Meet Bruce Tulloh, the original barefoot runner
by Simon Freeman, Editor
I met Bruce Tulloh just before his 80th birthday. He was in London preparing to walk and run 80-miles over seven days, from Marlborough to the capital, to celebrate entering his ninth decade. This man’s story — from school-boy runner to international medalist on the track to his world record breaking run across America — would be remarkable in itself, but it all the more so because throughout his career, he ran barefoot. Here is his story, from issue #7 of Like the Wind magazine.
“My grandfather used to say: ‘He runs like a hare and hits like a rabbit,’” muses long-distance legend Bruce Tulloh. Depending on your point of view, such an analysis might seem like an insult. But while a career as a pugilist may never have been on the cards, Bruce Tulloh undoubtedly took the qualities his grandfather saw in him and ran with them. Literally.
Bruce Tulloh says he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t running. His mother was a runner and — according to Tulloh — she never lost a race. His whole family were active, sporty people, including the perceptive grandfather, an international tennis player.
And starting running so early in life, on the hills and beaches near his family home in south-west England, meant that when Tulloh arrived at prep school in 1941, he won his first cross-country race. By the time Tulloh went to public school — an institution with a very strong sporting tradition — he already thought of himself as a runner. Aged 12, he won half a crown at the Horwood village sports day. This was the start of a life-long running career.
Tulloh was a young runner during a golden era of athletics in Great Britain and Europe. As he rose through the ranks, he looked up to runners such as Emil Zatopek, Vladimir Kuts, Alain Mimoun and, closer to home, Roger Bannister and Chris Chataway. This was also an auspicious period for coaching. Once he realised that running was his sport, Tulloh sought out the training ideas and schedules of Franz Stampfl, the Austrian coach who had been instrumental in getting Bannister, Chataway and Chris Brasher in shape for their record-breaking mile at Iffley Road in 1954. Stampfl’s ideas — focusing on intervals — formed the basis of Tulloh’s training, to which Tulloh added his own imagination and experiences.
As a young boy running in the great outdoors, to Tulloh, shoes were unnecessary. He still feels the same way about footwear. “There’s nothing nicer for me than to go out to a lovely bit of grass or on to the beach and run,” he says. “Even though nowadays I’ll be running a bit, walking a bit. It’s just a natural human activity.” And it is possibly thanks to his decision to not wear shoes that Tulloh will be best remembered. However, it would be a mistake to think that there wasn’t science and planning behind the choice to go barefoot.
Bruce Tulloh went on to great running feats and you can read the whole article in the seventh edition of Like the Wind magazine, out now.
