Melville Picks Up Pace at 70 : Triathlete: Ojai resident warms up for 100-mile run and 100-mile horseback ride with record in 50-mile road race.

John Melville’s idea of a good time: At the end of this month, jog across the spine of the High Sierra in a 100-mile ultra-marathon called the Western States Run, and then, about a month later--in a rare double--ride the same trail and the same distance in the Tevis Cup, the granddaddy of cross-country horse races.

It all sounded plausible to Melville, an accomplished triathlete who lives in Ojai, but the Western States 100 race committee balked. Melville isn’t a kid anymore. Or even middle-aged. He’s 70, at an age when even driving 100 miles can be detrimental to ligaments and tendons. Besides, nobody his age had ever entered the footrace, a tortuous trek from Squaw Valley to Auburn, Calif., with an ascent of 19,000 feet over several inclines.

So Melville was told that he would have to qualify by finishing a 50-mile race in less than 10 hours. That alone seemed like an impossible task. Melville had never even finished a 26.2-mile marathon in less than five hours. Even in training for the Ironman triathlon in Hawaii--Melville has competed in the past seven--he seldom runs more than 20 miles a day and he keeps his weekly mileage under 70, a low figure for endurance running.

But Melville was blissfully unaware of just how tough it would be to crack 10 hours in the 50-mile run: Nobody in his 70-74 age group had ever broken the 10-hour barrier. So Melville would have to become the Roger Bannister of septuagenarians to qualify for the Western States Run.

“Luckily for him, he didn’t know that,” said his wife, Wilma Dasche-Melville.

Melville competed in the West Coast 50 road run last month in Fountain Valley. Accompanying him was his physician and trainer, Dr. Jeff Herten of San Luis Obispo. Melville did cross-training--swimming and cycling when he wasn’t running--and upper-body weightlifting. Every other day, he’d run between six and 10 miles. One day a week he’d go 20 miles. Herten made sure that Melville did five miles of vertical running each week and also made him practice eating and drinking on the run.

For the first 25 miles around the five-mile loop in Fountain Valley, fortified by tubes of tapioca pudding concocted by Herten, Melville was 14 minutes ahead of the 10-hour pace and felt he was “really cooking.” But then his body began to ache. At 36 miles, a dreadful reality suddenly overtook him, and he thought, he said, “I still have half a marathon to do.”

But Herten talked him out of quitting. “Jeff said, ‘Everything that is going to hurt is already hurting and is not going to get worse,’ ” recalled Melville, who finished in 9 hours 56 minutes 38 seconds. “That was on a Saturday,” he said. “On Tuesday I get a call saying I set a national record. I was too much of a gentleman to ask what the world record is.”

(According to The Athletics Congress, Melville broke the national age-group record by nearly eight minutes and might have set a world record but TAC doesn’t list world standards for the event.)

Melville currently is in Squaw Valley training for next Saturday’s Western States Run, which will kick off an event-filled summer for him. A couple of weeks before the Aug. 4 Tevis Cup--just for fun--he is going to take part in a 40-mile ride-and-tie, a race in which the rider and his partner alternate riding a horse and jogging. Then, on Oct. 6, Melville will compete in another Ironman in Hawaii.

“He’s an amazing man, absolutely amazing,” said Herten, who met Melville in 1987 while taking part in a ride-and-tie. “He’s an outstanding athlete and also has an exceptional mental attitude.”

John and Wilma Melville’s 1 1/2-acre Ojai ranch is tucked away in a grove of eucalyptus trees at the base of the Topa Topa Mountains. It is an idyllic setting for a retired couple to while away the golden years, but the Melvilles are too busy to even smell the orange blossoms wafting over from a nearby grove.

A horsewoman who competes in the Tevis Cup and other long-distance horse races, Wilma, 56, runs the ranch, which includes the care and feeding of three horses, two llamas, two dogs and a cat. She also conditions her horses for endurance races, taking them on long rides into the mountains behind her house.

John mostly trains himself, jogging, cycling and swimming, and he goes to the local chiropractor for massages.

“I’d always wanted to lead a rural and animal-related life, and when I finally got a horse a few years ago, I told John I’d be spending four or five hours a day with it,” Wilma said. We’d always done things together--skied, built and flown our own airplane--and he said, ‘Well, I think I better find something to do (on my own).’ ”

Before then, John was an avid hiker--he met Wilma on a hike--and has hiked all stretches of the 214-mile John Muir Trail. An engineer and real estate investor, Melville retired in the mid-1970s. A “kinky back” had kept him from being overly active, but the back mysteriously “clicked in” sometime in the late ‘70s.

In 1982, John was vacationing in Hawaii when he read about the Ironman competition taking place on the island of Kona. He flew there to watch it, immediately convinced that he could take up the triathlon at the advanced age of 62. He was intrigued by an event that combined running a marathon, swimming 2.4 miles in the ocean and cycling 112 miles.

“I would not have done it if there was only one event,” he said.

Melville began training when he returned home, running 10Ks as well as a marathon before entering the 1983 Ironman. He has been remarkably consistent in the Ironman, recording a time of 16 hours 8 minutes in ’83 and again last year. His best finish was 14:48 in 1986.

“To succeed, you have to have an ability to make a commitment,” said Wilma, a former physical-education teacher. “John has always been a very definite person, sure of what he wants to do. Rain or shine, problems or not, he gets out there and does what he has to do. He’s also been very fortunate not to have any significant injuries.”

Despite his success, Melville is low key and self-effacing. Posters from several competitions hang not in a conspicuous place of honor but in his bathroom. He formed a club in L.A. for Ironman alumni older than 60, and their motto, he said, is omnius gloria fugit , all glory is fleeting. In other words, he says, “Don’t get so involved with yourself.”

A sign by Melville’s swimming pool--”Pain is inevitable; suffering, optional”--was given to him by Herten. It is indicative of Melville’s willingness to work hard to maintain a youthful, vigorous body and a dynamic lifestyle. But how long can he keep one step ahead of Father Time? “A 91-year-old man ran in the New York Marathon this year,” Herten said. “I’m not sure we really know what our limits are.”

For most of his life, Melville wasn’t much of a swimmer or a jogger, but there’s no doubt that he has grown faster with age.

“I’m nothing like I was 10 or 15 years ago,” he said. “My energy level is higher. . . . I can jump in the pool and swim for two hours. It’s really a kick.”