Dr. Paul Spangler, 95; Health Advocate Started Running at 67

Paul E. Spangler, the elderly physician who did not take up jogging until he was 67 and spent the rest of his life trying to get his peers off their seats and on their feet, died this week while running.

He was 95, said his daughter, Betty Nolen, from the family home in San Luis Obispo.

“The only thing that would have been better is if he had died at the finish line of the New York City Marathon,” she said. “I praised God and thanked Jesus for letting him die with his running shoes on.”

Spangler collapsed Tuesday not far from his home during an early morning run, Coroner Don Hines said.

“The fact that he died running is so supremely wonderful,” Dr. Walter Bortz, a Stanford University gerontologist told Associated Press. Bortz last saw his friend two weekends ago at the school’s Fifty-Plus Fitness Assn. run.

Spangler often appeared with Bortz, author of the fitness book “We Live Too Short and Die Too Long.”

“Paul would always say, ‘I’m the proof of what Bortz said,’ ” the author said. “Paul certainly didn’t live too short or die too long, so he fulfilled my very best design.”

Spangler was a 1923 graduate of Harvard Medical School and a Navy doctor for 17 years.

He did not take up running until he was 67 and realized that “my peers, classmates, relatives, all were dying around me from heart attacks,” he said in a 1992 interview with The Times.

He began jogging in the hills behind the California Men’s Colony prison, where he worked for seven years as a surgeon until his second retirement in 1969 at age 70.

A longtime friend and neighbor, Don Patrick, said Spangler’s training schedule called for running about seven miles a day three days a week. On odd days, he would lift weights and swim half a mile.

He watched his diet but did not deprive himself of red meat. He substituted yogurt for ice cream and baked his own bread.

Two years ago, after doing less than his personal best in the New York City Marathon (nine hours as opposed to the four-hour marathons he ran at age 78), Spangler vowed to do better. He intended to run another marathon, he said, when he was 100. And after that?

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