Masters Track News and Muse

In 2003 and 2004, with Dave Clingan retired from his world masters rankings efforts, Ross Dunton of Tennessee took up the challenge. Coach Dunton, an unpaid volunteer for World Masters Athletics, collated some national championship results from Europe, America and Oceania and called it a world performance list. The online rankings were useless, which I pointed out. And now they are worse than useless. They are gone. Dead links.

Gerry Lindgren can run but he can't hide -- from the questions. My videotaped chat with the distance legend at Hawaii masters nationals in August had a gullibly starstruck tone to it. I simply wasn't aware of the more notorious aspects of his personal history. But having been named a track assistant at the University of Hawaii, Lindgren is now subject to serious press scrutiny. And Dave Reardon of the Sun-Bulletin has a fairly substantive report in today's paper.

L'shanah tovah, y'all! Rosh Hashanah started at sundown tonight. It's the High Holy Days for a group that includes my sprinter friends Hillel Katzeff, Marty Krulee and Stephen Robbins. (Also, my straddler friend Jason Meisler.) We make up for our lack of Mark Spitzes and Sandy Koufaxes with a few doctors and scientists here and there. The quadrennial Jewish Olympics (called the Maccabiah Games) held in Israel the year after the Olympics has a few masters events (triathlon and half-marathon, among them) but still no masters track meet. Give us time.

So far, this looks legit. An ultramarathoner named Katy Cotton in Wyoming writes to inform me of a nonprofit charitable group called the International Masters Athletics Foundation that aims to help masters athletes in their athletic endeavors. The group got some local publicity in April 2005.

This past Saturday, the Club West Masters Meet in Santa Barbara was missing its heart. Longtime masters athlete John Whittemore of nearby Montecito was not present. Whittemore, an inspiring presence at the Club West meet over the years, died April 13, 2005, at the age of 105. He died of still-unreported causes at the Mission Terrace nursing home where he lived for a week after being taken to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital a week earlier, reports Beverly Lewis, a close friend of his and senior USATF official.

Think track season is over? Au contraire! Masters know no season, and in both hemispheres, major events featuring track and field events are under way. In St. George, Utah, it's the misnomered Huntsman World Senior Games, where track has been contested since Monday. In Adelaide, the Australian version of the National Senior Olympics began today. They call their event, more suitably, the Australian Masters Games. Both meets attract studs and weekend warriors. And one interesting entrant in Utah is an M100 age-grouper named Russell Clark (see his results below in the 50).

Kip Janvrin, step aside? Olympic champ Dan O'Brien appears to be intrigued by masters competition. (He turns 40 in July 2006.) In a chat with the Portland Tribune the other day, he mentions having been impressed with Willie Gault's showing in a masters 110 hurdles or sprint.

I look for inspiration everywhere. Folks who overcome adversity. Folks who excel through discipline. I especially like learning of folks who were slower than me in my kiddy days but who still kick butt. In the case of architect Jim Chinn of San Marcos, California, that's serious world-title butt. He won the M45 400 in San Sebastian (after failing to make the finals in the 1 and 2), and his 51.96 winning time was just 2 seconds off his all-time open best! I conducted a Ten from Ken email interview with him the other day. The key to his success? He works his butt off.

Don Pellman lives south of San Francisco in Mountain View, California, and if you haven't heard much about him, trust me, you will. Page 4 of the current issue of National Masters News features him with a story headlined "90-year-old breaks seven world records" and a first paragraph that represents something of a break with NMN policy -- sticking its neck out by suggesting a peformance as the best ever.

Mavis Hutchison, 80, is known as the "Galloping Granny" down south -- down in South Africa, that is. A former resident of Durban, site of the 1997 World Masters Athletics Championships, Mavis knows how to play the press. Today's news from the South African Broadcasting Corp. (SABCnews) quotes Mavis as saying: We have to have goals when you get to my age. You don't grow old; when you stop growing, you are old. I don't want to stop growing yet."

Below is a screenshot of the WMA Web site. We've just had a World Masters Athletics Championships, so you might expect some image of skill, speed or strength. But instead of highlighting any of the 6,033 entrants at the San Sebastian world meet, what's chosen to illustrate our sport? The WMA Council. That's weak, son.

Today's episode of Dear Abby deals with masters sports, and it's more evidence that some doctors practice CYA (cover your butt) more than medicine. The latest incarnation of the syndicated advice columnist gets a question from a W55 triathlete.

Here's a switch: Former world-class sprinter Tania Murphy of Australia competed in her country's version of the National Senior Olympics as a tuneup for a run at a spot on her nation's Commonwealth Games team. According to an article in today's Herald Sun, Tania (better known by her maiden name Van Heer) hopes to make the Aussie team as a 400-meter dasher. At the 10th Australian Masters Games (open to 30 and over, it appears), Tania won her race in 57.76.

TJ is Tom Jordan, the just-retired executive vice president of World Masters Athletics. He's also, with Barbara Kousky, the track majordomo in Oregon. And he'll be majorly involved in helping the Oregon Track Club host the 2008 Olympic Trials at Hayward Field at the University of Oregon, site of three previous Trials and also the 2000 and 2003 USATF national masters championships.

When saints are declared in masters track, meet directors go to the head of the line. They do the dirty work, usually unpaid, that gives the rest of us a chance to have fun and stay fit. My Saint Du Jour is Seth Brower of Texas, an M45 sprinter/hurdler/jumper who puts on throws competitions at the drop of a hat (or hammer).

Forgive my going off-topic, but this news transcends track: Last night in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, an 80-year-old man and a 76-year-old woman were official finishers of the world's toughest triathlon -- the Ironman Granddaddy of them all. The Associated Press reported: "Robert McKeague, of Villa Park, Ill., became the oldest finisher in the history of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship on Saturday, when at 80 he completed the 140.6-mile odyssey in 16 hours, 21 minutes, 55 seconds. Jim Ward was the previous oldest competitor, at 77, in the 1994 race."

Forget Ironman. That's for wimps in Speedos. Try a DD -- a double decathlon. A couple weekends ago, 34 certifiably insane track athletes gathered in Lynchburg, Virginia, for the World Double Decathlon Championships. Twenty-eight finished the two-day, 20-event grind, which included 5K, 10K, 400 hurdles and all the throws, jumps and sprints. That included 13 of 14 old folks. Masters can be especially proud of DD honcho Brant Tolsma. I'll let M50 winner Rob Duncanson tell why.

On August 30, 2005, delegates from 61 WMA member nations gathered in San Sebastian to give up, down and sideways votes to 26 proposals (rules changes, Constitution amendments and the like). Detailed results of these votes have only now begun trickling out -- seven weeks later. Sigh. National Masters News in its October edition summarized the votes but didn't give the complete context (for lack of space).

Don Pellmann has a passion for competition, as I noted here recently. But even the best masters reach a point where it's time to quit. So it is with Pellmann, who at 90 might be considered the best athlete of his age group ever. I interviewed him via email several times over the past week, and he says: "I feel it is time to 'Hang them up!' "

This week brought the intriguing news that Sylvester Stallone, 59, is planning to make a sixth "Rocky" movie, in which Rocky Balboa, at age 60, makes a boxing comeback against the world heavyweight champion. Cool. Stallone sez: "I am drawing on a lot of my feelings that are in synch with many people's feelings about facing the last chapter of their lives and how they want it to be written. Rocky goes through the skepticism of trying to go against the tide, to go against common sense."

And I mean that in a nice way -- now that his sons have provided photographic proof of Don's heroics at September's Rocky Mountain Masters Games, where he set M90 world records in seven events. No doubt, also, that Don refuses to act his age. In e-mail correspondence, he signs off as "Old Don in Calif." Well, he could show the young bucks a thing or two about computer literacy as well. Don's not old as long as he acts like a kid. My updated interview with Young Don is up now as well.

In case you haven't noticed, old is in. Geriatric studies and articles on aging are flooding the technical journals and news racks. Latest evidence of this trend is the new issue of National Geographic. The November 2005 issue has a cover story on "the secrets of longevity."

Poor Trigger. I'm about to beat him again. The Masters section of the USATF Web site is a snooze, a shame and sickly out of date, especially in comparison to the USATF Youth Athletics area. And even if a dead horse has to be abused, I'll ride this hobby horse until someone takes notice and action.

If you ever get depressed at the backward state of masters track, push the forward button to USA Masters Swimming. These folks have their shinola together. Of course, they have demographic advantage, since masters swimming starts at age 25 (or 19, depending on the source). But they still go into their 90s, and their rules are athlete-centric. I've been singing their praises for ages.

In December 1991, a 39-year-old Montana State graduate student named Russell Jacquet LaMar Acea submitted a master's thesis titled "A Profile of the Masters Track & Field Athlete." It was reprinted in National Masters News in the early 1990s, and then pretty much forgotten. In 2003. Russ shared some old 5 1/4-inch floppy disks containing the thesis. Today, after a long delay (mostly my fault, some of it technical), I posted it. See it here as a PDF document.

M50 stud (when he's not hobbled) Dave Ortman of Seattle has renewed his call for a grass-roots network of event rankers -- people who would comb the available printed and Web resources to compile seasonal lists of the world's best age-group performances in the various events. He makes this call, of course, because World Masters Athletics has bonked in this respect -- chosen either not to do it or to pawn the job off on a volunteer. But in Britain, it's being done bloody well in several events.

If Rod Milburn were still alive, he'd be 55. He wasn't into masters track, but some of his contemporaries are. And a few may still be fully engaged in the hurdling wars. Reason I ask about your contact with him is that he's the subject of research by a 39-year-old track coach and newspaper columnist named Steve McGill. who is living proof of what I learned from a Life magazine quote in the mid-1970s: "Hurdling is good training for a writer." (I really did see --and save -- that quote!)

The decathlon's 10 events have been set in stone for nearly a century, with the order of events committed to a million memories: 100, long jump, shot put, high jump and 400 on Day 1, then 110 hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and 1500 on Day 2. But come 2006, you may have to reboot your memory. At the Nov.-December 2005 national meeting of USATF, one of many rules proposals calls for a completely new order for the field events when it comes to the new women's deca. (The 100 and hurdles remain where they are, as do the 400 and 1500.)

All-star masters club teams -- involving distance runners from widely varied areas of the country -- have been common in recent years, especially at the national masters cross country championships. For example, M40 winner Brian Pope of Mississippi ran for SoCal Track Club at the 2004 club event in Portland, Oregon. So Masters LDR Chairman Norm Green is hoping to tighten the rules a bit. Item No. 49 on the USATF bylaws agenda (proposals for the annual meeting in December) addresses this issue.

'RATC' is the masters track documentary "Racing Against the Clock," which after a limited theatrical distribution is now out on DVD. And the Boston Globe is the hometown paper of the filmmaker. Finally, the Globe is giving this movie some pop. In a Sports section DVD review, Susan Bickelhaupt recounts the history of the film and writes: "At the risk of cliche, the movie is inspirational to anyone who fears it's too late to start being athletic."

March 15 kicks off the five-day 2006 World Masters Indoor Championships in Linz, Austria, and information is filtering out on how Americans can sign up. First, visit the new USATF page on the meet. The U.S. entry form is posted here. But Phil Raschker -- a native of neighboring Germany -- shares something called a USA Supplemental Entry Form. You'll need to review that as well. (It reads like a waiver to fight in the U.S. military.)