After he married and took up a career as a telephone technician, however, he hung up his racing shoes for the serious business of adult life. But soon the dreariness of that life began to sap his strength; he took to smoking and inactivity. The migraines worsened, his health deteriorated, and depression overpowered him. One day, at the age of 39, he stumbled into an empty church with tears pouring from his eyes. He had reached rock bottom. He was thin and weak with no hope but an early death.
His doctor recommended a six-month leave from the telephone company and gave Cerutty one prescription: ‘I can’t heal you with medicines, Percy … You have to save yourself. If you want to do anything about yourself, you’ll get off that bed under your own will and spirit.’ Cerutty took that advice seriously. He restricted his diet to raw foods and quit smoking. Perhaps most importantly, he started reading. He devoured everything from poetry to religious texts, weightlifting advice, Eastern philosophy, scientific treatises, and long-distance training guides. He developed a new approach to life, one unencumbered by fear and defined by exerting himself fully – physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
Mostly, though, he exercised. He lifted weights. He joined a walking club and began to take longer and longer hikes through the bush. Within a year he had completed a seventy-mile hike, to his wife’s shock. The outdoors exhilarated him. It was not long until he started to run again, and he ran constantly. Soon his body was transformed into that of a much younger man. In 1942, at 47, he showed up at the Malvern Harriers locker room and announced, ‘I’ve come down to have a run with you. I used to be a member here.’ Gone were the migraines, rheumatism, and spells of depression. The road hadn’t been easy though. When Cerutty had first begun exercising, he would return home on the brink of total collapse, his heart racing. He could hardly push open the front door. He would lie down on the floor, eyes glued to the ceiling as his breathing and heart rate gradually returned to normal. But he learned to appreciate the torture his body endured because he always recovered and returned stronger the next day. ‘Thrust against pain. Pain is the purifier,’ he said.
Within a year of joining the Harriers, he was regularly clocking mid-four-minute miles. Then came the marathons, 100-mile races in twenty-four hours, 200 miles in forty-eight hours. Such feats by a man of his age brought attention, and Cerutty adored it. He also welcomed the chance to expound his theories. As he codified his philosophy of training and life in the late 1940s, athletes were beginning to pay heed. In 1946 Cerutty purchased three acres in Portsea, a town south of Melbourne on the easternmost point of Port Philip Bay. There he began to build a ten-by-fourteen-foot hut and a larger shack out of lumber dismantled from shipping boxes. He would be a teacher.
By Christmas 1951, when John Landy walked up to the gate for his first and only visit to the Portsea property, Cerutty’s buildings and philosophy were complete. He didn’t train athletes; he guided ‘Stotans’.
The gate to the property was shut. Unlike the rest of the athletes at the camp, Landy had come down to Portsea on his own for the ten-day training session. His parents were circumspect about Cerutty, particularly because of his outlandish antics, but their son’s improvement as an athlete was undeniable, so they didn’t object to the trip. Seeing no lights on, Landy realised it was too late to catch anybody awake. He had brought a sleeping bag and, not wanting to disturb anyone, he found a hollow to sleep in. Because of the chill in the air, he donned every item of spare clothing he had brought, including his football socks, before slipping into his bag. He was all right until rain began to pelt his bag. Then it turned into a downpour. Shaking, wet to the bone, he stuck it out. By first light the hollow had turned into a streambed, and Landy stumbled into the camp, half in shock from the cold. The Portsea training had begun.
In the year since Landy had first called on Cerutty, he had paid close attention to the coach’s direction. He had paid ten shillings for lessons on how to move his arms and how to run like a rooster, clawing at the air. He had strengthened his upper body by lifting dumbbells. He had participated in running sessions on a two-and-a-half-mile horse path named the Tan (after the four-inch layer of tree bark discarded from tanneries, which cushioned the dirt), and bounded up and down Anderson Street Hill with the others under Cerutty’s watchful eye. Their runs provoked gasps from the Melbourne residents nearby. They couldn’t understand what these young men, hounded by a shirtless older man, were doing. Running for exercise was odd in and of itself, but a group doing so through the botanical gardens carrying bamboo poles in each arm and shrieking like banshees as Cerutty called to them to run like ‘primitive man’ was pure scandal.
What Cerutty had in mind for the ten-day training camp in Portsea would definitely have been beyond the observers’ comprehension. Landy was sceptical as well, yet there he was. By following Cerutty’s gruelling regimen, Landy hoped to win a spot on the Olympic team.
Before breakfast the men ran the Hall Circuit, a course that threaded through tea trees, up hills, down steep slopes, and across sand dunes for one mile and 283 yards; the runners were timed and pitted against one another with handicaps and a three-pence bet apiece. The winner won the pot, and Cerutty didn’t hesitate to direct runners around the wrong bend so that he could claim the prize himself. Sometimes he clocked their runs and badgered them to go faster, questioning their manhood or dedication, often both. He ridiculed and taunted them mercilessly, particularly Landy, whom he thought needed toughening up. ‘Move your bloody arms!’ he would shout. ‘Too slow! Too slow! … Come on, you lazy bastards! You’re hopeless bloody dogs! Children could run faster than that!’
Other training sessions were held on nearby golf courses, where Cerutty had his charges accelerate up hills to achieve the kind of energy explosion they needed in a race. They ran up sand dunes for the same effect, an exercise Landy particularly disliked. He preferred the rhythmic flow of running on flat ground. For resistance training they sprinted along the beach in knee-deep surf. When not running, they swam, surfed or hiked along the coast. They were always in a state of movement until Cerutty stopped to give a lecture on the grass beside the 300-metre Portsea Oval. There he taught his Stotan – part Stoic, part Spartan – philosophy. Cerutty had coined the term and its requirements:
1 Realization that, as Wordsworth the poet says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ which denotes there is no time for wasteful ideas and pursuits.
2 In place of wasteful hobbies there commences a period of supervised and systematic physical training, together with instruction in the art of living fully. This replaces previously undirected life.
3 Swimming will be done all the year round … This especially strengthens the will and builds resistance to quitting the task ahead.
4 The cessation of late hours. Amusements both social and entertaining should be reduced to a minimum, and then only in the nature of relaxation from strenuous work.
Cerutty delivered this philosophy along with quotes from Plato, Buddha, Jesus, Freud, Einstein, and St Francis of Assisi, among others. He stressed the importance of yoga, non-conformity, a diet of oats, the study of nature and animals, and running barefoot to connect with the Earth. There were also the impromptu lessons after meals, like the time when Cerutty lectured them on warming up. A cat was sitting on a ledge outside one of the huts when their coach snuck over and emptied a bucket of water over it. The cat leapt away and disappeared in a flash. Cerutty then expounded, ‘There. Did the cat do stretches? Did the cat jog around? Did the cat do knee bends? Did the cat have a tracksuit on before racing? No, the cat just got up and went. No more warming up. Forget it.’
For Landy, the son of an accountant and the product of private schools, this was wild stuff. He laughed off most of it, but there was wisdom in what Cerutty said about training hard. The body had amazing limits that most people never tested; Cerutty drove Landy to try. He had helped bring out a discipline and focus the young runner never suspected he had. This ability had been dormant, but now it revealed itself. The other athletes at Portsea were impressed by Landy’s discipline. During hard runs that seemed to last for ever, they also began to realise they could never match it.
There was no sense of jealousy, however. In fact Landy took away from this time with Cerutty more than important lessons. He had won a tightly knit group of friends at Portsea, among them Perry and Macmillan as well as three-milers Geoff Warren