Meet RUNColumbus team member Ladd Clifford. Ladd has two children, Kyle (28) and Cassie (26). Kyle ran in high school and his 5K is 10 seconds faster than Ladd’s (which he still likes to remind his dad.)
Why/when did you start running? I started running when I was 39 (15 years ago) when someone told me I couldn’t run a 5k. Not a good thing to tell a competitive person. I was happy being a golfer and never planned to stick with running. I trained for 6 weeks and ran my first 5k in 24 minutes. I never looked back. I still golf quite a bit but I run a lot more.
What is your favorite aspect(s) of running? My favorite part of running is meeting people. I love running races with friends. I am approaching 400 races at some point this year. I’ve run a dozen 100-mile races, guessing around 40 marathons, many 50 milers, and 50ks. I ran Boston twice including the infamous year of the bombing. I was standing at the drop bag bus when the bombs went off. My ten minutes of fame that day was when I was interviewed by a friend that is a reporter. I was on the radio, tv and in the paper.
What excites you about being part of the RUNColumbus Race Series and Team? I’m looking forward to running at least 6 races in this series. I like the idea of competing with people in my age group and watching the leaderboard, points system, and race series aspect. I ran in the Subway Challenge Series and enjoyed it and this is very similar.