{"id":76080,"date":"2025-02-04T15:27:35","date_gmt":"2025-02-04T07:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/runnerstribe.com\/?p=76080"},"modified":"2025-02-04T15:27:35","modified_gmt":"2025-02-04T07:27:35","slug":"forbsey-something-special","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/runnerstribe.com\/features\/forbsey-something-special\/","title":{"rendered":"Forbsey: Something Special"},"content":{"rendered":"

Article written by Michael Beisty<\/a> for Runner’s Tribe<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Forbes, affectionately known as Forbsey, was one of those distance runners with plenty of talent who never quite found his feet in the hurly burly of elite middle distance track racing. Hailing from Newcastle, New South Wales (NSW), he was known for his aggressive racing against allcomers in distances from 1500 metres to the half marathon. Though affected by injury and unfortunate circumstances at critical times, Forbsey managed to stay the course for a lengthy racing career, before hanging up his spikes from serious competition in 1990.<\/span><\/p>\n

My first recollection of Dave was racing against him in an 8 kilometres road race, in April 1979, part of the Newcastle Branch AAA winter race program. A timing handicap system was used to give the better runners some competition because athletic club membership was extremely low, and we started together. At 18 years of age, he arrived on the line as a relative unknown to the tight knit locals, despite winning the Australian Junior 1500 metres Championship the previous month. He turned up latish on his bicycle, surfboard under his arm, having ridden from Merewether Beach. Though he appeared to have a casual approach to this race, and was two years younger than me, he only ran six seconds slower. Both of us ran much slower than Brian Morgan, by that time an established elite runner, who was to be Dave\u2019s main competition in the Newcastle distance racing scene.<\/span><\/p>\n

While his senior career centred on the 1500 metres, Forbsey beat some of the best NSW and Australian distance runners on the roads. An astute positional runner, he could push the pace or hang in the pack, waiting for his time to strike. This may be an unfair assessment, but with an impressive level of natural speed endurance, it often appeared to me that he only ever did just enough to win. There were many young distance runners at this time aspiring to lift standards in NSW. Apart from Morgan, Dave\u2019s future was to become entwined with the running careers of Andrew Lloyd and Danny Boltz. There were some titanic battles, memorable duels, on the fun run scene, the AAA sanctioned winter events tending to take a back seat.<\/span><\/p>\n

In preparing this article Dave and I shared some fond memories of past racing and training experiences, with a hint of regret of what could have been. For isn\u2019t that the way of every distance runner?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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  1. Personal Bests<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n