“StachedWalker”

The community on BodyBuilding.com will often come across a profile photo of a guy with a great big mustache and a race number across his chest. That big mustache belongs to “StachedWalker,” and it all makes sense when you find out that “StachedWalker” is Richard Greene, an avid racewalker!

As I learned, there’s more to racewalking than going out and walking as fast as you can on some track. It’s a long-distance Olympic event in which one foot must be in contact with the ground at all times. The resulting reduced stride makes the racewalker keep up the cadence of an Olympic 400-meter sprinter. That will get your heart rate up.

Richard discovered racewalking about 10 years ago when he participated in a cancer fund-raising event. He’s now done 20 events around the country, from half-marathons to marathons—even a 132-mile team racewalk that took 33 hours to complete. You even have to learn how to eat and drink without stopping and losing your pace, Richard says. Along the route you also get “glucose shots” to drink so your body doesn’t become depleted at that tremendous pace. He says that the foot strike in the special walking shoes is the equivalent of doing thousands and thousands of calf raises—as he learned painfully in his early training walks and races.

StachedWalker’s health and fitness goals aren’t just racewalk-directed. Richard is interested in being fit, staying healthy and building strength. His unusual working hours as a technical-marketing engineer at Intel in Portland, Oregon, sometimes put him in the gym late at night. He works with weights to build muscle and strengthen joints and ligaments for racewalking as well as for aging healthfully. The weightlifting is also combined with work on the treadmill at racewalk speed, typically for an hour or more. Weekends bring actual training on the streets, up hills and on routes that simulate what he might face in upcoming meets. His goal for 2010 is to get his speed up to a 2 1/2–hour half-marathon.

A racewalker is unusual on BodySpace, but what’s not unusual is why Richard is a member. He found BodySpace as a customer buying supplements from BodyBuilding.com. He was impressed by the many members who were as interested in health and fitness as he was. Now, when he starts thinking that something might be too hard to do, he can check with another member who’s overcome real obstacles to meet a goal, or with people who are a little closer to his age—52—to see what great changes they’ve made in their lives. As StachedWalker says, there’s a lot of motivation there when you need it.

Go on over to BodySpace, and see what Richard is up to lately. You can find him at “StachedWalker” or go directly to http://BodySpace.com/StachedWalker.

Editor’s note: For more BodySpace bodies and info, visit Bodybuilding.com.