Jack Foster

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from October 1995.)

FOSTER THE MASTER. Age isn’t what it once was. In the slim biographical booklet that he wrote in 1974, Jack Foster referred to himself as an “ancient marathoner.” He was then in his early 40s and seemed old at a time, when masters were just beginning to claim special age groupings for themselves.

Forty isn’t old now, when masters life just begins at that age. But Foster never thought of himself as a young master. He was the oldest of the open runners.

The New Zealander is 63 now and long out of the racing headlines. Before updating his story, let’s review what he once did.

He ran a 2:11:19 marathon at age 41. The time stood for 16 years as a world masters record, and it remains the fastest on a loop course. (John Campbell, another New Zealander, ran 2:11:04 at point-to-point Boston in 1990.)

Foster competed against the best of the young for as long as he could. When, at about age 50, he couldn’t keep up with them anymore, he retired.

Sort of. This meant backing down on the running, but never stopping. And it meant picking up the pace of his original sport, bicycling.

He downplays his running, going so far as to say, “I feel like a fraud completing your questionnaire [for the book Road Racers and Their Training]. But I do run some, so I’ll answer it.”

Like many post-competitive runners, Foster chooses what he liked best from his past program and discards all else. His favorite session was, and still is, a run as long a 1½ hours over hilly farmlands. He now takes it two or three times a week, and nothing more.

Foster still races too. He calls it “indulging in a fun-run now and then, but at about half-throttle while finding someone to chat with.”

His “half-throttle” on half-training is a pace that few 63-year-olds can match — 37-minute 10K, for instance. A month or two of full training, and a few full-bore races could make him a record-setter again. But after all he did in his 40s, he has nothing left to prove in his 60s.

I’ve always liked Jack Foster’s comment that we pay too much attention to time, especially as age slows us down. He said, “If you don’t look at the watch, the racing feels the same way it always did.”

UPDATE. Jack died in 2004 when struck by a car while riding his bike. The day after hearing about his accident, I quoted advice from Jack in my talk at Dick Beardsley’s Marathon Camp. 

This wasn’t a memorial tribute. I’d already planned to borrow words from him, as I nearly always do in talks and books. Friends keep giving, even after they’re gone.

The last lines of his booklet read, “Perhaps what I’ve achieved as a runner may have inspired other 35-year-plus men to get up and have a go. I’d like to think so.”

I know so.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]