Leaving senior runners ‘Greene’ with envy
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Rick Greene as a runner at Morristown West High
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With his daughter, Tiffany Tallent, after a 5k run they completed in October
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After his two gold and one silver medals earned during the 2022 state Senior Olympics.
Rick Greene of Farragut has been running — to win, to stay in shape or just for the enjoyment of it — for more than a half century.
A star distance runner at Morristown West High School, where he was the 600-yard indoor state champ and 440-yard district top finisher, Greene has run the Boston Marathon (1997) among the four marathons he’s finished.
A Senior Olympics state champ in two middle distance events in 2022, Green’s most recent Senior Olympics feat came during the Upper Cumberland District meet Sept. 30 in Crossville: he made it a clean first-place sweep in the 200, 400 and 800-meter runs in the 65-to-69 age category.
“I’ve been running fairly consistently for 54 years,” he said, going on to run at Carson-Newman University
“I played football in high school … that’s when Ken Sparks was also the track coach at Carson-Newman; he’s the one that recruited me,” Greene said about the small college football coaching legend who led FHS football as head coach from 1977 through 1979. “But in college, I ran cross country and track. And in track, I was primarily an 800-meter guy then.”
Among his big college moments, “I qualified and ran in two indoor national championships in the 600-(meter) and one outdoor in the 800-(meter,” he said.
Only beginning his Senior Olympics career in 2022, “For years I had thought about doing it, but there was always something that would interfere with my training,” he said. “And I didn’t want to enter and compete if I wasn’t properly trained. So it was either travel for work or injury or something. And finally, I was getting close to retirement last year, and I just said, ‘I’m going to do it.’
“So my first meet was the state finals last year in Franklin, and I won the 200-(meter) and 400-(meter) and was second and the 800-(meter),” he said about his first taste of big-time Senior Olympics success, coming in June 2022.
During this year’s state finals, once again held in June back in Franklin, “I ran the 400 and won that,” he said. “I was supposed to run the 200 and 800, but I was struggling with Achilles tendinitis.”
Though qualifying for the national Senior Olympics in Pittsburgh earlier this year in the 200, 400, 800, “I had to drop out of those because of the injury, which is fairly common for Senior Olympians,” Greene said.
A certified health physicist, Greene retired in August of 2022. He and his wife, Gayle Greene, have three children and four grandchildren.
