Runner Rod Williams pounds the pavement around Warrensburg
On July 22, Rod Williams toed the starting line on the University of Central Missouri track, a place he knew well from his time as one of the Mules’ distance runners. Then he backed up 30 feet to ensure he was running a full mile on the 400-meter oval.
Four laps later, he completed, without fanfare, an amazing feat that began in 1980. That mile marked 100,000 miles of running for Rod.
“I was keeping real close track of it this past year and I kind of estimated I would hit it in July,” says the devoted Warrensburg runner. “I was trying to think of a place to do the 100,000th mile and that’s what I came up with. My wife came over here to the track and we ran the last mile together. I just started with that and then I did the rest of my workout that day. There was no celebration. That was it and I went on with my day.”
Rod can still remember the exact day he became a serious runner, though he has no idea what prompted him to lace up his shoes and hit the road.
“I got a logbook for every year and I still have them,” says the 62-year-old runner. “I started Jan. 13, 1980. I didn’t track any of my high school miles. In actuality, I probably passed 100,000 before I did this mile on the track. But since I didn’t track it, I wasn’t going to count it.”
Many runners train for years to reach the goal of running a half marathon, which is a little over 13 miles. Rod hit that distance on that day in 1980 and never looked back. That was an unlikely achievement for a young man who was a sprinter at Richmond High School.
In fact, Rod recalls his high school coach telling the team about a former school athlete who ran the 10K in college. “Being a 220 and 440 guy, I had no idea what he was talking about,” Rod says. “He said, ‘That’s 6.2 miles.’ I thought to myself, ‘Nobody can run 6.2 miles without stopping.’ That’s how naive I was.”
He says his legs hurt so bad after that first distance run that it was a week before he could run again. Undaunted, he ran on, quickly moving up to 50-mile weeks. He ran his first 10K road race on St. Patrick’s Day.
“That kind of got me hooked and I started running 10Ks,” Rod says. “I kept getting faster and faster.”
After just a little more than a year of running he was ready for a marathon, all 26.2 miles of it. He finished the 1981 Macy’s Marathon in Kansas City in eighth place with a time of 2 hours, 35 minutes. “I thought that was pretty good for a guy who didn’t know anything about distance running to do that on my own with no coaching,” Rod says. His time was good enough to qualify for a cherished spot in the Boston Marathon in 1982. He wasn’t pleased with his results there despite finishing in 2 hours and 38 minutes, but chalked it up to the heat and running with a stress fracture in his leg.
Rod thought he had hung up his spikes after graduating from high school in 1979. He worked construction for three years, but decided to go to college when work slowed. A cousin ran for what was then called Central Missouri State University and she helped Rod land a spot on the cross-country and track teams. Ironically, his coach, Bob Busby, won the first marathon Rod competed in.
He describes himself as an average college athlete. Rod ran the 2 mile and 10K on the oval. He found cross-country frustrating, especially one race he says took place in a freshly harvested cornfield that was so muddy he lost a shoe. But he continued to excel at marathons in the off season.
In 1983 he again ran the Macy’s marathon right after the cross-country team returned from the NCAA Division II regional meet in Wisconsin. “We didn’t qualify for nationals,” Rod says. “My season was over, so I decided to go do it.”
A day after running a hard college 10K, Rod ran his fastest marathon on just an hour and a half of sleep, finishing the race in 2 hours, 29 minutes and 50 seconds.
A teammate introduced Rod to his wife, Mona, who also is a graduate of Central Missouri. The two have been married 38 years.
Over the years Rod has run 42 marathons. Most have been in Kansas City and St. Louis, though he’s also competed in the Chicago Marathon and has twice run in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
One year he ran the Kansas City Marathon and two weeks later ran the St. Louis Marathon. “I figured that since I was already trained for the first marathon, I could just rest between the two and treat the first race as sort of a training run. I think I ran 10 or 15 seconds faster on the second one.”
One of the toughest marathons for Rod came in Kansas City thanks to the ever-changing Missouri weather. The temperature was an ideal 50 degrees as the race began, and Rod was running in shorts and a singlet. As the race progressed the temperature dropped. Rain fell, soaking the runners. Then it turned to snow.
Over the years, Rod has slowed but never stopped running. At one point he went eight years without missing a single day of running. His current streak is close to three years.
That means making sacrifices, including running outdoors in all kinds of weather, running while sick and even running just after midnight to ensure a workout for the day. His minimum daily distance is 2 miles.
Keeping the latest streak going is easier for him now that he is retired as an accountant for the University of Central Missouri. You can find him hitting the roads around Warrensburg daily. In bad weather he runs on the UCM indoor track.
He says running has been good for him, despite suffering five stress fractures, a torn meniscus and a painful Achilles tendon that probably needs surgery. The many miles helped him overcome exercise-induced asthma, a condition that has greatly improved due to his hard workouts.
“I’m still not sure to this day why I started distance running,” Rod admits. “I wish I knew. Usually, you would know those kinds of things. I hate to use the ‘Forrest Gump’ reference, but I think I just went out and started running. And I enjoyed it.”