Percy Cerutty

One day my father sat me down and told me he’d booked me into a physical training camp not far from where we lived. I’d heard of Percy Cerutty and sometimes seen a small, gnome-like man with wispy snow-white hair and white whiskers in the dimple on his chin driving slowly through our small seaside village in his big old black Daimler. 

As a young man Percy worked in the Australian post office. He suffered from a weak chest and general malaise. In his forties he started running and he ran himself into good health as an extreme marathon exponent. Now athletes came to Portsea to learn and he began teaching running clinics.

The camp was in the sand dunes near the Portsea back beach. You could hear the mighty Bass Straight waves booming. Great athletes trained here, men who ran in Olympic games and broke world records, and football players from first grade Australian League football clubs.

Percy and his wife Nancy set up their training camp in these scrubby dunes. It was a simple affair - flywire screened dinning room where we crowded together for breakfast eating raw oats, nuts, sliced banana, raisins and honey with hot tea. Afterwards we rested on our bunks till the 11am lecture or  pushed weight around - the hunk of railway steel we’d deadlift.   We’d already been up early for our first work out. 

We ran through the sand dunes and Percy showed us how to stiffen our arms like levers and pistons to accelerate pumping legs in the soft warm sand  climbing the dunes ankle deep pumping brown arms pulling at the air then racing down to the surf flinging off our running shorts and diving into the cold green sea. 

 

On one such morning I remember reaching the top of the final dune, the fresh ocean wind struck my face and I saw the broad yellow beach stretched out wide as two football fields. In the watery haze of foam and spray I detected two horses, two girls riding towards us as we stripped to begin the final dash to the beach. Percy found a great swathe of brown kelp seaweed and draped it over his shiny fish body. He bound towards the girls and the horses reared up and turned and galloped off into the early morning sun and Percy galloping like the horses then returned like King Neptune and plunged into the Pacific.

Sometimes we went to the oval, a large green sea of grass set in a natural amphitheater opposite the one room Portsea State School I’d attended as a first grader circa 1949. Stately pine trees grew along the steep banks of the oval and the long grass was great to slide on; like sliding on snow all the way down the hill to the soft green playing field.

Percy ran like a cat, like an animal and taught us how to stretch from the core to elevate our center of gravity and increase our stride and he stood with his stop-watch as we ran bare foot floating in graceful arcs of movement and symmetry and the world’s greatest running coach watching and teaching.