Randy Whorton, the new Wild Trails executive director, runs with his wife,
Kris, at Land Between the Lakes.
Contributed PhotoRandy Whorton's hobby is now his job.
He is the new executive director of the local Wild Trails organization. The 50-year-old Boulder, Colo., native gave up a much higher-paying engineer position to be the day-to-day overseer of the nonprofit he and his wife, Kris, had started with help from Rock/Creek co-owner Dawson Wheeler and other trail-running activists.
Whorton had served as president since Wild Trails was formed, meaning he was the highest-ranking volunteer. But when Jonathan Mobley recently resigned after "18 months or so" as executive director, Whorton decided he was the best person to take over.
Others agreed.
"He's kind of the dynamo of the whole thing," said Jeff Bartlett, a spokesman for the Rock/Creek company, which among other things sponsors an annual series of trail races. "He's the most avid outdoor advocate, probably, on the Eastern Seaboard, and he's a heck of a guy. He's perfect for the job."
Bartlett explained that Whorton started runintheboonies.com, "and that morphed into the Wilderness Trails Association, and that evolved into a nonprofit as Wild Trails."
Wild Trails runs the Rock/Creek races and from their proceeds provides grants for area trail building, maintenance and acquisition ventures. That has been the organization's primary function, but Whorton wants to expand that.
"We started as a trail-running organization, but we've grown so much into the areas of trail access and acquisitions and helping whoever's using the trails, not just runners," he said Wednesday. "I want to go after more philanthropic things and take a leadership role to finish the Cumberland Trail, for one thing, and to have user groups take care of trails.
"And we want to get more people off the couch."
Randy and Kris, who teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, are noted long-distance runners, each with more than 100 marathon or longer races completed. She has done 10 of at least 100 miles, he said, and he has done seven.
"In 2009 she had the second fastest women's time in the world in a 100-mile race, and only four American men were faster," said Randy, who went to college on a platform-diving scholarship and then left school to tour the world with a high-diving act for four years.
He later got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's in management and joined the high-tech industry. The Whortons left Colorado in 1997 for Huntsville, Ala., where Randy went to work for the Adtran telecommunications equipment manufacturer. He later started NuMarkets, the first company to provide Internet sales on consignment.
The couple came to Chattanooga in 2005. She went to work for UTC, and he hooked up with Stein Construction and Earthscapes.
"I was bringing vegetation to downtown cities," Whorton said of his latest work. "For instance, we have 14 green roofs in Chattanooga, and I installed 11 of them. But to tell you the truth, I was kind of banging my head against the wall to get people to do it. This was to be kind of my legacy project, and I could see myself probably being frustrated the next 10 years.
"That's probably what sent me into this direction."
There's nothing more fulfilling for him than running trails and making trails more available to others. And there's no better place to do it, he said.
"I've done a lot of research on this the last six months. We have 54 trailheads within 30 minutes of downtown Chattanooga," he said. "I'll bet no other city on the planet can say that. I'll bet no other city has even 30 within 30 minutes. And those 54 lead to hundreds of miles of trails."