MacDonald Better With Age

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 11

MacDonald Better With Age

T EKE the New Zealand athletics representative, W. D. Baillie, the Canterbury steeplechase champion, J. D. Macdonald, continues to get faster with age. This was evident in the last athletic season. Then 31, an age when most track athTetes think they have passed their best, Macdonald dropped his mile time by nearly 4sec to 4min 7.ssec. A more intensive programme of stamina training during this winter may result in Macdonald improving still more during the coming summer track season, when he will be 32.

The benefits of Macdonald’s winter training were in the senior six-mile Kennett Cup race last Saturday (June 11) when he was the first Canterbury man home, finishing fourth, a minute behind the winner, the New Zealand harrier representative, B. Rose, of New Plymouth.

The significant thing about Macdonald’s performance in this race was that it was achieved without the benefit of any lightening and sharpening up, Macdonald preferring to keep on with his big mileage programme. From the end of the track season Macdonald has spelled from competition to concentrate on his winter build-up, including at least one long run a week of about 20 miles. During the last seven to eight weeks, MacdonaM has been getting in his biggest regular training mileages, putting 80-90 miles a week behind him, distances that he has achieved only spasmodically in the past.

Macdonald’s first serious race of the harrier season will be the 12.3-mile threelap Holloway Memorial race to be run over a mixture of heavy cross-country and road in the St MartinsOpawa districts on June 25. Macdonald has the distinc-

tion of being the only man to have won the contest in two successive years and he is keen to make his record even harder to rival by making it three in a row. While Macdonald’s main object is to make further improvement on the track, he hopes to do fairly well in the major harrier events, including the Canterbury championships. While not planning to challenge University’s B. R. E. Jones and Greymouth’s E. Gray, in the battie for the Canterbury title, Macdonald will be making a determined bid to head the following group.

In addition to his own heavy training programme, Macdonald, a draughtsman with the design office of the Ministry of Works, finds time to advise several other youngsters about their training. To do this Macdonald has a training outing with half a dozen young runners one evening each week. As for his own continuing improvement, Macdonald attributes this to the accumulated benefits of experience an many years of sustained training and he is still learning.