Ardell Chester “A.C.” Linnerud of North Carolina, who introduced the weight pentathlon to masters track, died Friday, according to a report on the USATF Associations listserve on Yahoo Groups. A.C., who was about 75, helped Bob Boal with the Southeastern Masters Track and Field Championships in his home of Raleigh, N.C., and on April 7, 1974, he added the weight pentathlon to the meet. It became so popular that it now has its own USATF and WMA world championships. (A feast after the meet also became a tradition.) A.C. also helped devise scoring tables for the weight throw (with help from the famed deca-table man, Gary Purdy).

Walter High posted this note on the associations listserve this weekend:
Here is a tribute to A.C. Linnerud I have posted to a North Carolina group of people. I would like everyone to know how great his contributions to our sport have been. Several references within it are to a previous tribute from Jim Young, a local road race manager.
Dear Friends:
It is truly a sad day for the track and field community. A.C. was the embodiment of volunteerism; he gave back to the sport thousands of times over whatever he took from it. His life seemed to be completely centered around our sport; I never heard him say no to working at an event unless it was because he was already committed to working at another one at the same time.
Not only will we miss what he did for us, we will miss his great, jovial personality. A.C. got along with everybody, never had a harsh or mean word about anyone. He was eternally optimistic and good natured; no problem was too great to be resolved with the application of just a little elbow grease.
As Jim Young mentioned, those of us who have known A.C. for many years remember him in his running days. My first convention for USA Track & Field was the Constitutional Convention in 1980 when the sport was split away from the AAU. The meetings were held in Dallas and I was off to my first administrative event for the sport. I was perfectly ammenable when the group of other delegates (Bob Baxter, Jerome Perry, Dick Mochrie, etc.) suggested that I should room with A.C.
If I had looked closely, I would have noticed the smiles hidden behind hands covering fake coughs and I might have heard the quiet snickering. A.C. truly slept the sleep of the just. I have never seen anyone who could fall asleep so quickly. With no exaggeration it is fair to say that he went to sleep within 30 seconds of putting his head to his pillow.
While this never ceased to amaze me (during an entire week of rooming with him), what did amaze me was the incredible volume of his snoring. I suddenly understood why the others were so anxious to make sure the “new guy” got A.C. as a roommate. When I struggled awake in the mornings after spending hours trying to get to sleep, A.C.’s bed would be empty and I could look out the window and see him running lap after lap around the parking lot like clockwork.
I don’t remember how many it was, but he knew exactly how many days in a row he had run without missing, and it was well into the thousands. I believe at future conventions we often sprung to pay for a single room for A.C., unless we could snooker someone else into the roommate swindle!
I too had the opportunity (as many of us probably did) of meeting A.C. at “0 dark thirty, to use Jim’s term, to measure or remeasure a road race course. I can remember crawling along the edge of a street in the dark with a flashlight, trying to help A.C. find a nail he had pounded into the pavement some years earlier as a marker.
Invariably streets had been repaved, curbs installed where they weren’t before, or roads rerouted to some slight degree. All required a remeasurement and a hunt for nails in the pavement. Jim remarked on the Vega as a repository for everything associated with road races and track and field. Well Jim, if you ever visited A.C.’s office at NC State before he retired, everything that didn’t fit into the car was in his office. And that included reams upon reams of printouts.
A.C. was in the Statistics Deparment and he was from the era when everything out of a computer was produced on that lengthy, green and white, pin-fed printer paper. I don’t think A.C. ever threw away a single scrap of paper that he came in contact with. And it was all kept in his office. You could barely get the door open to get inside because of the piles of printouts everywhere.
A.C. was our first President of TAC as the successor to the AAU. Those were interesting times as we worked to govern the sport as it separated from its old roots. A.C. has always been on the Board in some capacity for the 27 years of our existence, but President was probably not the best position for him. A.C. had the patience of Job and was loathe to cut off a discussion before everyone had the opportunity to say their piece. And with Bob Baxter, Jerome Perry, Dick Mochrie, Bob Boal, Alex Almasey, and several others on the Board, there was a lot to be said. Meetings were interminably long, but A.C. never got rattled, never got angry, never lost his patience. He just never cut anyone off.
Over recent years A.C. had to endure the indignities of the the NCUSATF annual meeting where we elected delegates to the national convention. There is no one who has worked harder for our sport, given more of himself, and gone to meetings at national that no one else wanted to attend, and better represented North Carolina.
Yet when we held our annual meeting, most of the people who had votes were showing up for the one and only time that year. They did not know who A.C. was and he often ended up just a couple of votes short of delegate status. A.C. never was bitter or upset by his failure to be elected; he just made plans to be at convention and mapped out his driving route.
Invariably, several of the new enthusiasts who were elected as delegates decided they couldn’t sacrifice an entire work week to attend convention and dropped out. A.C. was always there to pick up the slack and do the necessary work of representing North Carolina.
I don’t know if it still exists, but A.C. Linnerud was the very first inductee into the North Carolina Road Runners Hall of Fame on Sept. 10, 1988. This was established by the RRCA and I think it is significant that this organization chose to honor A.C. as its first inductee rather than a star athlete. A.C. was truly the backbone of road racing in North Carolina over the last two decades of the 20th century.
He is more responsible than any other person for accurate road racing courses and accurate timing becoming a standard. It is out of his work that organizations such as Jim Youngs’ have sprung. We all owe A.C. a huge debt for the success of our sport.
Over time, A.C. gradually lost his mobility, but he never lost his spirit. He accepted gracefully the indignities of aging, kept on with his contributions to the sport in whatever way he could, and never complained about getting older like most of us do. He was invariably cheerful and upbeat. In recent years he would call me in advance of a NCUSATF meeting to make sure I would meet him outside the Law School Building at NCCU and get him up the elevator to the second floor meeting room. He didn’t want to be late and always wanted to participate.
At our meeting last Sunday A.C. was not present and I had meant to ask about him because he almost never misses. But one hurried conversation lead to another and I forgot to check. Now I find that he is gone and I didn’t get to say goodbye. So farewell Ardell Chester Linnerud. An era has passed in North Carolina. Your shoes cannot be filled.
Me again:
According to Len Olson’s “Masters Track & Field: A History,” A.C. Linnerud competed in the inaugural Southeastern U.S. Masters Track and Field Championships in Raleigh, North Carolina, on April 3, 1971. He took third in the M30-39 six-mile run with a 39:07.6 at age 39. He also was third in the three-mile run in 19:52.4. And he put the 16-pound shot 26-3 1/2!
A.C. was co-author of a 1974 study in the Journal of Gerontology entitled “Physiological characteristics of champion American track athletes 40-75 years of age.”
As recently as 2004, A.C. was listed as the Southeastern Masters meet’s media contact.
A tremendous loss for masters track — and the sport in general.