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Focus on ... Robert Butler
Runner, Triathlete, Photographer and Scuba Instructor
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was born in Pennsylvania but only lived there a year before we moved to South Carolina. My dad was in the public health service and I once figured that I moved on average every two years till I was sixteen. I have one brother 3 years older and a younger sister. I never considered my self much of an an athlete as a kid, but I was always outdoors playing and was pretty good at football. But when I entered high school it seemed all the other boys had shot up a foot over the summer and gained twenty pounds on me — so I decided football was no longer the sport for me.
We lived for a couple of years in Hawaii when I was eight and I remember trying to drag this huge surfboard down to the water. They didn’t have the small light surfboards they have now, just huge fiberglass boards that took quite an effort for an eight year old to haul down to the water. Can’t say I was ever a good surfer but that started my love for the water which hasn’t ended, and later led me to take up scuba diving and becoming a scuba instructor.
Skiing came after that when my older brother went skiing with his high school ski club. Of course being three years younger than my brother, I had to beg to be taken along on his next ski trip, so it was off to Great Gorge, N.J. for some night skiing. (Yes I went from living in Hawaii to living in N.J.) I’m really dating my self here but let’s just say the ski pants were blue jeans, the gloves were cotton, skis were wooden with cable bindings and the shoes you laced up. Yeah, it was a long time ago.
Early Interest Led to Photography Career
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y the end of high school I was living in Maryland, and for some crazy reason I decided I wanted to be a photographer. Let’s just say this was not one of my better decisions. But I’m still a photographer after 30 years in the business — so it wasn’t totally crazy, just not very smart.
So I went to college in California, at the Art Center College of Design, which is a small college for mostly commercial arts like photography, film, graphic design, automotive design, etc. In other words, no sports teams, no fraternities and no campus housing.
After college, a friend and I booked one way tickets on Peoples Express (yeah I’m dating my self again), and headed for New York where I’ve been (almost) ever since.
New York, NY — "If you can make it here ..."
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’m a commercial photographer, doing mainly product and fashion photography. Most of my career involved the use of large format cameras in a studio, which I always liked, but now almost everything has gone digital. I kind of miss the days of film when you had to know how to light and expose a shot — because it cost big money for a commercial shoot, and unless it was a really big ad shot there was no retouching.
Now, it’s “We’ll just fix it in Photoshop”. Today it seems like anybody can be, and is a photographer 
, so I keep
thinking I need a new career — but haven’t figured out yet what that might be.
In 1992, I attended a wedding in the Carribean and went scuba diving. I fell in love with the experience and the allure of the clear blue water. When I got back to New York, I took classes and eventually qualified as a PADI instructor. I still teach part time for Pan Aqua, a scuba store here in New York. I enjoy an occassional diving trip to the Islands and have especially enjoyed some cave diving I have done in Mexico.
Getting into Running — Still Chasing After my Big Brother
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ometime around 1993, my brother was living in California and he and his family came east to visit his wife’s family on the Jersey shore. So I took the bus down to Cape May one hot summer day and the next day we went for a run. Within a half mile, I was dying from the running and the heat, and I could see my brother just smiling at me. Talk about sibling rivalry! I’m dying and he is having a good old time and not even breathing hard. He had done about three marathons at this point and was in shape — and to put in mildly, I was not.
So after this humiliating run that I had to end after two and half miles, my brother says to me that he and some friends are coming to New York next year for the marathon and would I like to do it? So in my dehydrated and humiliated state, I naively said "Sure, run a marathon — why not?" Well, I wasn’t quite that dumb — but I was close. I gave my self a year to train for it. Thus began my career as a runner.
It turned out it was the 25th running of the NYC marathon, and it was my first race ever. My friend Ann Wool, also a marathoner, had encouraged me to enter this race and my brother and his friends would run with me — or so I had thought. We started together and I had imagined that they would pace me and give me some encouragement on this epic journey, but instead, soon after getting off the Verrazanno Bridge, they disappeared and I was abandoned and alone among the thousands of other runners. I managed to finish the marathon but not within my sub-4 hour goal time. What kept me going was my mantra, "I’m going to punch my brother and strangle my friend Ann who got me into all this pain and agony." They were both wise enough to be nowhere near the finish line when I finally finished in 4:16. Then a funny thing happened: somewhere between the finish line and the baggage pickup, another thought came into my head, "You know, I could run this better next time!"
I don’t have to tell those of you reading this how that can happen, and I’ve been running ever since.
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I Find the Flyers
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Over the next several years I got to the point where I was doing one or two marathons a year and managing to take about 10 to 12 minutes off of each race — which of course inspires you to keep pushing your self. Then I hit my plateau, so to speak, around 3:15 to 3:20 and languished there for most of my subsequent marathons. But all along, speed workouts with the Flyers were a constant. I found that the discipline amd structure pushed me beyond what I could do on my own. I continued through Cliff Held's retirement and now I've been with Toby Tanser right up to the present.
In the meantime I was more and more attracted to events outside your typical crowded Central Park race. Triathlons were one of my favorites from the beginning, but unfortunately they have gotten way too expensive and crowded. But when I first did the Hood to Coast Relay with the Flyers in 2003, and later the River to Sea and Ragnar Relays, I realized it's not just about the run or the race, but the friends, the comraderie and the places.
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Running is not my only outdoor activity. I've lately been doing some hiking — including showshoeing — in some of the beautiful
destinations across the country. I've included a few shots here, but remember, I'm usually taking the pictures, so it's rare that you'll find
me in one.