Island profiles: Francoise Mallow — a good run from France to Shelter Island

Winner take all? Well, not really. Francoise Mallow doesn’t run to win, although she certainly likes it if she finishes first in the Shelter Island 10K in her age group, the 65- to 70-year-old set. Second is pretty good, too.

She runs because she’s both a breast cancer survivor and a member of a family with significant osteoporosis; the former precludes most of the medications for the latter. So she needed to find a way to strengthen bones that didn’t depend on drugs not allowed for her.

“I thought I had to do something to avoid” bone loss “and I was told weight-bearing exercise is good for your bones so that’s why I started, for the impact, the boom boom boom. That’s why I did it, really, daily, a mile and a mile and a half. That’s what I’ve been doing for 20 years.”

Her first run, and she laughs as she remembers it, was from the corner of Congdon and Cartwright to Burns Road — not quite 10K. But as runners tend to do, once into it, she kept increasing her mileage and taking pleasure in doing so.

In this year’s 10K, she came in third in her age group. How could such a thing happen? It’s complicated. Another runner and former Islander, Susan McClanahan, who now lives in the city but comes for the race, is two years younger. She’s always been a challenge when she and Francoise run in the same age group. “She’s a real runner,” Francoise said, admiringly. “She’s always seven or eight minutes ahead of me. She did the New York City Marathon, and is really a trained runner.”

But Susan wasn’t the reason for her third-place finish this year. When Francoise turned 65, her competitor was still in the next age tier down. What happened this year? A dark horse from Center Moriches entered the race and outran her. “Even by next year I won’t have a chance to be first. I’ll still be 69, but the following year I’ll be in the next age group,” the 70- to 75-set, she said. The dark horse and her good friend Susan will still be in the younger category and, barring any surprises, Francoise will have a good shot at first place.

“It’s comforting to think you’re doing something good for your quality of life, physically, that you’re feeling better,” she said of her running. “Many people don’t have the same stamina — running makes a big difference.” In the beginning, she would listen to Bach on her Walkman. Now she listens to French radio and political talk shows. She’s out there every morning, occasionally later in the day or in the early evening.

One of her favorite loops is in Dering Harbor, where she drives to someone’s house, gets out there, runs for her mileage, then gets back in the car and comes home; another favorite is the first Ram Island Causeway, up the hill on to Little Ram and the Ram’s Head Inn and back. If she’s invited to someone’s house for drinks or dinner, often she’ll just run there — she likes it when “I have a destination.”

Francoise was born in Versailles, right outside Paris. She grew up and went to school there. She was the middle of three sisters, followed by a younger brother. They all still meet every September in Paris to renew family ties.

Her mother was a teacher and taught Francoise in fourth and fifth grades. She still remembers her grammar lessons. “I use them to this day. She was a wonderful teacher,” she said.

She went to the Sorbonne after the French equivalent of high school and visited the States, including New York City, on her first summer vacation, “for six weeks, just to see what it was like.”

“I was good at English. I visited people, went to the Museum of Modern Art every day. It was so wonderful. It was the only place I knew where you could sit outside and meet people. I don’t remember paying to get in, to go to the garden,” and she thinks back then probably it wasn’t required. She met the man who would become her first husband then and returned for both a second and a third summer. During the third summer, in 1965, they married. She was then 19.

They lived in New York City and had a son, Jean Philippe, who now lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned a master’s degree in linguistics at Columbia in 1968. The couple divorced in 1976. Some time later, she met and married her current husband, Gerry Mallow, who was a fellow parent in her son’s school. He is a former real estate developer in the New York metro area.

She taught French at the Lycee Kennedy, then at Union Carbide, and then gave private lessons to the employees and executives at L’Oreal Lancome, a French cosmetics company. That company’s president claimed to be non-English speaking — anyone working there who wanted to be in one-on-one communication with him had to speak French. She went on to do the same job at Schlumberger, a French oil and gas drilling supply company. She stopped work when her son left for boarding school in 1983 but continues to study linguistics and spends significant time practicing the cello.

Gerry had been a Shelter Islander when they met. A film buff, he had bought the Greenport Theatre, which he owned for several years. He now owns the Sag Harbor Cinema. He had always loved the Island and Francoise followed suit. They live here now full time, except for their time in France, and she loves her days of running, studying and playing the cello. She’ll be doing Ellen’s Run, a 5K, one of the South Fork Breast Cancer races this summer — coming in first in her age group? Maybe so.