CAMBRIDGE — When Ab Morton tunes in to watch the Boston Marathon next Monday, he’ll pause and wonder about the year he didn’t run in it but should have.

That was 1948 and Morton’s long-distance running career was at its peak. In 1947 he had won the Canadian Marathon Championship and was making his run at joining the Canadian team going to the London Olympics.

Morton, now 96, had won two Olympic qualifying races. He passed on Boston because his wife Gladys was about to give birth. Nobody told him until afterwards that Boston was the third qualifying race for the London games. In the two previous years, Morton had placed fifth in Boston – more than enough to qualify, he said

Eventually, Morton was given another chance to qualify for the team: a couple weeks after running another 26-mile marathon, he was told to win a race in Montreal. It was the day before the Olympic team was to set sail.

Morton was leading at the halfway mark but the short time between races caught up with him. “I hit the wall” and struggled to a second-place finish, he said. The boat left without him.

“That broke my heart. I felt so down,” Morton said.

He marks it up to something any athlete today would understand: sports politics. “I don’t want to sound bitter,” he says repeatedly, but he notes Olympic running committee was stacked with delegates from Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton — and wanted their choice runners to go to London.

By 1950, his spirit bruised and a growing family to support in Galt, Morton ended his running career.

In Morton’s room at Fairview Mennonite Home, a display case is full of trophies, photos and mementoes from his running career. He won the 1947 Lou Marsh award the same year he won the national marathon title. He’s also been inducted into the Cambridge Sports Hall of Fame and the Galt Collegiate Institute Stairway of Excellence — even though never graduated.

Morton never earned a penny for his races, but he remembers getting diamond rings and kitchen appliances as prizes.

After winning one race in Montreal, he didn’t know what to do with a refrigerator as he looked at his return bus ticket. He sold it to someone for $135 at the bus stop and headed home.

Morton’s first race was in 1934: the Galt YMCA “Around the Bridges Race” on Victoria Day.

He trained on a horse track behind Manchester Public School. There, he learned from runners like Scotty Rankine, Bill Reynolds and Cliff Bricker.

“They were great runners. It felt it was a great honour to be on the track with them.”

Running gave Morton an escape from the hardscrabble realities of the Depression.

“I liked it and I liked the fellowship. It was a natural athleticism I knew I had,” he said.

“You have to have desire. You have to want to win. Its something you can’t explain. I just enjoyed competing. That’s all.”

Born in Galt in 1914, he had to leave Galt Collegiate after three years when his father struggled to find work during the Depression. He worked 72-hour a week at 17 cents an hour in Riverside Silk Mills to help support his family.

In 1942 he applied to fly with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War. At age 27 and without a high school diploma, he was instead assigned to bureaucratic duties. His running buddy Rankine also signed up with the air force and they kept running in military competitions throughout the war.

After discharge in 1945, Morton ended up working with Rankine again at the Grandview Training School. At the time, the youth jail was for boys, with Rankine in charge of physical activities. In 1950, the boys school moved to Cobourg. So Morton started the door-to-door Pearle Laundry service in Galt, which he ran for 22 years.

Running today is miles different than in Morton’s prime. Specialized training, custom-fit shoes and water stations along race routes were unheard of six decades ago. It’s shortened marathon winning times to two hours 10 minutes, Morton said.

“If you ran a marathon at 2:30, that was good. That would win any marathon in my day.”

In one marathon, he remembers the top of his canvas tennis shoe ripped open — but he kept going and won. In another at New York City, he remembers his feet blistering badly over the last 10 miles.

“When I finished, they actually had to cut the shoe laces off to get my shoes off,” Morton said.

“You couldn’t get decent shoes.”

kswayze@therecord.com