Keith Hanson coaches from the sidelines at the 2005 Roseville Big Bird
Keith and Kevin Hanson, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways:

* Your four stores in southeast Michigan, each of which offer just what we need, served up with expert advice by runners for those who don't know what they need. (I'm reminded of the day I went into a chain sporting goods store at a mall and asked for a runner's watch and the salesman came back with a hand-held stopwatch like you see trainers using in movies about horses doing their early-morning workouts.)

* Those kick-butt Tuesday-evening speed workouts, which, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, return to Dodge Park in Sterling Heights each May and run through the Detroit Free Press marathon. Upwards of 200 show up each week, split into two groups: those who run their 10Ks under 40 minutes and those who run them over, with varying torture tests each week as determined by K and K.

* The Hansons 5K in Utica, held the end of March each year, a flat-and- fast test of early-season fitness, now heading into its 15th year.

* The three-race mid-summer cross-country series. The first two three- milers are in Dehlia Park in Sterling Heights, the last one in Dodge Park. Each costs the grand total of $2, and includes post-race food and awards in one-year-age groups for teens and 10-year age groups for adults.

* The 5K to raise money for and awareness of prostate cancer the last Sunday each October.

* Those free 16-mile marathon-training runs each year, one in the spring and three in the fall.

* Two cross-country meets for kids from middle school through high school each fall, which draw upwards of 1,000 per event.

Kevin Hanson was 4th overall and 2nd master at the 2005 Roseville Big Bird.
* Marathon training classes to get you ready for your first (or 20th) 26.2- miler.

* The Midwest Distance Solution track meet held each June at Hillsdale College, designed as a qualifier to get would-be elite athletes into the U.S. Track and Field Championships.

* Sponsorship of the Oak Apple, Dodge Park, Roseville Big Bird, Belle Isle New Year's Eve and Lake Orion New Year's Day runs.

* For putting their money where their mouths were when, tired of complaining about the sorry state of U.S. elite running, they started up their own teams of elite and would-be elite runners. There are 15 men now, and seven women, ensconced to three houses the brothers bought in and around Rochester Hills.

Success? You bet. In November, the men won their fourth national cross-country club championship in the last five years. In the last Olympic marathon trials, Brian Sell led most of the way before fading late, Trent Briney finished fourth and Clint Verran fifth.

In August, Sell finished ninth at the world cross-country championships in Helsinki, running 2:13:27 in 72 degrees and 90-percent humidity. If his time or place doesn't impress you, consider he beat the defending New York CIty Marathon champ, the Nos. 1 and No. 2 finishers in the Boston Marathon, and the first and third finishers at the last Olympics.

* Last, but certainly not least, for being all-round good guys and class acts who enrich all of us in the sport.

Keith, who just turned 40, made his first splash in the sport when he ran the Free Press marathon in 3:20:01 at age 13 (13-freakin'-teen). He was two-time captain of the Michigan State cross-country team and all-Big Ten on the track at 10,000 meters. Last Thanksgiving Eve he became a daddy for the second time when his wife, Sonja, gave birth to Isabel Jean Hanson.

Kevin, 45, was a star runner at Oakland University who, thank God, decided to give up corporate life and a nice, steady income to take a gamble, follow his heart and open the first Hansons store in Sterling Heights in 1991. The rest is state running history. For all of this and more, congratulations to Michigan Runner's Contributors of the Y ear. MR