Brad Kimmel retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2003 as a lieutenant colonel who deployed troops halfway around the world.

Now, some might see the 56-year-old Huntertown native marshaling a growing army of Fort Wayne-area fitness enthusiasts.

As a founder of the annual Fort4Fitness running event and executive director of Fort Wayne’s Academy of Sports and Health Centre, Kimmel’s new career is helping area residents get in touch with their inner athlete.

In just three years, he’s helped Fort4Fitness grow to more than 7,500 participants – all while turning an all-but-abandoned field house along Taylor Street into the non-profit Academy of Sports and Health.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a real passion for trying to help people identify and develop a (sports-related) talent that they’re good at and get started on improving their health,” Kimmel says.

But when asked about his own health, Kimmel, normally outgoing and chatty, turns reticent.

“That’s not what we talk about,” he says.

The story goes like this. Before Kimmel retired from a 30-year career in military logistics, doctors discovered tumors growing along his spine. They weren’t cancerous, he says.

But there he was in middle age, someone accustomed to keeping himself in good physical shape, suddenly facing major physical challenges.

He underwent five surgeries, including one that took a cluster of nerves from one place and reattached them somewhere else to restore feeling in his right arm.

“I had to change my lifestyle,” says Kimmel, who describes himself as “a competitive miler” who played baseball and basketball and ran track and cross country at Carroll High School. “I had to find alternative ways to maintain my health.”

He no longer competes, but he does things to remain active – like adding steps to his everyday routine by parking far away from the door of the store when he goes shopping. And he gets joy from being with others committed to improving their fitness.

Sometimes he’ll walk with the 60 senior citizens who do laps at the center’s indoor football field on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Or he’ll strike a conversation with city kids who come to learn baseball through the World Baseball Academy that uses the center’s ball diamonds.

Or he’ll exchange a knowing look at a winded high school student who’s just finished a workout with Athletes with Purpose, a training program for high school- and college-age athletes that stresses building character as well as speed and agility.

Kimmel envisions the center, with its indoor football field and weight room and 26 surrounding acres, as a place where young competitors and reforming couch potatoes alike can find their bliss.

“It’s sort of the opposite of ‘Build it and they will come,’ ” he says, recalling when he first saw the inside of the 40,000-square-foot building. The field was dotted with 40-gallon recycling containers catching water from leaks in the roof.

“We had this building, … but it had been neglected. … We have been getting in the programming first. The philosophy is then they will come,” he says, adding area residents now make about 80,000 visits a year to the facility and a remodeling plan is in the works.

Most recently, Kimmel has been working with others affiliated with Fort4Fitness to grow the event into a year-round community health program for all ages and abilities.

He’s proud that Fort4Fitness now includes “marathons” for kids and seniors, in which participants do 26.2 miles by running or walking a mile or so each week before doing their finishing leg inside Parkview Field on Friday night before the main races.

Those races now include a 4-mile run/walk, a 10K run/walk and a half-marathon that has been designated the 2011 Indiana championship race by the Road Runners Club of America.

Training programs around the region now prepare novices to participate in Fort4Fitness, which will take place Sept. 23 and 24, Kimmel says, and he’s encouraging charities to fold their fundraising walks or runs into the event, which also includes a health fair.

Fort4Fitness, now the second-largest running event in Indiana, also recently developed a new online calendar of area fitness events at www.Fort4Fitness.org/4yourhealth.

Kimmel says he doesn’t see Fort Wayne as a place where residents are fat and dumb, even if the city has been painted that way by much-publicized national magazine surveys.

Fitness trails are bustling, Y’s and health clubs are busy, and there are a growing number of walks and runs that people can use to motivate them to reach fitness goals, he says.

He says the area is “full of very smart people who are committed to addressing situations” when they are perceived as problems.

“I think there has been a strong community push that we have to make it more readily accessible and to have relatively inexpensive ways for people to exercise,” he says. “I think in the last few years, Fort Wayne has quietly embraced community health.”

rsalter@jg.net