It’s a mixed crowd trudging up concrete steps to enter the stands of the 1921 stadium. A young guy in dreadlocks walks near a 60-ish construction contractor with a cast on his arm. A 50-something mother with her college-age daughter are here together.
A few have the taut bodies of committed fitness buffs. Others have spare tires overlapping their waistbands.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers, police officers, retirees, young parents, high school athletes, business owners and children flow in. A few women and their friends hoist occupied jogging strollers up the steps.
They deposit keys, cell phones and towels on the aluminum bleachers and descend to the playing field, setting water bottles strategically along the track. Then they scatter from end zone to end zone, generally along stripes at 10-yard intervals down the field.
Welcome to Red Dog’s Dog Days, a community exercise program.
Red Dog is Don Gardner, a wiry fellow in a ball cap, who walks into the north end zone and lifts a microphone to his face. As stragglers enter, he starts without ado.
“OK, let’s stretch,” he says.
Speaking with a bit of a growl and twang, he instructs folks to reach for the sky, touch their toes, lean to this side and that. Then he launches them into a series of calisthenics — squats, push-ups, leg raises.
Afterward, Gardner makes some announcements — including info on running events and the day’s post-workout coffee venue — before sending the crowd to run the stadium’s steps.
After about 30 minutes in all the participants, winded and sweaty, head to the parking lot.
A labor of love
If Red Dog Gardner were, in fact, a canine, he might be an Australian Koolie, a breed known for its stamina, love of work and eagerness to please.
He isn’t in it for the money. Indeed, participants don’t pay a cent. Gardner, 69, instead reaps the benefits of personal satisfaction, friendships and helping others as he leads the program, now in its 25th year.
“It’s such a labor of love, it’s incredible,” says Laura Dahnert, 47, a participant in her 11th year.
When Gardner and Jim O’Connell started the workouts in 1984, with help from Gardner’s daughter Leslie, their goals were modest. Gardner and O’Connell, who were in law enforcement and volunteered with the Lawrence High football program, wanted to get players in shape so they would be ready when the season started. O’Connell says they especially wanted to help a few players who were prone to knee injuries, “so they didn’t have so many.”
“We had five or six players,” Gardner says. “The next year we had a few more.”
A couple of years after that, volleyball players started attending, “all of them super athletes,” says Gardner, noting Lawrence High’s dominance in volleyball in those days.
Pretty soon soccer players and their coach joined in to get ready for the fall season, and the leaders started taking roll.
Gardner, a longtime sports fan, began to look beyond the current players.
“I said, ‘Bring your little brother, your little sister,’ ” he recalls. “Sometimes I would see a parent out watching (and say), ‘They might as well come, too.’ ”
Sometime around 1988, they started calling the workouts Dog Days, a nod to Gardner’s Red Dog nickname, which the now-graying redhead picked up in junior high.
Janet Majure of Lawrence is a freelance writer. Jim Barcus is a photographer for The Star. To reach them, call 816-234-4779 or e-mail starmag@kcstar.com.
@Nyx.CommentBody@