Former smoker who helped inspire jogging craze
Gjournalist b December 24, 1925 d June 25, 2020
arth Gilmour, who has died aged 94, was an author and journalist who charted a glorious period in New Zealand athletics and helped inspire the jogging craze in a series of books about running.
A sports journalist for many years, Gilmour will mostly be remembered for his 22 books about running and his collaboration with the jogging legend Arthur Lydiard.
It was only a chance meeting that brought them together, but for Gilmour it was life-changing. Not only was it the beginning of a long friendship and a bookwriting career, but it saved his life.
‘‘If I hadn’t met Arthur, I would probably be dead,’’ the journalist was often heard to say. ‘‘I threw the cigarettes away and never smoked again.’’
Recreational runners weren’t the norm in 1962 when Lydiard encouraged a group of 30 unfit, overweight businessmen into jogging in Auckland’s Cornwall Park.
The Auckland Joggers Club grew out of this exercise. The same group was responsible for setting up the Round the Bays charity run. It was the subject of Gilmour’s book Running for Our Lives, published on the 50th anniversary of the club, in 2012.
Gilmour was very much a part of the movement. He gave up smoking and drinking and went on to run five marathons.
He and Lydiard wrote more than a dozen training manuals together, including and books about jogging, many of which went on to be published internationally and translated into several languages, and remain in print today.
Gilmour recalled with some amusement seeing an item in a Soviet giveaway magazine that referred to his two bestsellers – Russian editions of Jogging with Lydiard and
Lydiard. ‘‘I fell about laughing – top selling, lowest paid. I haven’t had a rouble from them yet.’’
He also wrote biographies of Olympic gold medallists Peter Snell and Murray Halberg, paraplegic world champion Eve Rimmer and ultra-marathon runner Sandy Barwick. Snell died in December 2019, and Lydiard almost exactly 15 years earlier.
It was tremendously satisfying telling these great New Zealand athletes’ life stories, and to have them recorded permanently, he said.
After some 20-odd years of trying, Gilmour finally persuaded Arthur Lydiard to write his memoirs. The pair collaborated on the top-selling biography, Arthur Lydiard: Master Coach, published in 2004.
Gilmour always wanted to be a journalist. He had had a plan since the age of 12, as a student at Otago Boys’ High School.
By the age of 15 he had started work with the Otago Daily Times. He moved on to the Taranaki Herald, and after seven years he was off to Auckland, where joined the staff at the
He found the editorial office at the brash and exciting, a noisy, cigarettefilled office, packed with 30 or 40 journalists, tight deadlines and the Occidental pub just up the road. Like Gilmour, many of his new colleagues were from the South Island, so it made for a close-knit mob.
Gilmour became well-known for his rugby reporting during the 1950s. His long-standing column
published in the his personal charm and wit.
Garth is survived by his wife Kay Gilmour, family and by the books he wrote, many of which have become classics in the science of running and training.
Life-long jogger Roger Robinson, a Victoria University English professor, wrote on Facebook after Gilmour’s death: ‘‘Running is a sport for everyone, and yesterday lost a writer who was one of the first to show that truth.’’
He described Gilmour as a ‘‘wellinformed Lydiard disciple. He was there at the beginning, a sports journalist and reformed chain-smoker, leading the slowest of the jogging groups’’.
He said of that first gathering in Cornwall Park: ‘‘Millions now run for the reasons Lydiard sold to those 30 sceptical Kiwis – not to win medals, but to improve their health, extend their life, enjoy meeting a challenge, and learn the simple pleasure of the human body in motion.
‘‘People listened to Lydiard. He was the man who had taken three runners from one obscure suburb of Auckland and turned them into 1960 Olympic medalists.’’ reflected
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