Catching Up with GTC's Bill Blask--89 and Going Strong

GTC: You have been very active in the Greenville Track Club over the past few years, including co-publishing the club newsletter and also directing the Santa Run in December. When did you become a club member and why?

BB: I first joined GTC back in the '80s, after I moved to Greenville from Toronto. Job changes moved us to Blythewood near Columbia, but many years later I rejoined GTC when my wife and I moved back to the Greenville area in 2018.
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You were the best running organization in town, and I have never regretted that decision. It's been the most important source of motivation in my continuing development as a runner. 

Bill Blask and Sandi Hardaway volunteering at Spinx Run Fest a few years ago.

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GTC: Tell us about how you began running. 

BB: My earliest memories are running for the sheer joy of the activity's unique mobility: floating over the ground, weaving and accelerating over the cobblestone streets of Racine, Wisconsin (when they weren't covered in snow and ice) while attempting to avoid traffic just for fun. More often I often ran for long distances to and from the city parks alongside friends riding their bikes, just because it seemed fun. There's a theme here. 

Later, I had some early successes in competition in the public schools system. An illness at 15 took me away from competition but I returned to running as a healthy hobby in my late 30's while raising a family. Think rubber galoshes (boots) in Denver's snowy streets. That continued during my years in Toronto (more cold weather), and again when I came to Greenville in 1981, when I first joined GTC. 

Lydia and Bill edited and produced some amazing GTC Newsletters.

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GTC: From some of your articles in the GTC newsletters you seem very interested in how to improve your running. What drives that curiosity?

BB: It is as much necessity as curiosity. After my teenage illness, – Bulbar Polio – I found it necessary to consciously direct my body to recover, and then to perform common activities such as walking and running. To this day the only completely "natural: or "unconscious" running I experience is after miles of sustainably performed running, and then sprinting all-out across a finish line. My most completely unconscious running occurs during that final sprint at the finish of a race!

GTC: As one of the elders, age-wise, in the club what do you attribute your enthusiasm for running to?
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BB: It is always an examination of how I might move on a given day. Practice brings the information about what I can or might do. Competition brings information about what I will do. I approach each practice as an almost always "limitless" activity in duration or mileage before I begin. Then I see what my body and mind will do. In contrast, competition is always precisely defined in distance, while an event's duration is defined by when I cross the finish line.
 
The competition also provides the psychological stimulus, while the psychological support is provided just by being among other   runners. There is always the positive stimulus of other people running alongside, ahead of or behind me. There's a certain inexpressible comfort in seeing them engaged as I am that day.
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After the start of any run, it is an examination of the limits I will experience: mostly breathing, but also through awareness of muscular stress or lack of it, a balance of forces on my physical body, the challenge to my perception of how to alter "the way" I run, and finally my will or capacity to persist and endure. Awareness of the changes in all of this is, I suspect, for me like watching a movie that I provide the plot and action for in real time. 

GTC: What excites you at this stage in life?

BB: Bringing positive changes into my life and the lives of others. 

GTC: We see you at many GTC events as a volunteer and/or a participant. What is your favorite running event in the Greenville area, besides the Santa Run?
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BB: I do so love the Paris Mountain 10 K. What a joyful grind! Beautiful neighborhoods, serious hills, and enough distance to wonder whether you've got enough in the tank this time. But GTC's series of sponsored races is so varied and rich I'm glad to be a part of all of them when I can. 

Two race directors: John Hart and Bill Blask

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GTC: How did you become the co-race director for the Santa Run?
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BB: I ran it a few times before it captured me as a unique event. It was the combination of children with parents, teenagers dressed in animal costumes, and dogs with Santa kerchiefs that opened my eyes to its intrinsic value. Add the lovely residential venue, the gentle variations of elevation in the course, the season, and fun naturally happened.

I also saw how hard Jim Roberts worked to run the event. At that point in the calendar year we all need a little help. Knowing how much else he was responsible for at the time, I was seduced by sympathy into assisting. Again, no regrets. It's been a pleasure.

GTC: What is your favorite reason for running? 
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BB: It helps me remember how I ran before my teenage illness took away that fundamental joy. It tempers the grief I still feel recalling those years of recovery. Running offers, and often allows a welcome balance of that memory of joy in some meaningful and sustainable way. Underneath that very personal reason is a physical determination to do what the human body – my body – is made to do. 

GTC: What advice would you render to our GTC members?
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BB: Be fully conscious doing some form of physical movement. The example that often comes to mind is a simple but anatomically profound movement: take several breaths as you slowly curl each finger and thumb of one hand, one at a time, into its palm; watch and allow amazement to come at the incredible complexity of that movement, at that very moment fully under your mind's command. A miracle by any measure.

Expand that image nearly infinitely into the movement of your whole physical self as you run or jog or walk – and you realize that movement at any level, slow or fast, hard or easy, long or short, privately or competitively, is another of these miracles. It is an experience worth treasuring.

And for Pete's sake, show up!