Ken Flanders
Winning the race that counts

After the finish of the Lewiston Recreation Department 3-Mile Race in May, 1970, race director Roland Dyer was wild with excitement over the amazing running of a rising star, young high school runner Kenny Flanders. Dyer could hardly be contained in his exuberance. In fact, it was Dyer who drove down to Portland to pick up Flanders that day to take him to the race because Flanders had no transportation. Then, after the race, Dyer drove him home again. But Dyer, who died a year later, would never see Flanders develop into the magnificent runner he would become.

Flanders went on to Northeastern University and, by 1973, he had been crowned New England collegiate champion in both the 2-mile and 6-mile. And through this decade he would race to seven victories in his favorite race, the Portland Boys Club Five Mile Race.

Flanders, 5-foot-11 and 148 pounds, was born in Portland and went to Deering High. As a ninth grader he had played basketball. In the spring of that year the track coach persuaded him to try running. They drove up to Lewiston to run in the 3-in-1-Day Road Race. It was 1967 and it was his first race. He ran in the 2-mile and won in 9:36, a record. While still in high school he won the Westbrook Rotary Patriots Day 2.25 Mile Race three straight years starting in 1968, setting a course record of 10:13.

Recruited by Coach Everett Baker of Northeastern, Flanders got a running scholarship and majored in physical education from 1971-76. According to Flanders, Everett was the kind of coach who knew how to bring the best potential out of any runner he coached. One of Flanders’s teammates was Mike Buckley. While Flanders was at Northeastern, Baker would continue to recruit many of Maine’s finest running talent, including Bruce Bickford, Steve Jaynes, Larry Greer, and Danny Paul.

In 1972, Flanders won the New England 6-Mile in 28:45, then went on to take 6th in the NCAAs, a race won by Steve Prefontaine. In 1973, at the New England Indoor Track and Field Championships, he ran a personal best 2-mile, winning in 8:50 while defeating talented Dan Moynahan of Tufts.

One of three best career races was a 7 miler he ran while attending Northeastern. With Bill Rodgers in the field, Flanders led for the first four miles before Rodgers came along to win it.

Flanders was never one to hang back and try to win the race at the end. He would challenge the best competition at any point in the race, even if there were 10 miles to go. His aggressive style of going out hard won him his share of big races. He won his first Portland Boys Club 5-Mile Race in 1970 and won it again in 1972. Then he won three straight, starting in 1979, for a total of seven victories. His best time was 24:04 in 1981.
His favorite race has always been the Boys Club race. “Whoever wins this race is the state champion for that year,” he said in January, 1979, at age 27.

Flanders best career times include: 1 mile, 4:12 in 1972; 3 miles, 13:55; 9 miles, 45:12; and 10 miles, 50:33. He was named Maine Runner of the Year in 1980, which many knowledgeable runners thought was somewhat belated. Yet when the Maine Running Hall of Fame was founded in 1988 and then had its first annual induction the following year, Flanders was among the first group inducted, along with Joan Benoit, Bruce Bickford, and Ralph Thomas.

His best racing distance was 10 miles, but his favorite race was 6 miles. During the late 1970s Flanders consistently ran weekly mileage of over 100 miles. One of his favorite workouts was a double, which included an 11-miler in the morning followed by a flat-out 10-mile “killer workout” later in the day. “When I walk into the Downeast Court Club after one of these workouts, my legs are wobbling,” he told Rick Krause in a 1979 interview.

“I like to run up front and control the race,” he said. Like Bob Hillgrove, he wasn’t afraid to run hard right from the gun, challenging the competition from the onset until the other contenders folded up and rolled off the side of the road. But as the years went by Flanders’ training methods changed somewhat. “It wasn’t geared to sprinting off the start. My strategy had gone back to being more experienced (rather) than being in better shape than the other runners,” he noted.

One person who knew and admired Flanders as much as anyone was Brian Gillespie of Portland. Early in Flanders’s running career, Gillespie would often take him to the races with him. “I have known Ken Flanders for 30 years,” said Gillespie. “He should go down in Maine running history as one of Maine’s top five distance runners. He had ability at all distances, from an 8:47 two-mile to a sub-30:00 10-K on the track. It seemed he never had a ‘bad’ race, the mark of a great performer.”