The team of Lindsay Dey, Alastair Stewart, Stuart Melville, Bruce Beath, Trevor Sutherland and Keith Darling will hold a reunion this weekend when the annual Lovelock Relay is held at the University Oval.
It will be the first time they have met together as a team since 1971. They will watch the race and recall old deeds at a dinner at Selwyn College at night.
Team member Lindsay Dey, who has organised the reunion, is surprised the record has lasted so long.
"We had 12 runners in our club who could run under 2min for 800m," Dey said. "Chip Dunckley ran 4min 02sec in the trial and couldn't make the team."
The six team members averaged 4min 02sec for the 1500m for the collective time of 24min 12.6sec.
Melville, who represented New Zealand at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in the 800m, ran the fastest time of 3min 57sec.
Sutherland, the other runner under four minutes, ran 3min 58sec. He ran a mile in 4min 00.4sec as a 19-year-old. It would have been a New Zealand junior junior record under the present age criteria.
The other members of the team all had successful running careers at national level. Dey won a silver medal in the New Zealand 5000m, Darling won a medal in the 3000m steeplechase, Stewart was a finalist in the 800m and Beath was the Otago marathon champion.
"We were the strongest club in the country with all members of the team making their mark at national level," Dey said.
"The decade between 1965 and 1975 was the golden era for the club."
No runner could count on automatic selection for the team.
"Because we had to work hard just to make the team we knew we could break the [relay] record," Dey said. "We led from the start and the pressure was on us to maintain that pace."
The team made it easier for themselves by rolling the track at the University Oval the day before the race.
"The ground was in top-notch order," Dey said. "But there was always a damp place near the art gallery corner."
It was the job of first-year surveying students to mark out the track for the 6x1500m race.
The students had to find the permanent steel pins that had been set into the ground by Prof John Mackie who was a long-time member of the University club.
Three members of the team still live in Dunedin. Melville is an accountant, Dey an accountant and a sports, tourism and business consultant, and Beath a retired school teacher.
Stewart is a researcher at the University of Auckland's School of Health, Darling an orchardist in Motueka and Sutherland a sports masseur in Tauranga.
The Lovelock Relay was first held by the Otago University Athletics Club in 1937 to honour former club member Jack Lovelock, who won the gold medal in the 1500m at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
It is not expected the relay record will be broken on Saturday.
Otago University
1971 Lovelock Relay team
Record:
24min 12.6sec.
Individual times: Lindsay Dey (4min 06sec), Alastair Stewart (4min 03sec), Stuart Melville (3min 57sec), Bruce Beath (4min 06sec), Trevor Sutherland (3min 58sec), Keith Darling (4min 02sec).
