The Walt Stack Spring Running Challenge will run for 10 weeks from 3/22-5/31/15.
You can participate in the following two categories:
- Short Stack: Run an average of 10 miles a week from March 22-May 31st for a total of 100 miles.
- Tall Stack: Run an average of 22.5 miles a week from March 22- May 31st for a total of 225 miles.
Post your running miles on the bulletin board at the Dolphin Club entrance. If you have any questions, please contact me at natazha.bernie@gmail or Chris Tschinkel at ctbob10@….
Here’s a brief Walt Stack bio.
Walt Stack was a Dolphin Club member and icon of the San Francisco running community in the 1960-90’s. He ran approximately 62,000 miles in his lifetime. Even in his seventies and eighties, Stack ran many more marathons and 50-mile ultra marathons than all but a few of his running peers.
Circa 1965/1966, Stack invited members of the South End Rowing Club to meet with him and another Dolphin Club member to form the Dolphin South End Running Club. He included women and children who were typically excluded from running clubs at that time. It’s San Francisco’s oldest running club and one of the oldest running clubs in the United States. Stack also organized the first Double Dipsea race in 1970.
For 27 years, from 1966 until 1993, Stack maintained a grueling, daily, highly visible training routine that made him a San Francisco institution. Starting on his bike, he rode six hilly miles from his Potrero Hill home to Fisherman’s Wharf. Once there, he’d strip off his shirt, displaying tattoos of peacocks, wild horses, and bathing beauties across his broad chest, and then proceed to run a 17-mile (27 km) route over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito and back, after which he would take a one-mile (1.6 km) swim in the currents of the San Francisco Bay near Alcatraz Island.
It is noteworthy that Stack could claim that he was the only actual ‘prisoner’ of Alcatraz Island to have made a successful swim from Alcatraz to the shores of Fisherman’s Wharf. Stack was a prisoner on Alcatraz for a six-month period; he was sentenced to hard labor while a youth for having left his post AWOL in the Philippines. He had in fact swum the distance many times in his later years, as a participant in sanctioned Alcatraz swims.
