Freddy: A Column By Len Johnson

With these words, or something like them, Fred Lester, who died this week aged 87, summoned runners up to the starting line for countless races. He would follow with the race instructions, usually including the advice to “tell the finish recorders your first name, surname, age and whether you are male or female, in case they cannot tell.”

For almost 30 years, Fred was the face of the Victorian Marathon Club, the club started by Percy Cerutty, Les Perry and others to foster distance running in Victoria, nominally, but across Australia by example.

Many of the things succeeding generations of runners take for granted _ including basics such as starting races in evening cool rather than blazing midday heat, accurate courses, participation for women in distance races _ were fought for and attained by the VMC.

Fred Lester was born in Germany in 1923 and arrived in Australia as a refugee in 1939. He joined the Australian Army and fought in WW II, which was probably as good a grounding as anything for the many battles he fought for distance running. He was secretary of the VMC for an almost unbroken 30 years from 1961 to 1972 and then 1975 to the club’s winding up in 1990.

He was secretary, when the club decided to stage an annual 10,000 metres track race named for Emil Zatopek, and when Ron Clarke graced the third edition of the race in 1963 with world records for six miles and 10,000 metres.

Fred was a runner himself, a marathoner with a best time of two hours 34 minutes 20 seconds at a time when sub-2:40 was not fashionable. In researching The Landy Era, I came across the tale of how he was the training partner and mate of Dave Stephens who encouraged Dave to have a crack at Emil Zatopek’s world record for six miles at Olympic Park in Melbourne on 25 January, 1956.

Stephens broke the record, despite cold and windy conditions, and told The Age’s Bruce Welch how Fred had written him out a schedule for 28 minutes. Lester must have been a good judge of form _ Stephen’s ran 27:54.0 to take four seconds off the record and there’s little doubt he would have got the record for 10,000 metres had he gone the extra 376 yards.

Hundreds more runners came to appreciate such attention to detail.

As a European by birth, Fred probably had an appreciation of opera. The phrase prima donna (Italian for first, or leading lady), has mostly come to be used in its subsidiary sense, that of an egotistical, capricious and demanding person, rather than its original sense of the leading female singer _ ‘the star’, in other words.

For Fred and the VMC, the runner was the star _ not just the world record breaker like Dave Stephens or Ron Clarke, but every runner. The practical application of this attitude was that he treated every runner absolutely equally.

Rules were never bent for top runners under Fred’s watch, not when he ran every element of the club himself, nor when he delegated some of the work to others later in the piece (though a few ‘swifties’ may have been pulled behind his back then).

If you were one second outside the qualifying time _ as Malcolm Norwood was for the Zatopek 10,000 one year _ you didn’t get a run. Fred once kept 1980 Olympian Steve Austin out of the Zatopek because his entry was a late; Derek Clayton got similar treatment. On another occasion, Chris Wardlaw drove to Fred’s home around midnight to slide a race entry under the door lest he, too, hear the uncompromising words _ “too late.”

Then there were the rosters. All members had to take their turn at officiating. And the working bees around Fred’s kitchen table to get the newsletter out. In those days, Australia Post was a stickler for bulk mail conforming to all its regulations to qualify for the discount, so with Fred likewise being a stickler for detail, the task had to be performed meticulously.

The VMC newsletter was the forerunner for publications such as Australian Runner, Fun Runner, Runner’s World and Run 4 Your Life, indeed, many contributors to those magazines got some of their first work published in it.

The newsletter was a quarterly filled with race results, training advice and musings on the sport and its personalities. As with all things VMC, it was a co-operative venture, but Fred contributed the lion’s share, most notably an eclectic column entitled “What Do You Make of It? Odds and Ends and Random Thoughts”.

For many years, the VMC conducted its own comprehensive schedule of road events _ the club marathon championship, a 30km King of the Mountain, The Fallen Comrades, a 12km road race held around Melbourne’s Tan close to Anzac Day, and The Two Bridges series of races around the Yarra River crossings at the back of Olympic Park as a lead-in to the Zatopek track 10,000.

These races provided both an end in themselves and a means to preparing for bigger competitions. Ron Clarke ran over 20 VMC races between 1959 and 1969, 1980 Olympic 10,000 finalist Bill Scott returned from injury with a sub-48 minute run in the VMC Two Bridges 16km in 1978.

Fred worked at the International Bookshop in Melbourne, an outlet for all sorts of (mostly left-wing) political publications. If his politics tended to the radical, his practices, as already noted with entries, could be conservative. He took some convincing to add the women’s 10,000 to the main Zatopek program, not because he did not want to foster women’s running, but because the VMC already staged Australia’s best women’s 3000 metres on the main program.

Fred also had a thing about starting races with a whistle instead of a gun. Gayelene Clews and Anne Lord ran Australian-leading times in the 1985 Zatopek _ the year the great Emil visited for the race _ but they were recorded separately by Athletics Australia statistician Paul Jenes under a “whistle start” notation.

Fred Lester’s legacy is probably best summed up by his own words at his 80^th birthday. As one present recalls, he said of his activism, “it wasn't for the running, he did it for the enjoyment of getting people together in a community spirit of helping each other for the common good.”