Belated RIP: Ken Young

This weekend, after about 35 years, I spoke to my graduate school officemate. We compared notes about the professors at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. So many have passed on! 

My Master's Degree advisor, Ken Young, passed away in 2018. Even though he lived in Petrolia, California, and ran in the Sacramento area, I never met him here.  I wrote a paper regarding equilibrium rainfall drop distributions under him. Many people cite that paper these days. We are still having an impact! I should see how our reputation is standing up these days.

I recall the first time I met Ken. I was a new graduate student.  I told him, "I understand you like to jog." His jaw dropped in shock.

"JOG????!!!!" he replied with overwhelming sarcasm. "JOG!!!!???? I AM A RUNNER! I RUN!" 

I stood corrected.

He had problems with injuries later in life.  I remember his difficulties with two of his Grand Canyon runs: running from the South Rim to the North Rim, and back, in one day.  Twice, he had knee issues on the very last leg of the runs. So hard!  (I'm amazed anyone thought to do that at all!)

Runner and statistician Ken Young, who practically single-handedly revolutionised the way road running is tracked, passed away on 3 February, aged 76. 

While working on his Ph.D at the University of Chicago, Ken joined the school’s track club where he met Ted Haydon, an assistant coach for the USA Olympic team. Haydon got Ken to help him with statistics for a handicap race which launched his lifelong passion for computer analysis of running data. He began to compare results from different distances to determine who the faster runners were and developed a model to predict race times. He visited libraries across the US and Canada to collect running data from their archives. In 1973 he founded the National Running Data Center.

Under Coach Haydon’s guidance Ken targeted particular records. In 1972 he succeeded in setting a world indoor marathon record of 2:41:29 in Chicago. Later that year, on an outdoor track, he set an American Records on separate occasions for 40 miles (4:08) and 50km (3:08).

Through his National Running Data Center he became the official record keeper of the USATF Long Distance Running Committee from 1979–1988. He also took a keen interest in the measurement and certification of running courses.

In the early 1990s these various interests coalesced in the publication of a statistics-heavy newsletter, The Analytical Distance Runner. 

In 2003 he banded together with other like-minded statisticians to establish the Association of Road Racing Statisticians (ARRS) which maintains the website arrs.net. By 2016 the ARRS database included more than 1.1 million performances from 214,000 races. He maintained a system of ranking elite runners worldwide for head-to-head competition which race directors used to decide who to invite to their races. 

Over about a 40-year period he spent about 40 hours a week sorting through running data. “The world is full of so much chaos, and I’m a born planner, an organizer,” he said. “I try to make sense out of things and look for an underlying structure.”