LONDON, October—Often it’s when you travel that you feel most privileged to be a runner. 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.

I was 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 interestingly 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 members carry that distinction with a low-key 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 I have ever seen in a 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 a runner 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 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, in a multi-school event with the most memorably incompetent starter in all of running’s history. In an old raincoat, a cigarette 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 I’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 a dead 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 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 neck-massage 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 him as he crossed, as if he 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 shoot all the aging and damaged ones.” There was a long silence. We were all in our 50s and 60s. I rubbed 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 annals 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. I saw no stags. I wouldn’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

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, and I’ve been coming 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 a few yellow leaves hang.

Later I did a little checking on that legendary day, mainly in Tom Jordan’s Pre, which provided two pictures as well as 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. Pre is 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 in a 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 cross-country 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 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.