Mike Toal, a world-class 800 man in Britain, has begun work on a masters track Web site focusing on UK masters news and issues. It’s a bit skimpy now, but he’s already posted a Forum, poll and a bunch of section pages. I wrote Mike, 36, to encourage him to challenge authority and cover issues not dealt with by the official BMAF Web site, and he replied: “As I’m a new boy on the block in terms of my involvement with Masters Athletics, I am relying on the more ‘forthright’ members of UK Masters to tell it how it is — and tell me how the website should be, but I’m sure that will come in bucketloads! Hopefully in the coming weeks and months I’ll be able to push it the right direction and get it to where everyone wants it to be.”

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This afternoon in a small town south of San Francisco, the 2007 U.S. track season draws to a close. Los Gatos High School, site of a Western Regional Masters Championships about 10 years ago, will host an “All-Comer Distance Meet and Special Event Meet” with an entry fee of $5 per athlete. Such a deal. Events are the 100, 800, 1500, mile, 3000 and pole vault. “(Some) high school runners, open and masters are welcome to compete,” says one blurb. How do I know about this meet? It’s in the USATF event calendar. Several years ago, my co-webmaster, Dave Clingan, discovered that it didn’t make sense to create a USA meet calendar from scratch when we could just link to USATF’s comprehensive database of masters meets.

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Deep in the bowels of the USATF Web site is information on how to enter the 2008 World Masters Athletics Indoor Championships in Clermont, France. Cool. You also get to fill out an entry form good for speakers of English, French and German. Riccione team manager Phil Greenwald apparently will reprise that role in France, since’s he’s listed as the contact honcho. We also learn the key deadlines: “The on-time entry deadline for submitting entries is January 4, 2008. All entry forms must be received by the USA Track & Field national office by this date to be considered on-time and not incur the late fee.The late entry deadline is January 25, 2008 . . . . Absolutely no entries will be accepted after January 25!” OK, got that!

World-class thrower Arthur Grayburn, a New Zealand masters pioneer and historian, has died at age 80 after suffering a stroke, according to this press account. The obituary (reproduced below) makes reference to the “1994 World Masters Association Games.” This isn’t the WAVA/WMA world masters championships (held in odd-numbered years) but instead is the event more properly known as the World Masters Games. The 1994 event was held in Brisbane. Arthur competed as recently as March 2006, when he won the M75 discus, shot and hammer at the New Zealand masters nationals. I regret that I never had a chance to meet Arthur or read his history of masters track Down Under.

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In major league baseball, you’re considered a legend when you’ve reached career 3,000 hits. So it’s with great awe and admiration that I salute the readers of this blog — who have combined to post 3,000 comments on this here board. Christel Donley of Colorado, talking about South Dakota’s anemic masters circuit, posted the 3,000th comment yesterday. In truth, probably 8,000 comments have been submitted, but the extras were spam (which I’ve deleted).

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My M50 hurdler friend David Ortman in Seattle is semi-nostalgic for his high school track days in South Dakota. But he’s also aware that South Dakota is “a USATF masters wasteland.” He writes: ” I don’t believe they have a sanctioned masters meet in the state. So they are left with the South Dakota and other local city Senior Games. So anytime a local South Dakota athlete makes it to a national meet (even if it is the National Senior Games), it’s a big deal.”

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When I competed at the 1999 world masters meet in northeast England, I was interviewed by an Athletics Weekly columnist. When the piece was published, I was shocked to see myself quoted in strange ways. The weirdest thing I “uttered” was: “What really gets up my nose….” So I have an appreciation for bizarre UK idioms. A new one appears in this profile of M60 Riccione entrant Earl Taylor, who is quoted as saying: “I must admit I was knackered after the two days, but it wasn’t bad for an old codger who hadn’t seen action for more than four decades.” Doncha love it?

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My knee is beautiful, the nurse said. Walking on crutches extensively for the first time since Tuesday’s ACL surgery, I made my way yesterday to Kaiser Zion hospital — where nearly 19 years earlier I saw my son born.Yesterday, when nurse Eileen took off my old bandages, I had my first glimpse of my reborn left knee. Happily, there was little swelling. She gave me a rehab routine for the first week. These include range-of-motion exercises — a welcome chance to remove my long, Velcro-laden leg brace. After X-rays were taken, I learned from another nurse that my surgeon, Dr. Donald Fithian, had just been included in San Diego magazine’s list of “Top Docs.”

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Dan Goldman writes for a Boston-area paper called the Enterprise. In September, he wrote about W70 thrower Mary Riley. In about 30 words, he managed to hit every masters cliche in the book. He began: “Mary Riley may be a grandmother of 10 and a great-grandmother of seven, but she is not spending her senior years toiling in the garden or baking in her kitchen.” Such amazement is common in mainstream news articles, but it’s still dumb and insulting. At least she wasn’t set in “her rocker, knitting afghans in her golden years.”

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Thank God for Slovenia. If not for this central European nation, Merlene Ottey’s latest Olympic hopes would be moot. Apparently, she’s still a superstar on that country’s tracks. But would she still be good to go for Beijing at age 48? If not, we’d still have other “supervets” to cheer for. One might be Russia’s Irina Privalova, who is focusing on an Olympic sprint comeback at age 39. But sad news: M35 superstar Allen Johnson may retire from the hurdle wars after 2008.

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