This summer, Walter Schuttler of Seymour joined an elite club when he completed the last of 50 marathons in 50 states, becoming one of only seven Connecticut residents to have done so.
And to make his feat even more remarkable, Schuttler, 61, the head custodian at Bungay School, had to beat heart problems to do it.
It all started in 1991 when Schuttler started running for exercise to lose weight and get in shape. It didn’t take long before he was pushing the envelope. He entered the New York City Marathon in 1992 and completed the race, which is the goal of most first time marathoners.
But after he started running, he noticed a burning sensation in his chest and throat pains when he ran uphill. The problem seemed to go away when he ran downhill, so he just kept running.
At age 39, it never occurred to him that something serious was wrong, even though his grandfather had died young from a heart attack. He assumed he must have had an allergy.
Finally, he went to the Griffin Hospital walk-in clinic and as soon as the doctors there heard his complaint they scheduled him for an angiogram. The test revealed one of his heart arteries had a 90 percent blockage, which was treated with an angioplasty procedure.
“It was lucky I had a warning,” Schuttler said in an interview at Bungay School. “The running alerted me to the problem. In that sense, running saved my life.”
He had his first angioplasty in 1995, a second one in 1996, and finally a triple by-pass operation in October 2009.
All that time, however, he kept running marathons.
Schuttler admits that his doctors advised him to slow down, but said as a dedicated long-distance runner he just couldn’t do it.
In fact, he ran three miles on the high school track the night before he had his second angioplasty.
At the same time, Schuttler was changing careers. When he started running, he was working for a plumbing supply company in Bridgeport, but then he got laid off. That meant he was looking for a job when the custodian position opened up at the elementary school.
“It sure beats working with a bunch of old fogies,” he joked. “It’s an environment that keeps you young.
“It’s tough to keep up with them,” he added, about the hundreds of young children who attend Bungay School, “so it keeps you in good shape.”
In total, he has run about 70 marathons and 11 ultra-marathons (races longer than the standard 26.2‑mile marathon), as well as numerous shorter races.
Through sheer luck, he got to run the prestigious Boston Marathon in 2005 when he overheard a race official in a restaurant complain about giving waivers to people who never showed up to run.
In order to enter the Boston Marathon, runners either had to meet the event’s qualifying time in another race, which that year was three hours and thirty minutes for his age group, or raise thousands of dollars for a participating charity.
Schuttler said he told the official that if he received a waiver, he would definitely show up to run, and that’s what happened.
Schuttler’s best marathon time was a 4:01 finish in the Bay State Marathon in Massachusetts in 1998. Today his finishing times are averaging between 5:30 and 6:30.
“These days I don’t look for a quick time,” he said.
His wife, Karen, doesn’t run, but she enjoys traveling to Hawaii and other far away states to wait for him at the finish line.
On June 23, 2012, Schuttler completed the Mayor’s Marathon in Anchorage, Alaska — his 50th marathon in 50 states.
A few months later, he received a certificate and a trophy naming him a member of the 50 States Marathon Club.
Schuttler said he won’t quit running marathons, but he is pleased because, “I wanted to get done before I was 61.”
