Craig's Bio and PR's

I am 35 years old and live in Southern California.  I am an electronic engineer now, but I have worked a variety of jobs ranging from car salesman to concert promoter.  I have a wonderful wife a 3 year old daughter, and a son born in June 2002.

I did a little running as far back as the 3rd or 4th grade.  We had a loop around the playground at school that was supposed to be 1/2 mile.  I started running this at recess, and for a short time I averaged several miles a day, split into 3 runs.  I'm not sure what inspired me to do this, but it might have been the '76 Olympics which occurred at the end of my 3rd grade year.

I didn't know much about running, but I knew the world record for the mile was around 4 minutes.  I decided to see how close I could get to going sub 4 by running two all-out laps of our 1/2 mile course.  At the end of the first lap I stopped to get a drink of water, and was shocked to see it had already taken 3 1/2 minutes and I had just 30 seconds to complete the second loop!

At that time, my sister was starting junior high school, and they had an actual track.  We headed over there one day and ran a mile race.  I think I ran around 7:30, but my sister beat me!  I got so mad, I ran another 2 1/2 miles just to prove something.  After that, I didn't run on my own anymore until high school - just the occasional run in P.E. class.  I would usually finish near the front in the longer runs, but I was the slowest kid in the sprints.

When I got to high school, I wanted to play football.  However, I had very bad knees, and flexibility problems as a result of being born with both feet twisted 90 degrees to the left.  Leg braces as an infant had twisted my legs back to something resembling normal, but various problems remained.  Basically, I was virtually guaranteed a serious injury the first time I got tackled, so I had to find another sport.  Since I was terrible at everything, the mystery sport of "cross country" seemed like an option.  My sister said they ran races or something, and the team was so bad all you had to do was show up to make varsity.

I was terrible to start with, but stuck with it in spite of swearing to quit after every practice.  I never trained that well, but ended running 9:33 for 3200m my senior year, good enough for 2nd at the CIF championships.  In spite of very low mileage, I was actually better at longer races, running 32:13 for 10K on a dirt track.

I was a walk-on in college, and struggled to hang on to a spot on the track team, and I never did make the traveling cross country squad.  I was pretty consistently in the mid 31 minute range for 10K, but we had a very strong team.  I was mostly known for running surprisingly fast for such little training and horrible running form, but was never really "fast" period.

I have run on and off (mostly off) since college.  I love to race, and would sometimes race more often than I trained.  In recent months, however, I have turned a corner in my running, and for the first time in my life I am doing really serious training.  While I am training harder than ever, my times are still well short of my college times.  Because of my historically poor training, I am motivated to train well for a change and see what I can really do.

My PR's (for now):