Teacher, runner, motivator

David Baird is a beloved fifth grade math and science teacher, at Charlotte Central School, as well as the school’s middle school cross-country coach. The Shelburne resident is an inspiration for his students far beyond the classroom, too, performing some outrageous athletic feats in his spare time.

At a recent school-wide meeting, the theme of which was Challenge Yourself, Baird shared a video he made for the kids during one of his regular weekend activities: a 50-mile trail race. He ran the gamut of human emotions during that short video of his long race, and said his sharing of the ups and downs of his accomplishment was intentional. “It’s a pretty concrete example that what seems crazy is actually pretty doable if you set your mind to it,” he said.

Baird’s mantra for running and life are the same. “Whether things are good or bad, just know they’ll change,” he said. “This has helped prepare me mentally for the school year, because inevitably there are ups and downs…knowing it’ll get better when things aren’t working helps me deal with the challenges a little more easily. This applies to everything in life, especially teaching.”

In his prior professional life, Baird was a sales analyst in the software industry in Boston. After the early 2000s recession thwarted his plan to become a dot-com millionaire and teach just for fun, he decided to pursue a more meaningful career and become a teacher anyway.

He’s been at CCS since 2005, and over the years has taught every grade from third to sixth. Baird’s wife Shannon teaches first and second grade at Shelburne Community Schools, and his son Grayson is seven and his daughter Charlie is almost nine. His children, unlike his students, are hardly impressed by his athletic endeavors. He said, “After my 50-miler a few weeks ago I was a little sore, and my son said ‘What? It was just 50 miles!’”

Just for fun, Baird, who as an adult has the energy and enthusiasm of a fifth-grader, runs one or two 100-mile races each year. To train for these, he competes in other races that for him are short, but for normal people are weekend car trips. So far this year he’s run a 50k race and a 50 mile race.

He compares his races to another life event that’s horrible at the time, but in the end is worth the pain. “It’s funny, but running 100 miles is a lot like giving birth…during and even the day after, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m never doing that again!, but then a week later your brain knows if you want to do that again you need to purge all those pain memories,” and you end up doing it again.

Like his transition to teaching, Baird’s transformation into an extreme athlete came later in his life. “I was a pretty un-athletic, overweight kid,” he said. His senior year in college, he started to run to lose weight and get in shape, and ran happily but not too far for a long time.

After recovering from an old injury that affected his running, he said, he read the book Born to Run and was inspired. “That book was the catalyst that got me thinking I could run farther,” he said.

In 2011 he did his first 50-mile race, and said at the end he felt like he could go 20 more. “I think that the road from runner to ultra runner is less about physical training and more about mental training…running 100 miles is easy compared to training to run 100 miles. It’s easy to get up on race day and run knowing you’ll get this great sense of accomplishment at the end. It’s hard to get up at 5:00am on a cold January morning and run 20 miles alone in the cold wind, and you do stuff like that for months and months.”

In the classroom, Baird applies his race lessons to himself as well as his students. “I think it has helped me see that it all comes together in the end, you just have to have faith in what you are doing,” he said. As for his students, he said, “I want them to love learning and see in themselves that they can always do more than they think they can and really that there is no limit to what they can do.”