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Richard Donovan is an Irishman who has run marathons in all seven continents and in the North and South Poles.

Richard Donovan is an Irishman who has run marathons in all seven continents and in the North and South Poles.

Ultra-runner Richard Donovan has run marathons in all seven continents and in the North and South Poles. Recently, the 56-year-old Irishman completed a marathon starting from Boston and ending in Santa Monica, traversing more than 3,000 miles across 16 states.

The run was special on two counts: it was in memory of his runner friend, Alvin Matthews of Ventura, who had a spinal cord injury in 2014 and died last year. It was also the first marathon that Donovan did after receiving two robotic partial knee replacements with Dr. Kevin R. Stone at The Stone Clinic in San Francisco.

“Robotic surgery at The Stone Clinic seemed nothing short of a miracle,” said Donovan, who had earlier consulted various medical professionals and tried various interventions without success. “My personal research led me to Dr. Stone as a last roll of the dice.”

At The Stone Clinic, robotic partial and knee replacement is routine, and driven athletes consist of a significant part of the practice. Dr. Stone recognized that only one part of Donovan’s knee was damaged, the medial side. 

“This was contrary to other advice where I was told I would need a full knee replacement and my days of distance running would be effectively over,” Donovan said.

He found the process simple from his perspective.

“I felt an absolute surety in Dr Stone’s prognosis. I limped into The Stone Clinic before the surgery, but within a week I could discard the crutches for good and walk pain free,” he said. 

Dr. Stone, who has written a book titled, “Play Forever: How to Recover from Injury and Thrive,” has a goal to return people life fitter, faster and stronger than they have been in years. 

“We feel great about helping people return to sports,” he said. “It is the whole reason we went into sports medicine orthopedics…people usually have a problem that we can fix and then share with them the joy of playing forever.”

Donovan is lucky that his running life didn’t come to a grinding halt with his bummed knees. Matthews, his running companion, suffered a three-story fall while working in Lebanon and had a devastating spinal cord injury. In 2015, Donovan ran across the U.S. from San Francisco to New York to raise money for his friend’s medical bills. 

He was planning to run from Boston to California again to fundraise for Matthews’ ongoing medical expenses. When he last spoke to him, “He was upbeat, happy, looking forward to new horizons,” Donovan said.   

He dedicated the run to his friend’s memory. “I carried some of Alvin's ashes in a pendant every step of the way, returning them to his mother at the finish in Santa Monica,” he said. 

He has also raised funds for Triumph Foundation in California, an organization that helps people to triumph over their disability and keep moving forward with their lives.

Donovan has been running since he was 12 years old in Galway, Ireland. With a short break in his 20s, he has run for more than 40 years of his life. Among his runs: 2,000 miles+ across Europe from Istanbul to Rotterdam in Summer 2016, and 1,000 miles+ across Argentina and Chile in South America in 2017.

The recent run from Boston progressed along a diverse route, he said, initially going northeast to meet Lake Erie, through the farmlands of Ohio, into the storms and heat of Kansas, ascending the Rocky Mountains, pacing himself under the Aspen of Colorado, running endless straight roads, including Forrest Gump Highway near Monument Valley, and traversing the deserts of southeastern California in relentless 100F + temperatures. 

In Arizona, he joined the occasional railroad track, or found a way through fields. For the final phase, he followed the historic Route 66 to the West Coast.  

Donovan, who spends a lot of time in the U.S. each year, is amazed by the country’s diverse topography that only a runner may witness firsthand.

“I went down some of the lesser-known byways, purposely going along country roads just to experience what I thought was real America and see what that was like, rather than just go on highways,” he said.

People in Ireland and Europe have a different perception of America because we see cities all the time on TV, he said. 

“It was quite surreal, for example, to be in a sparse mountainous area in the last couple of days and then suddenly descend onto the urban sprawl of Los Angeles,” he added. 

During the last two days of the run through LA, he encountered sidewalks, facilities and stores for the first time in days. 

“I sense that residents of LA also don’t know what’s out there in the rural areas,” he said. 

Donovan concedes that running is not for everybody. For those who embrace it, there certainly are a lot of benefits. 

“There is a lot of freedom in running and I think humans are designed to enjoy movement on foot,” he said. “In the modern world, it’s an opportunity each day to spend some time by oneself, away from technology and a bombardment of ‘information,’ and enjoy the simple act of putting one foot on the front of the other.”

On the competitive level, it can bring runners to amazing destinations around the world.

Everything nearly came to a standstill for him when his knee began troubling him in 2017. 

On a routine run, it suddenly hurt him to the point he couldn’t run another step farther. 

“I instantly knew this acute pain was different than before, and serious,” he said. 

MRIs revealed a myriad of issues with both knees, including torn medial meniscus. 

“Of course, I was gutted that the chance of running across Antarctica that year was gone, but there were greater concerns that worried me,” he said. “I had many problems with both knees that could threaten my ability to engage in any distance running again.”

Doing daily rehab sessions at Dr. Stone’s offices for a month provided the reassurance and guidance that he was on the right track.

“I have never looked back,” Donovan said. “There has never been pain since.”  

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