Childhood · bicycles · races · beginnings

Building Blocks

Cold water, bicycles, race travel, and a competitive record that started earlier than most.

The early building blocks

The yellow tie, blue blazer, and an alarming amount of mileage.

The early high-school photograph belongs here because it shows the beginning rather than the finished product. The yellow tie and blue blazer are not evidence of youthful restraint. They are evidence that somebody owned a camera at an unfortunate moment.

Long before the Team USA years, movement was already ordinary. As a child, I once competed in a biathlon, a triathlon, and a 10K over one Saturday-and-Sunday weekend. All three were morning races, and each was held at a different location.

Before I received my driver’s license on my seventeenth birthday, I had accumulated more than 25,000 miles behind bicycle handlebars.

Those facts matter less as precocious trivia than as early evidence of the habits that followed: movement as transportation, endurance as repetition, curiosity as a reason to try another event, and preparation as something learned before it acquired a professional vocabulary.

I swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco four times, completing the first crossing at age fourteen.

At fifteen years and two months, I became the youngest person to qualify for the United States Triathlon Championships. My older brother Ted had previously qualified at fifteen years and nine months, so the family record moved by seven months.

Before I turned twenty, triathlon had already taken me across most of the United States. Race travel made airports, highways, equipment lists, weather, course maps, and early starts ordinary long before adulthood did.

Early high schoolYellow tie · blue blazer · building blocksUse the literal childhood photograph, preserve its humor, and identify the approximate year.

Early high-school photograph. Add year, event, photographer, and family provenance. The yellow tie survived the photograph; the judgment improved later.

Age 14

First Alcatraz crossing

The first of four swims from Alcatraz to San Francisco.

Age 15 years, 2 months

United States Triathlon Championships

Youngest person to qualify, seven months younger than older brother Ted’s prior family mark.

Childhood

Three races in one weekend

Biathlon, triathlon, and 10K, all morning starts and all at different venues.

Before age 17

More than 25,000 bicycle miles

The bicycle was transportation, training, independence, and the first durable operating system.

October 1988 · age 14

One of those miles cost me a front tooth.

In October 1988, I crashed a bicycle on Stanford University’s Campus Drive and lost a front tooth. The original tooth has been absent ever since. It was an old injury long before the April 2024 collision, but that history became relevant again decades later as a dental baseline: the 2024 crash did not cause the original tooth loss.

The point here is not to turn a teenage crash into mythology. It is simply part of the physical history behind a lifetime spent on bicycles and, later, other small-wheel transportation.

Randall Stone at age 14 after the October 1988 bicycle crash on Stanford University Campus Drive — October 1988. Post-crash photograph after the Campus Drive bicycle accident at Stanford University. The front tooth was lost in this crash.

Randall Stone in the school year following the 1988 Stanford bicycle crash — The following school year. The photograph is useful decades later because it documents the pre-existing dental baseline.

Before age 20

Triathlon across most of the United States

National race travel came before the later Team USA and World Championship years.

1992–1993

Team USA, national title, and Manchester

The early endurance record developed into national and international results.

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Continue the chronology: Manchester, independence and Sigma Chi →