Grover Everett:
First, some background: I came to KU in 1966 as an assistant professor of chemistry.
I had been a scholarship athlete at North Carolina (where I won ACC championships in cross- country and in the 2-mile in 1961), and I continued to run throughout graduate school and after coming to KU.
In 1966, Jim Ryun was in his prime, and I remember watching him run in the fieldhouse, on the county roads, and on the track in the stadium.
There were few other runners in those days other than the track team. I was hesitant about running in the streets because people gave me curious looks! Therefore, I often drove or biked to the edge of town or to the Haskell grounds to run out of the public eye.
I ran outdoors most of the year, but in the winter I went inside the fieldhouse. There was a dirt track on the lower floor then that was more or less off limits to me unless I ran in the early part of the morning. By late morning, the track had been sprinkled with water to keep down dust. Then the track team took over about mid-afternoon.
First Meetings of the Mad Dogs.
I liked to run about midday, so in the winter I went to the second or third floor of the fieldhouse and ran on the concrete floor. I took fairly serious workouts then, doing sets of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 laps at a fairly good pace. I had been doing this alone for several years when several other faculty members started to run in the fieldhouse (I am not sure of the year, late '60s or early '70s; Phil or Fred would know).
I recognized Fred Van Vleck because he had interviewed me for one of the KU research grants. He was running with at least two other people from the Math Department, and I soon got to know Phil Montgomery and Jim Brewer. Ed Rutter may have been with that group then, but I am not sure. Eventually, we started meeting in the faculty locker room (I believe it was around 11:30 AM ) to run together, and the group gradually expanded.
In the mid-1970's, we started competing with other faculty members by mail ("postal competition"). We would time ourselves on events from the 440 to 10 miles and turn in our times to a clearinghouse run by someone in a math department at another university (Phil or Fred would know who and where).
Some of the times for these events are impressive (see the Mad Dog race results on the Web site for 1975-76; Phil was running well those days).
I believe I held the national clearinghouse record for the half-mile one year when I ran a sub-two-minute half.
We actually were able to have an event in the Kansas Relays for a couple of years, and faculty from several other schools came to compete. As I remember, we always won the distance-medley relay. We even had uniforms that said "KU Faculty Runners," and I see that these are visible on the Relays 76 photo on the Web site.
Some of the Mad Dogs ran in the KU Relays marathon, and others ran in Masters Events in the Relays. Eventually, we started sending teams of men and women to the Okie Relays, a relay across the Panhandle of Oklahoma from Elkhart, Kansas, to Texhoma, Texas.
After these early years, the group expanded, more women joined and individuals competed in local 10-Ks, half-marathons, etc.
We still ran from Robinson Gym every weekday, and Phil was our "leader" in that he determined the route each day. We all started off together but eventually split off in groups that wanted to go faster or farther.
By the 1980's I was less interested in competition, so I competed only occasionally.