Quirky adventure: Healdsburg man pioneers roundabout running

Asked why he spent six hours last month running around the traffic circle just south of downtown Healdsburg, Tate Dobson paused briefly on Sunday, then replied:

“Well, 12 just seemed like too many.”

The 21-year-old Healdsburg High School graduate, who lives in the city with his grandfather, has long marched to the beat of his own drum. Until relatively recently, much of the marching happened indoors.

“I mostly played computer games in high school,” said Dobson. “I mean, I did tennis, but that was just so I didn’t have to go to PE. And they had a snack table.”

Since graduating from high school in 2018, and for reasons he can’t fully explain, Dobson “switched pretty suddenly from wanting to stay inside and play video games all the time to wanting to be outside.”

Those outdoor pursuits include surfing, snowboarding, rock climbing, hiking — in October he completed a through-hike of the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail — and ultra-running.

In 2021, he finished an ultra in Colorado called the Golden Gate Dirty 30, his pace slowed, Dobson recalled, by the altitude, and steep vertical pitches on the course.

That wasn’t a problem on the roundabout, a five-way intersection that cost $14 million, and whose repeated construction delays made it a running gag in the city.

On Thanksgiving eve, he met some buddies at the Healdsburg watering hole, The Elephant In The Room, just south of that rotary.

“I had a couple beers,” said Dobson, ‘and it was like, ‘Hey, I wonder how many times I can run around this?’”

He vowed, then and there, to find out. Knowing that he might back out, he raised the stakes by sharing his plan with an acquaintance.

“I texted a friend of mine, a real ultrarunner” he’d met during his Pacific Crest Trail hike. “I said, ‘I’m gonna do this stupid thing.’

“She thought it was hilarious.”

And so, on Nov. 30, he laced up his trusty Altra running shoes and, at 11 a.m., embarked on this quirky, circular adventure. Over the next six hours, to the delight of some motorists and the bewilderment of many more, he covered 36 miles, running clockwise around the rotary.

Physically, it wasn’t so bad, he recalled. Mentally, he hit a patch of turbulence during the second hour. “I was like, ‘OK, why am I doing this?’”

The short answer: He has some time on his hands.

After two years at Santa Rosa Junior College, Dobson transferred to UC Santa Cruz — but withdrew after a year, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “And I just haven’t gone back,” he said. Before he does return, he wants to have a specific major in mind.

“I was doing computer science, and I don’t want to do that anymore.” Meanwhile, he’s working at the Sports Basement in Santa Rosa.

Pounding fruit snacks, periodically trotting to his nearby parked car to get water, he got through that second hour, then found his groove, listening to music — some indie rock, a lot of hip-hop — and occasionally texting friends.

“You can do that, if you’re running a tiny, little, flat circle,” he said.

Once he got to the halfway point, Dodson’s ordeal was all downhill. Figuratively. In 36 miles, according to his Strava readout, he gained zero feet of elevation.

Dobson had such a positive experience that he repeated it on Sunday.

This time, though, he had company. He was joined for the entire six hours by Melissa, the wife of a Sports Basement co-worker.

At the same time they were making the rounds in Healdsburg, two friends from the Pacific Crest Trail were replicating that feat on a traffic circle in Atlanta.

“They got a lot more rain than we did here,” said Dobson. “They were frikkin’ soaked.”

This time he covered 38 miles in 6 hours.

Dobson attributes the slightly brisker pace to the presence of Melissa, and to a pair of friends of his mother, who is on a trip to Indonesia. Her friends, however, showed up with molasses espresso cookies — “they had caffeine, so that was nice,” said Dobson — and ran the final half-hour with them.

Some in the running community believed that Dobson risked injury by proceeding in a clockwise fashion for the duration of his first roundabout run.

So, he went counterclockwise Sunday, “just to even things out,” he said.

Dobson isn’t sure if roundabout running will become a thing, or even what his next endurance adventure will be. There is a 36-mile route across the Oklahoma panhandle he wants to run sometime in 2023.

“My buddy did it, and I just want to beat his time.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.