Runner who took up sport to battle Parkinson’s disease participates in Napa Valley Marathon – Napa Valley Register

Yet Bucklew would find his way back to one of the longest and most grueling of running events after the unlikeliest of impetuses – a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2012. Even as the progressive, incurable condition has affected his movement and coordination, the Chicago-area resident and former marketing executive has completed marathons in Chicago, Berlin and other cities, and on Sunday completed the 26.2-mile distance for the 20th time at his first Napa Valley Marathon.

Taking up a uniquely demanding event began as Bucklew’s way of combating the symptoms of Parkinson’s. Ever since, marathoning has evolved into his tool for raising funds for research into the disease – Bucklew estimates he has raised nearly $200,000 in donations – and giving hope to other patients trying to hold onto a normal life for years to come.

“There are two things have been most important to me,” the 50-year-old Bucklew said last week by telephone from his home in Wilmette, Illinois before traveling to the Bay Area on Friday. “One is the importance of exercise, it has slowed the progression of my disease and helped manage the symptoms, and I want to share that message.

“Second, I meet so many people through my charitable efforts, and they’re some of my closest friends today. That community is really important and helps me stay engaged and stay positive. Nobody understands your situation like someone who’s in the same situation.”

Bucklew’s exploits in the eight years since his diagnosis have included marathons in the U.S. United Kingdom and Europe, as well as a 2,594-mile, 67-day transcontinental walk from Georgia to California in 2017-18 that raised more than $100,000 for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.

In connection with his Calistoga-to-Napa run on Sunday, Bucklew is collecting donations through the Uncorked Adventures website at uncorkedadventures.org/donations/102/. All proceeds are to be passed to the Fox foundation, named for the actor who has lived with the disease since 1991.

Such feats were the furthest things from Bucklew’s mind in his younger years, despite an active lifestyle that included soccer and basketball in childhood and windsurfing and aviation as an adult. His first marathon, the 1999 Chicago race, was merely one in a series of annual challenges he set for himself – a feat he admitted left him “in a big wad of pain at the end” after finishing in four hours and 34 minutes.

It was when Bucklew tried to take up running again in 2005 that he noticed the first signs of physical trouble, although years would pass before a diagnosis.

“There was a running club at work, and on the first warm spring day I went running, and my right leg was tight,” he remembered. “Then I could run a little, but it tightened up again.”

After visiting a variety of doctors and orthopedists, a neurologist identified what Bucklew once thought was sciatica as Parkinson’s – a condition that he said first manifests itself with tremors before leading to increasingly stiff and slow movement, impaired balance and slurred speech as nerve cells producing the neurotransmitter chemical dopamine break down and die.

Bucklew responded to this harsh diagnosis by working to benefit himself as well as others, deciding that intensive physical activity would be needed to stave off the disease’s worst effects for as long as possible.

Although he described himself as “a super baby when it comes to needles,” he began receiving spinal taps and CT scans for medical studies intended to help more accurately diagnose Parkinson’s. Later that year, he took up running again with a new zeal, entering the Madison, Wisconsin Ironman triathlon – an event that combines a marathon with a 2.4-mile swim and 112-mile bicycle race – and finished in 14 hours, 49 minutes and 18 seconds.

“You don’t know if you can do it, (yet) you put everything into the accomplishment,” he said of his renewed commitment to running. “And then you realize, “What can’t you do?’ I never thought I could do this before Parkinson’s, much less with Parkinson’s. It was OK to risk failing at something to see what I was capable of, and it was just an amazing feeling.”

Bucklew’s performances may have been marvels of persistence, but were not, by his own admission, things of beauty, as the effects of Parkinson’s gradually became more apparent.

“My right leg is like a peg leg, very stiff, and I have dystonia in my left foot, like a curling motion,” he said. “To see me run is pretty brutal; I’m not the most elegant runner you can imagine. It puts stress on my left knee’s soft tissue; I put almost twice as much effort into running as I did before.”

When Bucklew looked ahead to a day when long-distance running would become impossible, he focused on a slower, but equally bold, new goal – breaking the record for the quickest walk across the United States. The resulting journey began in Tybee Island, Georgia in November 2017 and concluded just over two months later in San Diego, in January 2018, with Bucklew raising a reported $120,000 for Parkinson’s research, then relating his experiences in a TEDx talk in Chicago.

With a change in medications and his fitness regimen, he then set an even more ambitious goal, to compete in six of the world’s most prestigious marathons within 12 months – Chicago, Boston, New York, London, Berlin and Tokyo.

The Tokyo Marathon was scheduled for March 1, the same day as the Napa Valley race. Bucklew was scheduled to join a reported more than 38,000 other runners in Japan – until the fast-spreading coronavirus outbreak led race organizers to cancel the marathon for all but 200 elite-level competitors as a public-health measure. (Bucklew plans to complete his abbreviated cycle at the London Marathon April 26.)

With his Tokyo run scrapped, Bucklew turned his attention to the wine country, a destination the self-described “wine geek” had wanted to visit long before a place in its local marathon opened up. After a friend contacted another runner Bucklew had met at the New York City Marathon, Bucklew found a Yountville resident to host him for the marathon weekend.

Bucklew’s run through Napa County is paired with his support that also takes the form of one-to-one encounters, he said, including emails and other contacts with other patients that now take place almost weekly.

One such exchange about three weeks ago, he said, put him in touch with an Arkansas man who was diagnosed with the disease seven years ago at age 38 – and who is now slated to run the Little Rock marathon with Bucklew in February 2021.

“He’s been walking every day since,” he said. “If I can help one person get off the couch and feel better and take that path, that’s all the incentive I need and all the satisfaction that I’m after. That just makes my year.”

Sunday morning’s marathon got off to an inauspicious start for Bucklew when dystonia affected his leg, causing the foot to drag so severely that his shoe tore and required a friend to patch the footwear with duct tape, he said in a post-race interview. But his running became smoother in the middle section of the race down the vineyard-lined Silverado Trail, all the way to the 22-mile mark – where he pulled off for a wine-tasting pit stop at Clos du Val and then briefly joined a percussion ensemble on the course to play the tom-tom. Finally he continued on to the marathon’s conclusion, arriving at Vintage High School in a time of 5:27:57.

The combination of a rough start with a relaxed, smell-the-roses ending seemed to Bucklew to summarize his life’s path over the past eight years.

“I really feel it’s important in life, and living with Parkinson’s, to take the tough situations and put a positive spin on it,” he said afterward. “The problems I had at beginning at the race were the same thing; I could hardly walk and I ripped my shoe to pieces, but I kept going – and I had the most fun I’ve ever had in a marathon. Taking adversity and putting a positive spin on it is the most important thing for me.”