It's not easy to describe Cowden because he didn't fit any of the tidy labels we tend to place on people. You could say he was a free spirit. Or a renaissance man. He was unconventional. He was original.

He was ahead of his time. He went green before anyone knew what that meant. Once a month he rode his bike from Sandy to downtown Salt Lake City to pay his gas and electric bills because he thought people were too dependent on cars for transportation because they were lazy and soft. He liked to cook and ate whole grains and organic foods before they were popular. He wore a thick, sometimes long beard, so that you were never sure what he looked like.

He embraced honesty and balked at convention and insincerity. When people would say, "We should go to lunch sometime," he would say, "How about next Friday? I'm free then." Becky would elbow him in the side. "Well, why do people say things they don't mean?" he would tell her later.

At home, he would put a child in a pack on his back and do the dishes or cook. He'd go for his daily run while pushing a stroller with his children in it. He liked to sing — mostly country songs — when he was doing dishes or driving. He listened to country music — not the stuff that passes for country now, but the real stuff. Becky has 14 boxes of country records in her garage that he left behind. He did his master's thesis on the work of Saul Bellow and read books on meditation and Buddhism and politics.

After 12 years of friendship with Becky, he married her when he was 45 years old, and they produced those two sets of twins when he was 46 and 49, respectively. "We're having our own grandchildren," he liked to joke.

A high school runner, he didn't really love running until the running boom came along in the '70s. He ran more than 20 marathons and became a big force in the road racing community and high school track and cross country.

After the melanoma was discovered as a lump on his arm, he underwent a year of chemotherapy that left him aged beyond his years. Six weeks after he finished the chemo, he was running 10 miles a day and coaching again. A few months later, on Christmas Day, they learned that the cancer had returned. Two months later, he died. His children were 5 and 2.

Every year since then, the Brighton High community has sponsored the Willie Walk and Run to raise money for the Cowden children's college education. This year the event will be held in Holladay as part of Matthew Cowden's Eagle project — instead of using it for his education, he will use the money to build a school in Ethiopia.

That would make the old man smile.

e-mail: drob@desnews.com