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Graham Broyd, 67, is a banker, runner, storyteller. Mostly, the Brit is a people person who hitchhiked across the U.S. For 45 years he has leaned on the people skills he was taught along the way of that trip, as well as lessons from other adventures.
By Ray Glier
I asked Graham Broyd, 67, “What is the most important lesson your parents taught you?”
“Stand on your own two feet,” Graham said.
Being the dutiful British boy, the son of a navigator on a World War II aircraft bomber, Broyd took his parents’ invocation literally and figuratively. He learned to stand on his own two feet…
…while hitchhiking across America.
On blacktop pavement, on dusty roads, on gravel shoulders of highways, the 22-year-old Graham stood on his own two feet in July 1980 and stuck his thumb out. Broyd must have learned during that 2,688 miles from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., what is required in life and, of course, he wrote a book about the adventure.
The lessons:
Patience, which came from standing for hours without a beckoning hand from a motorist to “hop in.”
The judgement when to know some men wanted to give him more than a lift.
How to handle rejection, over and over, as he heard the rush of tires, not the squeal of brakes.
The fortitude to be marooned overnight without a single drop of water to sip in July in Death Valley, Ca., some days the hottest place on the planet.
The resourcefulness to earn money on the trip.
How to engage with the stranger walking down the same street and make a friend.
The resilience not to frantically call home for money…and quit.
So don’t ask how, in 11 years of running Masters track, Broyd can keep competing without ever winning a single individual medal in the 200, 400 or 800.
It’s the journey, and the experience, and the people that count, he said, not the hardware.
“I have so many fourths, fifths and sixes I can’t count them anymore, but that’s fun, I’m competing, I challenge myself, and so I still get a lot out of it without winning,” Graham said.
“I start slow, unusual for a 400-meter runner, and finish fast. I nearly always can catch someone five meters ahead of me on the straightaway and that’s racing. That’s my enjoyment.”
Not that Broyd has never planted those two feet on the podium at a Masters track meet.
Earlier this month, Graham won a gold medal as part of the U.S. (65-70) 4x100 relay at the 2025 North American, Central American, and Caribbean Championships. He was part of the gold medal 4x200 relay at the 2025 USATF Masters Indoors Championships and a member of a gold medal 4x400 relay squad at the 2024 USATF Masters Outdoors Championships.
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Graham learned how to stand on those two feet in track & field even though they were not quite two feet. In another adventure, while water skiing on Gatun Lake, which is part of the Panama Canal, the rope line got wrapped around his right big toe. Broyd lost that toe, but not his sense of humor.
“I’m pretty sure, in the U.S., there’s no one who has beaten me who only has nine toes,” Graham said.
Speaking of toes, Broyd was mindful of those toes that vulnerable night in Death Valley while on his way to Las Vegas, then east. The man who last picked him up and rather wickedly dropped him off in the middle of the desert to make a turn, told Graham to keep his shoes tightly on his feet because scorpions like to nest in empty shoes.
Needless to say, Broyd made it out of Death Valley without a fatal sting and became a banker in a decidedly different climate, New York, and currently lives in Scarsdale, N.Y.
At 56 years old, he decided to put those nine toes to the test and run the 2013 London Marathon to honor his mother, Betty, who was dying of cancer.
“I was quick as teen,” Graham said, which doesn’t explain why he picked a marathon, the opposite of quick, to start his running career. He was dreadfully slow those 26.2 miles and “miserable.”
He did it as a fundraiser for his mom and, well, even in middle age we all still do some things just to be contrary to the old man, which would have been his aviator dad, Donald.
At just 16 years old, Donald Broyd finished third in a national 880-yard race, right on the heels of two Olympians. Before he could find his running peak, WWII, The Big One, started and Donald did his duty (he survived being shot down). He returned to running as a hobby after the war.
In back-to-back years, ’45 and ’46, Donald won an all-military national race. Considering all men 18 to 50 were all regarded as military men in Great Britain at the time, Graham figured his dad was the fastest, or among the fastest, in the whole country.
So, naturally, the younger Broyd did…a marathon.
He was finally put on the right track—on the track—when he asked Westchester (N.Y.) track coach Mike Barnow to watch him run.
“How did you ever finish a Marathon?” Barnow said after watching Graham run.
It wasn’t negative commentary, it was a coach’s eye that Broyd’s stride and physique (he is 6-foot-2) made him ill-suited for distance running. It was the first time Graham had met the coach, but he followed Barnow’s advice and became a 400-meter runner.
Broyd does not do ferocious workouts, or he would surely be faster, but his orthodoxy about track gets back to what he learned on two feet 45 years ago.
This is the imperative for Geezer Jocks.
Graham will engage with strangers—it was the first time he had met Barnow—and he is wide open to learn from them. Broyd also revels in the mystery of people, and their civility and benevolence. He is too busy people-ing to train for gold medals and has written another book Faster Than You At 60 about Masters sprinters and what in their backgrounds prompts them to keep running.
“I get to meet and engage with people I would never otherwise have met. I travel to cities I never otherwise would go to, and I hang out with people who would not normally be in my social circle in my world,” Graham said. “At this stage of my life that alone is worth it. You learn so much about them, but also about yourself.
“And I find the variety of people, the variety of backgrounds, to be thrilling.”
Maybe not as thrilling as a night in Death Valley, but thrilling in their own way.
(Graham's book with details of the night in Death Valley)
Persona in a picture. Graham Broyd, 67, surrounded by other runners/people, just as he prefers. He has a book on running with 60+ men.
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