You wouldn’t have known it existed from the Los Angeles Times or local television and radio. But a vibrant distance running community emerged in the 1960s. This community was linked by a network of all-comers races, weekly road races and newly established marathons. Most importantly, new attitudes were emerging among these runners: about long distance running as a lifestyle, as well as about workout regimens, diet, lifelong training and the inclusion of women.

My older brother Jim, then a senior at Fairfax High, introduced me to long distance running in the summer of 1967, a few months before I was to start my freshman year. My first run was from our house in the Fairfax district to the top of Mt. Olympus in the Hollywood Hills. Though I ran only the first two miles and walked the rest, I was hooked.

Fairfax did not have a strong tradition of long distance and track athletes. According to Gabe Grosz’s history of Fairfax track, the school lost every track meet between 1962 and 1965. But all that changed in the fall of 1967 with the arrival of a new coach, John Kampmann.

Like other successful high school coaches, Kampmann brought a commitment and passion to the sport that was contagious. Running was not done part-time or occasionally; it was a daily, year-round regimen. Running was one part physical, and a larger part mental. Running was linked to diet, sleep and focus.

Long distance training under Coach Kampmann was a mix of approaches: speed-play techniques from Finland, repetitions on the track, and long slow distance (LSD). We ran in the Hollywood Hills, on the trails of Griffith Park, at the La Brea Tar Pits near Fairfax. We ran at the area’s golf courses, throughout Brentwood and UCLA, at the Santa Monica beach. On weekends, we ran through the canyons north of Sunset. We’d start at Burton Way and La Cienega and each week choose a different canyon: Franklin Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Benedict Canyon, Beverly Glen Drive – 12, 14, 16 miles. Often on Sundays, we’d do a canyon run in the morning and come back at night with a three- or four-mile run at the Los Angeles Country Club.

By the next year, Fairfax was among the top cross country and track teams in the city. In the spring of 1968, Mike Wittlin set a city record with a two-mile time of 9:17. The following year, Dan Schechter won the city mile championship with a time of 4:16. In dual meets, the half-mile squad, led by Gary Shapiro, regularly ran in the 1:50s. Fairfax lost only one dual track meet in 1969. During the next two years, Fairfax won 14 straight dual meets.

Beyond competing as a team, we were part of the region’s distance community. We traveled throughout the region on weekends to compete in road races in Montebello, Pacific Palisades, Diamond Bar, Toms Peak and the Los Angeles Police Academy. We ran the Culver City Marathon in 1967 and 1968, and the Palos Verdes Marathon in 1969 and 1970. We traveled in a van to San Diego to run the Mission Bay Marathon in January 1970. During the summer, we competed in the all-comers meets at Venice High, Pierce College and Los Angeles Community College.

The region’s distance community was not large. Each road race might have 100 runners, and even the marathon races rarely had more than 200 or 300. The runners, though, traveled to the same races, met at the same handful of stores that sold running shoes and read the same books and articles on running, particularly the running bible, Track and Field News. Through these interactions, the running subculture grew.

Mainstream athletic culture in 1960s Southern California focused on a few team sports, primarily baseball, football, and basketball, in which a small number of athletes actually competed. Most high school athletes and non-athletes did not continue active exercise after graduation. But in distance running, everyone trained and competed. A main part of the sport involved reaching “PRs” (personal records), pushing yourself to improve your own time. Coach Kampmann gave as much attention to each runner’s personal record, from the slowest to the fastest runner, as to the team score.

Running did not stop in high school. It is a lifelong pursuit. At the road races, you’d see runners of all ages, and from a wide range of occupations. Further, the groundwork was being laid for the establishment of women’s high school and college teams, and for the full participation of women in all distance races.

Most of us from that running era at Fairfax have continued to find value in the distance running culture and continue to run daily. My own running career would have its ups and downs over the years. On a Saturday morning in May 1970, I ran my second Palo Verdes Marathon, finishing in 2 hours, 42 minutes – among the top 20 high school marathon times in the United States that year. Later that year, I went east to Harvard, where I joined the cross-country and track teams. My participation, though, ended after two mediocre years. A few years later, I competed again as a graduate student at Oxford University in England (where graduate students could compete on university teams), but stopped after an undistinguished year. In both cases, running had lost its cultural ties: the sense of purpose, the broader lifestyle, the camaraderie.

Since returning to California in 1976, I’ve continued to train, almost exclusively long slow distance, increasing my weekly miles over the past 10 years. Today, I run twice a day, around 40- 50 miles per week. If you’re on the Presidio roads and trails in San Francisco, you’ll see me at 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., usually with a Nike hat and a hiker’s light, running at a nine-minute-mile pace, alone and in thought.

Similarly, if you look around the streets of Southern California, you’ll see others from the 1960s Fairfax teams who continue distance running: Gary Shapiro, Eli Kantor, Jeff Rothman, Bobby Sherman, Mike Wittlin, Irwin Merein, Roy Cohen, Tom Flesch, Dale Lowenstein, Sam Kiwas.

But the full legacy of those Fairfax years stretches far beyond our teams. Long-distance running has soared in popularity, and today attracts thousands of runners, both men and women, to major races. Thanks to the coaching and life philosophy of John Kampmann and other Southern California running advocates of the 1960s, for many of us reminiscing about high school sports isn’t an exercise in remembering things long gone, but rather reflecting on the birth of ongoing life-affirming habits.

Michael Bernick, an attorney in San Francisco, has served in several government positions in California, including director of the state labor department, the Employment Development Department, 1999-2004, and director of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), 1988-1996.

*Main photo originally published in Track and Field News, May 1969

**Photos courtesy of Michael Bernick.

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In Los Angeles, a city with no shortage of obscenely fit people, new yoga studios crop up as frequently as pot dispensaries, and spa-like gyms with names like “Equinox” or “Spectrum” teem with beautiful people shrink-wrapped in Lycra. I do not belong to such clubs. I am a member of a Koreatown branch of 24-Hour Fitness. It would be on anyone’s short list for the worst gym in Los Angeles—possibly in all of the United States.

The dues at this club are not high. Thanks to a work discount, my annual membership probably costs less than a single chakra realignment. It’s a debatable bargain. Yelp gives my gym one and half stars, with evocative reviews like “The dirtiest and ugliest gym I have ever seen in my life!” and “What. A. Dump.” and “Locker room smelled how I imagine Satan’s ***hole to smell.” (Asterisks not mine.)

24 Hour Fitness in Koreatown occupies the bottom floor of an office building on Wilshire Boulevard between two iconic spots—the art-deco Wiltern Theatre and the former site of the Ambassador Hotel. The area is one of strip malls, blaring neon digital billboards, low-slung apartment complexes and a smattering of impressive high-rises. Kids on skateboards careen along the sidewalks and curbs. It’s crowded, which means the first challenge is parking, a process that usually requires a few passes around a six-block radius.

What awaits me after I’ve found a space is a gym that’s cramped and poorly ventilated, with liberal wafts of sweat and damp socks. The bottom floor is a din of clanking free weights—the domain of a cadre of tattooed hombres in muscle t-shirts. There’s also a large group exercise room painted in greenish pastel and peach accents straight out of 1986. It looks like the set of an Olivia Newton John video.

Upstairs are the cardio and weight machines, most of which also appear to date back to Grease 2. About a third of them are reliably broken. A couple of battered television screens hang in front of the treadmills and spew out telenovelas and fuzzy episodes of Jeopardy! I scrupulously avoid ever letting my bare feet touch the floor of the locker room. Plenty of older Asian ladies stride about completely naked, however. They do not know fear.

The Koreatown location is one of two 24-Hour Fitness clubs in Los Angeles that fall under the category of “Active,” a rung below “Sport” and two rungs below “Super Sport.” Yes, believe it or not, 24-Hour Fitness has a caste system. “Super Sport” clubs offer “towel service and plenty of equipment.” My “Active” club offers four walls and a roof. When I told a friend of mine who frequents the Super Sport level club on Sunset Boulevard where I work out, he wrinkled his nose and simply said, “Eww.” There are few experiences as humbling as being pitied by a fellow member of 24-Hour Fitness.

But here’s my confession. I’m fond of my gym. It’s the modern-day Los Angeles version of the Alamo—the place where body fat makes its last stand. Here, the bar for splendor is set agreeably low, and the mirrors are coated with a forgiving film of fog and condensed perspiration. I won’t say that I cherish being scoped out by the oversized guys on the weight machines, but I can’t honestly claim it’s the worst part of the day, either.

Tucked away in K-Town, my gym brings together a genuine cross-section of the city. There are lots of Asians, many Latinos, a handful of blacks, a few whites, some Indians, and even the occasional Borat-like patron of mysterious origin. You might even say that my gym is the city of Los Angeles. It’s a place of nearly constant frustration where diverse people are peacefully forced together, united primarily in their sourness and irritation. And yet we dimly suspect, despite the hassles, that this is exactly where we want to be.

I usually go to cardio classes in the Olivia Newton John studio a couple of times a week, and I’ve gotten in the habit of chatting with a fellow club member, a middle-aged Asian lady who’s usually accompanied by her teenaged daughter. After about a year of brief exchanges, we figured out that we live just one block apart. Her husband has been the mailman in our neighborhood for the past 20 years.

My favorite weekly class is Bollywood Dance, taught by a lithe Indian man with a posh (to my unschooled ears) British accent. He blasts the music so loudly that it rattles the grungy mirrors on the walls. Every once in a while, one of the muscled weight lifters will wander in to join the fun. Everyone looks ridiculous. No one cares. Then we pour out, a little healthier, into the pungent night of smog and flashing neon lights and go our separate ways.

Meghan Lewit is a freelance writer and recent graduate of the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing program.

*Photo by Megan Greenwell.

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