Well-paced time on his side

The father of nine and grandfather of 20 encapsulates a life not only well-lived but one that is still thriving in his pursuit of fitness and fun.

“It’s very important to have a bit of fun and let your hair down occasionally,” Kerry said after a morning shift on the cups at a Kyvalley dairy.

“If you can’t go out and laugh and have fun, then why bother doing anything?”

At 82 years old, Kerry is not stopping, and although we met to talk about his decorated running career, this Kyabram character soon had me on a journey of his other passions.

He first worked in a dairy more than seven decades ago and has not ventured too far away from the vocation during his lifetime.

Kerry now milks nine shifts a week, usually on his own although his wife Rica joins him occasionally.

“Nothing’s difficult about cows; you must not take anything too seriously and even if there’s an issue, you just got to do what needs doing.”

Kerry said the health of any herd was an ongoing job.

“Every milk you’ve got to watch all of them and be right on the ball.

“If their health is a bit off or you have any problems, the milk factory will let you know, so we get it right all the time.”

Currently the farm is joining the cows and Kerry says he’s not bad on the maternity side of things.

“But to make it easier, she lets you know when she’s going to calve.

“And quite often I have some midwifery duties, because if you wait, you’re not going to be able to do anything and if you lose her, well that’s $4000 of production lost.”

The other half of Kerry’s story is running and he enjoys his Tuesdays off to do handicap-staggered hill sprints with his son Daniel and any grandchildren who care to join in.

He has taught all of his offspring how to run.

In 1973, he was famously threatened with being hand-cuffed to a power pole by Tasmania’s police commissioner when he planned to make the first known run along the island’s now-famous Overland Track, long before it had boardwalks.

“They all said I was crazy.”

He pulled it off.

As a professional runner in the 1960s, he was winning events all over the nation, famously pushing through a major calf injury around Brisbane’s St Lucia circuit to pull away from some serious contenders.

In 1967, Kerry broke the 30-mile professional world record for 20 miles, then nearly two decades later shaved another 19 minutes from it at the age of 44.

He has also had a few brushes in his time.

He fell into a bog up to his neck on the Overland run and took his time to get his heart rate down and think his way out.

“I was really annoyed because it added a jolly hour to my time.”

On an uphill winding training run that went so long he went into a sleep-like trance, he enraged a bus driver sitting on his tail despite non-stop blaring of his horn.

“It sounded like a noise just inside my head — I was that focused.”

And if dealing calmly with a co-worker coming at him with a knife was not enough, a 0.22 calibre bullet whizzing past his ear on another run told this cat that nine lives might just be enough.

“I heard the whizz of the bullet and felt the air brush past me,” he said.

He has recently taken to golf with family and friends and claims that having done a lot of running through fairways all his life, he’s only seen one bloke smiling on a fairway.

“Why bother playing?”

He has Saturdays off to manage the siren at Merrigum Football Club, helps out at Kyabram P-12 school little athletics on Wednesdays, and takes growing broccoli and Brussels sprouts quite seriously.

But he still takes his chances, be they more genteel, with his trips to Crown Casino paying off at the roulette wheel.

Kerry does not put it down to luck, either: he has a practice wheel at home.

“I worked it all out here on my table where I have maybe 250 different types of strategies.

“They all work some of the time but none of them work all of the time.

“You got to know what’s happening — you don’t just win-win-win-win.”