May - June 2005 Event Calendar - Michigan Runner

Holmes Runs:
Tales of Two Peninsulas
By Scott Sullivan
“We come from the land of the ice and snow,
from the midnight sun where the hot springs
blow.”
–from “The Immigrant Song,” Led Zeppelin
Plastic soles skreek-skreek on the snowy
streets of Iron Mountain. Kevin
Holmes, 5, watches three older siblings,
taking their new boots for a trial run, vanish
ahead of him.
“I ran after them,” recalls Holmes, more
than 43 years and 100,000 miles running
later. “After about 50 yards, I quit.”
It was an inauspicious start for one of
the fastest and most-persistent one-eyed milers
ever to sweep from Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula to its Lower one.
The U.P. breeds legends: Paul Bunyan,
Bigfoot, winter 13 months a year; that
good shippin’ cre w, cast from iron ore of
the hills, entombed under Gitchee Gumee,
p re s e rved in ice — flinty, innocent —
maybe 1,000 years.
Holmes is of that ilk. He has roamed the
peninsulas half a century, almost, vied with
other runners, his own ghosts, demons. If age
or illusion suggest he is slower these days to
rage, quicker to regret, it would make truth
elastic to say he’s mellowed.
He is sweet as sugar, unrefined, with a
tang of vinegar, undistilled; and should you
meet over Blue Moon beer at Kosciuszko
Hall in Grand Rapids, Second City in the
Lower Peninsula, amid walls lined with mirrors
and dart boards, you might see both.
Shawn Sweet (l) congratulates Kevin Holmes on completing 100,000 miles.
Country of the Blind
At age eight Holmes was playing army,
“occupying” a barn in his hometown of
Escanaba, when a rock flew through a window.
“I turned right into it with my left eye,”
he says. “I’m still waiting for my Purple
Heart.”
Today he’s caregiver at the 750-bed
Grand Rapids Home for Veterans. “I like it,”
he says. “I clean shit well. I have endurance.”
At 48, Holmes has never married (“I
came close a couple times, but it didn’t work
out. I got lucky,” he says), devours books (“I
enjoy Sinclair Lewis; he gets to the point and
gets inside people. He’s more funny because
so much of his stuff is sad”).
And he loves to run.
“On Va l e n t i n e ’s eve more than 30 gathere d , amid stinging hail outside Ko s c i u s z ko,
to jog together for two of the slowest miles — Nos. 99,999 and 100,000 — of
Holmes’ care e r.”
Suicide 360 Times
“Mom was married several times; I’m
not sure how many,” says Holmes. “I’m the
ninth out of 18 children. I wanted to be the
first to win a high school letter in football, I
wasted three falls as a 140-pound, one-eyed
end.
“Before practice we warmed up running
a couple laps on the track. I ran way out
ahead of everyone. Upperclassmen told me
my sophomore year I should go out for track
in spring. ‘You’re a miler,’ they said.
“OK, that was what I’d do.”
Holmes won his first race, excluding
excursions in plastic boots, on a five-laps-permile
cinder track in Menominee, in four minutes,
58 seconds.
He learned he more than liked running
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