Paul Greer,who’s been known as the Pied Piper of San Diego runners, lived as much as his popularity Tuesday night when he ran his “ultimate mile.”

About 300 San Diego Observe Membership members and buddies adopted him as he ran a 6:50-mile across the monitor.

“They stayed behind me. They had been very sort to me,” says Greer, 57. The elite athlete’s 42 years as a monitor warrior have caught as much as him, and he wants to switch a worn-out hip.

So he determined to show his “ultimate mile” run into an occasion.

He invited former teammates and coaches to run with him and afterward took the chance to publicly thank them for making an enormous distinction in his life.

But it surely additionally was Greer’s manner of reinvigorating the native working group and bringing members collectively to heal after two years of hysteria, melancholy and stress created by the pandemic.

He offered contributors with a medal he designed engraved with the phrases: “religion, hope and love.”

Greer isn’t retiring from the working scene. He’ll nonetheless coach males’s cross nation at San Diego Metropolis School and train courses in train science, well being and kinesiology there.

Though he’ll now not enter races, he’ll proceed to coach those that dream of working a marathon.

In 1989, Greer, then 24, ran a mile in underneath 4 minutes at UCLA’s Drake Stadium. The St. Augustine Excessive alum grew to become solely the fourth San Diego County highschool graduate to perform that feat.

He nonetheless holds the 1,500-meter monitor report at San Diego State College, which he attended on a full monitor and subject scholarship. He laughingly attributes his report longevity to SDSU’s discontinuation of its males’s monitor program in 1992.

That exemplifies one of many endearing qualities of San Diego’s Pied Piper — humility.

“Paul is inconspicuous,” says Tracy Sundlun, co-founder of the Rock ‘n Roll Marathon Sequence. “He didn’t a make an enormous deal out of this. … This was a thanks, not ‘let’s speak with Paul Greer’, not ‘take a look at me.’”

Greer despatched out just a few invites to household, former coaches and fellow runners. Amongst those that confirmed up had been a minimum of 4 Olympians: 800-meter Olympic gold medalist Joaquim Carvalho Cruz and lengthy soar Olympic athlete Martha Rae Watson, in addition to previous Summer time Olympics opponents, heptathlete Shelia Burrell and race walker Philip Martin Dunn. In 1992, Greer competed within the U.S. Olympic Trials’ 1,500-meter occasion.

But he described himself as awkward and unathletic in highschool. Via onerous work, he went from not having the ability to do a leaping jack as a freshman to working the seventh quickest mile within the nation by the point he graduated.

“He is likely to be small in stature,” his former St. Augustine coach, Dan Schaitel, as soon as informed the L.A. Occasions, “however he’s acquired one thing only a few will ever have — unbridled willpower.”

Greer’s aggressive spirit wasn’t simply on the monitor. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, and he scaled the damaging slopes of Mt. Blanc, the tallest peak in Western Europe. He biked throughout the Swiss and Italian Alps. He even tried diving with the sharks (in an underwater cage) in San Francisco.

For 5 years, between 1997 and 2002, Greer celebrated his July 8 birthday by working with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.

“I’m a thrill seeker,” he admits. Plus he’s an enormous fan of novelist Ernest Hemingway, who romanticizes Pamplona in “The Solar Additionally Rises.”

Greer curtailed that risk-taking life-style, nevertheless, after marrying classical dancer Callie Jean Kuklok a decade in the past. “I didn’t need to make her a widow.”

He estimates he’s gone by way of as many as 250 pairs of trainers through the years, however, due to sponsors, he didn’t have to purchase them.

He nonetheless has the fortunate sneakers wherein he ran his sub-4-minute mile. “However when you come into my home, you’d by no means know I used to be a runner,” says Greer, who retains his trophies in storage.

He does put on a pin in every single place — a tiny silver cross that testifies to his Christian religion. He says it’s his manner of sharing God with others with out having to be vocal about it.

One Sunday a month, the religious Roman Catholic visits the Kearny Mesa Juvenile Justice Facility with a few church volunteers to learn the gospel and pray.

He timed his hip surgical procedure for June 13 — after Sunday’s annual Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon, after all.

He plans to be at tomorrow’s race with a bullhorn leaping from mile 1, to mile 8, then to mile 13 and at last to mile 24, to cheer, not simply his trainees, however all runners.

“He’s all over. He has a megaphone, and he’s cheering everybody on,” says Greer’s longtime working associate, Steve Scott. “He exudes motivation.”

Scott, previously of Leucadia, holds the lifetime world report of sub-4-minute mile races — racking up 137 in a span of 18 years from 1977 to 1994. He credit Greer with serving to him put collectively the Carlsbad 5000 5K in 1986.

“Paul Greer is the Fred Lebow of San Diego,” he says, evaluating Greer to the person who based the NYC marathon and co-founded town’s big Highway Runners Membership.

“He got here from elite runner to coaching individuals in any respect ranges — from novices anxious to run their first half-marathon to extra seasoned opponents.”

This marks the twenty fifth yr that Greer has been teaching runners for that marathon and half marathon by way of his Rockin’ ‘n’ Runnin’ Coaching program with exercises that start in January.

“We created that collectively to coach locals particularly to run the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon,” explains Sundlun, who’s now not concerned with the sequence. Anyplace from 300 to 500 individuals join the annual exercises and most aren’t repeats, he says.

Sundlun credit Greer with bringing hundreds of runners into the game and serving to many enhance their well being by way of their involvement. “His impression as a instructor, coach and president of our native USA Observe & Area affiliation — strictly on altering individuals’s lives — has been every part we at Rock ‘n’ Roll had ever hoped it might be.”

After I requested Greer what he would really like inscribed on his grave stone, he was fast to reply: “Thanks all for making a distinction in my life.”