The Man Who Got Arrested for Jogging

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Something different this week. No science, no training advice. Just a story I think every one of us ought to know, because it explains why you have a race to enter at all.

Here's the thing that surprised me when I went looking: for almost the entire history of organized running, there was no such thing as a masters runner. Not as a category, not as an idea. If you were 50 and wanted to race, you entered the open race and got beaten by 22-year-olds, and that was simply the arrangement. Nobody thought it needed changing.

Then a lawyer in San Diego got arrested on a golf course.

In the mid-1960s, David Pain was a middle-aged attorney in La Jolla, British-born, a father of four, who had run a half-mile in high school and then let it go for a couple of decades the way most people do. He'd stayed reasonably fit playing handball and racquetball. Somewhere in his early forties he decided to start running again.

The problem was that in 1965, running around in public for no visible reason was regarded as slightly deranged behavior. Pain was picked up by police at the Torrey Pines municipal golf course, accused of not paying the greens fee. Reports of the incident had officers describing him in terms best summarized as troublemaker. The charge collapsed in court, on the reasonable grounds that he hadn't been golfing. The story got picked up nationally, apparently even reaching Sports Illustrated.

I love this detail because of what it tells us about the world these men and women were operating in. Not a world that disapproved of older athletes. A world that didn't have a mental category for them at all. A running man was an escaping man or a lunatic. There was no third option.

Pain's idea was modest. He asked the organizers of the San Diego Invitational track meet at Balboa Stadium to add an exhibition event: a mile, for men over 40.

They agreed, and in June 1966 fourteen men lined up for what was billed as the Masters Mile. Pain ran in it himself. The winner was a 44-year-old salesman named Jim Gorrell, who covered the distance in 4 minutes and 47 seconds.

Sit with that time for a second. A 44-year-old, in 1966, in whatever shoes were available in 1966, with no coaching literature, no training plans written for his age, and a broad cultural assumption that men his age should be sitting down. 4:47.

The Masters Mile was an exhibition — a novelty item tucked into somebody else's meet. But the idea traveled. Similar races started appearing elsewhere; an Eastern version was held the following summer. And in July 1968, with the San Diego Track Club and the city Recreation Department behind him, Pain staged the first U.S. National Masters Track Championships.

There's one detail from that first nationals that I find genuinely touching. They left several events off the program — the triple jump, the hammer, the steeplechase, the pole vault — for a simple reason: nobody had any idea how skilled the entrants would be, or what would happen if they tried. There was no precedent. Nobody had ever run this experiment. They were, quite literally, finding out what a 50-year-old body could still do, and they were sensible enough to be cautious about it.

Before that meet, no age-group masters track championship had been held in the United States. Ever.

Pain wasn't alone, and it would be wrong to tell this as a one-man story.

The broader conditions were shifting. Bill Bowerman, the Oregon coach, had traveled to New Zealand in 1962 and come back astonished at the sight of ordinary older people out jogging — and wrote about it persistently through the decade. Kenneth Cooper's book Aerobics landed in 1968 and helped ignite the running boom. In Europe, a group organized around older long-distance runners formed in 1968 and held marathon championships in the Netherlands.

Pain's genius, if that's the word, was connective. In 1971 he and his wife Helen — a travel agent, which turns out to matter — went to London, Munich, Copenhagen and other European cities laying groundwork. In the late summer of 1972, they took a group of roughly 150 mostly American and Canadian masters athletes on a tour of London, Helsinki, Stockholm, Gothenburg and Cologne to race age-group meets. That tour is generally credited with turning a scattering of national curiosities into an international movement.

He also fought the amateur authorities of the day, who had rigid views about who was permitted to compete. Pain's position was that anyone over the age threshold had a right to enter, whatever their standard, background, or history as a professional. That principle — that the field is open to the ordinary runner, not just the good one — is why you can enter a masters championship today without qualifying for anything.

In August 1975, at Centennial Park Stadium in Toronto, the first World Masters Championships were held. Fourteen hundred and twenty-seven athletes came, from 32 countries. The cross country race was run in Sunnybrook Park.

Nine years earlier the whole concept had been fourteen men in an exhibition mile.

The age minimums that first year were 40 for men and 35 for women — and here's a detail worth noticing: men were divided into five-year age groups, women into ten-year groups. The women's side of this story is a shorter and more grudging one, and it took considerably longer to reach anything like parity. Worth remembering when we talk about the sport being "opened up." It was opened up unevenly.

During those championships, delegates met at the University of Toronto and formed the steering committee for what became the World Association of Veteran Athletes — the body now known as World Masters Athletics.

The story goes that the president of the international federation attended, watched club runners lining up alongside aging Olympians, and was struck less by the standard than by how obviously everyone was enjoying themselves — and concluded the thing deserved formal recognition. Which it eventually got.

One more thing about Toronto in 1975, and then I'll stop.

Among the competitors that year was a 44-year-old Canadian engineer named Ed Whitlock, who had run seriously as a schoolboy in England, quit for two decades, and come back to it in his forties. He finished fourth in the 1500, fifth in the 800, twenty-first in the cross country, and ran the anchor leg of a bronze-medal relay — reportedly the last runner on the track at the entire meet.

You may know where this goes. Whitlock kept running. In 2003, at 72, he became the first man over 70 to break three hours for the marathon. The following year he ran 2:54 at 73. At 85 he ran under four hours. He trained by doing loops of a cemetery near his house, wore the same racing singlet for decades, didn't do intervals, and had no sponsors. He died in 2017.

I find it almost unreasonably fitting that the man who would become the greatest argument the sport has ever produced was already there, in Toronto, in 1975, running last.

Because none of this was inevitable, and all of it is recent.

The first World Championships happened within the lifetime of most people reading this. Some of you were already running when it happened. The category you enter, the five-year age brackets you age into, the fact that a race director prints results for M55 at all — that's not the natural order of things. It's the residue of a stubborn lawyer who got arrested for running on a golf course and decided the sport should have room in it for people like him.

Every time you pin on a number now, you're using something somebody had to invent.

Next week we'll get back to the usual business. But it seemed worth a week to say thank you to a few people who never got much of one.

— Ageless Runner

Sources for this piece include archives at mastershistory.org, World Masters Athletics, and contemporary reporting on David Pain's life and work.

USA/Canada/UK & Europe/Rest of World

September 5–7

• Toronto Island Run 5K & 10K (Toronto, ON)
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• North Bay Road Race 5K & 10K (North Bay, ON)
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• Oasis ZooRun 5K & 10K (Toronto, ON)
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September 11–13

• Brita Night Run 5K & 10K – Vancouver (BC)
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• Brita Night Run 5K & 10K – Calgary (AB)
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• Servus Calgary Marathon Foothills 10K (Calgary, AB)
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September 18–20

• Brita Night Run 5K & 10K – Edmonton (AB)
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• Canada Army Run West 5K & 10K (Edmonton, AB)
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• Terry Fox Run 5K & 10K Events (Nationwide)
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September 25–27

• Brita Night Run 5K & 10K – Toronto (ON)
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• Oasis ZooRun 10K (Calgary Zoo, AB)
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• Don Doan Dash 5K & 10K (Burlington, ON)
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USA/Canada/UK & Europe/Rest of World

September 11–13

• GMS Queen City Marathon & Half Marathon (Regina, SK)
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• Georgina Marathon & Half Marathon (Georgina, ON)
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• Road Uniformed Services Run Marathon & Half Marathon (St. John’s, NL)
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• Marathon Groupe Ouellet Bolduc de Rimouski (Marathon & Half Marathon) (Rimouski, QC)
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September 19–20

• Be Fearless Trail Marathon & Half Marathon (Squamish, BC)
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• Run On Edmonton Marathon & Half Marathon (Edmonton, AB)
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• Canada Army Run Half Marathon (Ottawa, ON)
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September 26–27

• Fredericton Fall Classic Half Marathon (Fredericton, NB)
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• Railway City Road Race Half Marathon (St. Thomas, ON)
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• Run for the Grapes Half Marathon (St. Catharines, ON)
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