FARMINGTON — Thomas Eastler, who helped make racewalking a high school sport in Maine and contributed to its popularity throughout the state and nationally, died Thursday at age 73.

The Farmington resident, who was also a professor of natural sciences at the University of Maine at Farmington for 41 years, was a USA Track & Field official for 30 years and coached racewalkers from around Maine, including two of his children who went on to the Olympic trials and two Olympic games in racewalking.

Now, Maine is one of only two states where racewalking is a high school sport — the other is New York, though only girls can participate there.

“He was the father of the racewalk,” Michael Burnham, assistant executive director of the Maine Principals’ Association, said Friday. “He was certainly an ambassador for the sport, and the entire MPA community is saddened by his passing. He was a wonderful gentleman who impacted the sport of track and field.”

Along with New York, Maine is the only state that offers high school athletes the chance to compete in the racewalk. The sport is defined by two main criteria that distinguish it from running slowly: first, that the athlete maintain constant contact with the ground with at least one foot; and secondly, that the leg remain straightened from the moment of first contact with the ground to the point it passes under the body.

Eastler died at his home in Farmington from complications of cardiac and kidney disease, his family said. His love of racewalking dates to his days as a graduate student at Columbia University in New York City in the late 1960s, where he was visiting a local gym and spotted a man practicing.

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“My dad was always interested in athletics, and he was in the gym and saw a man doing a really funny walk,” said Eastler’s daughter, Gretchen Fishman, of Boxford, Massachusetts. “He was always a curious, intellectual man, so he went up to the guy and said, ‘What are you doing?'”

That guy, it turned out, was Shaul Ladany, an Israeli Holocaust survivor, world record holder and two-time Olympian who in 1972 survived the Munich Massacre, an attack on Israeli Olympic athletes during the Munich Olympics.

It was Ladany who taught Eastler to racewalk in New York City, and he competed there recreationally before moving to Maine in 1974 to teach at the university and live on a farm.

He passed his love for the sport on to his children and became an advocate for racewalking as a high school sport across the state, working in the early 1990s to get the MPA to recognize it as an official track and field event.

He also published a children’s book, “Racewalking? Fun!,” that has been distributed by USA Track & Field and in schools across Maine.

“Getting that advancement to take place with the MPA and getting racewalking to be a competitive piece of Maine’s high school track and field, that was a major goal of Tom’s and it was accomplished,” said Don Berry, a longtime friend and the officials liaison for both indoor and outdoor track and field with the MPA. “It was one of those really amazing things that happened in our lives as far as the sport is concerned.”

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Jeff Salvage, who recently succeeded Eastler as president of the USA Race Walking Foundation, said his ability to get it recognized in Maine has dumbfounded advocates for the sport across the country.

“He did a lot of things nationally, but no one has cracked the school system and he did,” Salvage said. He said some of the reasons racewalking hasn’t been adopted in more places has to do with its obscurity, technical difficulty and the budgetary constraints of high school sports departments, many of which are cutting rather than adding programs.

“He did that and that’s his personality, perseverance and intelligence,” Salvage said.

In Maine, Eastler didn’t coach at any specific school, but racewalkers from across the state would often call him up or come to Farmington to seek his guidance.

When Fishman was in high school, she said her father would often wake her up at 4:30 a.m. and in the winter they would go to the basketball court at UMF to train for race walking before she went to school.

She went on to the 2000 Olympic trials in the racewalk while her brother, Kevin Eastler, who was also coached by his father for a time, competed in the 2004 Athens Olympics and 2008 Beijing Olympics for racewalking.

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“It’s almost foreign to me now that there are high schoolers who would want to racewalk,” Fishman said. “I think it’s amazing it’s become ingrained in the state the way it has. It’s really a testament to his hard work and advocacy because, you know, racewalking looks funny and it’s not the most popular track and field event. So few people give it a try or appreciate the sport for what it is. He worked tirelessly to change that view of it.”

Eastler’s willingness to work for hours with a single athlete to help him perfect his technique also carried over to the classroom at the University of Maine at Farmington, where his passing drew a comparison from university officials to the late Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

“As was written last week in the aftermath of Sen. John McCain’s death, ‘Some voices are so vibrant, it is hard to think of them stilled,'” wrote Eric Brown, UMF interim president, and Celeste Branham, UMF vice president for student and community services, in an email to the campus community. “So too, for this university, it is difficult to think of the highly energized voice of Emeritus Professor Thomas Edward Eastler stilled.”

A professor in the division of natural sciences, Eastler taught for 41 years and was known on campus by the nickname Dr. Rock. He was also involved over roughly the same time period in various boards and committees in the town of Farmington, serving up until last month as a member of the planning board.

From 1987 to 2015 he held gubernatorial appointments to both the Maine Board of Environmental Protection and the Maine Low-level Radioactive Waste Authority, the latter of which he chaired for three years, according to the university.

As a retired colonel in the U.S. Air Force, he consulted on classified security matters for the Naval Air Warfare Center and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in California, Sandia Laboratories in New Mexico, and Raytheon in Virginia.

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In addition to Fishman and his son Kevin, Eastler leaves behind a second daughter, Lauren Farkash, of Plainville, Massachusetts, and his wife of 52 years, Susan Eastler.

“He found time where there was none,” Fishman said. “There were a lot of things he wanted to accomplish and that was a stress, of course, but he took great pride and joy in everything he did. He never did a job half way. That was really his attitude about life — you do it because you can and live a life with a purpose beyond yourself — and he really did that.”

Rachel Ohm — 612-2368

rohm@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @rachel_ohm


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