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July-August 2004
Over the hill and picking up
speed
It’s summer, it’s
Boulder, and any number of staffers are spending
their free time enjoying the outdoors. We decided
to track down a few people who are particularly devoted
to their favorite pastimes. And just to make it interesting,
we’re focusing on the older set.
This month, we profile Jack Fellows, who surfs at
every opportunity,
and Betty Valent, one of the organization’s
top runners. Next month,
we profile Dave Kennison, who’s climbed Longs
Peak 70 times, and DJan Stewart, a passionate skydiver.
Surf’s up
The day Jack Fellows turned
16, he loaded up his surfboard and drove to the
local Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration office
to take his driver’s
test. Then he drove 3,000 miles to San Diego to surf
for the summer.
“It was like a dream to surf the West Coast spots
I had read about in Surfer magazine for years. I was
16, had no clue where I would live, and could not have
been happier,” he says.
Jack Fellows on the beach in Maryland.
Thus began a 13-year cycle in which Jack worked and
went to school during most of the year, surfed in
Hawaii over winter breaks, and surfed during the
summer. He even lived on a sailboat most of his college
years at the University of Maryland. Today, despite
living in Colorado and maintaining a busy schedule
as UOP director and UCAR vice president for corporate
affairs, he makes time for surf adventures.
“If I travel close to the ocean, I’ll try
to fit in a day of surfing,” he says. “There
isn’t much that’s more peaceful and relaxing
than spending time in
the ocean.”
Jack started surfing in fifth
grade, when he was living in Washington, D.C. “I was nine years
old, four feet tall, and hauling around a 10-foot
surfboard,” he recalls. After finishing his
doctorate, he wanted to teach in hot surfing spots
around the world. Although those plans changed, he’s
surfed in the Maldives, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Mexico,
and both U.S. coasts.
“It was a special time in my life, full of adventures,” he
recalls of his peak surfing days. He slept on the beach
during a hurricane with 90-plus mph winds, jumped off
30-foot cliffs in Hawaii, lived in a tree house, surfed
under the Golden Gate Bridge on a rare swell, and nearly
got impaled by jumping dolphins in Mexico. “I
grew up in the 1970s. While everyone was turning into
hippies and doing drugs, I was this clean-cut kid focused
on making the next surf adventure a reality,” he
says. “So, surfing has been a positive force
in my life.”
The Maldives are the source
of one of Jack’s
favorite surfing memories. He arranged a surf day
with locals, but when he showed up at the dock they
had ancient guns aboard a leaky sailboat. He learned
that the guns were protection against pirates that
roam the Indian Ocean. “I figured the pirates
would have modern firepower so I talked them into
not taking them,” he says. “We didn’t
see any pirates, but got great waves.”
This year, he took a trip
to Costa Rica in late May. He traveled solo to
the remote Nicoya Peninsula and was happy to meet
some fellow surfers because of the large waves. “The other surfers were 20
years my junior and it was challenging to keep up
with them. When they learned I was over 50, they
joked about whether they would be surfing when they
were that old,” he says.
In February, he surfed a
few days in Maryland. “I
drove six hours to sit in 42-degree water and periodic
snow showers,” he recalls.
When not surfing, Jack is
likely snowboarding here in Colorado. “Snowboarding in deep powder is
pretty close to surfing,” he says. His teenage
kids surf and snowboard. “Being able to share
this with them is great fun,” he says. But,
he concedes, “It is getting harder to keep
up with them.”
Life on the run
F&A’s Betty Valent
clearly remembers the first time she went running,
over 30 years ago. It was after the birth of her
third child, and the stay-at-home mom decided she
needed to do something to stay in shape. So she
laced up her sneakers and headed outside.
Betty
Valent in the 2001 Up-the-Hill foot race.
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“I ran as fast as I could for two blocks—and
just about died,” she recalls with a smile.
After that, she started pacing
herself. By joining a group of runners who held
informal races in Denver’s
Washington Park, she gradually improved her times
and evolved into one of the better women runners
in her age group in the area. Eventually, she won
a number of 5- and 10-kilometer races, and her time
of 3:30 in the 1980 Denver Marathon set a record
in that event for women 40 and over that stood for
three years.
Betty has now run for 33
years—about 10 years
longer than most people can go before suffering knee
problems or other debilitating injuries. Her goal
is to keep running regularly without wearing
out her body.
“It’s sort of a balancing act,” she
explains. “The idea is to run as hard as I can
without running so hard that I get injured. We’ll
see what happens. There are a few people who can keep
running into their 80s and even their 90s.”
Betty runs about 30 to 35
miles a week. On workdays, she starts her run about
4 or 4:30 a.m., sometimes seeing UCAR president
Rick Anthes bicycling up the hill to the Mesa Lab.
Getting up before 4 is hard to do, but as she puts
it, “I’ve run
enough years to know I really will feel better and
the day will
go better.”
One of Betty’s favorite events is the annual
UCAR/NCAR Up-the-Hill Races. She is a seven-time
winner in the women’s foot race with times
as fast as 10:13. Many of the organization’s
top runners drop out of the event after they pass
their peak and their times start to slow, but Betty
continues to compete even though it now takes her
about
13 minutes or so to finish the 1.2-mile climb up
the mesa hill.
It’s a fun race because it’s short, she
says. “You just take off as fast as you can
go and hang on.”
Another favorite race is
the Vail Evergold, a daunting trail run that ascends
part of Vail Mountain. It began on a different
course as a men’s race,
but Betty and some other women ran their own race
in 1974, and the two events gradually merged. Over
the years, Betty has often entered both the 5K and
10K versions of the race, which take place back to
back, and she has sometimes won both in her category.
Racing in a steep area like
Vail calls for a lot of discipline. “When you’re running,
you ask yourself, ‘How much longer can I breathe
this hard?’” Betty says. “You have
to slow down, but you don’t want to walk too
much.”
On weekends, she enjoys running trails with her husband,
SCD’s Dick Valent. When they travel, they often
go running together as a way to explore
the area.
“Running for me is a great way to handle worry,” Betty
says. “If you get out there long enough, you
get to the point where you have to think about the
running and you leave the worry alone.”
•Nicole Gordon and David
Hosansky
Also in this issue...
A pair of sixes: NCAR bolsters
its scientific staff
Coping
with heat
No
day at the beach: SOARS protégés
tackle research projects
Child's play
Delphi
Questions
New
Leaders
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