The Schools’ International was my first race at Meadowbank, but it wasn’t my first visit to the Stadium. I had sat in the stands for a week, with my parents, a year earlier, as we watched the 1970 Commonwealth Games. My parents had never shown any particular interest in athletics before I started running, and I really appreciated them going there for my benefit.
We watched a lot of great athletes, but I especially wanted to see my hero of the time, Ron Clarke of Australia. He was a phenomenal runner, who had re-written the record books over 3 miles and 6 miles, without the aid of pacemakers. He won his races from the front by pushing harder and harder until no one could stay with him. In one race, he took half a minute off the world record for 10,000 metres. Unfortunately, he did not have a good sprint finish, and in the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964, he couldn’t drop Billy Mills or Mohammed Gamoudi, and they both sprinted past him in the finishing straight.
Four years later, when he was in the greatest form of his life, the Olympics were held at the 7,000 feet altitude of Mexico City. High altitude athletes dominated all of the distance events and the rarefied air robbed Clarke of any chance to run his best. He was carried away from the 10,000 metres on a stretcher, with an oxygen mask over his face.
He was about to retire, and these Commonwealth Games were his last chance to win a major title. I was enthralled as he led for lap after lap, and one by one the group got smaller. With three laps remaining, Dick Taylor of England and Lachie Stewart of Scotland were his only challengers. Clarke pushed on and Taylor was dropped. Every man, woman and child in the stadium was on the edge of their seats as Stewart hung on to the great Australian as they entered the last lap. Stewart was running the race of his life in front of his home crowd, and they all leapt from their seats as the Scot sprinted past in the last eighty yards.
The noise was deafening as they cheered home this unexpected Scottish victory. I sat still with a churning sensation in my stomach, because I had suddenly realised how harsh, and almost brutal, competitive sport could be. Clarke had been a much better runner than Stewart throughout his career, but now Stewart had a gold medal and Clarke still didn’t. I looked at Clarke and thought ‘you don’t always get what you deserve.’ But then I looked at Stewart and thought ‘perhaps you can win anything if you are sufficiently inspired.’
Thanks to my meeting with John Caine in Loughborough, I was now a member of Gateshead Harriers, and the sight of John finishing fifth behind Lachie Stewart jolted me from my thoughts about Clarke. It felt good to be in the same running club as someone who ran in such amazing races. Later in the week, another Gateshead Harrier won the first of his large collection of major championship medals, when Brendan Foster took bronze in the 1,500 metres.
Gateshead Harriers had been formed in 1928. It had never won any major Club Championships, but it had a healthy membership, which now included a couple of international runners, and a large section of teenage runners. Stan Long coached the teenagers, and he was full of enthusiasm and optimism. He persuaded me to come through to Gateshead each Tuesday for the weekly Club training night.
By this time we had moved a couple of miles up the road from Ferryhill to Croxdale and before I had a car, I used to catch the bus to Gateshead, which was fifty minutes away. Our Tuesday night training venue in the winter was Coatsworth Road Junior School. The school didn’t have changing rooms, so we used a classroom. Everything in a junior school is junior sized, and sitting on a toilet meant resting your chin on your knees. With no changing rooms, there were obviously no showers either, and after an hour of hard running round the dark, damp streets of Gateshead, you just can’t beat getting washed with cold water in a pint sized basin, which is fixed to the wall just above knee level.
For a couple of months after I started going to Gateshead on Tuesday nights, I would wake up on Wednesdays with very stiff legs. I assumed it was because I was training harder than I was used to, but I now wonder if having a hot shower might have made a difference, instead of sitting on a bus for nearly an hour after washing myself in cold water.
Our summer training venue was Gateshead Stadium, but it was a different place then to the stadium that now hosts televised international athletics. A cinder track was surrounded by a steeply banked cycle racing track, and the grandstand seated all of fifty people. Nobody seemed too bothered about the facilities because the council had provided hundreds of miles of tarmac for us to run on, and in the winter they even made it floodlit.
I was sixteen when I joined Gateshead Harriers, and if I wasn’t running for the school, I was running for the club in the Youths’ age group. There were a few boys who could beat me at first, but I quickly developed, and soon there was only one who would regularly beat me in local road races. In a typical race, I would go to the front and push the pace. I would eventually drop everybody except him, but with a hundred yards to go Mike McLeod would whoosh past me, get a gap, look around, and then hold me off till the finish. I found it very frustrating. If I had known that his exceptional sprint finish would eventually win him an Olympic 10,000 metre medal, I may have felt better about it. But at the time, I didn’t.
I was collecting lots of little prizes during this stage of my career. I was getting a prize for finishing in the first three, and I was also getting a lot of team prizes as Gateshead usually won the team race. Entry fees for a Youths’ road race were about 10p back then, so you couldn’t really expect too much, but when you’ve got one tartan duffle bag you really don’t need another one.
David Lowes, who I was to race often on the track, was a Gateshead teammate, and along with Ray Sterling and Derek Alderson, we had a good Youth team. Good enough, in fact, for Stan Long to think we had a chance of team medals in the National Cross Country Championship. I had no idea what the “National” was like, but everyone told me it was like nothing else I would ever run in.
In 1970 it was held at Blackpool Showground. All the best runners in the country were there, and they all wanted to get to the front when the race began. I had been warned to start fast, but I couldn’t believe how everybody sprinted when the gun was fired. The start is extremely wide, but the course has to narrow and turn after 400 yards. If you are at the back when the course narrows, you will never be able to work your way through.
I had never been in a race with so many other runners. I spent the entire four miles in an ocean of arms and legs. I was continually passing people and being passed. Running hard in a dense crowd was so strange. I couldn’t see more than a yard or two in front of me for bodies, and kept stumbling in dips and on tufts. I finished a very tired 28th, and second counter for Gateshead. All the team ran well and we finished second to Small Heath Harriers. Our silver medals were the first medals Gateshead had ever won in a national championship.
After my event I watched the senior race. There were no mass-running events at this time. A road race did well to attract 150 runners, but in the National Cross Country there were ten times as many. Almost every running club in the country sent a team, and every club had a place on the starting line. The start was divided into numbered pens, which were one runner wide. With a maximum of nine runners to a team, the best runner in each club would stand at the front, and his teammates had to line up behind him in their respective pens.
A big road race nowadays might be ten feet wide, and two or three hundred yards deep at the start, but the ‘National’ is ten feet deep and two or three hundred yards wide at the start. I stood a couple of hundred yards away from the line, and watched in amazement as a wall of runners hurtled towards me, all trying to make the first bend in a good position. The ground shook beneath my feet as they passed. Along with scores of other people, I ran from vantage point to vantage point to watch the leaders go by. I couldn’t believe how fast these men ran, for nine miles, over rough ground.
Cross Country running could never be described as a glamorous sport, but on that day I was indelibly impressed by how everybody involved in it was so enthusiastic. They all talked in reverential terms about the leaders, but unfailingly encouraged every runner who went past. When they didn’t know their names, they would recognise the colours of their vests and call them by their running clubs. Joining Gateshead Harriers had expanded my sporting horizons so much and so quickly. On the coach journey home I felt infected with the same enthusiasm, although I suspect the little silver medal in my pocket had something to do with it.
Over the next two years I was running for the school with plenty of success, but I was now in the Junior age group for the club. Juniors ran in the Senior men’s road races over six miles and I was well beaten in my first few events. Our Gateshead Harriers team was never able to repeat the success of Blackpool at the Junior National Cross Country, and I finished 37th at Norwich in 1971, and 23rd at Sutton Park the following year.
Saturday, March 4th 1972 at Sutton Park is a day never to be forgotten by anyone who was there. The Youths’ race was run in quite reasonable conditions, but as we started in the Junior race, a cold front came blowing through; the temperature dropped to 33 degrees Fahrenheit; it rained hard and the wind blew. The term ‘wind chill factor’ was never heard then, but it was creating conditions equivalent to well below freezing, and we were running around soaking wet in our vests and shorts. On the part of the course directly into the wind, I had to run with my head down, looking just ahead of me. I knew that my friend, Dennis Coates of Middlesbrough, was about 20 yards in front of me, and I wanted to catch him. With my head down I pushed hard for a hundred yards; I looked up and Dennis was nowhere to be seen. I put my head down and battled on through a stream, which was swelling by the minute. I looked up again and he was there, 15 yards ahead. He had fallen head long into the stream, and been almost submerged when I had glanced up.
The ground was becoming soaked as the rain lashed down, and I fell twice during the last mile. The cold gripped me like a vice at the finish, and my hands were shaking too much to be able to take my racing spikes off my feet. The freezing rain came down throughout the entire nine miles of the Senior race. The stream, which ran through the middle of the course, had been an easy jump for the youths, but took three or four strides to cross by the last lap of the men’s race. At the finish line, I had never seen so many people shaking uncontrollably.
The changing rooms were at the nearest school, but it was over a mile away. People were so cold and so tired they couldn’t walk back. Every passing car was stopped by runners, standing in the road, demanding to be taken to the school. It was the most extraordinary mass hijacking I have ever witnessed. Of course, the one thing everyone longs for, after such an experience, is a hot bath or shower. The school corridors were full of exhausted, semi-naked men looking for the shower room. It soon became apparent that there were no showers, but there were some baths. They were portable tin baths placed outside in a quadrangle, and filled by a fire hose. There were over a thousand dirty runners changing in the school, but nobody used those baths.
I had passed my A levels with appropriate grades by now, and I was in my first year of a Pharmacy degree course at Sunderland Polytechnic. There were about 60 of us in that year group, and being an active sportsman put me clearly in a minority of one. Much to the amusement of some of my fellow students, and a lot of the locals, I was running through the streets and parks of Sunderland every day. It was unusual in those days to see anyone running through the streets, and I would often have cars tooting their horns at me, or pedestrians shouting little gems of wit and repartee along the lines of ‘Get your knees up!’ or ‘Have you missed the bus?’ Depending on my mood I would either ignore them, or simply indicate that I had two miles left to run.
I ran on the track for Gateshead Harriers that summer and ran around 4 minutes 6 seconds for the mile on a few occasions. I was running well enough, but I was competing with the men now, and it was very hard to win anything. During my last year at school I had run 42 races and won 19 of them. In the next two years I ran 62 races, but won only nine times. Runners who have enjoyed success at school often find the transition to senior level difficult, especially with the additional distractions of student life. I certainly preferred winning to losing, but because I was only a short drive away from Gateshead, I was able to thrive on the enthusiasm and attitudes of every one at the club each Tuesday night. I was frequently told how it takes time to become a good senior runner, and I was happy to accept it.
General enthusiasm wasn’t the only influence on me. I was regularly training with John Caine, a track and cross country international; Bill Robinson, a cross country international; and Brendan Foster, who by now had bronze medals from both the Commonwealth Games and European Championships at 1,500 metres. Young runners often regard international athletes as creatures from a superior species, who possess powers and talents that are denied to ordinary mortals. I may have thought the same way if I hadn’t mingled with them on a weekly basis, but because I ran with them so regularly, I rather naively adopted a different attitude. My club-mates were going away to run in major championships, so I assumed that this was the natural thing to do. Thanks to their achievements, I quietly, almost sub-consciously, adopted very high expectations for myself. These expectations took a very long time to fulfil, but they were definitely formed in my early days at Gateshead Harriers, thanks to the presence of people like Brendan Foster.
Although that environment helped me a lot, I often found it daunting to train with Brendan. Apart from being a better runner than me, he also had far more self confidence than I did. Over the next few years I learnt some of his techniques. When I was about to run some big race and felt concerned about how many good runners I was up against, he would say that I could dismiss half of them, because half of them would beat themselves with nerves; that would only leave half and surely I could beat half of them. Once, when he wasn’t very fit but was about to run a big event, we asked what he was going to do. He replied that he would have to ‘borrow one.’ When asked to explain, he said it was like going to the bank for a loan; he would have to win the race and then do the training afterwards.
Brendan made the team for his third major championship in three years, when he was selected for the Munich Olympics. I usually watch the Olympic Games on television, (because, as Eddie Izzard said, they have never held them outside my bedroom window), but in 1972 I drove to Germany with Steve Walker to watch the ultimate athletics event. Steve was a long-haired, scruffy, beer drinking, music loving runner from Middlesborough, so, apart from our football allegiances, we had a great deal in common. Unfortunately, one thing we didn’t have in common was a driving license, so I had to drive the 1,500 miles there and the 1,500 miles back again. There were no hotel rooms to be had in Munich, and the nearest accommodation we could find was in a little Bavarian village 45 minutes drive from the stadium. My car was a brown and beige Riley Kestrel, and it struggled with the intense heat on the German autobahns. On the warmest days, we had to drive with the heater on full blast to take heat away from the engine, to prevent it from boiling over.
We had tickets for every session of the athletics, and we sat through every round of every event. We really lapped it up, if that’s not too bad a pun to use. I had presumed that people sitting in the Olympic Stadium would all be track and field fans, but I was quickly proved wrong. Just before the first heat of the first event, an American sitting in front of us turned to me and asked, ‘Hey Bud, which way round do they go?’
I particularly remember seeing Brendan Foster finish 5th in the 1,500 metres when Kip Keino of Kenya was surprisingly beaten by Vasala of Finland; and how Keino won the 3,000 metre steeplechase when he wasn’t expected to. I remember David Bedford trying to win the 10,000 metres with aggressive front running, and how Finland’s Lasse Viren won that race, even though he was tripped and fell at half way. I was impressed by how smooth Frank Shorter looked when he ran into the stadium to win the marathon, and even more impressed by Viren, who completed an incredible double when he won the 5,000 metres.
Mary Peters won Britain’s only athletics gold medal in the pentathlon, but Foster was 5th in the 1,500 metres, and Ian Stewart, who I had watched win the Commonwealth Games, was 3rd in the 5,000 metres. Bedford was 6th in 10,000 metres and Ron Hill was also 6th in the marathon. We didn’t have any distance running world-beaters, but we did have world-class runners at all the distance events. As I watched all this drama unfold, I privately wondered if I would ever emulate any of these heroes.
During the long drive home, I committed myself to moving my running career forward. I was determined to train more consistently, and to achieve higher levels of performance. As my second year at Sunderland polytechnic began, I was into my winter training, and feeling very committed. There was no college running club, but the student’s union was very helpful to any individuals who wanted to compete in external polytechnic events. I entered the British Polytechnic Cross Country Championships as Sunderland’s only representative, and trained hard for it, believing that I had an excellent chance of winning. A British Championship of any sort was exactly the step forward I wanted to make.
The race was in Liverpool on the third Sunday of January, and to make sure I was fully rested and could run my best, I drove there the day before. I booked into a hotel and looked forward to a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately, the heating wasn’t working, and it was an incredibly cold night. There were no spare blankets in my room and I just couldn’t get to sleep. I eventually warmed up after taking the curtains down from the window and using them as blankets. Undeterred by a restless night, I had a good breakfast and wandered around Liverpool to while away the morning. Giving myself plenty of time, I set off for the course with determination and high hopes. I had a map of the location, sent by the organisers, who, from the pre-race information, seemed to have everything under control. I was a little surprised that the streets were so quiet as I approached, and even more surprised to see nobody at all on the course, except a farmer in his tractor ploughing the land precisely where my map said ‘Start’.
I checked my information again. I checked the date, and I checked the name of the road. This was definitely the right day, time and place, but there again, quite definitely it wasn’t. After scratching my head for a while, I had no alternative but to get back in my car and drive the three and half hours home, having been to Liverpool for the joy of shivering all night under a pile of curtains. I bumped into the secretary of the Student Union the following day.
‘Did you get my message?’ he asked.
‘What message was that?’ I said.
‘The one about them changing the race to Saturday.’
All my training, however, was not in vain. I was driving to Gateshead every Tuesday night to run a gruelling ten miler with the club’s best runners. All through the winter of 1972–73 we discussed the same thing on those Tuesday runs, and we all made a commitment to aim for the National Cross Country team title. The club had never won a national title, but we believed we had a team that might just do it, and every week, as we hammered round the dark streets, we talked about how we were good enough.
Bill Robinson, John Caine and Brendan Foster were all established internationals. Lindsay Dunn was a 4:06 miler and winner of plenty of local road races. John Trainor was a former Northern Counties Boys’ Champion and Peter Parker was the club captain. I was now old enough to run in the senior race, and hoped I could handle nine miles of country at my first attempt.
The race was in London, at Parliament Hill Fields on the edge of Hampstead Heath. We had to run three laps of three miles each. I had seen the start of a senior ‘National’ for the first time three years earlier at Blackpool, and I had been impressed with it. I now realised that it was considerably more impressive, or frightening, when I was in the middle of it. The first four hundred yards were uphill, but that didn’t deter anyone from setting off as if it was a mile race. I knew I had to start fast, and got carried along by the surge and momentum of people around me.
We had all worked hard for this race, and I wasn’t going to let anyone down. I wanted to be part of a winning team, so I raced round the first lap as fast as I could. There were always plenty of spectators counting the runners, and shouting out the places, as we went past. I was 33rd going into the second lap, and Stan Long was urging me on because we were just leading the team race.
My efforts on the first circuit were now taking their toll. I was breathing hard, and my legs were aching. It was a hilly course, and on every climb a couple of runners would come past me. I was struggling, but I had to keep plugging away. I knew I was losing places but I seemed unable to do anything about it. At the end of the second lap I had slipped to 47th, and Stan was urging me on because the team was in second place.
With one lap to go I made up my mind that nobody else was going to pass me, but ten yards later a runner came up beside me. It was John Caine, who had started more slowly, but was now working his way through. He urged me to work together with him. I stuck to him and we passed one and then another. Suddenly, I was feeling better; I was still tired and working hard, but we were moving through, and nobody was passing us. It was easier to push myself on with John as my pacemaker.
The race was won by New Zealander Rod Dixon, who had won a bronze medal at Munich the year before. More importantly for us, Bill Robinson finished 6th and Brendan Foster was 12th to give the team a terrific start. With half a mile to go, John pressed on harder than I could manage and he finished 34th as I hung on for 36th. Four of our six counters had now finished, but more than sixty runners crossed the line behind me without the sight of a red and white Gateshead vest. Bolton Harriers were our biggest rivals and by now they had six runners home.
With about a mile to go, Peter Parker was our next runner, followed closely by John Trainor. Lindsay Dunn was out of any medals we might win because he was seventh counter. They were all pushing hard for the finish, and they all knew there were two possible medals for the three of them. John passed Peter. Lindsay knew he would miss out unless he could move up. They were all passing other runners, but it was beating each other that motivated them. Lindsay took Peter with half a mile to go. John finished 107th, and with Lindsay in 109th place, we had a team total of 304 points. It took ages to confirm Bolton’s score, but their positions added up to 310, and we had won the National Cross Country Team Title by six points.
The trophy is a very old, very large, and very beautiful silver cup. It may not be as famous as the FA Cup, but the champagne we drank out of it on the train from Kings Cross to Newcastle could not have tasted better. We had dreamt about winning this title for a long time; we had worked together through a lot of dark, cold winter nights; and even though running is such an individual sport, we had truly become a team for this event. We had shared the commitment, and the training, and it was a wonderful feeling to share the victory, and the pints of champagne, with everybody from the club on that journey home. In fact, we shared it with everybody in that railway carriage whether they were from Gateshead Harriers or not.