Monte Piliawsky has run enough miles in his life to circle the Earth nearly three times.
On the surface, it seems implausible. But it’s easy to see how the 74-year-old has racked up more than 65,000 miles (and counting), considering he maintains a strict running regimen of 35 miles per week. Despite the impressive numbers, Piliawsky admits he never had any athletic prowess growing up.
“Most runners are not good athletes. I’m not an athlete. I’m small. I’m 5-foot-6. I weigh 120 pounds. I’m not fast and I’m not strong. So, what could I do?” said Piliawsky, a senior lecturer in Wayne State’s College of Education. “My only real sport was table tennis in high school, but that doesn’t require strength. However, it does require the same thing you need for running — stick-to-itiveness. Discipline. Hard work. Outworking your opponent. Practice, practice, practice.”
It wasn’t until his mid-30s that running found Piliawsky — it also saved him. In 1980, his father died at age 65 of a heart attack. Ten months later, Piliawsky’s mother died in a household accident. The two tragedies, unbeknownst to him at the time, put Piliawsky on his current path.
“That was pretty overwhelming,” he said. “I was 36 years old and in a funk. For some unknown reason, one month to the day after my mom passed, I went to a park next to where I lived in New Orleans. I started jogging around the circumference, about five laps. It was probably about a mile. And there you go.”
Piliawsky was hooked. “The one thing runners will say, more than any other expression, is ‘running saved my life,’” he said. “Running can save people’s lives, both physically and mentally.”
Piliawsky’s first race didn’t come until 1982; a 5K in City Park in New Orleans. By age 40, he was running a 6:10-mile and finishing a 5K in 19:08. But in 1989, just as he was finding his stride, Piliawsky took an 18-year hiatus from competitive running to help raise his daughter, Rachel, who he adopted with his ex-wife, Joan Mahoney (former dean and professor of law emerita at the Wayne State Law School). “She was 6 weeks old and born premature. She weighed 3 pounds and 1 ounce,” he said. “She was our priority in life, along with my career, not racing.”
Piliawsky earned his Ph.D. in 1970 in political science from Tulane University in his hometown of New Orleans. From 1974 until 1987, he taught at Dillard University, a historically black university. After career stops at schools in Missouri and Connecticut, he and Mahoney came to Wayne State in 1998. He said Detroit was the perfect place to continue his career.
“There’s no place in America I’d rather be teaching than at Wayne State,” Piliawsky said. “And, probably no city suits me better than Detroit. Except for the weather. After all, I’m still from New Orleans.”
At Wayne State, Piliawsky's research focuses on designing, implementing and evaluating school dropout prevention programs that provide academic tutoring and supplemental enrichment to high school students. Some areas of his expertise include remedies to school segregation, school tutoring programs, mayoral takeover of school districts and charter schools.
At age 61, Piliawsky stepped back into competitive running. Since then, he estimates he’s competed in at least 275 races. Currently, he runs with the Ann Arbor Track Club. He’s never run a marathon, preferring shorter distances. “In order to run a marathon, you have to get your training runs up to 18 miles and then pray. Why would you want to do that?” he joked.
As for how long he’ll continue on his current path?
“There’s only two things I really do well — run and teach,” Piliawsky said. “I want to do both of them as long as I can.”