Betsy Kenyon woke up at dawn on her 59th birthday two days after Christmas and decided to commemorate it with a 25.8-mile beach walk from Flying Point in Water Mill, where she lives part time, to Montauk.
“The weather was perfect, the sand was frozen, easy to walk on, though once the temperature got into the 40s it softened . . . and, wonderful to tell, there was no wind,” she said a week or two afterward, speaking by phone from the Los Angeles area, where fires were sweeping away myriad houses, including one that she and her husband, Richard Rutkowski, had built and had sold.
She’s run the Boston Marathon six times, including the year, 2013, of the terrorist bombings that killed three people and injured hundreds. “I finished a half-hour before the bombs went off near the finish line. I didn’t look to see what my time was for the next six months.”
She is from an active family — her 86-year-old father walks 10.8 miles a day, her 84-year-old mother runs two to five miles three or four times a week, and her husband co-captained East Hampton High’s boys cross-country team back in 1983. Kenyon, who used to log 30 miles a week, has run in ultras, including “the very technical and brutal North Face 50 at Bear Mountain.”
But back to her walk, which was blissful. She took some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and water, though she didn’t need much. Her husband met her six times along the way, the last meet-up being at the foot of the Montauk Lighthouse. She did it in nine hours, her pace pretty much matching the Roman Army’s.
That night the couple had dinner at the 1770 House in East Hampton, where he had washed dishes as a teenager, and where, some years later, he had proposed to her.
There they learned from their waiter of Anthony Daunt’s 127-mile, 46-hour fund-raising run from Times Square to the Montauk Light. She had run 130 miles to celebrate her 50th, Kenyon said, the length of southern Ireland, though it had taken her five days.
On New Year’s Day, she and her husband, who also live in the city, walked the length of Manhattan, 13.2 miles, from 220th Street to Battery Park. As for the Flying Point-to-Montauk Point walk, “next time, I’ll join her,” he said. “Two years ago, I got as far as the Lobster Roll and hitched back.”
