Seth Roberts

Seth started running in 1978 to lose some weight and hasn’t stopped since. His first race was the Father’s Day Road Race, a race that he directed for 30 years starting in the mid-1980s. 

 

Seth also started the Hannukah Road Race in 1992, directing it for 20 years, and founded the Springfield area’s first ultra marathon, Seth’s Fat Ass 50, with his son Frank and Brian Donoghue. The initial name of the race was the Forest Park Fat Ass, as Fat Ass races have been held for years throughout the country around the holidays as an invitation to get ultra runners to get their Fat Asses off the couch and run. But Frank and Brian tricked Seth and named it Seth’s Fat Ass 50km without his knowledge. The trio directed the race for four years, before turning the race over to the Cyclonauts Club. 

 

Seth ran his first Snowstorm Classic in 1982. He has run at least one race each season since then and is 5th on the all-time list of finishers. Seth started running the Summer Sizzlers around the same time and he has completed the challenging 5K course more than 150 times. In his most memorable finish, he won the race in 18:36 and predicted his time down to the second.

 

Seth ran his first marathon in 1982 in Boston as a bandit. After the race he vowed never to do it again, a refrain that his family grew used to ignoring over the years. He went on to run Boston 15 more times as a qualified runner, and has completed 75 marathons. 

 

Seth heard about the Holyoke Marathon around the same time. Since it was, and still is, the only local marathon, Seth vowed to sign up and try to run it every year to make sure the marathon keeps going. To date he has completed 35 Holyoke Marathons, including this past May. They now time him with a sun dial instead of a watch. This past spring Seth’s wife informed him that they used to go out for brunch after the race, and now they just go home for dinner!

 

In the late 80’s, Seth tried Triathlons. After about a dozen events, including a half-ironman, he realized what everyone already seemed to know: he was an incompetent biker and an even worse swimmer. When Seth read about a 100 Mile race in Vermont near his vacation home in Barnard, he was stunned to find that runners could run this far, and that the best could keep up a nine-minute pace. Fred Pilon, an ultra-runner who owned a running store in Northampton, gave him the confidence to give it a shot, explaining that “if you can run a marathon, you can run 100 miles. It’s all in your head.”

 

Seth’s first ultra marathon was a track run, where Seth completed 50 miles in just over eight hours to qualify for the Vermont 100, which he ran in 1993. He went on to complete 12 100 milers, and has run over 50 ultra marathons. In 2005, Seth won the Maine Track Club 50 Miler in 7:26 on a very rainy day. His prize possession is his 500-mile Vermont 100 buckle, awarded to runners who complete the race five times.

 

Seth retired from his family business in 2011, and in 2012, after writer Bill Wells left his job writing the “On the Run” column at the Springfield Union Newspaper, Seth applied and with no writing experience got the job. He wrote the weekly column from 2012 until 2015 when the paper ended the feature due to a lack of interest (or more likely a lack of money).

 

In 2018 Seth self-published a training manual for runners called If I Can Do It, You Can.  The training manual has tips, subtle boasts, and (according to his sons) a smattering of challenging, helpful, and mildly absurd recommendations for training and running distances from the Mile to 100 Miles.

 

In 2012, Seth became a track official and officiates 25-30 high school and college meets a year. Seth is also a musician, playing guitar, mandolin, and ukulele in The Blueberry Hill Boys.

 

Seth wants to thank his wife Kathy for her patience with his years of running, as well as his three sons, Frank, Michael, and Erich, who have spent a lot of time training with and pacing their father, trying to figure out how he could run so far and so fast.