By Bob Burns

 

Brian Pilcher squandered his first running career. He ran two miles in a promising 9:33 as a high school junior in the mid-1970s but junked his racing shoes for a surfboard.

“I knew I had talent, but I was too much of a goof-off in high school,” Pilcher said. “I was into proving how good I could be without working hard.”

He still wonders how good he might have been. He’ll never know. What he does know, however, is how good he can be now, in his early 50s. The stopwatch provides the same answer each time he races.

Pilcher is one of the top age-group runners in the country. Less than two years after returning to the sport after a three-decade hiatus, the Marin County resident has won a national senior title in cross country and clocked a succession of personal-best times on the track. In 2008, Pilcher won 25 of the 27 races he entered.

“They say you don’t PR in every race, but I pretty much have PR’d in every race I’ve run,” Pilcher said. “My prime motivator is to find out how good I can be. It’s fun to find out how good you are.”

Pilcher was semi-retired following a successful career in the financial industry when his youngest child, Nathaniel, decided he wanted to run cross country at Marin Academy in the fall of 2006. Brian, who had recently turned 50, hadn’t run at all for nearly 35 years.

“I went out and bought the cushiest pair of running shoes I could find and ran a mile with him on the track,” said Pilcher, who remembers clocking about a 6:20.

Two weeks later, Pilcher entered a 5-kilometer road race and placed fourth. Before he knew it, he had joined the Tamalpa Runners and was competing in the national cross country club championships in Golden Gate Park. Pilcher finished ninth among the over-50 set. He was hooked.

“I had no idea there was this running community for 50-year-olds,” Pilcher said. “I always had the bug. I just never had a running bug. I had a racing bug.”

After putting away his surfboard, Pilcher turned his competitive streak to the world of finance. After graduating from Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School of Business Administration, he worked as options trader on the floor of the Pacific Options Exchange before becoming co-CEO of Nomura’s Real Estate Finance group.

Brian’s wife, Becky Foust, attended Stanford Law School and practiced law in San Francisco for 10 years. She is now a critically acclaimed poet. They have three children and live in Ross.

“It’s like two skyrockets going off side by side,” Pilcher said, referring to his running and his wife’s writing.

Becky’s first book of poetry, Dark Card, won the prestigious Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize in 2007 and was a finalist for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award. Their late-blooming careers had one thing in common: Brian resumed running to encourage their youngest son, and she began writing to express her feelings about another son who is autistic.

“The primary motivation for Brian was trying to inspire our son to run cross country for his high school team,” Becky Foust said. “My motivation came from turning 50. I’d always wanted to write a book and figured it was now or never. But I think Brian saw the joy I was feeling at tackling a new endeavor, challenging myself. My guess is, he wanted some of that action, too.”

Becky said her initial surprise at Brian’s newfound commitment to running soon gave way to insouciance.

“He was a true couch potato – or maybe I should say wine potato,” Becky said. “I was surprised that he decided to get back into shape, but once he made the decision, the zeal didn’t surprise me one bit. Whatever Brian does, he does intensely.”

Pilcher ran just 30 miles a week in his first full season as a senior runner before increasing it to its current level of 50 to 60 miles. He says he spends almost as much time stretching and practicing yoga as he does running.

“If I recognize that something’s wrong, I’m obsessive about fixing it,” Pilcher said. “Since I don’t have a job, I have more time to devote to this than most people do, and the extra time goes into the preventative stuff.”

Pilcher raced indoors for the first time this winter at the USA Masters Indoor Track & Field Championships in Washington, D.C. Despite feeling the ill effects of food poisoning, he placed fourth in the men’s mile (4:47.50) and third in the 3,000 meters (9:24.91) in the men’s 50-54 age classification.

He sees himself eventually moving up to the marathon, but his goal this spring is to break the U.S. record in the 5,000 meters for men age 50-54 (15:41.6). He has a best of 15:47. He’d also like to become the youngest competitor to “run his age” at the Dipsea, the 7.4-mile race from Mill Valley to Stinson Beach.

Looking further ahead, Pilcher plans to compete in the 2011 World Masters Association Championships in Sacramento. It will be his final race in the men’s 50-54 age group.

“The good part is that it will be in Sacramento,” Pilcher said. “The bad part is that I’ll be 54 years and 11 months old. It crushes me. In one more month I’ll be 55.”

Nathaniel Pilcher has since given up running, which his father understands, having done the same thing himself. But retirement is the last thing on Brian’s mind these days.

“This has exceeded everything I expected,” Pilcher said. “I want to do it as long as I can do it. It’s my passion. Now, I actually enjoy running.”