The Tom Osler Chronicles

Osler, now 69, still lives in Glassboro, New Jersey where he enjoys publishing Mathematical research papers (more than 120) and teaching Math at Rowan University (his 49th year as a teacher; 41 at Rowan University) and running close to 50 miles a week.

A quick review of Osler’s running accomplishments: over 2100 races run; his first national championship, a 25K race, in 1965. He captured a second national title, for a 30K race in 1967. It was the same year he finished 19th in the Boston Marathon and, later that year, self-published a seminal work on running, the 32-page classic, The Conditioning of Distance Runners. Osler also published the Serious Runner’s Handbook in the ’70s during the height of the running boom. Dr. Tim Noakes (author of The Lure of Running) said \”Conditioning of Distance Runners remains one of the absolute classic training books of the world. Tom Osler\’s great contribution was to emphasize the importance of peaking training. He was the first to verbalize that in a way that was really understandable to most athletes. Most importantly, he was absolutely correct in what he proposed. Our own research undertaken [in South Africa] shows his principles to be absolutely correct. The principles he described withstood the test of time and are unquestionably real physiological laws.\”

His second book, Serious Runner’s Handbook, sold more than 55,000 copies during the peak of the running boom in the 1970s and was called \”the best running book\” by Osler’s friend and mentor Olympian Browning Ross.