re just fat.’ And I agreed with her, when I thought about it,” Benson said.

After 40 years of smoking, he threw away all of his pipes, gave up drinking beer and read a book by a track coach that detailed how to start a running regimen. And run he did — more than 20,000 miles in the past 36 years, every mile accounted for in a logbook Benson faithfully attends to. While he’s already surpassed his goal for miles run, he has yet to achieve the figure he set for races: 1,000. He’s at 983, just 17 to go.

Benson’s running career officially started when he was in college. He was on the freshman track team at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, in 1941. World War II interrupted his academic career, and he was drafted as a quartermaster. He remembered working with German prisoners of war in that role — “They were good workers,” Benson said.

He returned to Ohio University in 1946 and graduated the following year. But his running career was again interrupted, this time by a career as an agent for Liberty Mutual Insurance. Benson moved to Valley Stream in 1951, where he and Annette raised three sons, Jeff, Don and Richard, in a house near the Gibson train station. Jeff, who ran track at South High School, eventually died of cancer. Don still lives in the village with his family.

Benson didn’t run again until his encounter with his tightening clothes, three years before he retired from the insurance industry. He started off by intermittently running and walking the mile-long track around the lake at Arthur J. Hendrickson Park. Once he could run a full lap around the lake, he entered a 5K race he saw advertised in the newspaper.

“I ran it,” he said, “and almost died.”

He ran the Long Island Marathon at 62, then the New York City Marathon. He joined the Greater Long Island Running Club, of which he remains a member — and was honored by the group on Dec. 15. Club president Mike Polansky called Benson a personal friend whose enthusiasm for the sport has never wained.

“He’s certainly one of the most durable runners to ever come out of Long Island,” Polansky said. “There is no one like him.”