OrganicAthlete: What is your athletic background?

George French: As a young boy, I started as a long-distance hiker at the Thacher School, Ojai, CA. This was an outdoors- oriented boarding school where everyone had his horse, but I was first boy in the school NOT to have a horse. The only way the headmaster would admit me was with the condition that I would hike or bike literally EVERYWHERE the horses went.

This condition got tested severely a year or so later when one horse fell into an old septic tank from the old WPA camp set up in the Sespe River Valley where we happened to be on a weekend camping trip: I was put to work riding that horse out of the septic tank after we had built a huge ladder-platform for the purpose. We both emerged grunge-laden and stinking - and my new friend galloped me into the Sespe River for a relevant bath.

This "go-everywhere" condition (along with winning bets from my schoolmates by daring to jump off the 3rd floor of the Upper School Dormitory) forced me to develop unusually strong legs. I was on the varsity swimming team and varsity tennis team at Thacher.

After my junior year at Princeton in 1949, I made a transcontinental bicycle run from Ashbury Park, N.J. to Santa Monica, CA in 23 days, 16hrs, 48min, and 21sec. I made the ocean to ocean trip on a Raleigh Lenton Clubman with Sturmey-Archer 3-speed gears ("derailleur" gears were then just being introduced and parts were available only in NYC and SF). During college, I was also on the Princeton swimming team.

I started distance-running in about 1965 to combat incipient obesity. I tried to stay in training for half-ironman triathlons, but I completed only 3 or 4 after I found the training regimen was just too time-demanding. Ideally I would still like to go back to such . . . there is accumulating evidence that I am certifiably insane.

OA: How long have you been vegan?

GF: From about 1985, when I started eating macrobiotic fare at the former "East Bay Macrobiotic Center/Organic Café", a 20-year-long tenant in the Oakland building I own.

OA: What was your motivation to become vegan?

GF: My motivation was twofold. One, I was tired of the diet I had been getting from my native- Russian wife (fat-laden meat; sugar-spiked sweets; lack of greens and other fresh vegetables; etc.). In contrast, my wife Masha and I are now co-owners of the Manzanita Restaurant (where the old Organic Café used to be), where ONLY macrobiotic and vegan food is served. And Masha and I are now primarily vegan in our tastes (except when she is with Russian friends, when the Big Thing is meat, fish &, mushrooms... Russian specialties!)

Two, I had been slowly learning that I felt much better after eating vegan or macrobiotic fare, than after meat meals. Then I discovered that there were a LOT of vegans among long-distance runners . . . and I came to the conclusion that they must know something that I didn't.

OA: How many marathons have you run?

GF: I had been supposing about 38. But I tried recently to count them up and list them, and I couldn't come up with more than 33. It is quite possible that I've forgotten 4 or 5 of them. And I ran just 1 UltraMarathon ("The Skyline Fifty", which was a 50Km ridge run from Pinole to a Lake in the Hayward area I don't now recall the name of). It was a painfully hot day in August, 1983. It was 108°F at one aid station, and about 40% of the entrants dropped out due to the heat. I finished in 5+ hours, but lost 14lbs on the run, far more than was safe.

OA: What athletic aspirations do you yet have?

GF: One, to keep running the New York Marathon every November for the next 15 years (complex rationale to visit friends on Staten Island); Two, to be the oldest finisher at least once at the New York Marathon (last November the oldest finisher was 84; I am now 77). Though I'm pretty slow, my general health is excellent, and my recovery speed after each marathon is fast. So I do believe I may have a fair shot at becoming that oldest finisher at the New York Marathon: most other runners in my marathon age bracket (75-79) are visibly far more decrepit than I am. Three, to enter and complete the Western 100 Ultramarathon from Sun Valley to Auburn (this is an absurd pipe dream . . . but as my basic vocation attests [I happen to be an inventor by trade], I am an admitted dreamer. This may be silly, but it is not all bad; there are some advantages to such dreaming: it keeps you younger, it keeps you fantasizing, and it keeps you trying. We growing boys need our dreams and fantasies...