About Me

I’ve always run. But I never payed much attention to it. Running was a way to get from one place to another. Faster than walking, slower than the bike. I ran for transportation. Usually I didn’t run much, but it was always an option — you never know when you’ll get a flat and discover you’ve forgotten the bike pump.

I suppose I first started viewing running as a serious option when I was a little late getting out of school, and I missed the bus. I was 11. It wasn’t far, two miles perhaps three, it would be faster, or at least more fun just to run home. So I did. School uniform, shiny leather shoes, and all.

We moved back to the states, and my mother drove me to and from school (no more double decker buses, sigh). Then school acquired access to a computer! (Computers were not ubiquitous in the early seventies). There was one terminal. The person who got to it first could use it up until the start of classes. My parents (rightly) were not interested in carting me off to school early. So I started to run to school.

My mother told me that if the temperature was below 40 I had to wear a sweater. Other than that I was allowed to run to school. So I’d get up before everyone else, do my chores and run in. When the doors were unlocked I’d rush to the computer and claim the teletype.

Then the track coach noticed me. And I was forced onto the track team. I hated it. I’m not a miler. (I’m far worse at shorter distances). Once, and only once, we had a meet with a two mile race. It was the state championship for our division. I placed second in the state. My best performance in any race. Some runners from other schools came up to me afterward and congratulated me and told me they hadn’t taken me seriously because I was wearing normal shorts and not running shorts. That amused me.

After that year I refused to run track. It was too painful. I refused to run cross country too, though I might have found that more pleasant had I tried it.

Running continued to be an occasional mode of transportation.

In my mid twenties, a friend mentioned running a 6 minute mile. I wondered if I still could. I then lived in Pasadena, near CalTech, and I snuck over the fence one night and ran 4 times round the track. And, yes, I managed to break 6.

In my early thirties I was living in Boston. It was too snowy and icy to ride my bike to work that winter, so I would run. Or I’d drive one way (~8 miles), run home, run to work the next day and drive home. A friend tried to convince me to run the Boston marathon with him (mind you, neither of us had qualified). I decided to do it a week or two before the race. I did two ~30 mile runs on the remaining two saturdays before the race. So then I knew I could run that far. And then ran the race.

It was a cold day. I ran it in long pants and a button down shirt (the people at the finish line didn’t believe I’d run the whole thing because of my clothing).

I moved to SB. I started doing water quality monitoring of the state beaches around SB. One day I was biking out to Carp. and I got a flat on Ortega Hill. I looked at my watch. If I fixed my flat, I’d have to wait for the patch to dry — I would not get to Carp in time to meet the person I was helping. If I ran I thought I could make it. So I ran. It happened to be the day that the 3 day breast cancer walk was happening, and they were also walking over Ortega Hill. As I ran by someone showed out “Slow down, you idiot, it’s a walk, not a run.” Didn’t seem to occur to her that I might use running as a means of transportation rather than a way to make a statement.

I thought that was rather sad. That walking, running, are considered so unusual to us that these most natural and human (for what other animal can run as we do?) activities are only used to grab people’s attention, rather than to get places.

Later I heard about Pier to Peak. That sounded fun. No one would expect me to go fast on that race:-) I decided to run it. But not race it. So labor day morning (the day after the race) I locked my bike to Stern’s Wharf, and set off. A nice foggy morning. All the chalk marks were still visible. It took me about 2 hours to get up. I ended up racing a pair of cyclists, they were marginally faster than I, but they took breaks, so we’d pass and repass each other.

I enjoyed that. So the next year I signed up for the race (of course I still wasn’t training). It was sunny that year, and I went out far too fast, and had to stop and walk at the hairpin. Then I slowly started to train, and got more and more into running competitively.

Now I enjoy the races — except for the miles and the 5Ks. They are just too short (and too fast).

In 2005 I ran my second marathon, Big Sur, and loved it.

In 2009, to celebrate my 50th year, I ran my first 50 mile race, the White River run near Mt. Rainier. I came second in my age group (which was nice). It was also the USATF national championship race for 50 mile trail runs, and the guy ahead of me was not a USATF member — so… I became a national champion (which didn’t seem fair to the guy who beat me).

Snippets of narcissism.

When faced with ~20 different glazes in our pottery studio I set about, methodically testing every single permutation of two glazes. I threw 400 bowls for that series of tests, and another 100 odd bowls for other tests. It took me two years.

After spending years creating fonts with a font editing program, I got so frustrated that I went off and wrote my own. And have since become a font editor writer rather than a font designer.

I spent a dozen years traveling to Madagascar to study lemurs, at first as a vacation, but later I tried to become a professional primatologist — until I figured out that while I could bear a forest full of leaches for a month or two, they got annoying after four — and I regretfully had to give up that dream.

George W. Williams