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| Owen Connell at Parlor F in Seattle. |
Two years ago at a business meeting in Southern California,
I noticed a pair of running shoes near the door of the house where we were
meeting. Thinking I might get some good ideas for a local running route, I asked
about the shoes. It turned out the owner was an ultra-marathoner who was a
recent transplant from Seattle.*
That’s interesting, because my friend Owen is an ultra
runner in Seattle, I said.
“You know Owen? He’s one of my best friends! Let’s call him
up!” And so it goes when you know Owen Connell.
Now I’m sitting in the chair at Parlor F, Owen’s tattoo
parlor and work space on Seattle’s Capitol Hill. Owen is inking a new tattoo on
my left arm, and we’re talking about running.
I met Owen several years ago when a friend of a friend
recommended him to my girlfriend as a good tattoo artist. It was in our first
meeting that I learned he was a runner. I must not have been paying any
attention before that, because it’s hard to miss Owen in the Northwest running
community.
If you do any competitive trail running in the Northwest or
follow the ultra-marathon circuit at all, you probably already know Owen. If
you run at all in the Seattle area you probably know him too, even if you don’t
know his name. And on the off chance you have never seen Owen at a race, you’ve
probably seen his work.
Owen is the “tattoo guy.” He claims he doesn’t hear it
anymore, but when you run with him, you hear it from the sidelines. “There goes
that tattoo guy!” He is unmistakable for sure. His long legs are literally
covered in body art. As are his arms and much of the rest of his body. I’m
surprised I know what it’s like to run with Owen, actually, because he is much
fitter and much faster than I am.
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| Running with Owen at the Seattle 26.2 |
We’ve never planned it, but for the last three years, Owen
and I have run into each other somewhere in the first few miles of the Seattle
Marathon and run together for the next couple of hours. Last year, I was pretty
pleased to be keeping up with him and doing well into mile 15, when he casually
told me that he had run a marathon that day before, too.
What?
He wanted to see if he could do two sub-four hour marathons
back to back. He can. And he did. He finished the 2010 Seattle Marathon in
3:42:28 the day after running a 3:50:35 the day before in the Ghost of Seattle
Marathon. I struggled in 8 minutes behind him
In last year’s Redmond Watershed 12 Hour race, Owen logged
68.1 miles in the 12 hour time limit. He finished the Cascade Crest 100 Mile
Endurance Race in 25 hours, 24 minutes. Those numbers still make me shake my
head. 68 miles? That’s the distance from downtown Seattle to Olympia, just to
put it into perspective. I get tired driving that far.
It’s easy to think of marathoners and ultra runners as
super-human, or to imagine that they are somehow seasoned athletes who have
trained all of their lives to get to that level. Owen quickly debunks that
myth.
“I was like everybody else,” he told me as he inked one of
his signature shapes onto my arm. “I was running three or four miles now and
then and I thought ‘no way I can run a half marathon!’ Then I went out and did
one and it was the biggest thing I had ever done. And once I had done a few of
those, I thought, ‘no way I can run a marathon!’ But I tried that and realized
it was possible…and if you can run a marathon you can probably run an ultra if
you can get your mind around it.”
To hear Owen tell it, running is all about overcoming mental
obstacles. So much so, that he forgets ever being injured.
“I’ve been lucky,” he said after I updated him on my latest
bout of foot pain. “I just haven’t been injured. “Well, I guess that’s not
true. I mean, I get hurt sometimes, but never anything serious. Well…”
And what follows is a list of the types of small injuries
that sideline the rest of us but that for Owen are just a part of the mental
challenge of running.
“That’s the trick: battling through the low spots and making
your body do what you want.”
As I listen to him talk, I actually start to believe that I
could tackle one of these ultra marathons. To hear Owen tell it, you just have
to ramp up the training miles a little bit and go for it.
But he’s probably been running all his life, right? Nope.
“I was never a runner as a kid or anything. I played sports
and was in shape and whatever, but running never occurred to me. Then about 10
years ago I sort of woke up and was overweight, was partying too much, and just
wasn’t happy. So I started running.”
At the very least, he must have a pretty detailed and
rigorous training schedule, right? Not so much.
“I don’t have a real training plan. I’m kind of an idiot
with that stuff. I just go running and try to get my mileage up for races. My
girlfriend (ultra-runner Alison Moore) always gets on me about stretching and
varying my training and taking days off and all that. I just sort of go out and
run. That’s probably why she’s a better runner than I am? I dunno.”
Owen punctuates most of his sentences with question marks or
self-deprecating comments, which merely emphasizes his humility. He’s just one
of those people that everyone likes.
“I could probably be faster if I trained better. Or if I had
a coach. For a while I wanted to try to run a three hour marathon, but I
realized I’d need to commit so much time to track running and speed work and
all that. I’d rather just go out and run with my friends.”
Running for Owen is a social thing. You get together with
some friends on a sunny afternoon and take off into the hills for a few hours.
You support each other and have fun together. Maybe that’s why ultra running
appeals to him so much. Compared to the thousands of people who lace up for big
marathons, the trail running community is small, and everyone is in it
together.
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| Owen's Design on the White River 50 Shirt. 2008. |
That’s what appeals to him about art as well, it turns out.
It is a normally solitary venture that you can share with other people. His
work has been featured on concert posters, event t-shirts, and on the skin of
countless people, runners and otherwise.
Owen’s tattoo business is old school. There is no
storefront. He doesn’t do drop-in work for weekend partiers or impulse
shoppers. His work is art, not iconography.
Parlor F is an artist’s studio hidden in non-descript
building on Capitol Hill. He works by appointment only, and does all of his own
designs. Sometimes those designs are based on something a customer has in mind,
but Owen usually works in abstraction. A tattoo project can take three or four
visits before a needle ever touches your skin. The design as to be right, and it’s
not uncommon for Owen to go through several drafts of a design idea and to
still be tweaking it as it goes from the two dimensions of the paper to three
dimensions of the body.
Three hours after I sat down, Owen is putting the final
touches on my new tattoo. The lines and shapes are unmistakably his work, but it
somehow matches what I had in mind when I first started talking with him about
it over a month ago.
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| My New Tattoo. Undeniably Parlor F. |
His work is unique and recognizable, and once you know it,
you will see Owen’s art everywhere. As I queued up for a recent trail race on
the Eastside, I noticed a design on the calf of the young woman in front of me.
“Owen?” I asked, gesturing to her tattoo.
“Yep. You know Owen?”
And just this week, as I labored through a run with low
energy and tired legs, I remembered something Owen said to me the last time I
saw him. He was a day away from going in for major abdominal surgery that would
sideline him for a month or more and he had just returned from an hour-long
run.
“I never feel worse after I go running. No matter how bad
the run is, it’s always better to have done gone out there and done it.”
*That transplanted Seattle runner is Jonathan Bernard, the
evil genius who came up with Dizzy Daze, an ultra event that goes around, and
around, and around Greenlake.
