exhilarating and sobering. Exhilarating in those instances when a T-shirt just dripping with good memories surfaces, causing you to sit back onto the bed with the shirt cradled in your hands, and for the moment your sense of time and place neutralizes, and you are carried on the flood tide of the memories; and sobering when you realize that you’ Il never again race as fast as you did in the race the shirt in your hands represents.

Relative to marathons, my own shirt collection creates a problem there. My three fastest times were on the Humboldt Redwoods Marathon course in Weott, California, during that race’s first three years. Unfortunately, the organizers apparently overestimated how many runners would race under the tall trees, and they ordered too many shirts. Consequently, they gave the same undated T-shirt to runners for the race’s first three years. So I don’t know if the shirt I hold in my hands is from my fastest marathon, my second fastest, or my third fastest. And at the moment I can’t find the other two identical shirts sol can’t hold them all at once to cover all the bases.

What makes this T-shirt process doubly sobering is that our 20-yearold race T-shirts look as though they’ve shrunk. I can only hope the shirts were made of inferior material and that they have, indeed, shrunk. The alternative is much too sobering to contemplate.

The other matter—checking my running log to learn that it’s taking

me a minute and a half longer to complete the local 10K course than it did a mere five years ago—is perhaps even more sobering than handling the memories of races run at a pace that would be impossibly fast today.

Some of the added 90 seconds can be written off to the fact that a few years ago, while passing a pond that’s along the course, I stopped to retie my shoelace and spotted a turtle on the pond bank, and I have made it a habit to pause at that spot during each run to see if [can respot the turtle, even in the middle of winter when I know it’s hibernating.

My pit stop takes about 10 seconds. What accounts for the additional 80 seconds is the same process that annually seems to remove two more days from the calendar, and midway through the year it seems as though we had just brought in the New Year, run another Boston, and celebrated another birthday.

Time’s passing is so inexorable. And so natural. And not to place too philosophical a spin on my turtle tale, but 15 years ago, had I passed the pond ona workout, I’d have been going so fast I’d never have even seen the turtle. And yes, the symbolism of the turtle isn’t lost on me.

It makes good sense to refer to a runner over 40 as a “master.” By that point in life, one begins to learn to master the inevitable, not in the sense of mastering it by overpowering it, but mastering it by working in concert with it. And why not? Consider the alternative. —Rich Benyo

March/April 1998

MONMOUTH MEDICAL CENTER > we An affiliate of the Saint Barnabas Health Care System a

Ww presents the

JERSEY SHORE MCMARATHYN

Sunday, April 26, 1998 (10 AM start)

Come ruw at the Jersey Shore!!

Enjoy a scenic 26.2 mile journey along the New Jersey coast to benefit the Ronald McDonald House of Long Branch, Nu.

Staged by the Jersey Shore Running Club

The course is fast, flat, and scenic. USAT&F CERTIFIED The weekend of events will include:

The Jersey Shore Mile McMarathon Kids’ Races The Kids’ McMarathon

15K (9.3 miles) Fitness Walk

Free bus to start (Gateway Nat’! Recreation Area-Sandy Hook) Clocks at every mile

22 Fluid stations e Buffet Pasta Dinner Stadium track finish e In-Training tee Uniquely designed tee e Race Expo

Finishers’ medals and certificates ¢ Free post race party

www.penvision.com/JSRC/Homepage

On THE Road

HOW TO RESCUE A STUCK STAG

LONDON, October—Often it’s when you travel that you feel most privileged to be arunner. The running tourist is never just one of the packaged hordes dutifully shuffling from one overcrowded attraction to another. My last visit to England took me along paths that only a runner would tread and provided the bonus of private moments of history, beauty, and high comedy.

Iwas in Richmond Park, about 10 miles southwest of London, with the intent of jogging around an old stomping ground, there to touch base with the origins of cross-country running as a sport, meet a few old friends, and watch them race.

The event was the Surrey Veterans Cross-Country—that is, the annual cross-country championship for masters men and women, resident in the County of Surrey, an area that extends from the traffic-clogged outer London sprawl of Richmond and Wimbledon to heaths and farmlands barely changed since the days Jane Austen used to picnic there.

This year, during my October visit to family, the races were held in Richmond Park. It’s wonderful running country, good underfoot, mostly firm sandy tracks that undulate interestWITH Roger Robinson

ingly around hillsides and never get too boggy, with plenty of testing hills but not too steep or high, all in a fine English landscape of rolling slopes and lakes, swans, deer, fern, heather, and trees in curving clumps and elegant avenues. Truly, it’s the country in the city, only a few yards from the ceaseless roaring frenzy of the A3 highway to the southwest.

Richmond Park, in fact, is where the modern sport of cross-country running began. People have always run across country, of course, and the boys in England’s private schools had organized paperchases since at least the earlier 1800s, but it was in Richmond Park and the adjoining Wimbledon Common that the members of the Thames Rowing Club put on the first adult races of the modern era. That was in 1868. They called themselves Thames Hare and Hounds. Still in existence (I am a long-standing club member and its occasional historian), Thames is the world’s oldest adult running club, though today’s mem-

March/April 1998

bers carry that distinction with a lowkey humor and sociability. They run the same courses as 130 years ago, compete for hundred-year-old trophies, and drink a few beers afterwards in the same pubs.

My own memories of running in Richmond Park go back to the early 1950s. This time, more than anything, I noticed the trees and the deer. The landscape I ran in as a boy, though I didn’t realize it at the time, had been denuded for wartime firewood in the hard days of 1939-45. The Park was more bare then than at any time in its long history, from its beginnings as a Royal hunting domain. On this autumn day more than 40 years later, oaks and horse chestnuts that had been skinny striplings then now glowed in blocks of green and flaming yellow on grander scale than for half a century.

The deer, too, had multiplied. I suppose they also did their bit for the war effort. Now, everywhere, you see herds chomping quietly under the trees, or solitary stags striking macho poses on prominent hillsides. Sometimes they burst into wonderful motion.

One group gave me a moment of unforgettable beauty, the finest sporting sight Ihave ever seen ina lifetime of watching sports. I was jogging gently, and more than a little nostalgically, around a grassy hillside above the Robin Hood Gate. (Yes, that’s its name, because of the deer, I suppose, though the old outlaw’s beat was 200 miles north of here, in Sherwood Forest.) Along the paved roadway

inside the park’s perimeter came a long peleton of cyclists, all bright colors and smooth, whirling movement, streaming silently through the landscape. And below them, across the grass, beside the road, bounding and seemingly flying alongside, lightly raced a fleet herd of deer. It was exquisite. Beauty in movement is one of the joys of sport, but I never saw such a magical high-speed dance as that coordinated race of cyclists and deer. For once in my life, I wished I were a filmmaker, though you could never set up such a scene. I may have been the only person to see it.

The races I had come to see were reassuringly familiar in their unpretentious friendliness. As arunner who dates back to the old days (though not quite to 1868), I sometimes find myself overwhelmed by the huge scale, the public festivity, the commercialized showbiz of modern megaraces. It was nice at this championship to see four or five officials begin to set up the finish chute of stakes and tapes only after the women’s race had gone off, and then sort out which of them would hold their three watches, two clipboards, and one pile of cardboard disks on a bit of wire.

I imagined America’s race management experts swooning with the unscientific horror of it, though only weeks later I was at an American championship in Van Cortlandt Park (another historic cross-country venue) that was equally casual and amiable: “Open men, if you can hear me, you shouldn’t be here,” called the event

March/April 1998

director, by way of announcing that start time was imminent.

In Richmond Park it could have been 1954, when I ran my first open race here, on parts of this same course, inamulti-school event with the most memorably incompetent starter in all of running’s history. In an old raincoat, acigarette waggling on his lower lip, he gave us a long and incomprehensible description of the course, while we stood shivering, and then without any change in his monotone, and without any perceptible punctuation, he said, “Or-right, boys, when I say go, go, go.” The third “go” was actually the command, but we all stood and looked enquiringly at each other, until somebody edged tentatively forward, and then another, and when they were not summoned back, we all trickled unsurely away. It was less of a shock than the field artillery some races blast your eardrums with, but it was hardly a dramatic way to begin my racing career.

These masters races went off smoothly, however, with over 200 in the men’s field, though it was all somehow done without fuss or glamour. Jogging around, I replanted several of the flags that sparsely marked the course and had fallen over, or been skittled by some frisky stag. Pale orange in color, they were almost invisible against the autumnal bracken, and their sticks were made of the frailest bamboo and almost impossible to fix firmly. They are most likely produced by the same company that manufactures the baggage trolleys at Heathrow

Airport, every one of which has one wheel that insists on going in a different direction than the other three. You have to admire the ingenuity that can produce the consistent nonfunctionality of things in England.

Stags were everywhere. I was just watching the women’s leaders race by when one suddenly let rip a resonant male bellow not 10 feet behind me in the bracken. I hadn’t seen him, nor had I ever heard such a roar close up, so I rose several inches, I confess. I don’t know what he meant by it, whether he was commenting on the women’s T-shirts, on me, or simply announcing, “It’s rutting season, and T’ve got the best antlers this side of the Petersham Gate, so does, let’s go!” Or something like that.

Then toward the end of the men’s race I encountered another. I was waiting to cheer Frank Carpenter, an eminent Thames Hare and Hound who has been a friend since we started high school together in 1950, when I saw this stag crouched right alongside the course, his head down, seeming unable to move, his antlers apparently entangled in the spikes of adead branch on an old pine tree.

What do I do now? I wondered. How do you rescue a stuck stag? Could I persuade him to lower his antlers and push them clear of the branch? Do stags bite? Or spit? No, that’s llamas. Could I be gored?

While I stood heroically musing, the stag gave me a long, contemptuous stare from one rolling eye, lowered his antlers till they swept the

March/April 1998

fallen pine needles, cleared himself from the branch as if he did it 10 times an hour, and proceeded to lean sideways against a strong protruding branch and give himself a systematic, thorough, and obviously blissful neckmassage with its sharp point. Then he strolled by me, not two yards away, utterly disdainful, right into the path of the line of runners who came racing hard down that long wooded slope. The runners simply parted and went around himas he crossed, as ifhe were some large swaggering cop stepping self-importantly through the crowd.

That evening in the Fox and Grapes, the favorite pub of the Thames Hare and Hounds, we talked first about our injuries in the way old runners do, and then about the London Marathon, a new-fangled event by Thames Hare and Hound standards but one that has become a main focus for many of them.

Then the conversation turned to the deer. I commented on their increased numbers. “The park is closed for two or three weeks every year while they cull them,” Frank explained. “They shootall the aging and damaged ones.” There was a long silence. We were all in our SOs and 60s. Irubbed my injured knee thoughtfully. It was quite a relief when somebody began to talk about soccer.

NEW YORK CITY, November—A month later, as I walked with New York friends away from Van Cortlandt Park, the talk was about that venue and its own long tradition in the anMarch/April 1998

nals of cross-country running. It was a biting November day, with hard patches of snow lurking icily around the Bronx. We had been watching the RRCA Age-Group Championships. Van Cortlandt is a rugged little circuit of ridges and gullies, rocks and trees, without the long sweeping landscapes of Richmond Park, but just as priceless an island of nature in the midst of the gray, clattering city. Isaw no stags. Iwouldn’t give much for their chances in the Bronx, where the outlaws outnumber the cockroaches. But there were plenty of birds and some good, testing running despite the new, uniform artificial surface that now covers all the trails.

As we walked back across the sports fields where the races start and finish, Michael Frankfurt, a New York attorney and running friend, was in a reminiscent mood. His first race at Van Cortlandt Park, he told us, was a high school event in 1951.

“I did everything wrong,” Mike lamented, slipping into that downbeat self-mocking humor that I am beginning to recognize as characteristic of much New York narrative. “I went out too fast, I died, I struggled across the finish, and I violently puked my guts out almost over my mother’s shoes. ‘Milton,’ she said to my father, ‘never take me to this again.’ But I couldn’t wait to get back. My father, too, he loved it. In his high school days he ran here but fell over one of the hay hurdles they used to put out on the grass fields and broke his hip. He could never run again, but he loved track

ON THE ROAD WITH ROGER ROBINSON & 7

and cross-country. He used to take me to the Millrose Games. I remember him, with a straw hat and a cane. He limped badly. He was happy when I wanted to run at Van Cortlandt. I was born in the Bronx, andl’ ve beencoming to Van Cortlandt every season for nearly 50 years. It’s the one thing in my complex life that has never changed. The stones, the stumps, the smell of it are always with me.”

Of such small stories are great traditions made. Van Cortlandt Park holds a place in American sports history way beyond my present novice’s knowledge. Its greatest day in recent memory—at least, in Mike’s memory—was when the NCAA Cross-Country Championship was run here in 1969. “The great names came,” Mike recalled. “Prefontaine! and he was beaten by Gerry Lindgren.” He made it sound like a visitation by the gods to his humble hillside in the Bronx. Which in a way it was. Lindgren and Pre: their aura still lingers at this time of year, in these bare trees where afew yellow leaves hang.

Later I did a little checking on that legendary day, mainly in Tom Jordan’s Pre, which provided two pictures as wellas reliable text. The day had been cold, cold enough for spectators to be well muffled in coats and hoods, though not so cold as to put those hot young runners into long sleeves or gloves. Prefontaine and Lindgren jogged sociably together while warming up. They had been on the AAU team together the previous summer, Pre straight out of high school,

Lindgren five years beyond his own international debut as a high school prodigy. An action photo shows four runners close together on a soft sandy track, all looking fresh, so probably they are just coming off the first loop of the grass sports fields, approaching one mile. The spectacled Lindgren is already forcing the pace. “I was scared, really scared, so I wanted to lead all the way,” Jordan quotes him as saying. A stride behind him, bouncing confidently despite the soft footing, is one of England’s tough young harrier products of the 1960s, John Bednarski, who was then running for the University of Texas at El Paso. Preis screwing up his face in the trademark grimace of effort. Donal Walsh of Villanova is the fourth.

Jordan reports that Lindgren won, with Mike Ryan, “the defending champion from Air Force,” second, while Pre had an off day. He is not the only one to have had one at Van Cortlandt, where the unpredictable twists and switchbacks and shifts in footing are merciless on any loss of racing rhythm.

I have only minimal experience of racing there, but one good race and one bad one can teach you a lot about a cross-country course. I won these RRCA Age-Group Champs (over-40) while living in New York for a few months in 1986, zipping over the tricky terrain, flying down the steep last hill after you cross back over the footbridge across the roaring Parkway. Three weeks later the same circuit reduced me to a lifeless plod ina

three-lap 15K. Van Cortlandt allowed no half measure, no half-effort coasting, at least until the recent makeover of its trails.

Without being unappreciative of the effort to keep those frail tracks usable, I can’t help wishing that their true surface would soon reassert itself. The purpose of crosscountry is to interact with the earth itself. Mud and sand and treacherous tree roots are part of the deal. Van Cortlandt’s bland, smooth new padding is about as natural as a Baywatch bosom.

The history of cross-country is intertwined with the history of urban parks—Richmond Park and Parliament Hill Fields in London, Sutton Park in Birmingham, United Kingdom, New York’s Van Cortlandt, Paris’s Bois de Boulogne, Auckland’s Cornwall Park, and many more.

Cross-country races do not often literally go across country. The competitive sport has most often used urban parks or horse-race tracks near centers of population, patches of nature however landscaped and reshaped.

And so old runners like Frank and Mike and I will keep going

Come See Us at Boston! Marathon & Beyond will be at the 1998 Boston Marathon Expo on Saturday and Sunday, April 18 and 19. Come by our booth and meet M&B staff and running/ writing luminaries Kathrine Switzer, Roger Robinson, Tom Derderian, and Nancy | Clark. We hope to have Johnny J. Kelley in the booth as well. Bring your friends by to pick up a complimentary copy of M&B and subscribe on the spot. |

back to our parks, smelling their earth, remembering their legendary races, and running as best we still can among their rocks and stags and trees; that is, until they start to cull the aging and injured ones.

? SUPPLEX °

ear ®

cs wes

CoclMax°, a DuPont Performance Fabric, is made from 4channel fibers that draw perspiration from the skin and allow it to evaporate rapidly. This combination of wicking and evaporation keeps the body dry and comfortable during demanding activities and is suitable for year-round use. CoolMax is soft, non-chafing, and washes easily.

March/April 1998

ON THE ROAD WITH ROGER ROBINSON = 9

SPECIAL MASTERS SECTION

“Mastering” the Distance

Preamble…

Distance accomplishments come to those who mature into them. Thus, it should surprise no one that the longer the distance raced, the more mature the successful practitioner. It’s almost a dictate of nature. A toddler intent on taking its first steps doesn’t actually take steps. The kid launches itself across the room from the launch-pad parent to the recovery/catch parent at a sprint. At the other end of the spectrum, a 110-year-old codger is asked how he lived to be more than a century of age. “I paced myself,” he says.

World-class marathoners are into their mid-30s before they really peak. Carlos Lopes was 39 when he won the 1984 Olympic Marathon. In ultramarathoning, the success of the mature runner is even more pronounced. During 1996, several handfuls of 50-plus-year-olds won ultra races outright.

And while young women in the 20- to 35-year-old age group are invigorating the sport of marathoning, the median age of marathoners continues to creep up. The 1997 New York City Marathon featured 30,427 finishers and a median age of 38. Distance running is one of the only sports in the world where you aren’t sent out to pasture as you age—you’re merely sent up to a longer, more outrageous distance.

M&B’s special section takes a long, varied look at people who have been going long in more than one sense. From Timothy Martin’s essay written on the eve of his turning 40 to Roger Robinson’s memories of the best-of-breed among masters marathoners, from Keith Williams’s scientific examination of how aging affects distance running to Bill Childs’s personal examination of agegrading racing performances, from world-record-holder John Keston’s unique experiences at the front of the pack at the Turin Marathon to Jeff Hagen’s review of why older runners do better the longer they live and the longer they run— there’s plenty of proof positive that if you keep on running, some of your best years are yet to come, and occasionally they can be downright gold-plated.

SPECIAL MASTERS SECTION

The Edge of Might —

Some Fears and Realizations on the Eve of Turning 40

C LEARLY, IT’S time to arrive at some sort of mandated retirement age for runners—especially for those about to turn 40.

The way I envision it, any runner 40 or older should be required by law to turn in their running shoes. I’m not saying you should throw a shaw] over their shoulders and point them toward the nearest rocking chair. But you should make it clear that running is O-U-T!

I bring this up because my 40th birthday is just around the corner, and I’m experiencing the kind of fear and dread that only aphilosopher like Kierkegaard could fully appreciate. I lie awake in the middle of the night listening for an irregular heartbeat and asking myself questions like, When was my last checkup? and Have I been getting enough fiber?

Other runners I know are more optimistic about turning 40. For them, it will be a delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty, a rebirth in the simplest, literal, primitive meaning of the word. They can’t wait for masters competition, for new PRs. They say, “Don’t think of 40 as old. Let your personal crisis lead to constructive growth by becoming a more intelligent, creative masters runner.”

I wish I could be so positive. Especially since (according to the studies I’ve been reading), my speed, endurance, and VO,max are all about to take a long, slow escalator ride to the has-been basement. I’ ve already started to experience depression (“I’m getting too old to be arunner’), physical breakdown (“I think my Achilles is acting up”), professional self-doubt (“Look for me at the back of the pack’), and the loss of youthful idealism (“T’Il never get that marathon world record now’).

My optimistic friends assure me that age is only a state of mind. “If you keep telling yourself that you’re over-the-hill,” they say, “before long, that’s how you’ll start to feel. On the other hand, if you work at staying youthful—if you

think young—that’s what you’ll be. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look at Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, and Priscilla Welch. They turned 40 and were as competitive as ever—maybe more so. You can bet they don’t consider themselves old.”

Idon’t know, maybe my friends have a point. I may be losing a little speed, and my body has become a little stingy regarding certain juices that have all sorts of beneficial effects (only unpleasant things like anger or the proximity of death seems to open the floodgates). But at an age when most men are worrying about bulging waistlines and lamenting over scarcely remembered football games, I eat anything I like and smile at the knowledge that I’m physically as strong as I’ve ever been in my life.

I guess things aren’t all that bad.

Actually, running has a lot going for it: It keeps me fit and healthy; it adds focus to my life; it forces me to set goals; and ithelps me develop mental stamina. Besides that, it’s fun.

Quit running? No way.

T’mkind of looking forward to masters competition. Who knows, I might even set a few PRs. Maybe I’ll give Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter a run for their money. Nothing is impossible, right?

Why, I bet if I had an electric guitar, I could even jam with The Rolling Stones. Wait a minute, isn’t Mick Jagger over 50? Gee, I wouldn’t want to make him feel old. Let’s see. First I’d have to learn to play the guitar. I can do that.

But, hey, it might not be too late to make that next Olympic team; then the Stones would let me jam with

them whether I could play guitar it or not.

Tim Martin rushes headlong into his masters running career.

SPECIAL MASTERS SECTION

Masters of the Marathon

A Look at the Great Masters Marathoners of Our Times

T HIS PIECE is a personal reminiscence, not a researched analysis. A full history of the masters marathon would have to recognize such pioneers as Jack Holden, the Englishman who in 1950 won the Commonwealth (then Empire) and European marathons, at age 42 and 43, and American heroes Ted Corbitt and Johnny A. Kelley. The legendary prewar South African ultrarunner, Arthur Newton, deserves a place, too. But these men were from an earlier generation than the great vintage years I knew, years that began when Jack Foster crossed the finish line in Christchurch in 1974.

JACK FOSTER

Jack Foster brought fire to the world of the masters marathon. On that hot 1974 evening in Christchurch the crowd acclaimed him primarily as a New Zealander, rising to cheer his all-black uniform and silver medal in New Zealand’s Commonwealth Games. But for the runners present, especially those past their first youth, the figure skimming around the stadium meant something different. A 41-year-old man running 2:11:19 had transformed our sport; he had raised our sights, extended

a careers, revised human potential. Older runners need no wen longer be shuffling gray joggers. They could race, win medals against the best, be like Foster.

For me, it took several hours before all this sank in. As the stadium announcer, I was enslaved to the frenetic demands of the moment: accurate coverage of five or six events simultaneously, names, stats, pronunciation, timing, clarifying and highlighting the crazily complicated sport of track and field.

Roger Robinson MASTERS OF THE MARATHON & 13

You need to be a martian, with eyes on stalks all around your head. After a meet I often can’t remember what happened. So it was later, as Iran the warm, dark eight miles home from the stadium, limp as a discarded sock, that I conjured up that dignified, springy runner in black. I thought to myself, He beat Ron Hill and Derek Clayton. He pushed Ian Thompson to one of the fastest finishing times ever. He got silver. He’s 41. 2:11! The old goat!

Iwas 34, and Thad not yet run a marathon, represented New Zealand, or met Jack Foster. I was also at a downpoint in running, apparently fading into what one sportswriter called “the twilight of an outstanding career.” I won’t say Jack Foster was the only reason I declined to go gentle into that night, but he helped. Thanks to making the twilight last 20 more years, I got to be a participant and eyewitness in one of the greatest movements in sporting history: modern masters running.

My first conversation with Foster was inauspicious. We were in the fastmoving spearhead at the front of the New Zealand 10K road championship in 1976. I was having problems with blisters caused by hot road surfaces, and I had learned to seek water to cool my feet. Two miles into the race, with six or seven still in the front group and moving at sub-5-minute pace, I spotted a puddle in a roadside patch of dirt. I veered aside to splash through it, but misjudged how close the others still were. An indignant Lancashire voice spoke at my right shoulder. “Thanks very bluddy mooch, mate. Filled me bluddy shoes wi’ bluddy mook.”

Soon after that he floated lightly away, and I more laboriously fought through to second. He was 44, I was 37. I ran over to apologize. Low-key and kindly, as he always is, he just waved a hand and said, “Forget it.” But what a folly! There I was, living a fantasy, running alongside The Legend, and all I could do was squish mud into his best racing flats. Jack never gave it another thought, but it remains one of my life’s more embarrassing memories. Worse even than the day I ate Carl Lewis’s lunch.

Racing at world-class level into his later 40s, Jack was a rarity then. Nowadays we expect a master or two in the top 10 of most races. Martin Mondragon, Antoni Niemezak, Steve Plasencia, Jane Welzel, Regina Joyce, Gillian Horowitz—all did it in 1997.

Back then, Foster was treated as a freak, and he liked to play it up in his droll way. “I’ma bit deaf, like, coom round to me good ear,” he would say, claiming that his secret to success was “a nice coop o’ tea.” He half-jokingly titled his book The Tale of the Ancient Marathoner, it remains one of the best running autobiographies.

Foster had a low-key, pragmatic wisdom that could cut through stacks of running magazine “10 Ways to Put One Foot in Front of the Other” solemnities. On injuries: “Tf it hurts, don’t run on it.” On postrace recovery: “One easy day

for every mile of the race.” On hill training: “When you hit flat country, you really fly along.” On hosing down his legs in his front yard after a run: “If it’s good enough for race horses, it’ll do me.”

Yet wily old campaigner that he was, Jack retained a zest for running that could become a childlike exhilaration. There is a film sequence of him leaping down the steep, stoney slope of one of New Zealand’s volcanoes, slithering down through the loose shingle with giant bounds, whooping with excitement. He was 45.

On his favorite hilly forest circuit near his home in Rotorua, he was irrepressible. Hal Higdon (another master who deserves a mention) visited that forest on my advice in 1997 and pronounced it the best training route he had ever seen. To get the full experience, you had to zoom to the forest from Jack’s home in his little open-topped sportscar, a secret pleasure that he reserved for special visitors. Then you had to keep up with Jack at his nimblest and quickest, as the reassuringly tidy wood-chip of the lower tracks gave way to sand and mud, as the hills became steeper and sharper, the twists and turns tighter, the tree branches closer and the pace hotter. “Coom round to me good ear,’ he would say, and as you fell back a stride, he’d dart away up some unseen root-tangled precipice through the pines.

He simply loved the sport, and loved it simply. After the New Zealand cross-country team had run as guests in the German championshipin 1977, as preparation for the world championship there, Iremember Jack afterwards calculating an unofficial

Mike THAN Jack Foster lowered the course record by six minutes when he won the 1975 Honolulu Marathon. _ team result between us and the Australians, who

had also competed. He counted off the places with the earnest glee of a sportsmad schoolboy: “Them — 00z [us] — 00z — 00z — them.” The glee showed in his stride, too. He ran with the lithe, joyful fluency of a Kenyan, and he was as floating and fearless.

He had many fine races after his dramatic emergence in his late 30s as a world-class runner, but he always resisted praise or pretension. His modesty is

Roger Robinson MASTERS OF THE MARATHON @® 15

essential to the man. That’s why after a few weeks Foster withdrew from a contract to make appearances in America for a shoe company. He disliked razzmattaz, hated being féted as a star. Instead of living off his legend, he took a year off work to ride with his wife on a tandem bicycle all around the coastline of New Zealand.

His origins were modest, working-class, urban northern England. If he had not emigrated to New Zealand, he might have labored all his life in a Liverpool factory. His boyhood was one of wartime deprivation. Sitting together once during an airplane meal, we each noticed the other’s compulsion to finish the scraps and confessed to that shared childhood experience. The plenitude of America gave him no pleasure.

After recurrent leg and breathing problems ended his running in his early 50s, we met at an age-group road time-trial cycling event in a small New Zealand town. (It was 1985, one of my injury years.) Naturally, he won. We sat together as we waited for the casually organized awards presentation to begin. “This is what I like,” Jack said quietly, looking around the dusty little hall filled with clusters of aging cyclists. “A hard race, and a coop o’ tea wi’ a few mates.”

He found the obscurity he prefers. Occasionally now Jack is seen at track cycling events, since his son is a top competitor. That son’s first name—Jackson—is the only sign of pride Jack ever revealed

PIET VAN ALPHEN

Jack Foster’s inspiration percolated through the age groups as masters running got going, with the first World Association of Veteran Athletes (WAVA) Games at Toronto in 1975. For many years, however, his 2:11:09 stood unchallenged like some towering mountain. Ron Hill did 2:15 across the bridge at New Orleans, wafted along by a wind so strong the paper cups were overtaking the runners. Otherwise it was more than a decade before the sub-2:18s began to come. For a while, my 1981 2:18:20 put me third on the list of top masters marathon performances. Foster’s New York record, 2:17:28 (at age 46), stood for 10 years until Ryszard Marczac ran 2:15:54 in 1988.

The two 1970s masters who equaled Foster by ranking among the world’s open best were both women. Joyce Smith (England) was over 40 when she converted from a distinguished track career to win the 1978 Avon International Marathon in Waldniel in the days when that race served as a women’s world championship. Her best was 2:29:43, at age 44. And after age 40, Miki Gorman was twice the first woman finisher at New York, with a 2:39:11 at age 41 in 1976 and a 2:43:10 in 1977 at age 42. Although the women’s fields were much smaller then (a record 250 in 1977), only two masters women have subsequently run New York faster than Gorman did.

Foster’s equivalent in the upper age groups, as pioneer and inspiration, was Piet Van Alphen of the Netherlands. In the 1982 Rotterdam Marathon, at aged 53, he ran a staggering 2:22:14, which is still off the charts for that age.

In 1984 I found myself running with him in the excellent Veterans 25K race in Bruges, Belgium (Jacques Serruys’s race introduced many essentials that others still overlook, like colorcoded numbers on the back). There in the lead group was a stocky, silver-haired man with an over-50 number anda brisk, economical stride. It was Van Alphen. He may even have been 55 by then. [had missed seeing him at the WAVA championships in New Zealand in 1981, but Hal Hidgon recounts how his winning run in the 45-49 marathon put him two places behind Van Alphen, the 50-54 winner. “So the next age group up was

ach) tougher. He was extraordinary,” Hal says.

Holland’s Piet Van Alphen Thad only one brief conversation with Piet, at at the 1986 Twin Cities New York, when he was about 56. “Getting slow, Marathon. getting slow, is bad,” he told me. That’s all. A

year or so later he was dead. He has become a hazy figure therefore, and even here I am conscious of not giving him the informed recognition he deserves. A letter in one of the running magazine claimed that his early death proved that older runners should not race hard. I thought it proved only that men of 57 sometimes die.

VILLANUEVA, MIELKE, AND OTHERS

As running boomed, and a little travel and prize money became available even for masters, the top ones began to race head-to-head, usually in America. No shyness or dodging the competition among this group—we wanted nothing more than to get out of the confines of our own countries, lay the chips down, and establish the global pecking order.

At the top over distances up to 15K were Mexico’s Antonio Villanueva and Germany’s Giinter Mielke. Despite significant marathon victories, however— each won New York—neither reached the same level in that event as in shorter races, perhaps because Antonio’s racing was too tempestuous, Giinter’s too analytical. For three years we were the oddly assorted gray musketeers of the masters circuit, liable to be found hanging out at all hours in the elite runners’