Triathlon Cofounder Jack Johnstone Dies at 80

The retired math teacher helped conceive the first race to combine running, biking, and swimming (in that order, originally) in 1974.

Jack Johnstone
Betty Johnstone

Jack Johnstone, a retired math teacher who cofounded the sport of triathlon, died on Thursday at age 80 in San Diego, according to his wife, Betty Johnstone. He had been living with Alzheimer’s disease since January 2013.

In 1957, Johnstone was an All-American swimmer while in college at West Chester State College (now University) in Pennsylvania, but he didn’t start running until he was 35.

“He’d put on weight and wanted to get back into shape,” Betty Johnstone told Runner’s World Newswire in an interview in February 2015. She said running was an easier option for exercise because they lived close to a high school, where he could run on the track.

Four years later, in 1974, Johnstone ran his first marathon, the Mission Bay Marathon, in 3:08.

“He just knew he could do better than that, so he kept doing marathons,” she said. In 1977, he ran two marathons, Mission Bay and Orange County, both in 2:50.

She said Johnstone considered the marathon the ultimate distance, but after he got his two sub-3s, he decided to devote his time to coaching his five children on their sports teams. So he switched to half marathons, 10Ks, and 5Ks.

The same year as his first marathon, Johnstone worked with Don Shanahan, a fellow member of the San Diego Track Club, on what they thought would be a one-time wacky event: a running, biking, and swimming race.

“When we started, Jack and I, neither one of us had any idea it would take off like it did,” Shanahan told Runner’s World last year. “It was really kind of a different, goofy, fun event to put on.”

But Johnstone was enthusiastic about it.

“We talked in a general sense about what the course would be like, and a couple days later Jack called back and said, ‘By the way, I've got the course laid out,’ and he did,” Shanahan said. “Jack was one of these guys, he was a math teacher and he had one of those controlled minds, that when he decided to track a project, he did it with precision.”

The course was different from modern triathlons. The 46 participants started with a three-mile run, then biked five miles, then swam a short distance to the shore in San Diego’s Mission Bay. They then ran in bare feet over sand and grass to another small bay, swam across it, ran again in bare feet, and swam to the finish, where they had to crawl up a steep dirt bank.

Having the swim so close to the end “might have been problematic because most of the people were runners,” Shanahan said. “Very few were swimmers, and it showed once they got into the water. Luckily we didn't have a problem, but people were doing the side stroke, the back stroke.”

Some of those first-ever triathletes took longer than Johnstone and Shanahan expected, and it started to get dark. (The race started at 5:45 p.m. so people could come after work, and some took 90 minutes to finish.) So they pulled a few cars up to the finish line and turned on the headlights.

Johnstone competed in that first race, finishing sixth with a time of 1:02:18.

“As I dismounted my bike and tried to run (to the start of the swim), my legs felt like they didn't belong to my body,” he wrote on the website he created to document the event. “I let out a moan of anguish and remember someone yelling to me, ‘Well, it was your idea!’”

After that first race, interest grew as San Diego runners organized more triathlons. Then in 1978, one of the original triathlon participants, John Collins, took the event a step further by putting on the first ever Ironman race.

“It gave triathlons a shot in the arm,” Shanahan said. “When (Ironmans were) being televised, it grabbed the attention of a lot of people.”

In 1998, Johnstone and Shanahan were induced into Triathlete magazine’s hall of fame, and two years later the triathlon became an Olympic sport.

That was an important moment for Johnstone, his wife Betty recalled.

“We laughed about it, because it was never something we expected to happen, but he was also very proud of starting it,” she said.

Johnstone wrote about that pride on his website: “In this small way, I changed the world; the course of athletic history,” he wrote.

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