Now in his fifth decade of national-class age-group running, Witold Bialokur, 81, will compete on September 3 in the 5Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. It’s the signature event in a masters career that gave him a second life after earlier years of deprivation behind the Iron Curtain.
Using training techniques learned in his native Poland, and thriving on the idea that “with hard work you’ll age slower than the competition,” Bialokur hopes to run faster than the sizzling 7:00 he ran last year, when he won the 80-84 division by 80 seconds. He says that recent training and racing indicate his fitness level has improved since last year’s mile. This past spring Bialokur ran a 25:30 5K in hilly and windy conditions, a 53:33 10K and, his best effort, a 32:00 4-miler.
Bialokur runs 35 to 40 miles a week, often done alongside those he coaches in Witold’s Runners, a prominent New York club. He also derives dexterity and coordination from a regular schedule of ballroom dancing. Bialokur does waltz, mambo, and tango, both on land and at sea. He and his wife, Urszula, have traveled the world on more than 40 cruises as dance instructors.
“I’m either taking lessons or giving lessons,” says Bialokur, who lives in the Rego Park section of Queens, a short subway ride from Manhattan. “You have to practice all the time, just like running.”
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Bialokur’s running practice borrows from his athletic upbringing in Krakow. Meeting with his Witold group three times a week at Forest Park in Queens, Bialokur dishes out elaborate warm-ups, high-knee drills, multi-faceted repetition work and, out of the playbook of four-time Olympic champion Emil Zatopek, Running to Freedom.
Zatopek was known not only for pioneering interval training but also for doing workouts with his wife, Dana, an Olympic javelin champion, riding his back. Likewise, Bialokur asks his runners to pair up for grueling piggyback sprints: up and down a hill 10 times, no complaining. “You have to bring the body to exhaustion,” he says, “and then apply the heavy stuff.”
In an interval workout, Bialokur’s heavy stuff, or “trick,” as he calls it, is a fast effort once the athlete is drained and assumes the workout is over. Consider the time many years ago when Bialokur was coaching 3:55 miler Ross Donoghue. After Donoghue and others had run a hard hour through the woods followed by sprints and stretching, and thought they were done, Bialokur ordered them on the track for a fast mile. “They cursed me,” said Bialokur, “but they got a shot of oxygen back to the brain.”
Bialokur, a svelte 5-feet-10-inches and 138 pounds, is no less demanding of himself. In a recent workout, after a 30-minute warm-up run followed by stretching and drills, he did six 400-meter repeats in 1:43—his 5Advertisement - Continue Reading Below goal pace—with two-minute recoveries. Then, the trick—one more 400 that had to be at least 5 seconds faster than the others. Bialokur ripped off a 1:35.
Bialokur is a 5Advertisement - Continue Reading Below fixture. The event started in 1981 with Sydney Maree’s victory in 3:47.52, still the event record. Bialokur started competing the next year in the masters and age-group divisions, which now number more than 6,000 participants. At 50 and 51, Bialokur ran victorious 4:40s. At 62, he ran 5:14, defeating the Canadian star Earl Fee, who has set numerous world masters track records. (That year, in 1997, the title sponsor was a local business tycoon, who named the event after himself: “The Donald J. Trump 5Advertisement - Continue Reading Below.”) At 70, Bialokur ran 6:00. Then, last year, he did his 7:00 at 80.
Bialokur’s 2015 time bettered the American age 80-84 mile record by almost 10 seconds—Joseph King ran 7:09.60 at 82 in 2008—but road miles cannot be accepted for record purposes. Bialokur said he may shoot for a fast track time next winter at the New York Armory.
In his prime, in his early 50s, Bialokur trained up to 55 miles a week. He did interval work like 16 x 200 meters in 38 seconds with a one-minute recovery, and could run 5Ks under 17:00. Now, for 200s, he does 10 reps between 46 and 50 seconds. Bialokur admits that he no longer has the musculature—the high-octane body, as he puts it—of his younger days. His mission is “to be careful not to lose fitness” and to try to pick himself up when motivation lags. Some of that motivation comes from coaching. He feels inspired helping “mature” runners with modest talent to faster times. He takes more pride in his athletes’ PRs than his own.
Running to Freedom
It’s something of a miracle that Bialokur was able to fashion an exuberant life around running. As a child growing up in Eastern Europe during the 1930s, he and his family experienced the ravages of war. Because of persecution during the breakout of pre-war hostilities between Poland and neighboring Russia, Bialokur’s parents and two older siblings went into exile on the Russian side of the border in what is now southeastern Ukraine. In 1938, when Bialokur was 3, his father, an officer in the Polish military, was arrested by Russia as a political prisoner and sent to a labor camp in Siberia, where he eventually perished.
“In Russia,” recalls Bialokur, “we lived in a straw hut on the front lines in the middle of nowhere. We had no protection from the bombing all around us.”
Somehow, his mother and her three young children were able to survive. In 1943, family members orchestrated the Bialokurs’ move to join them in relative safety in Krakow. Once there, the family lived for a year under the Nazi occupation, which was starting to loosen as the Germans fled amid the approaching Russian troops. Bialokur says he’d heard talk about the nearby Auschwitz death camp but, at 8 or 9, was too young to understand it.
In Krakow, he and his family, at their peril, tried to aid Polish Jews who were rounded up under the auspices of the German industrialist Oskar Schindler. Bialokur’s mother made sandwiches for those in the camp, and he and his friends, in clandestine missions, tossed them over barbed wire fencing into the hands of the hungry detainees. Schindler ultimately saved 1,200 Jews and was the subject of the 1993 Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List.
After the war, Bialokur completed his schooling, eventually receiving an engineering degree, while also excelling in running. Representing what he called a semi-professional club—“we were supposed to be amateurs but received government stipends”—he ran bests of 1:53 for 800 meters and 4:15 for the mile. He found he was more interested in coaching. Sacrificing his own running at the time, Bialokur coached for ten years, with some of his athletes qualifying for big competitions like the European Championships. One of his 400-meter runners competed in the 1968 Olympics.
In 1970, at 35, by then married, and with the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain stranglehold resulting in violent protests and riots in Poland, Witold and Urszula left Krakow for better opportunity and political freedom in the United States. First, they spent three years in Vienna before settling in New York.
The upheaval, finding a job, and raising two children caused Bialokur to stop running for ten years. As an engineer, his main line of work was with a firm that designed nuclear power plants. He retired at 69.
After resuming running in his mid-40s, Bialokur started racing and met his contemporary George Hirsch, who is now chairman of the New York Road Runners. Bialokur and Hirsch have maintained a friendly rivalry into their 80s. Bialokur has been named the club’s top male runner in his age group 14 years in a row. Last year, USA Track & Field named him the nation’s top male performer in the 80-84 age-group.
On the day of the 5Advertisement - Continue Reading Below, Bialokur’s performance will not end at the finish line. He and Urszula will enjoy the afternoon in the city and, at dusk, stroll just off the race course and into Central Park to join in the Saturday night dance traditions in front of the statue of Shakespeare.
“I do a mean Argentine tango,” he says.
Marc Bloom’s high school cross-country rankings have played an influential role in the sport for more than 20 years and led to the creation of many major events, including Nike Cross Nationals and the Great American Cross Country Festival. He published his cross-country journal, Harrier, for more than two decades.
