Running history recalled

THE Geelong Cross Country Club will celebrate its rich history on Sunday, July 21, at a Legends Morning.

Founding members and other legends of the club, which is entering its 49th season, will be honoured at a presentation following the 10km Pro Feet Podiatry run at 9am.

Dale Jennings, 81, is one of the founding members and still runs today.

He says the event is fantastic for the veteran members.

“It’s important to the older guys because it brings them back,” Jennings said.

“Some of them are living for quite a while — probably because they got regular exercise, stopped smoking and stayed out of the pub.”

The running group started as a way for Addy journalists to get fit and socialise on a weekend and has grown from 14 members to “close to a couple of hundred”.

Jennings said his former colleague John Craven was the brains behind the idea in 1971.

“We couldn’t find anywhere else to get together and have a run except Sunday morning, so it started off as a Sunday morning run and remains so,” he said.

“John was one of our journos and was working in Tassie, and he came back to Geelong and said, ‘We’re all getting too fat’, which we were.

“We were going to the pub next door. So he said, ‘Let’s go running’. We had to start work at 2pm on a Sunday in those days and do all the weekend sporting reports, so we met at 10am and away it went.”

Jennings believes the club is stronger than it has ever been and is looking forward to its 50th anniversary next year.

The July 21 run will start at the Belmont Park Pavilion, under the James Harrison Bridge.