Running has been an important part of my life
Recorded 1 year ago
About this recording
“I suppose I’m quite proud of what I have achieved. It has been an important part of my life and I’ve managed to keep it going for a good number of years. I still enjoy it and I still love it, and I don’t really see an end in sight.”
Willie Miller reflects on his long involvement in running, starting from an early age while he was growing up in Wick and Thurso.
“When I went to school, particularly when you moved up to high school, you found that football was the norm,” he recalls. “Everybody played football. And, if I have to be honest, I hated football – I couldn’t stand it. I was a skinny wee kid with glasses, I got knocked about, the glasses would get knocked off, or get broken, and I never really enjoyed it.”
He found he had a talent for running, however, starting with cross-country wearing his black plimsolls. “There was an interest kindled there,” he says.
By the mid-1980s Willie was at his distance-running peak. He won many North District championship titles and came first in the Black Isle Marathon in 1985. He ranked in the top ten Scottish 10,000m runners that year. Willie later got into the Highland Cross (winning the veterans’ prize in his 40th year) and triathlons.
He tells of the impressive times he set at different distances, from 10k to marathon. Willie also acknowledges the support he was given by Chris Oakley, who encouraged him to get into racing.
As an amateur runner, he was not eligible to compete for money, or to compete alongside anyone who was deemed professional. Consequently, after successful races, he would come home with an odd assortment of prizes… ranging from a pie dish to a hairdryer.
After leaving school, Willie got a job as an apprentice glassblower at Caithness Glass in 1975 and then, from 1980, spent many years working at Dounreay.
At the age of 50 Willie became a full-time student of theology and later became a Baptist minister. In the recording he tells how he chose not to compete in athletics on a Sunday because of his Christian faith.
There were parallels with Eric Liddell, the Scottish missionary and Olympic athlete whose story was told in the film Chariots of Fire. At the 1924 Olympics in Paris, Eric refused to run in the qualifying heats for the 100 metres – his strongest event – because they were held on a Sunday. Instead he competed in the 400 metres, and won.
Willie feels that in this own case he would not necessarily take the same approach now. “At the time it seemed the right thing to do,” Willie says. “I think culturally what Eric Liddell did was appropriate in his time… He made his stance. He was a guy I greatly respected, and still greatly respect, but I think culturally things have changed so much. It was a different time and a different culture.”
Footnote: In the 1940s Eric Liddell became a leader and organiser at a Japanese-run internment camp in China. He is mentioned in this context in another Wick Voices recording, featuring Brenda Herrick, who as a young girl was interned in the same camp.
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