Shawn Sweet (l) congratulates Kevin Holmes on completing 100,000 miles.

"We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow." -from "The Immigrant Song," Led Zeppelin

Plastic soles skreek-skreek on the snowy streets of Iron Mountain. Kevin Holmes, 5, watches three older siblings, taking their new boots for a trial run, vanish ahead of him.

"I ran after them," recalls Holmes, more than 43 years and 100,000 miles running later. "After about 50 yards, I quit."

It was an inauspicious start for one of the fastest and most-persistent one-eyed milers ever to sweep from Michigan's Upper Peninsula to its Lower one.

The U.P. breeds legends: Paul Bunyan, Bigfoot, winter 13 months a year; that good shippin' crew, cast from iron ore of the hills, entombed under Gitchee Gumee, preserved in ice - flinty, innocent - maybe 1,000 years.

Holmes is of that ilk. He has roamed the peninsulas half a century, almost, vied with other runners, his own ghosts, demons. If age or illusion suggest he is slower these days to rage, quicker to regret, it would make truth elastic to say he's mellowed.

He is sweet as sugar, unrefined, with a tang of vinegar, undistilled; and should you meet over Blue Moon beer at Kosciuszko Hall in Grand Rapids, Second City in the Lower Peninsula, amid walls lined with mirrors and dart boards, you might see both.

Country of the Blind

At age eight Holmes was playing army, "occupying" a barn in his hometown of Escanaba, when a rock flew through a window. "I turned right into it with my left eye," he says. "I'm still waiting for my Purple Heart."

Today he's caregiver at the 750-bed Grand Rapids Home for Veterans. "I like it," he says. "I clean shit well. I have endurance." At 48, Holmes has never married ("I came close a couple times, but it didn't work out. I got lucky," he says), devours books ("I enjoy Sinclair Lewis; he gets to the point and gets inside people. He's more funny because so much of his stuff is sad").

And he loves to run.

Suicide 360 Times

"Mom was married several times; I'm not sure how many," says Holmes.

"I'm the ninth out of 18 children. I wanted to be the first to win a high school letter in football, I wasted three falls as a 140-pound, one-eyed end.

"Before practice we warmed up running a couple laps on the track. I ran way out ahead of everyone. Upperclassmen told me my sophomore year I should go out for track in spring. 'You're a miler,' they said.

"OK, that was what I'd do."

Holmes won his first race, excluding excursions in plastic boots, on a five-laps-per-mile cinder track in Menominee, in four minutes, 58 seconds.

He learned he more than liked running fast. He could not get enough of it. He adored it.

"That was in 1973, the year I started keeping track of my miles," says Holmes, pulling out a 5"x 8" Spiral notebook containing results of every race he has run: 1,189 as we speak, and counting.

Of the 1,096 of those races with age divisions, Holmes had 552 overall wins and 544 losses ("This is the year my losses will overtake my wins," he concedes to age), 720 age-group wins to 376 losses.

As we speak in the old Polish hall, whose name sounds like someone sneezing, over televised sports and bar chat, Holmes has trained and raced 100,026 miles in the 32 years since he was a sophomore: more than four times around the earth, halfway to the moon, and farther than any car he has owned.

That's an average 8.5 miles per day, 59.5 miles a week, 263.3 miles per month, 3,124 miles a year ...

Not that anyone's keeping count.

"I once wrote, 'I've committed suicide 360 times,'" says Holmes. "That was after I had run 360 races.

"Before the start, I am hard to talk to. I'm scared as hell. Once we go, I feel like I'm being chased."

Ghosts

Holmes' fourth-place finish in the U.P. high school mile during his junior year still haunts him.

"I didn't kick and got beat. I should have won," he says. "No one beat me my senior year - because of that, I think.

"It poured rain at the finals. My shoes filled with water - they felt like bricks; I could have used plastic boots that day. I entered the gun lap 10 yards back and took off. I couldn't face my coach again if I lost."

He won in 4:38. College scholarships? Few scout the U.P. and Holmes, not interested, worked the next eight years changing bedpans for the aging in Escanaba.

Then he would clock out and rip up the local roads.

When Holmes was 27, Northern Michigan University cross country coach Chris Danielson, one of the top U.P. runners ever, offered him a $200 scholarship.

"I'd only run cross for one fall, after giving up football, at Escanaba," says Holmes. "I got hurt early in the season. Now Chris, one of my toughest rivals, was offering 200 bucks - enough for my books - to make me a 27-year-old freshman. I said sure."

Holmes was voted most valuable runner his freshman season. "But I wasn't into school," he says. He quit NMU and stayed in a house with five other athletes in Marquette, taking jobs slinging sausage at Vango's Pizza, working in nursing homes, always running.

Holmes turned his best mile ever, 4:10, at age 36; his best 5K, 15:09; his best marathon, 2:36:48 ... Nice times? You bet. But don't quit your day job.

"I was never more than a decent regional runner," he says. "But I loved the adrenaline rush, the racing.

"What's the satisfaction of running fast?" Holmes answers one question with another. "What's the satisfaction of eating a good meal, drinking a good beer?

"It is uplifting - not religious, but more like a quality of experience. It's a sense you are making the most of the time you're here.

"While in Marquette I learned something college could never teach me," he continues. "I'd been angry, taken things personally for years. In Marquette I met people who forgave me.

"On Valentine's eve more than 30 gathered, amid stinging hail outside Kosciuszko, to jog together for two of the slowest miles - Nos. 99,999 and 100,000 - of Holmes' career."

"They taught me how I could be a friend."

Fall to Earth

"Winter is not a season, it's an occupation."

- Sinclair Lewis

In 1994 Holmes decided he couldn't live. Not, at least, working part-time at a nursing home in the natural-beauty-rich but job-poor U.P.

He took a test for a veterans-home opening in Grand Rapids. Sample question:

How often do you change a patient's underwear?

a) Once a day

b) Once a month

c) Once a year

"I scored 100 percent," Holmes says. "I drove six and a half hours south for a 10-minute interview, then drove back. I got home, went to bed and woke up to my ex-girlfriend's note that the home had called. I was hired."

Holmes packed what possessions he had - running shoes and clothes, trophy plates (he'd recycled the rest of the bulky hardware), books and furnishings - in his Ford Escort "with rust-ic trim" and headed south the July 4 weekend, this time to stay.

"I saw fireworks over Mackinac, then things went downhill," he remembers. "My car broke down near Cadillac; no place was open that could fix it. I had 20 bucks in my pocket.

"I remembered Dave Foley, the editor of Michigan Runner magazine, had interviewed me once, and he lived in Cadillac. I looked up his address in the phone book, got a map, knocked on his door and said, 'I'm sorry, but ...'

"Dave took me in and fed me. He took me fishing. I'd never caught a pike before; I caught three that day.

"I'll never forget," Holmes says.

Kevin Holmes (center) celebrates running miles number 99,999 and 100,000 with Scott Sullivan (l) and Dan Kelsey.

In the South

Holmes arrived in Grand Rapids 10 years, six months, 19 days, seven hours and - he glances at his watch - 28 minutes, 13 seconds ago, and counting.

Not that anyone's keeping track.

The U.P. has about one-third of Michigan's land mass and less than one-30th of its residents, not counting caribou, wolves or Sasquatch. Holmes fends for himself in the urban wilds of Grand Rapids, second to Detroit in population, with defiance that, shortly, softens.

"More fast people, more competition," he says. "I'm a veteran. Try to get in my head, you can't; try to pass on my blind side, I'll read your shadow. If I get elbowed, I give it back. I know all the tricks."

"Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form," said Sinclair Lewis. Holmes knows that too. "My best competitors are my best friends these days," he says.

Time has forced adjustments. "My string of years running 5Ks faster than 16 minutes has gone by the wayside," he says. "Sub-17 and -18 too.

"Sub-19 is still alive; that's my 'fast' these days, and I don't consider it any slower. Not as long as I've done my best."

Holmes has run sub-5-minute miles for 32 years straight, with help of late from L.P. topography. The sixth annual Kevin Holmes All-Downhill Mile is slated for May 21 this year.

The North remembers. In 2001 Holmes was inducted into the Upper Peninsula Road Runners Hall of Fame. "That may be the greatest honor I've had," he says.

He has friends among "trolls" - L.P. souls who live "under" the Mackinac Bridge - as well.

On Valentine's eve more than 30 gathered, amid stinging hail outside Kosciuszko, to jog together for two of the slowest miles - Nos. 99,999 and 100,000 - of Holmes' career.

Sixty-plus running shoes scrape-scraped over snow-melt asphalt until midway, when Holmes popped an "oil can" of LaBatt's Blue beer, brewed in Canada, and passed it around, sharing germs with his health- nut friends.

Back at Koscuiszko, two non-running spouses hoisted a banner inscribed "Kevin Holmes 100,000" for him to run through. Hugs were exchanged and the oil can, discarded, went spinning off toward the gutter.

A friend retrieved it and gave it to Holmes after untold stories had been exchanged, without any polygraphs, at the hall, toasts raised and designated drivers were revving engines in the cold February night.

"What do I want with an old LaBatt's can?" wondered Holmes, who enshrined it instantly near his TV as he stayed up late watching Simon and Garfunkel's "Old Friends" DVD, until realizing he had to rise for work two hours later, plus run a 4 x 1-mile interval session after.

"There are things you don't want to miss," Holmes says. MR