Bruce Tulloh
Gold-medal winning barefoot athlete who ran the 2,876 miles from Los Angeles to New York
BRUCE TULLOH, who has died aged 82, was a long-distance runner best known for winning gold over 5,000m in the 1962 European Championships – a feat that he accomplished barefoot, in only 14mins 0.6 secs. One of the earliest advocates of barefoot running, Tulloh had honed his technique on the grass tracks of Devon and the beach at Instow, where the soft ground made shoes unnecessary. In 1961 he agreed to be the guinea pig of Dr Griffith Pugh, a pioneer of exercise physiology and scientific adviser to the British mountaineering team which climbed Everest in 1953.
To test the theory that barefoot running is a more efficient form of exercise, Pugh collected breath samples from Tulloh after the runner had completed a mile both with and without shoes. “We found that running in bare feet was at least 1 per cent more efficient, in terms of oxygen cost, than running in lightweight shoes,” Tulloh reported.
Another advantage to the technique was that it allowed Tulloh to accelerate more quickly, giving him an edge over his competitors as he approached the finish line. It was this that sealed his victory in the 1962 championships, as he pulled away with only 700m to go, beating the Russian favourite Pyotr Bolotnikov to the title.
Though Tulloh’s small, thin frame might have looked unprepossessing to rivals, his performance on the track made him a crowd favourite. In 1962 he was the fastest British athlete over one, two, three and six miles, and ran his first and only sub four-minute mile that same year.
In 1969, contemplating retirement from professional athletics, he decided to run from Los Angeles to New York – a distance of 2,876 miles. Accompanied by his wife Sue and their seven-year-old son, who went ahead each day in a car with a caravan, Tulloh finished the course in a new record time of 64 days and 22 hours. On this occasion he chose to wear shoes, and at one stage was in so much pain that he could only walk with the aid of ankle boots and a stick. “Forrest Gump got the credit for it,” he later told reporters. “I only did it once. He did it two and a half times.”
Michael Swinton Tulloh, known as Bruce, was born on September 29 1935 at Datchet, Berkshire, into a family of keen athletes. His mother Margaret (née Branfoot) was a botanist and accomplished runner in her youth, and his grandfather had been an international tennis player. His father Tony, an Army captain, died in South America soon after the war, leaving Margaret to bring up her two sons and support herself by working variously as housekeeper, companion and matron.
At Wellington College, Bruce was an enthusiastic cross-country runner, preferring it to cricket because, by his own admission, he “couldn’t see a cricket ball to hit it”. He took up running in earnest while on National Service in Hong Kong and won the 5,000m championships there.
Back in England, Tulloh studied Botany at the University of Southampton followed by a postgraduate degree in Agricultural Science at Cambridge. It was at university that he decided to ditch his running shoes when competing on a cinder track. Thanks to years of practice over softer ground, the soles of his feet were unharmed – though other athletes’ spikes could be a hazard. He ran barefoot to claim his first Amateur Athletics Association title in 1959 and went on to represent Britain at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. But he struggled to cope in the city’s heat and humidity and came home empty-handed.
A second Olympic bid was stymied when he caught measles, and he elected to stay away from the 1968 games in Mexico City claiming that the local athletes enjoyed an unfair advantage by being able to train at high altitudes. He subsequently switched to running marathon distances.
When not competing, Tulloh pursued a wide variety of interests. In 1971 he went for a two-year teaching job to Kenya, where he gave lessons to the athlete Mike Boit, helping him to a bronze medal in the 1972 Munich Olympics. For many years he taught biology and coached young athletes at Marlborough College. Under his tutelage his twin daughters both won English schools titles on the track.
Of the British professionals, perhaps Tulloh’s most famous trainee was Richard Nerurkar, a colleague at Marlborough who went on to become national cross-country champion and to win the 1993 World Cup Marathon in San Sebastián.
Tulloh’s books included Running is Easy (1996) and Running Over Forty (2001). In 2015 he published How to Avoid Dying ( for as long as possible), a heartfelt and witty guide to later-life fitness, to mark his own 80th birthday.
Bruce Tulloh married Sue Baker in 1961. She and their three children survive him.
Bruce Tulloh, born September 29 1935, died April 28 2018