more so now. Originally priced at $1.50, a copy sold recently on eBay for more than $100. I wouldn’t part with my one tattered copy for 100 times more.

WHERE HE CAME FROM

Running humbled Jack at first, which might be why he retained humility about his later successes in the sport. He remembered where he came from and that by not running he would soon return there.

His first sport was bicycling. After taking long, hard rides with friends in his native England, Jack “drifted into racing” on the bike. This continued through most of his 20s, until he settled into family and working life in New Zealand.

Biking only to work and back and playing some soccer, he imagined himself to be fairly fit at almost 33. “Surely a half-hour run would be no trouble,” he said of his first try.

After going what seemed to be several miles, Jack arrived back where he’d left his wife, Belle. “What’s wrong, have you forgotten something?” she asked. “You’ve only been gone for seven minutes.”

“Impossible,” Jack recalled in his booklet. “I was sure I’d run at least six or seven miles. I was soaked in perspiration and felt tired.

“Now I was worried. If I felt like this at 33, how would I be when I was 40?”

We now know that by 40 he was an Olympian, with his best marathon time still to come. But he couldn’t have known that when he began running “only every second day, and I was working to maintain that 20-minute jog even on alternate days.

“T kept at it. I liked the feeling after the run, feeling the glow which comes after exercise. Sometimes the glow was a whole fire, in fact a real burnt-out feeling!”

Running led to racing. “I noticed I was still very competitive,” he wrote. “A hangover from my cycling days perhaps, or maybe my nature.

“My competitiveness might better be described as a desire to excel, for I have no ‘killer instinct’ at all, no real will to ‘win at all costs.’ Getting my times down was the motivation to do more and more running.”

Better times led to more training, to better times and… you now know where the repeated cycles led.

Other runners have climbed this high, but none was a later starter. Jack Foster wasn’t like the young superstars who seemed to drop in from another planet, bringing with them apparent immunity to the limitations imposed on us mere mortals. He was more like one of us, one who made very good.

He ran while raising four children and working full-time. He knew the feeling of starting to run as an adult and of recovering from hard runs slower than the kids of the sport did.

He wrote for us. We lacked his late-blooming running talent. (His son Jackson, himself a competitive bicyclist, called Jack “a white Kenyan—an oxygen-processing unit on legs.”) But he spoke a language that any older, parttime runner could understand.