Air Force men raise $700 in run

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32567, 29 March 1971, Page 14

Air Force men raise $700 in run

A group of 21 R.N.Z. A.F. warrant officers and airmen, aged about 40, took part in a relay-type run from the Woodbourne base to Wigram on Saturday—a distance of 210 miles.

Their main purpose, according to the organiser of the run, Warrant-Officer R. P. Clark, was to emphasise the role of physical fitness in preventing heart attacks. The run was over the same distance as one by younger Air Force men about two years ago.

Warrant-Officer Clark said the group had adopted a form of training evolved by Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Cooper, who was director of clinical research at the Aerospace Medical Laboratory at the Lackland United States Air Force base in Texas. The training programme was being used at air bases in New Zealand.

At present about 800,000 men in the U.S.A.F. were training on the Aerobic method of fitness by long distance running, and at Woodbourne, the group which ran on Saturday had been covering about 25 to 40 miles a week in training for some months, he said.

Aerobics, explained War-rant-Officer Clark was the degree of efficiency with which the human mechanism could make use of oxygen during exertion. WEIGHT LOSS The men, who were aged about 40, had lost on an average a stone in weight, and had decided to name themselves the Aerobic Club in recognition of Dr Cooper’s system of training, which was designed to improve heart and circulatory efficiency, he added. The points system laid down by Dr Cooper has been adopted as a routine fitness test in the R.N.Z.A.F. Now that the idea of training for distance running had been established in the R.N.Z.A.F., it was intended to hold a series of inter-base handicap road races, said Warrant-Officer Clark. The men who ran from Woodbourne on Saturday took, turns to do 10 one-mile laps and covered the distance at a pace of about 6min 40sec a mile. Warrant-Officer

Clark set a good example to his team mates, at the age of 39, by covering one of his laps at smin 20sec pace. "But I had the wind behind me,” he explained. The sponsored run produced about $7OO to provide cardiac equipment for the Wairau hospital.