Published January 7, 2001

By Ken Stone

In early 1984, when he was one of eight Democrats running for president of the United States, Sen. Alan Cranston could be found sprinting in hotels.

At the Holiday Inn in Keokuk, Iowa, “Cranston (then 69) sprinted barefooted down the 40-meter hallway, walked back and repeated the exercise for some 40 minutes,” observed Ron Roach of The San Diego Tribune.

“His favorite hotel, the O’Hare Hilton in Chicago, has 250-meter hallways.”

The Californian’s White House ambitions would soon be spiked, but Cranston remained a dreamer -- and a track devotee -- until his death a week ago at his home in Los Altos Hills at age 86.

His obituaries properly focused on his careers in journalism, politics and world statesmanship -- his efforts to banish the threat of nuclear war.

But except for a sentence or two (usually mentioning his 12.6 world record for the 100-yard dash at age 55), these long pieces gave short shrift to the place track held in his heart.

Sprinting deserves more than a dash of credit for Cranston’s success in public life.

In fact: “I learned a lot from participating in track,” Cranston told his hometown newspaper, the Los Altos Town Crier, in May 1999. “I learned about the need to focus. I should have been in the Olympic Games in 1936, but I didn’t quite make it. I was good enough to do it, but I just, in effect, goofed off.

“I didn’t concentrate enough. That taught me a great big lesson that has stayed with me through my lifetime: Success isn’t a matter of coincidence or happenstance. You need to be disciplined and focused.”

Cranston, a world-class quarter-miler at Stanford in the mid-1930s, resumed sprinting at age 55 in 1969 -- at the second U.S. masters national championships at Balboa Stadium.

By the time the editor of Track & Field News caught up with Cranston in Washington in 1972, he’d already competed in many meets.

“Now and then he breaks away from his Senate office for a session alongside the Reflecting Pool,” wrote that editor, Bert Nelson. “There, after a quick warm-up, including a session of high knee lifts, he likes to run a 660.

“ ‘That’s just 20 feet short of the full length of the pool, (Cranston said), and I have run it as fast as 1:54.’ ”

Nelson also wrote: “More than one meet, eager to have the publicity which surrounds the participation of a prominent U.S. senator, has been quick to add a special race.”

That included meets in Los Angeles, San Francisco -- and the San Diego Indoor Games at the Sports Arena.

San Diego’s David Pain, who organized those first masters outdoor championships, recalls: “I honestly think (meet director Al) Franken put in a 60-yard race (for Cranston) to capitalize on the publicity.”

In spring 1972, Cranston ran his senior best 12.4 for 100 yards at the Penn Relays. And that summer, he managed to be in Europe on Senate business. Just so happened that Pain was leading a U.S. and Canadian masters track tour of the Continent -- and Cranston found time to compete.

I met Cranston once -- in a lounge at Georgia State University between events at the 1996 Atlanta Games. I mainly was interested in whether Cranston had beaten prostate cancer, the illness that led him to forgo a Senate race in 1992.

Happily, he was clear of cancer, he told me, his tanned face a testament to the health track had provided.

Cranston kept lifting those knees until his mid-80s. He ran stairs at Stanford University until recently, his daughter-in-law told the San Jose Mercury News.

Cranston was a champion of many causes -- environmentalism, civil rights, freedom of the press.

But in the end, I picture him the same way Nelson did in that February 1972 profile -- as a champion of the sprints.

“The competitive spirit remains strong,” Nelson wrote, “and when Cranston concluded an interview, his final words were: ‘How do I get in more meets?’ ”