The Godfather: Peter Corris on running
Fred Hollows started me running. At a party he poked my soft belly and told me I’d be dead before my time unless I lost weight and got fit. I felt mortified and challenged.
I’d never been much of a runner – not particularly quick over the sprints and with no endurance for distance events. At Melbourne High School there was an annual, compulsory, cross-country run of about four miles. Like many others I jogged the first mile or so and was content to walk to rest of the way. At school and in the years after, I played tennis, which only involved running in short bursts and apart from dashing for a train, I wouldn’t have run more than 50 metres for years.
A week after hearing Fred’s strictures I dug out a pair of tennis shoes, put on some shorts and tried to go for a run. We were living in Glebe down near Jubilee Park (not then the sculpted showpiece it is now) and a football ground. I set off around the oval and found that I couldn’t complete a single lap without pausing for breath.
Over the next few months I became serious about running. I read Jim Fixx’s best-seller The Complete Book of Running (1977), bought a pair of light Adidas running shoes, some shorts and singlets and worked at building up my endurance. I decided that circuiting an oval was boring and began running around the parks and streets on different surfaces and seeing different things. I was working at the National Times and took my running gear in to work and ran around Wentworth Park at lunchtime.
We moved to Coledale on the south coast, which was a runner’s dream. I ran south a mile and a half to Austinmer, where I swam before running back. I varied this with a run north, perhaps a little further, uphill to Scarborough and enjoyed the downslope on the way back.
I admit I became obsessive and to an extent puritanical about running. To the worry of my family I occasionally underestimated the effect on my sugar level and suffered distressing hypoglycaemic episodes.
A high point at this time was a visit to Melbourne to interview four-minute miler and Olympian Merv Lincoln, then a lecturer at Melbourne University. Lincoln had finished second to Herb Elliott in many races, had never beaten him but had once been awarded the same time.
After the interview, I went running with Lincoln – two laps of the university’s cinder track and then for a few miles through the adjacent parkland. Obviously, though long retired, he could have run me off my feet but he didn’t and we enjoyed a companionable run that was photographed for the paper. The photo of me, whippet-thin, apparently keeping pace with a champion, is one of my proudest possessions.
I never had great endurance. One day in Coledale I paced out the perimeter of the soccer ground and calculated that five circuits would make a mile. Just jogging, I determined to see how far I could go. I was joined by Jim, our splendid kelpie/border collie cross, for the first few laps before he went to sit under a tree. I did 40 laps, eight miles, and that was the furthest I ever ran – not even a half marathon.
In the 1980s I went overseas several times. I ran in Paris, Madrid and New York and would have in Rome except that I couldn’t find a space. I ran on a beach in Morocco.
Approaching 50, I was still running but less often and with diminished enthusiasm. It hadn’t got harder and I hadn’t had any injuries, but I became tired of the routine. I stopped running and took up golf. Despite Mark Twain, an 18-hole golf course is a good walk. It was far less aerobic but much more fun.
