Eddie Wyatt Jr. remembers waking early on school days to run.

He ran downhill on Stanley Spencer Mountain Road to the South Fork of the Catawba River then back up the hill, because doing that climb each morning would give a bantam athlete endurance. To a “really, really, small”  ninth-grader – short, maybe 120 pounds – sports such as football and basketball weren’t suitable, though he did do football in 1962-63.

So Wyatt ran track and devised training schemes to push his limits and shrink his times.

“Track wasn’t taken very seriously then. It was just another sport for those not playing baseball. I kind of liked it that way, because we knew everybody (on the teams) from ninth grade through the 12th,” he says, “and they were more friendly toward each other. Now, sports have gotten so big, they don’t know each other.

“Coach Dick Thompson (MHSHOF, Class of 2009) encouraged me to come out for track. I didn’t do well my 9th-grade year, so as a sophomore I switched to the mile and 880 and started having some success at it. I had decent speed, but I wasn’t a very good high-jumper or hurdler, which I tried as a 9th-grader, and on sprints, I got out-run. So I tried the mile on a whim.”

Wyatt measured a course in his backyard – he calculated 7 laps around the yard would equal a mile – and trained there.

“When I wasn’t getting faster, I’d get up before school and started running on the road. That’s what gave me my endurance and it led me to believe that hill running and road work was good for developing distance runners.”

Wyatt, 72, of Stanley turned that self-discipline into a successful track career as a record-setting athlete and a coach, which led to his induction in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.

He set a school record for the mile – at 4:34 – his senior year at Stanley High, when the school won the Little 7 Conference championship, and also was all-conference in the 880 and mile run, winning both at the conference meet.

He segued to Gaston College – but college intentions were redirected by the military, which escorted him on a tour of several foreign countries, earned him a Purple Heart, and sent his higher education on a 60-year escapade that concluded with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Technology in 2003.

“I’ve been in the military half my life and college the other half,” he says. “When you’re working full time, you can’t go to school full time, so you have to take it a class or two at a time.”

Wyatt’s college credits were transferred many times, to accompany his many moves. “I got talked into it (enlisting) by a man in dress blues. They sent out postcards, and I said I was interested in their 120-day delay program and he came to the house talked to me directly” he says. “They had a way of persuading people who may have been a little reluctant, but he told me stories and I was hooked. I graduated May 27 and my first day at Parris Island was June 6, in the Marine Corp. All the others went to the beach and enjoyed themselves; I joined the military.”

He served 35 years – in Vietnam, Desert Storm, at Rein-Mein Air Base in Germany, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Operation Iraqi Freedom, for a total of 26 military ribbons and medals.

His Purple Heart was awarded following Operation Iraqi Freedom. “I had a bad fall during the night. I blew out my right knee and my back when I stepped into a ditch in pitch black darkness,” he says.

Wyatt kept his desire to run as an adult and managed to complete 21 marathons and other races – 5K, 10K, half-marathons.  He set personal best times as an adult in the 1 mile at 5:10; 5K at 18:04; 10K at 37:50; 10-mile at 1 hour, 4 minutes; and marathon at 3 hours, 14 minutes.

At age 44, he ran a 5:10 mile in a Charlotte event called the Tryon Street Mile, featured on the television show “PM Magazine.” It was there that he met one of his biggest influences in running, Jim Beatty. “He was the first person to break the 4-minute mile (3:58.9), and he was from Charlotte and was there when I ran the 5;10,” he says.

Wyatt says it wasn’t his plan to take his talents to East Gaston High School as a track coach, but plans have a way of changing. “Coach Robert Keaton was there, and I took my son (Rodney) by and it was grades 10 through 12 back then, and I was trying to get my son interested, and Coach Keaton said he’d love to have him,” Wyatt, who also has two daughters, says of his East Gaston initiation in 1983. “And he says, ‘I heard you were into running. Could you help us out?’ And I did for about two days, then they kept adding days, and by the end of the year I was a full-time volunteer coach.”

By fall, he also was the cross country coach. He coached from 1983 to 2014. His boys teams won six conference championships, and his girls teams won five. In 1985, his boys were undefeated.

This past May, Wyatt was asked to help out at an East Gaston track meet – a lure to get him on the premises, where the track was dedicated in his name.

But for all the road training, the races, the military service and the coaching, Wyatt says his biggest accomplishment is none of the above.

“I would have to say it’s just being a leader in my church,” Wyatt says. “It’s the year I was Church Council president (at Christ Lutheran in Stanley). On the top of my list is God, and everything else falls under that. My family would be second, and everything else falls somewhere under that.”