After breakfast at McDonalds, 84-year-old Carlton Mendell, of Windham, takes his daily jog around North Windham.
Sporting a striped headband, track club jersey, shorts, and gloves, Carlton keeps pace as he jogs through the Shaw’s shopping plaza to Route 35, down Basin Road and then back.
He is in good health and good spirits days after a 5K race on the soggy trails of Black Mountain near Rumford where he won first place for his age bracket.
“I was the only runner over 70,” he said. “So I guess I lucked out.”
Rain or shine, Mendell runs these circuits every day in preparation for his next marathon. And there is always another marathon on the horizon.
At the Marine Corps Marathon on Sunday, Oct. 30, a hundred thousand spectators watched from the sidelines as Mendell and 30,000 other runners lapped around Washington D.C. racing from the Iwo Jima monument, past the Pentagon, through Georgetown University and up Pennsylvania Avenue and throughout the capital city.
Mendell, once again the oldest runner in the race, clocked in at 6 hours and 38 minutes, just a minute behind his time clocked at the Boston Marathon this past spring.
“I do it because I enjoy it,” Mendell said. “I’m not a competitor at all. I just attempt to finish.”
Mendell, a retired lieutenant colonel of Maine Air Force Reserve, has run every Marine Corp Marathon since it began thirty years ago and more than 120 marathons since he started competing in 1972. His personal best time for a race is three hours and three minutes at the Maine Coast Marathon.
Mendell runs 210 miles in the three weeks leading up to each marathon, a routine he learned from Bill Squires, former coach of the Greater Boston Track Club.
A self-professed junk food junky, Mendell said he runs for “good health” and the camaraderie among runners. His thirty-year running legacy has earned him many friends across the country, he said.
Mendell is a longtime member of the Maine Track Club and used to run from Fort Kent to Kittery with a track club called the Maine Rowdies. In 1984, he ran 125 miles in 24 hours circling the Bowdoin College track with the Rowdies.
“Long distance running is all mental,” Mendell said. “All you got to do is get in a certain frame of mind.”
Positive and negative thinking can make the difference between whether you finish a marathon or not, he said, and thinking you can’t finish may guarantee that you don’t.
In the early 1970s, Mendell began running to lose weight by jogging “one lamppost at a time” down on Baxter Boulevard in Portland.
He lost 70 pounds after a year of running, participated in the Portland Boys Club 4K in 1972 and turned his sights on bigger ambitions, the Boston Marathon.
Next spring will be Mendell’s 29th time running the Boston Marathon and he has no plans to stop running in the future.
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