It’s not every day you come across someone in his mid-40s who’s in the best shape of his life.
Meet Dave Evans.
In his adolescence, he was in reasonably good shape. However, he was never consistent with anything in terms of physical fitness. He certainly wasn’t a gym rat and he didn’t run.
Five years ago, Evans began running. He competed in his first half marathon in September 2015 and competed in the first Naturalist 25K on the Bartram Trail.
“You get a few of the races under your belt and you start to get hooked,” Evans, 45, said.
Another factor in his rise to peak health is sobriety. Evans went sober a few weeks after his 41st birthday in October 2015.
“A big part of recovery is getting my mind off of things,” Evans said. “I’m just trying to channel it in a healthy way.”
Evans’ first marathon came in March 2016, where he ran the Biltmore Marathon in 4 hours, 53 minutes and 8 seconds.
Now, he’s is hoping to post a sub-three hour time over 26.2 miles at the Boston Marathon.
Of course, he’ll have to wait a little longer. The race was originally scheduled for Patriot’s Day, April 20. The coronavirus pandemic forced organizers to push it back until Sept. 14.
It will be Evans’ first time competing in a “major” race. Fellow Franklin runner Kim Jakushev will be making her second straight appearance at Boston. She achieved a personal record time at last year’s race to qualify again.
Both Evans and Jakushev began running regularly with other members of Franklin’s Shameless Running Group.
Russell Bowling, who ran Boston in 2018, said the group is proud of Evans and Jakushev and had planned to give them a send-off party.
“Our running group really looks up to Dave and Kim because of their leadership and encouragement,” Bowling said. “We hope that the 2020 Boston Marathon will take place in September so that they will get the opportunity to run and represent Franklin’s Shameless Running Group.”
Jakushev, 33, is a radiologic technologist at Angel Medical Center.
When asked the age-old question – why do you run? – Jakushev listed several reasons.
“I like our running community. I feel like you can connect to people through that, help people out, listen to people,” she said.
“I like the challenge for myself. That’s me, though. I’m not competitive so much with others as I am myself. I try to beat my own time.
“I enjoy when you’re running how you don’t think about chaos and everything else happening in the world. It’s a time that’s just free.”
Despite running in humid conditions, not to mention it was only her third
marathon ever, Jakushev turned in a PR time of 3:19:42 at last year’s Boston Marathon. She ran it after qualifying in Indianapolis with good friend Kay Hilty.
Jakushev is going to be very busy this fall. She’s entered in Boston, followed by the Chicago Marathon Oct. 11 and the New York City Marathon Nov. 1.
Her main goal is to earn a qualifying time to compete next year at the Berlin Marathon. Because of that, she began training much earlier than she did for previous marathons, starting eight months out in August.
“I usually would start in January,” she said, “but this time I’m trying to drop 19 minutes so I started a lot earlier. This is the first time I’m actually ‘training’ training.”
Jakushev had been running about 80 miles per week, but cut back to about 55 after the race got postponed.
She ran a half marathon PR in Myrtle Beach in March, finishing as the third overall female in a time of 1:23:36.
She hopes to break three hours at Boston and planned on starting out the race running a 6:55-per mile pace.
“Just hold that as long as I could and see what happened, not hold back and keep that pace and go from there,” Jakushev said.
Evans is a senior IT project manager for a software company in San Francisco.
His daughter, Annabelle, lives in California. When he’s not running here or on the West Coast, he runs in London, which is where his wife lives.
He has to be careful when running in England because of the different traffic patterns.
“You come to intersections and you don’t know which way the cars are going to go,” he said. “For safety on my runs I ended up doing a lot of treadmill there so I didn’t have to worry about getting hit by a double-decker bus.”
Traveling is nothing new to Evans. He was born in Puerto Rico, spent part of his childhood in California, attended middle and high school near Tampa, Florida, and spent three years in the Navy while based in Virginia.
He visited Franklin on holidays as a child when his grandparents lived here. His parents and sister relocated here about 15 years ago. Six years ago the house next to them went on the market, and he decided to buy it and move here from San Diego.
Like anything worthwhile, it’s taken a lot of hard work for Evans to reach this point in his fitness journey. Joining the Franklin Shameless Running Group was a great start.
“That’s what got me going, just doing the social runs, the Taco Tuesdays,” he said.
For a few years, qualifying for the Boston Marathon seemed ludicrous to Evans. He was nowhere near the times he’d need to get into the prestigious race.
He focused on setting smaller goals. After completing about three marathons, he asked himself what was his next running goal.
“A few races have time qualifiers for the majors: Boston, Chicago, New York,” he said. “So I figured if I was gonna go after one of them, I’d shoot for the Boston time.”
The qualifying time is based on one’s age and gender. And because so many people achieve those times, getting it doesn’t guarantee a spot either.
Evans needed to run a 3:20 marathon. He secured it by running a 3:15.38 at the Myrtle Beach Marathon in 2019. He then lowered it and ensured he’d be in a faster corral by running a 2:58:37 at the Peaks to Creek Marathon, a race which features quite a bit of downhill terrain in Morganton.
Evans gave credit to some great runners in the area, such as Charlie Ledford, for giving him tips. He noticed his time really started to drop after incorporating tempo runs and speed workouts.
“It was a major breakthrough once I started doing that,” he said. “And just being more consistent getting daily miles in.”
Like Jakushev, Evans ran a half marathon PR at Myrtle Beach last month. His time was 1:23:17, placing him 24th (Jakushev was 27th) out of over 2,100 runners.
Boston made its postponement announcement on March 13. Neither Evans nor Jakushev were surprised after many other races had already canceled or postponed.
They were just glad it got postponed rather than canceled.
Both appeared to be peaking at the right time. The duo, who occasionally run together, have altered the training.
Evans has dropped his mileage down to avoid injury.
“You can’t stay at that peak level until September,” he said. “I was already starting to get a little overuse in the hip. So now just trying to stay active and do base miles.”
Boston will easily be Evan’s biggest race ever. He has clues about what to expect having talked to Jakushev, Bowling and others who have run the race, which drew 30,000 entrants last year.
“I have no idea other than what was shared talking to runners who have done it. They say it’s elbow to elbow at the beginning. I’m hoping with the increased starting gate, I should be in the right group for those that are going to be going for sub-three hour marathons,” Evans said.
“But I don’t know. A September race. Everyone says it’s different. Instead of having a crowd at the end, there’s people lined up almost all the way from Hopkinton till the finish.”