Real Runner Profile: Owen Connell

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.

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.

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.

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.