Indian Harbour Beach man to run 500 km race

On Fourth of July morning, George “Scott” Maxwell figured he’d run a little with his granddaughter, so he bicycled from Indian Harbour Beach, across the Eau Gallie Causeway, to the Liberty Bell Memorial Museum in Melbourne.Then he ran the Firecracker 5K with his granddaughter.Then he bicycled home again, heedless of the heat and humidity.

It was all in a day’s training for a man who has run ultra marathons since long before they became en vogue and who in two weeks will race the Vol-State Road Race, a 500-kilometer “adventure,” in Maxwell’s words, that begins each year at Dorena Landing, Missouri, and ends at Castle Rock, Georgia.

He does 12 to 15 long-distance runs per year, only a few of them competitive, and serves as race director for the annual Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail (LOST 100) Run and the Cross-Florida Route 40 Romp, a 97-miler.

He races throughout North America because “I like the people,” he says.

Maxwell always has gone running with someone, going back to his high school days in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania, and then his college time at Penn State University, which he calls “the usual high school and college stuff.”

After college he “followed the logical progression,” in his words, and became a marathoner. “I got into ultramarathons while training for marathons. You had fall and spring marathon seasons and so in the winter, you could train by doing longer-distance races.”

“It keeps me alive ... That’s my extended community of friends, and I have friends in the USA and Canada ... When I race in Chicago, I stay with friends. Other people go camping with their friends. I go running with my friends.”

The Vol-State Road Race will start at 7:30 a.m. July 14