Ted Winters' Long Run

THIS 78-YEAR-OLD HAS LIVED A LIFE A LITTLE BIT OUT OF THE ORDINARY

- Jarod Contreras

As we departed from his car, Ted Winters, 78, hunched over, shuffled with determination toward the trail head, saying, “It ain’t gonna be speedy, but we’re gonna get there.”

We were out for a jaunt on the Palos Verdes Peninsula when Ted stopped and motioned out to the landscape.

“This is one of the largest continuous landslides in North America,” he informed me, gesturing toward the hues of silver, brown and blue of the coastal-sage-scrub landscape. “It’s slid 700 feet since it began in 1956. People have tried all kinds of things to stop it; nothing’s worked though.”

As I pondered, Ted stopped to examine a cactus. He made quite a picture bending down, wisps of white hair sticking out from beneath his cap, wearing an Angeles Crest 100 shirt and short shorts, and sporting muscled legs and a gnarled wooden walking stick.

An Addictive Personality

This is roughly the same outfit he’s worn for many of his thousands of miles of running. Those miles reach back into the antiquity of ultra running, when Ted’s nickname was “Buffalo Red.” When races and runners alike were barely figuring it out back in the early 1980s, Ted traipsed across races from the Western States 100 to the Angeles Crest 100. All the while he was running his own adventurous jaunts of 20, 30 or 50 miles across places like Catalina Island and the San Gabriel Mountains in California.

“When the Spaniards came and encountered the Aztecs, they were shocked by the deep-red dyes that the Aztecs used. It comes from these little guys on this cactus here; they’re called cochineal,” Ted told me as he smeared some on his walking stick.

“How do you know all of this?” I asked.

“Well, I have kind of an addictive, curious personality I guess,” Ted responded with a smirk.