Track Legend Bill Emmerton: Walking Doesn’t Mean Running Down

Bill Emmerton’s feet have trudged more miles than a traveling circus. If he were a car, he would have been stripped and junked years ago.

Emmerton has literally lived his life on the run. In recent years he has down-shifted to a slower pace. Now, he just walks--everywhere.

“I’m walking every day, just walking all the time,” Emmerton says. “After a while, it’s like cleaning your teeth. It becomes part of your daily life.”

Emmerton strolls with the grace of a much younger man. He is 68. Like his pace, his appearance fools you.

Arms and legs move like pistons. Feet touch the ground like someone feeling a new loaf of bread. Moving. Emmerton is always moving.

“I walk twice a day, in the morning and in the evening,” Emmerton says. “I do anything from six to 12 miles.”

As he walks, a cool ocean breeze whisks down Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. The walks, however, aren’t always that pleasurable.

Take, June 7, for instance. It was hot, extremely hot. Emmerton went to the desert by choice. He wanted to test his arthritic knees. For others, a good test might have been a brisk walk in a park. But he isn’t like others.

Emmerton walked 52 miles through Death Valley, making the trip in 14 1/2 hours as the ground temperature scorched to 135 degrees.

“That’s very bad weather,” Emmerton says. “That was hard. I had bad blood blisters and I lost both my big toenails. What happens is your feet swell because the ground is so hot.

“If it wasn’t for the blisters I could have done it in 12 hours.”

Emmerton smiles. Not because he enjoys the agony but because he is back. Back walking.

The lean and lanky Emmerton stops now at a restaurant. He has a few stories to tell about his life. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Emmerton has been on the move since bread was a nickel. He began running in 1935 and has walked and run over 200,000 miles in his lifetime. That’s over seven times around the Earth.

The exercise has kept Emmerton in extraordinary shape. But there’s no mileage guarantees on joints. The wear and tear reduced his knees to bundles of arthritis. Two years ago he had to quit.

“I was more or less retired,” Emmerton said. “I was doing a few exercises, bending and stretching. But that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to get back out walking. When I was walking or running my knees used to get so damn sore. I mean painful .”

A friend, Greer McNeil, contacted Emmerton about a therapeutic balm ointment for knees.

“During the prewar years my aunt formulated it,” McNeil said. “It’s an external tropical balm made from natural herbs and used as an ointment.”

Emmerton tried the balm and liked it. He left his home in Santa Monica and headed out to Death Valley to test it--52 miles of testing. After it was over, Emmerton considered himself back on the move again.

“I never had one ache in my knees,” Emmerton said of his desert walk. “Not one ache. I was getting to be a bear to live with. But now I’m back into action once more.”

To see where Emmerton is going, one must first see where he has been.

Emmerton was born on the island of Tasmania, just south of Australia. He lived on a sheep farm and suffered from asthma. At the age of 15, he began to walk and run six miles a day--25-30 miles on Sundays. The asthma vanished in two years.

“I felt so good because my body was getting so much oxygen,” Emmerton said. “I started to believe there was really something in endurance-type exercises. So, I started to really study it.”

He did more than study it. He became obsessed with it.

In Australia, Emmerton won over 150 running championships in distances ranging from a half-mile to 26-mile marathons. He once ran a 4:05 mile when the world record time was 4:01.

“He’s a legend in track and field,” said Skip Stolley, Track West Club coach. “Bill is known primarily as an ultra-distance runner. He’s certainly one of the ground breakers in that area. But before that he was known as a very good international track runner.”

When he wasn’t running, Emmerton spent his time as a sports announcer, physical education instructor, amateur boxing champion, and cricketer. He even hunted crocodiles. But his true love was a different type of hunt.

“My heroes were the explorers,” Emmerton said. “The guys who went to the South Pole, the North Pole; Lindbergh. They conquered something nobody else had ever done. I wanted to explore the benefits of what the proper exercise will do for you and how much better you’ll feel.”

Emmerton felt so good he felt he had something to prove. The distance of his journeys stretched to extraordinary lengths.

In 1965, he ran from Melbourne to Adelaide, Australia--500 miles in 10 days. He nearly doubled that with a 954-mile run from John O’Groat’s, Scotland, to Land’s End, England.

That same year, Emmerton came to the United States to support the John F. Kennedy Fitness Program. He ran 254 miles from New York to Washington. He was 45 years old.

“A lot of people can’t comprehend it,” Stolley said. “We’ve gotten so far away from our roots that those things have become difficult to understand. People don’t understand what the human body is capable of. Because of people like Bill, more and more people have seen these things are possible.”

Not everybody. Emmerton’s amazing feats with his feet astonished the most hardened skeptics. Still, some people began to think too much oxygen was getting to his head.

“I first heard of Bill in the mid-’60s when he ran the length of Great Britain,” Stolley said. “Then, I didn’t think it was possible.”

“People said I was crazy all the time,” Emmerton said.

One person who said so at first was his wife, Norma. They’ve been married 27 years now, and Norma has warmed up to the idea of 500-mile journeys.

“I just didn’t know what to think for a little while after I had met him,” Norma said. “But then I saw there’s a purpose behind what Bill Emmerton is doing. It’s not always visible to everyone.”

If his purpose was hidden, Emmerton wasn’t. As the years rolled on, so did he. Emmerton ran 1,100 miles from Houston to Cape Kennedy in 27 consecutive days to pay honor to the first U.S. moon launching. NASA sponsored the event.

Two runs through Death Valley followed. One 211-mile jaunt took him from one end of the Mojave Desert to the glittering strip of downtown Las Vegas.

Emmerton found different terrain but the same results in the Grand Canyon. He ran the 22 miles from the South Rim to the North Rim in seven hours.

“That was the toughest one I’ve ever done,” Emmerton said. “The trails are only three feet wide, and you’ve got to give way to the mules. You’re looking down at a 1,000-foot drop.

“While I was running, they were looking for the body of a fellow who fell off the trail. That was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. No way would I ever do that again.”

In 1978, he spent 47 days covering the 2,000-mile Pony Express Route from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento. He had no pony.

Perhaps the most famous Emmerton accomplishment ended in defeat. In 1975, he was challenged by notorious hustler Bobby Riggs.

“Bill said to me, ‘You’re always picking on girls; why don’t you take on me,’ ” Riggs said. “I said, ‘OK, if you’re such a hot runner, name the race.’ ”

Emmerton suggested a race through Death Valley and granted Riggs a 25-mile head start. Riggs ran--sort of--his 25 miles. Emmerton, running 50 miles, couldn’t make up the huge deficit. Riggs won by half an hour.

“I damn near caught him, though,” Emmerton said.

Riggs begs to differ.

“He wasn’t within sight,” Riggs said with a laugh. “If it was close, it was only close because I made it close. He was working his . . . off while I was taking it easy. I was having a ball.

“Even as great a runner as he is and as bad a runner as I am, at that distance I just had to go at a fast trot. I knew he couldn’t make up 25 miles. I’m ready for his next challenge. Tell him to call me.”

He couldn’t catch Riggs, but the miles soon began to catch up with Emmerton. His knees hurt. Arthritis set in.

Emmerton had to shift gears. The runs became walks, but the distances remained outrageous.

Seven years ago, at 61, Emmerton returned to the desert and walked 54 miles across Death Valley in 12 hours and 37 minutes. In doing so, he became the first man to have walked both the width and length of the valley.

But finally his knees gave out. The pain was too much.

“As magical as it all seems, he is human,” Norma Emmerton said.

Bill lugged his aching knees to a doctor. He received cortisone shots and advice to have surgery. Emmerton said no thanks.

“I didn’t want to have any operations,” he said.

So, Emmerton spent the past year doing simple stretching exercises around the house. No more walking. It didn’t take his wife long to see something was wrong.

“He was a little more quiet than usual,” Norma said. “And it’s usually never quiet around here.”

“He’s not the type of guy you’re ever going to see sitting in front of a TV watching daytime game shows,” Stolley said.

Two months ago, McNeil introduced Emmerton to her balm. Three weeks later, he was back in Death Valley--at age 68.

“Bill just loves life,” Stolley said. “He looks at these things as opportunities to have an adventure as well as prolonging his life and elevating his fitness. I often see Bill up in the Santa Monica Mountains and up in the canyons. He thrives on these things.”

Those who know Emmerton understand. Others ask: Why would a senior citizen even go to Death Valley, much less walk 52 miles across it?

“I believe people should test their endurance,” Emmerton said. “I think a lot of people in the world today are scared of what might happen to them if they start to punish themselves a little bit or hurt themselves a little bit. They have a feeling that they might die if they do something unusual.”