The Joy Of Running

No one of my age had won the race before, so I did not have to worry about being the favorite. But this did not prevent me from lying awake the night before. I thought hard about tucking my head well down (this was what my gym master advised), and chasing the third-form giant who had won the race last year. I had been quietly watching him for some time. He had no idea who I was, of course, and my keen eye detected signs of his overconfidence and of unfitness through lack of training. I won the race, and remember with pleasure the utter astonishment of all my school friends.

This victory restored some of my waning self-respect, and I settled down to other activities with renewed vigor. In the peculiar convention of English schools it now seemed that I would be allowed by my school fellows to work hard because I also won races. It was apparently the magic formula for being accepted by those who never worked at all. This was the moment when I stumbled upon the technique of masquerading as the good games-playing schoolboy. This discovery worked, and gave me greater freedom in the next few years to follow my own inclinations. I am sure that I was not a better runner than the others in the sense of having more innate ability. I just knew I had to win for the sake of peace. It was as simple as that.

I went up to Oxford in the autumn of 1946 to study medicine. In Oxford, I had been told, a man without a sport is like a ship without a sail. Here, it seemed, you could both work and play, each being complementary to the other. The idea appealed to me, the only question being to decide which sport to take up. Of all sports, running seemed to be the only one for which I had any aptitude. I eliminated ball games because I just did not have the eye. Also I was too light to throw my weight about either in a rowing boat or on the rugby field.

But it was much more than a negative decision to take up serious running. Since 1945 when I watched my first international athletic meeting, I had a schoolboy dream of becoming a runner. I had never watched anything more than school sports until my father took me to the White City. Perhaps he wanted me to be a runner. He himself had won his school mile and promptly fainted afterward—as many runners did in those days.

The main feature of the meeting was that Sydney Wooderson was challenging Arne Andersson, the great Swedish runner. Wooderson had been a corporal in the Pay Corps for several years, and no one knew how or where he had been able to train. Could he win? Perhaps not, but he had always been a gallant fighter. He ran a magnificent race and battled stride for stride with the great Swede until the last bend. Andersson won in 4 minutes 9.4 seconds.

Seeing Wooderson's run that day inspired me with a new interest that has continued ever since. The point about running is that anyone can do it if he wishes to intensely enough. Nobody could have wanted to run more than I did. So in Oxford I decided to devote a proportion of my time to sport, and if possible to make myself a good runner.

"NO ROOM FOR CRANKY NOTIONS"

The Freshmen's Sports were to take place two weeks later. I came across an article on training by Wooderson in which he said, "There is no room for crazy ideas or cranky notions. It consists of just running and plenty of it." This was a simple enough formula to carry in my head, so I trained along the lines of my cross-country preparation in Bath and waited for the great day. I was extremely nervous beforehand and it was one of the few mile races in which I tried to lead from start to finish. I was beaten by an ex-serviceman, Peter Curry, who later represented Britain in the Olympic steeplechase. His time was 4 min. 52 sec.

It was my first race over a mile. I remember vividly K. S. Duncan, now Secretary of the British Olympic Association, coming up to me afterwards and saying, "Stop bouncing, and you'll knock twenty seconds off." It was the first time I had ever worn running spikes, and they had the effect of making me over-stride in a series of kangaroo-like bounds.

Most of my running in my first year at Oxford was cross-country, although I did run the mile in Freshmen's Sports. The Captain of the Third University team—he was a formidable figure, an ex-Army captain with a grand manner and a disconcerting way of prefacing all his remarks with "my dear chap"—had invited me, and though I felt I would burn myself out on the grueling seven-and-a-half-mile course, I meekly consented, week after week. Then, in the spring of 1947, came my first chance to represent Oxford on the track, in a meet against Cambridge. I was chosen among a bunch of "also-rans" for the third string in the mile.