Ted Noble is too modest to tell you this, but the man very nearly invented Jazzercise.
He was in his late 20s, married, living in a little blue-collar logging town in northwest Washington, working during the day and taking classes at the local community college at night. But Ted, at that time, was a tad fat. Actually, explained Noble. I was a two-tripper.
Whats a two-tripper?
Thats when youre so fat, explained the 77-year-old, that when they tell you to haul [butt], youve got to make two trips.
But Noble is in his bones a man of action, and so he came up with a fix.
Each day, Noble would come home and shut himself in the bathroom. He would fill the bathtub with the hottest possible water, letting the small bathroom fill with steam. He would then put on three or four shirts, turn on the radio, and dance away a man alone, perspiring, jiggling his heart out in a damp bathroom.
This was in the late-1960s. Were talking way before Jazzercise, insisted Noble, who was sweatin to the oldies back when the oldies were still new.
One day, though, Teds wife, Sally, fearing that the chronic moisture would eventually bring the bathroom wallpaper in their old house down around Teds head, told her husband to take his aerobics outside. She finally got tired of it, remembered Noble, and she told me: Go run. And so I did. I went out the door and ran across the flats, and thats how it started.
IN A FEW short years, Noble transformed himself into one of the top distance runners in the Pacific Northwest, a distinction he held for nearly three decades. His name has appeared in countless newspaper and magazine articles. Hes run 5Ks, 10Ks, half-marathons and whole ones. He has a garage lined with plaques and trophies, sacks full of old race T-shirts and top-place ribbons. Theres a framed photo of a star runner from the University of Washington, personally inscribed to Ted I ran until I puked, the young man has written. I always told the kids I trained, Run until you puke, and then run in it, explained Ted. Brooks Running, the popular shoe company, once named Noble their Northwest Runner of the Month. Well into his middle age, Noble could still swing a sub-5-minute mile and he once placed third in his division in a 36,000-person race in Spokane. He also holds the course record for a 5K run along Washington States Grand Coulee Dam, which spans the panoramic width of the great Columbia River. In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray theres a song by Woody Guthrie about the Grand Coulee Dam.
BUT TEDS real distinction lies in what hes given back. For the last four decades, working mainly in the Marysville, Washington, area, Ted Noble has acted as a volunteer coach, mentoring hundreds, maybe thousands, of student-athletes in the rigors of the sport that he knows best.
He set up training schedules for these young runners. He marked courses. He was there to hug the athletes after a tough meet or sing their praises when theyd done well. He helped send a number of runners to sports camps. He arranged for the purchase of a racing wheelchair for one disabled high school girl who wanted to join the cross-country team. He coached all of his runners through the five stages of racing: the warm-up, the first length, the middle, the finish line, the cool-down. Know yourself, know the course that was the thrust of Teds advice. They called him the godfather of running at Marysville-Pilchuck High School.
When Noble retired from Boeing, the local school district awarded the honorary running coach a varsity letter for his service to the community. When he and Sally came to Kansas nearly 20 years ago to be closer to Sallys family and to the couples daughter Noble arrived with one letter of introduction after another, each document laden with enough praise to make a dead man blush.
In other words, everybody loves Ted.
