Running For Their Lives – Mark Whitaker

In this dual biography Mark Whitaker relates the lives of Arthur Newton and Peter Gavuzzi; names not as well-known as maybe they deserve to be given their incredible achievements as long distance runners.

Arthur Newton was born in Britain but settled in Natal, trying to make his fortune farming, but having invested time and money improving the land he fell foul of the South African government’s plans to separate farmland into racial divides. His land was in the wrong place, became worthless and the compensation offered derisory. He hit upon a novel idea to publicise his grievance – become famous; the means to fame would be as a runner and the competition he targeted was the 54 mile Comrades (double) Marathon from Durban to Maritzburg.

He worked out his own training regime and running strategy, and despite starting the race as a thirty-nine year old unknown, won it by a clear half hour. This and other successes did little to move forward the farm dispute, and even taking his campaign back to Britain to set a new world record for 50 miles, was to no avail. Back in Natal he gave up the battle and, penniless, walked to Rhodesia. There he got back on the road and broke the 100 mile record, beating a relay team of four athletes.

His farm gone and his days as a top class runner numbered (he was by now 45) he had little choice but to make a move from amateur to professional and entered a bizarre race set up by American impresario CC Pyle. The course across the USA from Los Angeles to New York had athletes running an average 40 miles a day for eighty-four days. Amazingly there were 199 entrants for the ‘Transcontinental’.

Among them was Peter Gavuzzi, until then a steward on a Cunard liner who maintained his fitness by running laps of the deck. Lured by the prize money he, along with the others set off over mountains, through deserts, as much part of a travelling circus as a race. Running together, hours ahead of most, they formed an unlikely friendship – Newton older, middle class, articulate, Gavuzzi young, working class and deferential – sharing a love of running and the necessary embracement of solitude that few others understood.

Professional running, particularly road running, was not a commercial success, depending on novelty as much as performance – Newton & Gavuzzi raced in six day snowshoe marathons and against horses – so when both eventually retired it could have been to obscurity. Yet both men’s later lives contained incident of note.

Gavuzzi was caught on the wrong side of the English Channel when Nazi Germany invaded France, and spent years as a prisoner of war. Newton’s war was a longer and personal one against the athletics establishment. He was convinced his unconventional training theories would benefit British runners but he was barred from engaging with them (officially at least) due to his ‘professional status’.

Newton and Gavuzzi (happily returned from France) got belated recognition in the post-war years as interest in athletics increased in the publicity spotlight of a burgeoning Olympic movement and the race for the four minute mile. But that same Olympic movement, by capping their distance races at a mere 26 miles also rendered Newton’s records at 50 and 100 miles obsolete, and the likes of him and Gavuzzi to relative obscurity.

So the book does a great service in retelling the story. Its tangential departures into early South African politics, American sporting showmanship, Second World War internment, and the amateur versus professional Olympic controversy adds context and depth to the world these two, otherwise unexceptional, men found themselves living through.