By Martin Cleary
Ken Parker is a well-respected and long-term member of the Ottawa running community, having served as an event organizer, coach, participant and webmaster.
At the 49th annual A.C.T. and City of Ottawa Sports Awards Dinner in 2003, he was presented the Gord Trivett Memorial Trophy as the volunteer of the year for 2002. He was inducted into the Ottawa Sport Hall of Fame in 2005.
Parker co-founded the National Capital Marathon in 1974 and was its guiding force and race director until the mid 1980s. It was the largest marathon in Canada from Day 1 and remains the biggest running festival in Canada as the Tamarack Ottawa Race Weekend. It wasn’t unusual to see him running with the growing masses of participants on marathon Sunday.
His interest in staging distance races continued to grow when he brought the Avon Running Series to Ottawa. In 1981, he spearheaded the Avon International Marathon, which was considered the unofficial women’s world championship and was a major stepping stone for the 42.195-kilometre race to make its debut in the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
In 1981, Parker also founded the OAC (Ottawa Athletic Club) Racing Team, which was geared specifically for women runners. But after 42 years, declining membership in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted him last year to close the club, which once benefited from training on a 125-metre indoor track at the now-defunct OAC.
Read More: What powers a woman’s life in sport
With no more events to manage, marathons to train for or athletes to coach, Parker maintained his firm grasp on running and athletics through the runnersweb.com website, which he created as a retirement hobby in 1997.
But that, too, has now slipped through his fingers, after 27 remarkable years of collecting and posting local, national and international stories from the vast world of road racing, athletics, triathlon and cycling.
Parker could sense that some day soon he would have to close his high-quality and informative website because of the daily workload. He didn’t expect to be forced into it so quickly.
A heads-up trip to his general practitioner, a number of tests later and Parker was quickly admitted to the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. Cardiologists didn’t like the look of the heart of an active, 82-year-old, who exercised daily.
He needed open-heart surgery.
Three months after struggling through the process of testing, surgery and rehabilitation, Parker posted his final message on the runnersweb.com site on Feb. 1. It read:
“The Runner’s Web site has been closed. Following a slow recovery from open-heart surgery in October of 2023, I find that I am unable to continue with maintaining the Runner’s Web.
“I founded the site in 1997 as a hobby because of my interest in running and athletics. I had no idea it would survive this long. Thanks to those who have followed the site over the years.”
Survive.
That was a word that sometimes flashed through Parker’s mind as he endured his cardiac event experience.
As a veteran running coach, Parker knew how he should feel during and after a workout. Last spring, he started to feel as if his fitness level was declining, despite his regular workouts. He was switching to cycling workouts on a new indoor bike from running and tried to maintain a 30-kilometre-an-hour pace during his 40-minute rides.
An appointment at the end of September with his general practitioner led to blood work and a stress ECG at the Heart Institute to get some basic medical data. The news wasn’t good.
Cardiologists told Parker he needed open-heart surgery.
The surgery lasted seven hours, which included a few unexpected twists. The surgeons repaired the aortic and mitral valves and fixed one coronary artery blockage. He also received a pacemaker to assist his heart.
The whole process hit Parker hard and he found it difficult to handle, struggling to eat and sleep as well as losing 20 pounds.
“I went through a really rough time,” Parker said in a phone interview this week. “Can I do this (he wondered to himself)? I’ve never experienced that feeling before. I really had my doubts.”
When Parker was fit enough to leave the Heart Institute, his rehabilitation program started at the Elisabeth Bruyère Hospital in mid November.
“I looked like the distance runner I never was,” said a joking Parker about his much thinner frame.
“If not for doing my workouts, I wouldn’t have been tested (at the Heart Institute). The chances were 100 per cent that I would have had a cardio event, a heart attack.”
By early December, Parker was well enough to return to his Ottawa home to continue his rehabilitation and was cleared to resume exercising.
It has been challenging.
“I’m progressing. But it’s very slow. Part of the issue is I’m not patient,” admitted Parker, who is walking for exercise and hoping to hop onto his bike in the near future.
His extended time away from updating his runnersweb.com website also allowed him more time to consider its future.
“I was starting to think before my surgery if I should shut down the site,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, but I enjoyed it, finding articles and publishing content.”
Runnersweb.com reached its finish line with the tapping of a few keyboard keys.
“Nothing is forever,” Parker said in his goodbye to the site.
Martin Cleary has written about amateur sports for 50 years. A past Canadian sportswriter of the year and Ottawa Sports Awards Lifetime Achievement in Sport Media honouree, Martin retired from full-time work at the Ottawa Citizen in 2012, but continued to write a bi-weekly “High Achievers” column for the Citizen/Sun.
When the pandemic struck, Martin created the High Achievers “Stay-Safe Edition” to provide some positive news during tough times, via his Twitter account at first and now here at OttawaSportsPages.ca.
Martin can be reached by e-mail at martincleary51@gmail.com and on Twitter @martincleary.
HELP SHINE A LIGHT ON LOCAL SPORT! The Ottawa Sports Pages has proudly provided a voice for local sport for over 10 years, but we need your help to continue another 10 and beyond. Please donate to the Ottawa Sports Pages Fund today. 