Kansas is home to a world champion runner ... who runs backward, as in reverse
When Aaron Yoder was a kid, his parents set up a make-shift workout gym in his family’s milk house on the farm.
Kettlebells, dumbbells and squat racks were set up, but Yoder was a runner. He wanted a treadmill, so he saved his money and went to WalMart to buy the cheapest one he could find.
The machine got up to only about 8 mph, and Yoder felt like it wasn’t pushing him enough.
“I just thought, ‘If I run backwards, wouldn’t this be a better workout? It would definitely be harder,’” Yoder said.
Years later, Yoder, 32, is a world champion in “retrorunning,” or running in reverse. Thanks to that cheap treadmill from WalMart, a kid from Peabody, Kansas, found what made him unique.
“I have a mindset that really embraces adversity,” Yoder said. “That’s the Kansas motto: ‘To the stars, through adversity.’ I think I have always embraced that.”
Yoder’s full-time job is at Bethany College in Lindsborg, where he teaches and serves as the school’s cross country and track and field coach. He is in his 10th year with the Swedes. But in his free time, he runs on tracks, dirt roads and improved treadmills — with his back to where he is going.
Yoder is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest one-mile time while running backward at 5 minutes, 54.25 seconds. That is about only 30 seconds slower than the Kansas high school girls Class 1A state champion from 2019. It was also his first attempt on a track in 2015.
Since then, he has run a road race in New Hampshire in 5 minutes, 30 seconds. And in the summer of 2018, he ran 1,500 meters in 5 minutes, 22 seconds.
He is also a world record-holder in the 1,000 meters and 4x400-meter relay and is now submitting paperwork for a better mark in the one mile.
But what the heck is retrorunning, exactly?
It’s not backpedaling like in football. Runners are more upright and reach back farther on their strides.
Retrorunners don’t wear rear-view mirrors, like cars. Yoder said he relies upon instinct and his training to stay on path.
He said he has fallen down a few times, and that is what scares most athletes away from running backward. But in Yoder’s case, running forward wasn’t much of an option.
Doctors diagnosed him with arthritis in his chronically injured left knee. He was a state champion in the 1,600 meters at Hillsboro High School, but physicians advised him never to run again — at least not in the usual way.
When running backward, less pressure is exerted on the knees. Yoder says it causes him no pain. His entire immediate family is made up of collegiate runners, and this was his way of continuing to put one foot in front of the other after a competitive career at Fort Hays State.
“I knew where I was going, just didn’t know what direction I’d be driving,” Yoder said.
Retrorunning has taken Yoder across the planet. He has competed in Germany and Italy. He has run Asia and even trains a forward-running juggler in Australia to go in reverse.
He has given motivational speeches and hopes to publish a memoir entitled “Reverse Reality” later this year. He was even recently featured on CNN.
Running in reverse has given Yoder a new perspective. Instead of focusing on how far he has to go, he can appreciate how far he has gone.
All because of a treadmill that wouldn’t go fast enough.
“It’s kind of crazy how one treadmill that didn’t go fast enough has put me here,” Yoder said. “When I look back on it, it’s like, ‘Oh the places you’ll go,’” Yoder said. “You’ll never know until you try.”
This story was originally published March 26, 2020 at 2:43 PM with the headline "Kansas is home to a world champion runner ... who runs backward, as in reverse."