Ann Asks: How you and the running guys got together

I started running in the fall of 1967 when I joined my high school cross country team in an effort to get in shape for the wrestling season. The concept of specializing in a single sport in high school and year-round training in that sport was just in its infancy. There were no facilities, clubs, or organizations that offered year-round wrestling for high school kids. I’d heard apocryphal stories about someone who knew someone whose parents had bought wrestling mats for their sons and set up a workout room in their basement, but nobody knew these people firsthand. I didn’t know of anyone with a wrestling mat, and didn’t know anyone who wrestled during the offseason, so I ran when I wasn’t wrestling and wrestled when I wasn’t running. By the time I got to college I’d transferred my fanaticism from wrestling to running, and had colleagues willing to run with me throughout the year.

When I graduated from college in May of 1974 I’d been running for roughly 7 years. I started a job in Marion Iowa on the Monday after graduation. I’d been in organized sports my entire life and suddenly I was without a team and had no sport to pursue. I was lost. I gave up running altogether for several months, and then ran sporadically after that. There weren’t many track or road races for non-elite runners back then, so there didn’t seem to be much point.

I moved to the Atlanta area in 1975 to work for Emory University and it was more of the same. I was listless. All I had was my job, and I didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t have any hobbies. I wasn’t a member of a team anymore, so I didn’t have a team of guys to socialize with.

Nicolaysen, my boss, recognized this fairly quickly and told me I needed to find an avocation to balance against my vocation. My job was good, he said, but I needed to have more than that in my life. He said I needed a diversion, a distraction, a hobby. It could be anything; one thing, or several things would do, but he observed that I had enjoyed running once upon a time, and that might fill the void in my life. So I started going to Stone Mountain Park to run a couple days a week after work.

Running was still a rare activity back in those days, so I rarely saw anyone running at the park, but one evening I saw two guys about my age that appeared to be headed out to run. I asked if I could tag along, and they agreed. They introduced themselves as Greg Jordan and Billy Savage.

I couldn’t keep up because I’d been running so rarely, but they told me they ran every weekday from the same starting point at 5pm and I was welcome to join them any time. I did join them with increasing frequency and was eventually able to keep up and go the entire distance. Over time Greg introduced me to every trail in the 3200 acre park.

Greg and Billy also told me about a group of guys who met at 7:30 on Saturday and Sunday mornings at the park for long runs. Eventually I got up the courage to join these fanatics, and they became my teammates in the running pursuit. Mike Anderson, Ben Burr, Joe Carter, Debbie Carter, Mark Erb, Dave Eve, Mitch Ferrell, Larry Giddings, Marvin Hodge, Greg Jordan, Eugene Klibinoff, Randy Kuykendall, Hal Leeuwenburg, Mike Lowrie, Gordon Maner, Robin Porter, Mike Pratt, Scott Raymond, Jean Richardson, Jesus Romero, Tom Shinnick, Warren Southerland, Dave Stiles, Wes Wessely, Rita Wilhoite, Tim Willis, Gale Wood and a host of high school and college kids have been my training partners and friends over the years.

So now it is 36 years later and I am still running with the Stone Mountain enclave on Saturday and Sunday mornings. We are fewer in number (3-4 most mornings) and less able than before, but our competitive and argumentative natures persist. Actually, we never argued. We simply engaged in enthusiastic discussions and called each other names like “Dumbass”, but we always said it with great affection.

And that’s all I have to say about that.


Tom Millen
June 2011