On the Run to 100 : Paul Spangler’s 90s are a ‘time of enchantment.’ Now his sights are set on marking a century at the N.Y. marathon.

SAN LUIS OBISPO —  Dr. Paul Spangler is a bit irritated over his less-than-personal best in the 1991 New York City marathon. Spangler made it all 26.2 miles, but it took him almost nine hours.

“I’m too damned old,” he reflects. “And I went out too fast.”

Spangler could have come home, licked his wounds, hung up his Nikes and checked into Shady Acres rest home.

Not Spangler. He laced on his running shoes and upped his training for the 1992 New York marathon. “I’m gonna do better, too,” he vows.

At 93, he’s not leaving it to chance, genes or Geritol.

He is in serious training. About 4:30 a.m. any Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday, a lean, white-haired figure in a reflective vest can be spotted jogging along city streets.

That’s Spangler, getting in his seven-mile run before his half-mile swim at the municipal pool. And Monday, Wednesday, Friday? By 5:30 a.m., he is at the Kennedy Nautilus Center for a 45-minute workout.

“He parks about a mile and a half away and jogs down here to warm up,” says manager Terry O’Farrell, who has been coaching Spangler through his leg curls and triceps extensions. “Then he jogs back to his car and goes to the pool.”

O’Farrell, 20, says: “I would hope when I’m his age I might be able to do half the things that he does.”

Spangler was 67 when he took up running. It wasn’t a case of a lifelong jock seeking a new challenge.

“In high school,” Spangler says, “the best I could do was make tackling dummy.” In college, he made the baseball team only because “my dad let me take his Model-T” to drive teammates to games. Spangler never played.

Into his 60s, he was, at best, a weekend athlete who enjoyed mountain climbing and a bit of tennis.

Then, while heading the local American Heart Assn. chapter as a Navy surgeon at Monterey, he became acutely aware that “my friends and relatives and peers were all dying of coronary heart disease. I wondered when my time was going to come.”

He wasn’t ready to go just yet.

Spangler, having just finished mowing his lawn, leads the way into the neat white house where he has lived for 30 years.

He explains the fresh paint smell: He recently set fire to his microwave. Smoke damage was extensive, and everything in the house had to be removed and cleaned. “The trouble is they bring things back and I can’t remember where they go.”

There are small reminders of age. He has had five cataract surgeries and three lens implants and “my hearing has gone to pot,” he complains.

“The thing that bothers me the most is my balance has gone to pot. I can’t run a straight line. I fall a lot.”

Mind you, these are mere inconveniences not to be dwelt on. This day, he is due at a mobile home park to talk on “Life Styling for Health, Happiness and Zestful Longevity.”

Spangler does not consider the infirmities of old age inevitable; rather, he points his finger at such “sins” as high-fat diets and sloth-like regimens.

But he is not some health nut who exists on steamed seaweed: “I exercise a lot, and I sin a lot. If they have a chocolate sundae on the menu, I take it.” He eats red meat, too.

Nor would he have everyone on his punishing routine. “I exercise 10 to 15 times more than you have to to become physically fit.”

He has good reason: He intends to run the New York marathon when he’s 100. “There’s a $100,000 prize, and nobody’s done it yet.”

And then? “I actually think I have a good chance of making 110.”

Spangler was born in Mitteneague, Mass., where his father (who lived to 85) was a minister. The family later moved to Eugene, Ore., where he went to high school and--after an interruption for Navy service during World War I--graduated from the University of Oregon.

At Harvard Medical School, class of ‘23, he was one of three magna cum laude graduates. He observes, “I’ve outlived the other two.”

He dreamed of becoming a medical missionary, but marriage a year out of medical school dictated instead that he eventually go into private practice in Portland.

War again changed the course of his life.

Spangler, a Navy reservist, was called to active duty as a lieutenant commander in April, 1941, and sent to the Navy hospital at Pearl Harbor.

On Dec. 7, the Spanglers and their four children were planning a picnic. They could hear the explosions from Pearl Harbor but dismissed them as routine artillery practice. Then came the call from the chief of surgery: “All hell’s broken loose.”

For the next 72 hours, Spangler and the staff worked without rest, treating about 1,000 casualties.

In 1945, he returned to Portland, but homecoming proved bittersweet. He was disillusioned by what had happened at home and by how profit-driven his profession had become.

“The doctors had all bought apartment houses and farms while I was in the Navy. . . . They controlled the hospitals. We were nothing.”

He opted for the regular Navy, re-entering as a captain. Before retiring in 1959, he served at hospitals from Portsmouth, Va. to Oakland.

Still, his adolescent dream of being a medical missionary hadn’t been realized, so he became a recruiter for Project Hope and was among those who took the peacetime hospital ship on its first mission to Southeast Asia.

Back in the states, he stopped by the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo to see a former shipmate who was a prison doctor. By visit’s end, he had signed on as a surgeon.

Only mandatory retirement, at age 70, made him leave.

Spangler flirted briefly with returning to private practice, but somehow that didn’t seem practical. So, he quit, “and I’ve been loafing ever since.”

While at the prison, Spangler jogged in the hills during lunch hours, becoming more fit each week.

“I set three world records the first track meet I ever entered”--for one, two and three miles in his age group. “Naturally, I was hooked.”

In 1977, when he was 78, he ran his first marathon, the world masters championship in Sweden, besting the defending champion with a time of 4:04.

A year later, in a Northern California meet, he cut his time to 3:59. “The first, and last, time I broke four hours,” he says. “I’ve been getting slower ever since.”

He has now competed in 14 marathons and figures his chances of picking up a medal improve each year--”I’m outliving most of my competition.”

In his lectures on zestful living, he says nothing that others haven’t said. But, he says, when this “old fud” talks, people listen.

His vital statistics tell the story. At 5 feet 11 inches, Spangler was 215 pounds when he finished medical training. When he began his fitness quest, he weighed 190. Today, he weighs 132 and is about 5-foot-9. “I shrinked,” he says.

He loves ice cream but makes frozen yogurt instead. He trims red meat of all fat. He drinks skim milk. His staples are steamed vegetables, beans, salads, clam chowder--and the bread he bakes.

Spangler and his wife divorced in the ‘60s and he later married his college sweetheart. He was devastated by her death from Alzheimer’s disease 10 years ago, at the age of 82. His children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are scattered.

Sometimes he is lonely, surrounded by his memories and by the trophies that represent numerous wins, and world records, in masters running and freestyle swimming events. One is the Arete Award, for courage in sports.

To Spangler, his 90s are “the years of enchantment.”

He has taken up singing, to exercise his larynx “so I could speak without having a squeaky old man’s voice,” and sings lead in a barbershop quartet, the Jolly Swagmen.

After performing, the quartet might socialize over a Bloody Caesar (a Mary with Clamato juice) “to clear our throats.”

Spangler boasts of having young bones and has had only one major mishap, a broken wrist suffered about 15 years ago while sprinting at the high school track--”Someone had left a hurdle down.”

James Webb, an exercise physiologist at Cal Poly, started testing Spangler at the campus human performance lab when he was 77, to learn if such a high activity level could retard the aging process. What he found was “an individual who was physiologically more like 40 or 45.”

Follow-up tests, the last in 1987, found minimal deterioration. It’s “remarkable,” Webb says. “Most people, when they get up around 80, 85, they’re lucky to be walking around with a cane.”

And Spangler?

He’s wondering if he needs more cross-training. He’s bought some roller skates. Now, he figures, if he were to attach some short skis. . . .