Bruce Tulloh, who has died aged 82, was a runner of distinction, winning the 1962 European 5000m title on a cinder track in Belgrade – running, as usual, barefoot. Further, he stunned his opponents by sprinting for home fully 700m out.

The winter before the championships, Tulloh had spent some time in New Zealand, where he raced against Peter Snell, the Olympic 800m champion. On a grass track in Whanganui, Tulloh broke the four-minute mile, running 3min 59.3sec. It was no match for Snell, who broke the world mile record with a time of 3min 54.4sec in the same race, but it was January in New Zealand, not Belgrade in September, and it was a much longer race, 5000m, that Tulloh was preparing for.

Come that September evening, in the dimly lit JNA Stadium in Belgrade, everything went to plan. Tulloh broke away on the penultimate lap to win relatively comfortably, though he did much later admit to feeling “scared stiff” that he was going to be caught.

It was also the race that Brendan Foster’s father dragged his son in from playing football to watch. “My first inspiration,” said Foster, later also a European 5000m champion, “was provided by Bruce Tulloh.”

In Tulloh’s youthful imagination, he was foremost a novelist. However, while his literary ambitions were pushed to the background by running, his career was as diverse as his imagination: as well as his track successes (he was a multiple British record holder and a four-minute miler), he broke the record for running across the US, when Forrest Gump hadn’t been invented; ran with the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico in 1971, nearly 40 years before they were rediscovered; and became a regular visitor to Kenya, coaching, among others, the Kenyan Mike Boit to Olympic bronze and Richard Nerurkar of Britain to victory in the 1993 World Cup marathon.

Born in Datchet, Berkshire, but brought up on the north Devon coast, at Instow, it was on the nearby beaches that he first ran barefoot. His mother, Margaret (nee Branfoot), was a botanist and a keen runner in her youth, who worked as a housekeeper and matron after separating from Bruce’s father, Tony, an army captain. Bruce’s grandfather paid for his education at Wellington college, where his running started with more intent, but no great success. Only when he did his national service in Hong Kong did his performances step up a gear.

Though Tulloh did not consider himself to be a natural athlete, in his prime few seemed more physically suited to their occupation. He was 5ft 7½in tall and extremely light, on occasion only 52kg (8st 3lb). “Like Lester Piggott, but not as wealthy,” he would say. His style was distinctive too; head rolling, elbows out and, for his height, a disproportionately long stride, which ate up the ground.

Bruce Tulloh, running barefuoot, wins a three-mile race at White City, London, in 1962. YouTube

After national service, Tulloh studied botany at Southampton, graduating in 1959, and then agricultural science at Cambridge. He won his first national title in 1959, and earned selection for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. But he suffered in the heat and missed qualifying for the final by a single place. There were no world athletics championships in those days and Tulloh’s next target was the European Championships in Belgrade two years later.

After his 1962 triumph, the 1964 Tokyo Games could not come soon enough. As it turned out, they came at exactly the wrong time. “I really felt I had a good chance of winning,” Tulloh told Roy Plomley in a 1974 edition of Desert Island Discs. But, in June, just four months before the Games, Tulloh caught German measles from his 18-month-old son, Clive. “I was never really the same for the rest of that season,” said Tulloh, who missed the event.

There was to be no final throw of the dice for Tulloh, who felt that the allocation of the 1968 Games to Mexico was palpably wrong. “As a biologist I knew the effect of running at that sort of altitude, 7,500ft, and like a lot of distance runners I thought it was very unfair.”

Ironically what he chose to do instead would have been considered by most people as far more challenging. Tulloh decided to run across the US. The record was held by a South African, Don Shepherd, who had taken 73 days.

“He’d done it the hard way. He’d taken a bus to Los Angeles and run back to New York carrying everything on his back,” said Tulloh, “I don’t believe in suffering unnecessarily so I did it in much more comfort.”

His wife, Sue (nee Baker), whom he had married in 1961, and Clive accompanied him. They had a car and a caravan and were sponsored by British Leyland, Schweppes and the Observer, which had commissioned a weekly column. In 1969, after years as an amateur athlete, Tulloh became a professional.

Even with his support team (and for once wearing shoes) Tulloh’s run was gruelling. He averaged 45 miles per day; slightly less early on, more as he got “fitter”. He was not allowed to run on freeways, unless it was the only road out of town. “It was at times like running on the M1,” said Tulloh. In just under 65 days, though, he completed the 2,876-mile journey, beating Shepherd’s record by eight days. Tulloh wrote a book about the experience called Four Million Footsteps. He would go on to write more than 20 books, all on athletics, including Track Athletics (1994) and Running is Easy (1996).

After a period living with the Tarahumara Indians, which Tulloh wrote about for the Observer, and a two-year teaching post in Kenya, when he coached Boit, in 1973 Tulloh joined Marlborough college, where, for just over 20 years, he taught biology and, of course, looked after the athletics teams.

Tulloh continued to set targets for himself, too; when 58 he ran the 1994 London Marathon in 2hr 47min to win his age group; when 60 he ran a 1hr 16min half-marathon; and, when 75, he ran the original Athens marathon with Sue and other family and friends.

He is survived by Sue and their children, Clive, Jojo and Katherine.

• Michael Bruce Swinton Tulloh, runner, teacher and writer, born 29 September 1935; died 28 April 2018