Transcript
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Hi friends.
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Welcome back to the ageless athlete podcast, where we tap into stories and secrets of high-performing outdoor athletes.
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This is Kush.
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your host from my corner in San Francisco.
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Sometimes you get lucky and get to speak to it.
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Distinctively unique athlete.
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Who breaks the ground on high-performance combined with radical self-expression.
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Today we have Frank Chan.
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A 51 year old.
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Marathon runner from Northern California who manages to combine high performance running.
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With run art.
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This involves outlining complex designs.
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On a map by running specific routes.
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And creating intricate, still art.
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With the ships that have been outlined.
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Why logging hundreds of miles across the city.
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Frank has managed to draw some gorgeous works of art, including tributes to rockstars.
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To his mom.
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As well as animals.
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Food groups.
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And even the statue of Liberty.
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How to describe orally.
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Of course.
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We will provide Frank's Instagram, et cetera for you to see the designs themselves, but imagine large city blocks and an entire neighborhoods.
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Carved into intricate shapes and designs.
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That is run art.
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Frank is no slouch when it comes to the actual running either.
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As an MIT engineer, Dern bicycling advocate.
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Frank started running only a few years ago, late at the age of 45.
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But he has already run over 13 marathons.
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He has been consistently improving with each run and is closing in on the fabled three.
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Three hour mark.
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In the sport where the elites carefully plan each day and each meal.
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He has a refreshingly wholesome approach to training.
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Why he's still intensely focused on performance.
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He manages to combine with life outside of running.
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Such as with supporting local causes.
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And also volunteering, participating and mentoring with werunsf and run365sf.
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amongst others.
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Thank you Diana for introing me to Frank and for expanding my perspective on what it means to be an elite outdoor athlete.
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Excited to dive into Frank's unique pursuit.
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And learn how intellectual rigors.
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Planning and spontaneity converge and his pursuit of run art.
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Know anybody else who may inspire you and others on the show?
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Send me a note at kush@agelessathlete.co.
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Or DM.
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On social media.
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Without further ado.
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Here.
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We go.
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Hey, Frank.
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How are you doing?
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Good to see you in person.
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please tell us a little bit about, where you are right now.
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How old are you and, what did you have for breakfast?
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Oh wow.
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Good question.
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my name is Frank Chan.
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I live here in San Francisco in the Russian Hill neighborhood, just a little bit west of Chinatown.
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I'm 51.
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I'm sure we'll talk about it more, but, I used to bicycle a lot and now a lot of time running.
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did I eat for breakfast this morning?
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I had some oatmeal, just some dried fruit.
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Pretty boring, some protein powder.
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I think you are asking me about nutrition.
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so I usually have that every day.
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oh.
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And I've, one, one thing I do with my oatmeal, I do sprinkle in a little bit of cayenne powder just to spice it up.
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It's like coffee, but it just gives a little kick.
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That sounds like a delicious and a nutritious, breakfast and a cayenne pepper.
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that's, we'll have to come back to that one.
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Yes.
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That's, that's great actually, I had something similar.
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I usually have a steel cut oats thing a few a week, and I did something different.
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I, I did that and I, but I baked that into a muffin.
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I added some cacao powder and some banana.
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you tired, get tired of eating the same, mush every day.
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So I made that into a baked treat.
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Yeah.
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I'm usually not one to mix these, the sweet and savory, but in that case, the spice usually associated with savory, works well with the sweets.
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we happen to live in a city full of, Geeky gourmet chefs and, it's not unusual to see flavors being experimented with.
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And yes, the, the spicy, I like those, those Mexican hot chocolate kind of things myself.
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yes.
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No, definitely.
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very tasty.
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We jump right into it.
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please tell us a little bit about, your running
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sure.
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like I said, I, at least growing up, I had more of a background in, let's say bicycling, just as a commuter.
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I've only raced like one bicycle race in my life, and it was less than an hour, so it was clearly wasn't that impressive an effort.
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I used to work, at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, a nonprofit promoting the bicycle for everyday transportation.
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And Susan, who was her name, my colleague at the time was running the San Francisco Marathon in 2017.
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And I was just inspired by her whole journey of building up the mileage, eventually tapering, getting ready for the race and just trying to, following her on that day of, I didn't actually see her in person, but I just followed online.
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And then I heard about how she did afterwards.
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And so inspired by that, I just ran into work, the week after and it was two miles.
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And if you're not used to running two miles is.
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You might as well have run across the country.
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I felt horrible.
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I immediately got to work, was panting, probably sweating a little bit too much, but something with me resonated.
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and I think it's that one of the things about running, I think that's been fascinating is it's all been found money.
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I didn't run cross country or track in high school or college.
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And so someone once said that people have a lifetime amount of miles in them.
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And so one of the things that's been nice for me is that it's all new.
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Even if I certainly don't recover as well as, let's say I was back in my twenties or thirties, like most runners, all those early days are prs come easy and I'm trying to have to figure it out now that I've been running a little bit longer how to get better.
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And it gets harder of course, as we're not as, young as we used to be.
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But, I like that it's a new chapter, relatively late in life.
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Interesting thing you said about, a certain number of life miles and, many people who are gifted runners, they might have started at a very young age, and, and you started later in life.
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Do you think that starting later gives you any other kind of advantage be besides the fact that, you haven't exhausted your, lifetime miles yet?
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Yeah.
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I, there's a few, I think, I obviously wonder, geez, if I'm doing this now, how fast could I have run back in my twenties or thirties?
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Certainly, I do wonder about that.
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But there, there's some advantages to now.
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I think there's a patience that you have, especially for long distance running where.
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You're a little bit better about not starting out too hard, just because you can't start out too hard.
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I just don't have a five minute mile in me ever, and I'm at peace with that.
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maybe I'll try, to get that a little bit faster.
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and I think the, specifically with running it really rewards a consistency.
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Like no individual workout is gonna transform your body.
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So it's about how can you set yourself up to go after, get out there day after day, week after week, month after month.
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And so I think perspective, something you associate with being older, not necessarily everyone, but, that, that's an advantage too.
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And maybe it's also being in a position in life where, I've been lucky to be living in San Francisco for a while.
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I know the paths.
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Let's say And yeah, that you can later on in life pick up a new hobby and really embrace it.
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I think that is certainly, an aspect that is inspiring.
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I.
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About what you're doing because many of us, we chance upon something like this maybe could be picking up a musical instrument.
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talking of which I started playing the Congress a couple of years ago and I realized that, I have this beginner's enthusiasm about it that maybe if I started much younger, I probably would not have appreciated.
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Frank, you are known to fuse art and running and we will get into that in a second.
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Really excited to hear you speak on that.
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But just on the subject of pure running itself, can you give us an idea of, what kind of running do you actually do and any running accomplishments that, you're particularly proud of?
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Sure.
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perhaps I'm unlike some of the other guests that we've had on here.
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I'm certainly not an elite runner.
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I think I'm doing like, okay.
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For my age, that's the way I like to say.
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perhaps like in local races, I.
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They grade you by age group, so they bucket you.
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And I'd like to say, I'd like to try to get on the age group, leaderboard of the podium.
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I don't think I'm gonna win many age groups, so I think I'm doing okay.
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in terms of accomplishments or where I generally find myself, I do a lot of local race road races.
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I haven't done as much trail just because of where we are.
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I just run where I happen to be, which is in a metropolis.
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So I tend to spend a lot of time on the road.
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I have heard that most people or not, I shouldn't say most people, but there are people who eventually when they're, have had their time on the road, they switched to the trail and there's a different mentality and a different ethos to trail.
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And I totally appreciate that.
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I don't do it as much, but I do get over to, let's say the Marin Headlands or even in Mount Sutro in the middle of San Francisco.
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I do enjoy that too.
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I've done, let's say, so after being inspired to run, by my former coworker.
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The first thing I signed up was, let's say the Kaiser half marathon.
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That was in 2018 and I did two halves.
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And then for some reason, this is where I did not have that discipline.
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I just decided, oh yeah, I'm ready for the full marathon.
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just after two halves.
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And that was the first marathon I ran, the San Francisco, 2018 version.
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I've since done 13, I think marathons, doing reasonably, I think, I don't think anything super spectacular, but it's been a goal to chip in to the low three hour range.
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so I think now I'm quite content to just try to chip away a minute, at a minute, at a time.
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not the days of massive gains may be behind me, but I think I continue to, find little optimizations.
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Excellent.
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Yeah.
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Chipping away at, at, one's, performance one day at a time.
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there's nothing like, like success, breed success and progress is wording.
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Now getting into the subject that I'm really excited to talk about, which is, which is run art.
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I didn't know something like this existed.
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And, when our common friend, Diana first told me about you and I had to go.
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Back and look at, your website and your Strava profile.
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I was, yeah, I was just floored.
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I had not seen, that kind of stuff on the streets for San Francisco.
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So could you describe, what is run art?
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Sure.
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so I'm certainly not the only person doing this.
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In fact, my friend Lenny Mon, he's certainly a local legend in this, but you'll find a few of these running geeks in every city or every country, as if running or cycling, you can, I guess you can bike the same paths too, as if running or cycling weren't niche enough.
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There is this sub niche or sub genre of running, we call run art, and it basically involves tracing a certain pattern through the streets or paths or parks or wherever, staircases even where, wherever you can cut through, a single line.
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So it's like drawing a line, but you can't pick up your pen and you just try to make as.
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Artistic or as long as a path as you can.
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And this is what usually done with a GPS device.
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So you either you have a watch or you, I guess you could even record it on your phone also.
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the watches seem to be a little bit better.
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and for the most part, this is usually done in a day though a few of us nerds have done sort of multi-day efforts where effectively you draw, let's say half your drawing, you pause, go home, take a shower, eat something, the next day hopefully charge the watch to you.
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Next day you go back out there to where you left off and resume and you pick up.
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And that's how you do like a multi-day effort.
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gotta make sure you don't lose it on your watch.
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some real nerds like me wear multiple watches just to make sure you record, this effort that you've spent hours designing, much less running.
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so I, they don't have to be super long efforts.
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in fact, we can get into how our mutual friend, we coax Diana into doing a five mile run art for our local weekly run group.
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but efforts can be 20, 30 to 40 miles.
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And I'd say the longer or the bigger your run art is, the more you eliminate the jaggies from the And the more you're your design is resistant to error.
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So let's say if you've missed a block, ah, when you're won over, it doesn't matter if your drawing is that big.
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If it covers the entire, let's say city of San Francisco, no one's gonna notice if you went down 23rd instead of 25th or something like that.
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Got it.
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No, that makes sense.
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Over, yeah.
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the longer, A piece of art.
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the longer run is, or the longer anything really is, the more you can, the law of averages takes.
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and your design can be more intricate.
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one of the challenges is, you can't run through a building but you'd like to, anytime you have a diagonal line going through a street grid, you're pretty much going up, down, up and over, up left up, left, let's say in a staircase pattern.
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But the more you zoom out, the more that approaches a diagonal line.
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makes sense.
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Yeah, no, it absolutely makes sense.
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couple of dumb questions
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sure, sure.
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since I'm new to this.
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are you drawing something on paper first and that somehow gets transferred onto real map?
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Like how does this evolve?
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Yeah, I would definitely not recommend doing this on the fly or designing this on the fly.
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In almost all cases, you'd want to plan out how you'd want your run art to look.
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So I'd say my general process is, first you want a sense of like how long or how big you want this to be.
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So let's just say for you and me, on the eastern side of San Francisco, if we were to constrain it to, let's say the northeast or downtown quadrant, instead of San Francisco being seven by seven, it'd be like, let's say three by three miles.
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So that'll give you a sense of, if you were to draw a big circle, okay, that'd be about like, six or seven miles, who knows?
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Within the down, within the downtown portion.
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so the first thing you wanna get is a sense of scale, and you have a certain design that you have in mind.
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And I think the first thing is to take that design.
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Which may have different shadings or colors and simplify it down to black and white line art, right?
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Just the lines.
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And that may mean eliminating some details that come out better when you're actually drawing, like with the pen and pa, pen or color, and simplifying it.
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And then you at least visually or actually overlay it onto a map and see where logistically it could go.
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So obviously you don't want, you can't run in the ocean, or maybe you can and you switch over to swimming.
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but generally you wanna avoid water bodies of water freeways where there's no, unless there's an underpass or overpass, there's some areas of the Presidio where it's let's say, or Golden Gate Park where it may be unintuitive to get through where or may be fenced off.
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I have had to climb a fence or two just to make sure the line goes through in some very rare cases.
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But you generally wanna make it.
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Where is the least runable?
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So I'd say the first things to think about are the scaling and the positioning.
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and then if you really want, one of the more advanced things is think about is like, are there key elements of your design, let's say the eyes where you really wanna make sure those are runnable and drawable?
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So I've had sometimes eyes of, let's say aerial or Little Mermaid where I'm effectively just like you went on a piece of paper, if you're going around in circles to circle the eye where you're running around in circles on the street and you wanna make sure it's a large enough area where a key element, your design can be executed.
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so sometimes I've positioned something where I wanna freehand it in the middle of a park just so I can run all over the lawn and not be constrained by anything else.
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But that's more of a niche thing.
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I'd say the biggest things first are just to get the scale and the position right, where it's actually doable.
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Makes sense.
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And I think maybe people listening if they wanted to get started, I think you've given people an idea of how they start with the drawing on, let's say a piece of paper and then they tried to, overlay that into, onto a map and then.
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When it comes to executing it, so now you have it, and then do you take that map that you've drawn?
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Do you somehow import that into Strava?
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And then as you're running, are you like looking at your watch at the map and having it spit out directions?
00:17:41.230 --> 00:17:41.471
Yep.
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a bunch of different ways to cut this and they're all correct.
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Whatever works best for the person.
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I generally do, so one of the things I should have backed up, you should have a general idea of how long it's gonna be.
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Otherwise you'll be out there forever.
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And with Straw or MapMyRun or Garmin or a lot of those.
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You can begin to sketch out the root and see how long it takes.
