Running : This Briton Decided to Go Indoors to Get Out of Cold

The indoor track season is over, and in this post-boycott year, Soviets, Cubans and Romanians all ventured to the United States to compete. In fact, athletes from Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa routinely compete on the U.S. indoor circuit.

Does anyone notice that athletes from Great Britain seldom are among them? Remember the last time Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett or Steve Cram ran indoors in the United States? Didn’t think so. They haven’t. The nation that has been the cradle of middle-distance running doesn’t let its kids come over and play.

That has been a sore point for years. Steve Scott, among others, has called upon Coe and Ovett to run against the rest of the world’s best milers.

“It would be good for the sport. We need it,” Scott has said, recognizing that British runners are steeped in the tradition of cross-country. English indoor facilities are few and largely outdated. There is little incentive to run in Europe, and it seems that British runners choose not to disrupt their winter training to compete in the United States.

Jack Buckner, 25, an English middle-distance runner, knows that. He also knows what months of dreary English winter can do to the body and spirit. So, when his U.S. agents called to suggest he train and race in the warmer climes of the Southwest, Buckner was packed before he put the phone down. With his wife, Kerin, he settled in Denver until the snows chased him to Los Angeles. With L.A. as a base, Buckner then traveled the indoor circuit, running anything from the 1,500 to two mile.

“I wanted to have a good period of training and get away from the British winter,” Buckner said. “I planned to come here and be happy with running three or four races while training through them. I’ve continued my winter base work, which, for me, is running 70 to 80 miles per week. I can’t say that I took this indoor running as seriously as I will the European outdoor season. It’s really an experimental thing.”

So how about this running under roofs and on boards? The Englishman abroad has collected plenty of stories to take back and amuse his outdoor running mates.

“It’s been an experience,” he said, laughing. “The noise is terrific. The crowd is so close. I like that. Indoor athletics in Europe is very, very low key. We’ve got a much stronger tradition in our cross country. I don’t know how people can manage to run more than three to four meets on the boards. It can be very stressful on your body if you go over the top on it.”

Buckner didn’t go over the top, but his performances surprised even him. His 3:58.07 in the mile at the Times/Kodak meet Feb. 8 was a British record.

Hard as it is to believe, considering that English miler Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier more than 25 years ago, Buckner became the first Englishman to run the indoor mile in less than four minutes with that performance.

In January, Buckner won the two-mile in the Sunkist meet here by six seconds. “It’s been interesting,” he said. “Over here, people don’t know me. The reaction I got before the Sunkist meet was pretty low-key. After I won, people seemed to think I had emerged from nowhere. It does seem like that. In Europe, people wouldn’t have been so surprised to see that.”

Buckner is widely known among English middle-distance runners, but with competition from Coe, Ovett and Cram, it’s like being runner-up at the Miss America pageant. Just another pretty face. Buckner was not chosen for the 1984 British Olympic team.

“I never stood a chance, really,” he said. “I wasn’t going to go in the 1,500 with Cram and Ovett, and I wasn’t strong enough for the 5,000. I’ll be ready to take a shot at the 5,000, although I’ve only run one in 13:45. My training seems to point toward the 5,000. It seems to indicate I have more endurance. But even in the 5,000, there’s no running away from speed. I’m not quite ready to turn my back on the 1,500.”

Like other middle-distance runners, Buckner is flirting with a wider range of distances. Early this month, he ran in a 10-kilometer race at Phoenix in what was perhaps the best field of male road racers ever assembled.

Buckner finished 11th in 28:20, and said: “My wife and I have had a lovely holiday. This whole trip has been exploratory. I may come back every winter to run road races. It’s been lovely.”

Running Notes Joan Benoit, winner of the women’s Olympic marathon, has grown tired of being asked where she keeps the gold medal. She has it stashed “in the bureau drawer with the candlesticks and trivets.” . . . Michelle Sellers, 12, a student at Iowa Park Middle School in Texas, seems to have grasped the essence of sport. “I like to beat people,” she said, after finishing second in the recent Forth Worth Cowtown Marathon. Her time for the 26.2 miles was 2 hours, 59 minutes and 21 seconds, second only to a 35-year-old woman. Sellers said she is training for the 1992 Olympics, when she will be 20. . . . They don’t give speeding tickets for footraces in North Dakota, but if you’re out for a leisurely stroll, watch out. A 1935 law, still on the books, prohibits anyone from running the marathon for more than four hours. The fine for slowpokes is $500 or 30 days in jail, or both.