I have been a competitive runner for more than 70 years and, as more years go by, I keep finding more good reasons to keep running. The latest, totally unexpected, is that it puts you in peak shape for surgery.

Not your problem? You’re 100 percent healthy? Symptom free? Regular medical checks showing all clear? Super-fit for running? So was I.

The simple reality is that serious medical problems, and in some cases surgery, are an increasing hazard as you move through your sixties, seventies, and eighties. We are, it seems, mortal, although I don’t recall ever agreeing to that arrangement. In my case, the out-of-the-blue diagnosis was the early detection of lung cancer.

I’m not writing to make a drama from that all-too-common experience, which was, in my case, skillfully and successfully dealt with. I want to pass on the main lesson I learned from the last six months: that being a runner in good shape made the whole process smoother, safer, faster, and less damaging long-term.

Full disclosure: I have no medical qualifications, nor special knowledge other than as a thoughtful lifelong runner. The remarks that follow are my personal conclusions from my personal experience. The only medical recommendation I offer is that running is good for you, in general, and in case you ever need to undergo surgery.

The better shape the body is in, the less serious and traumatic the experience will probably be. My running fitness was evident and appreciated before, during, and after the surgery.

BEFORE

“I had an adequate margin to lose some capacity and still function comfortably.”

When they measured my lung performance pre-surgery, I tested 153 percent for my age (that’s a simplified version of the results).

My doctors told me, “Even though lung lobe removal is the most effective treatment, we often can’t undertake that significant surgery at your age (then 83), because the reduction in capacity would not leave sufficient to cope with the demands of normal life.”

In other words, thanks to my runner’s lungs (big, capacious, efficient), I had an adequate margin to lose some capacity and still function comfortably through life afterward. They kindly warned me that my running would be adversely affected, but I’d figured that out for myself.

My heart, too, gave enthusiastic proof that it had ample resilience to deal with the general anaesthetic and whatever else I might have to undergo. I generally break age records on health clinics’ treadmill tests. Resting pulse is low, the heart copes robustly with effort, it can hold high heart-rate levels without problem, and it recovers and returns to normal quickly and smoothly—all good signals for problem-free surgery, and not as common as we might think. My procedure got bumped by 24 hours because the patient before me had a cardiac incident on the operating table. My guess is that a lifetime of interval repeats made that less than likely for me.

Preparing mentally for the surgery was also helped by being accustomed to getting mentally ready to race. In the days before the operation, I told myself that this was easier than any race—all I had to do was go to sleep. I wasn’t the one who had to perform at a top level or have my ability tested. Nevertheless, it felt like a test, a challenge, and I was aware that I was approaching it with that curious mix of nervousness, determination, and off-to-the-office relaxation that is typical before a race.

DURING

“The impact of surgery was probably not unlike the impact of a serious interval session—something to be tolerated, endured, recovered from, and adapted to.”

Invasive surgery and removal of part of the body is serious stuff. General anaesthetic itself is a traumatic shock to the body. Yet despite my advanced age, I came through without any apparent problem. That is probably because a lifetime of hard racing and training has accustomed my system to deal with extreme physical stress. Runners’ bodies learn how to manage discomfort, even pain. That’s not usual in our cosseted modern world, which inflicts stress on the mind more often than on the body. My guess is that from my body’s point of view, the impact of surgery was probably not unlike the impact of a serious interval session—something to be tolerated, endured, recovered from, and adapted to. The main difference between hard running and being carved up was that the latter happened lying down while I was unconscious. And there was free oxygen available.

My runner’s leanness also paid off by simplifying the process of incision. When my family physician checked the scar, she said it was the smallest she had ever seen for the lobectomy procedure, and attributed that to the fact that there was no body fat to be cut through and held in place. That made it possible for the surgeon to work without cutting muscles, leaving me without the usual damage to my shoulder and arm movement.

The only problem about being a post-surgery runner was revealed in hospital in the darkest hours of night. My low heart rate put on a nightly comedy show. My resting pulse is in the high 40s, and it apparently drops to low- to mid-30s at the time of deepest sleep. That’s no worry for me, and it’s normal for a well-trained runner, but it’s below the official safety level of 40 beats per minute, and therefore a source of alarm and anxiety for the nice night nurse.

I figured that she does her rounds every four hours, taking blood pressure and checking vital signs. To save her worrying about me, and spoiling her well-earned rest, I learned to recognize the sounds as she crept stealthily from bed to bed, and I spotted the moving glimmer of her little flashlight. When she was one patient away, I would start secretly pumping my legs in bicycle pedal movements hidden under the blankets, watching the dial above my head creep up. 32—pedal pedal—36—pump pump—39—pedal pedal pump—42—over the line! By the time she reached me, my heart was at a reassuring 48 or 50 per minute, probably beginning to think I was off for an early run. The nice night nurse documented my stats, and continued on her rounds happy that all was well.

Thus, I conformed with what the modern world considers normal. I am grateful for the nurses’ care to ensure I came safely through the night. But I wonder what the average Neolithic person’s normal resting pulse was?

AFTER

“Runners are often told, “Listen to your body.” I totally agree. But I also expect my body to listen to me.”

Runners practice how to recover, over and over again. It’s something we are very good at. We know how to rest, but also, given the choice between total rest and a cautious measure of activity, we know that low-level movement will usually bring the best recovery.

I was ready to walk pretty much as soon as the drainage tubes were disconnected. It was a great treat when I had to go for an x-ray and they didn’t have a wheelchair free, so I hiked under escort along a maze of underground passages. They let me go home after only three nights.

The booklet they provided on “Lung Surgery: Home Management Guidelines” was helpful, but it again revealed the gap between runners and what is “normal.” It advocated exercise, with caution initially followed by a slow increase. All good, except that the recommended exercise levels would not be worth a runner changing socks for. At the end of Week 1, the book’s recommended level was five minutes easy walk, three times day; I was walking more than an hour without any strain.

After two weeks, I introduced a little slow running—literally one minute, then two minutes two days later. By such small steps, every second day, I have moved from 8 x 2 minutes in Week 3, to 10 x 3 minutes in Week 5, and up to 4 x 10 minutes in Week 7, with the walk recovery interval also slowly diminishing.

Runners are often told, “Listen to your body.” I totally agree. But I also expect my body to listen to me. It’s the age-old training principle of progress by small stages of overload and adaptation. As I walk or jog on my new lower-cylinder engine, I judge the point where I am slightly pushing the breathing, teaching the reduced lungs something new. The body willingly adapts, but only if you show it what it needs to do. I literally listen to my body. If I do too much, it makes noises like the character I used to read to my children, Thomas the Tank Engine.

There is double evidence of progress. I can chart it from the movement in my Thomas the Tank Engine limit, and the hospital’s six-week x-ray also showed that the gap in the lungs is already being filled.

Will I ever get back to the racing level I was at before the surgery? Almost certainly not. Will I get to a level where I can be competitive enough to satisfy me? Probably, but not for many months, and after that who knows? I’m willing to try. The benefits of running are too great to stop. And there’s a lot to discover about running on reduced lung capacity.

POSTSCRIPT

At our six-week sign-off consultation, the surgeon told me, “Lead your normal life.” I whispered to my wife, “He has no idea!” A few days later, less than seven weeks after the surgery, I registered for a 10K, initially only to make up a team, and anticipated walking much of it. But I unexpectedly found myself able to hold a pace just below stressing the breathing. I guess an experienced runner is good at finding that level. And so I ended by running the whole 10K, months before I expected that to be possible, in 61:38. Not bad, though not close to my best recent time pre-surgery, 52:49.

Two weeks later, after doing some repeat 400s to work the breathing, I tried a 5K. Again, bad and good news: 29:59 was five minutes slower than I could run before the surgery, yet five minutes faster than I thought would be possible at this time.

Always another challenge. I’m realistic about the gap, but hopeful that I can close some of it. I’ll have fun trying, and I’ll be healthier for the effort.

Roger Robinson is a leading writer and historian of running, and lifetime elite runner. He won the world cross-country championship in his 80-84 age-group in February. His latest book is (Meyer & Meyer).

The post How Being a Runner Helped Me Stride Through Lung Cancer Surgery�� appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Last weekend, in Bathurst, Australia, I did something I thought I would never do again: I ran once more in the World Cross-Country Championship. Not the main men’s open race, in which I competed for England in 1966 and New Zealand in 1977. Not at age 83. But for the first time, the World Athletics federation added Masters championships, and—almost like a dream—I not only participated again, but raced at the front of the M80 field and managed to outlast a stubborn Australian for the win.

If you believe that running after eighty is about leisurely slow toddling, wait till you’re up there, racing to your limit, and you make the sharp u-turn at halfway and see that you are being closely stalked by a lean lanky Aussie with M80 on his bib and a threatening scowl like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon.��

He is called James Harrison, and he made me work for it. I have won and lost many hard races over the years, and this was one of the hardest. The only possible tactic was unrelieved pressure. I finally broke him three-quarters through the four-kilometer distance, on the second two-kilometer lap, as we gasped up a big steep rough-surfaced hill that broke many hearts that weekend. At last, I sensed him drop. It took tenacity, months of focused training (including hill repeats), and years of learning the wiles that true cross-country demands.��

This was a course where every decision counted about where you placed your next stride. Every sharp oxygen-draining uphill demanded that you keep momentum over the crest, every downhill was there for attack, not recovery, every tight turn required poise and pace. Those things don’t come easily after age eighty (and on two replaced knees in my case), but it was a World Championship of cross-country running, and we were there to take those tests.��

I won’t claim the sheer thrill of winning the race was the same as ever. But it was real, and it had a private significance. I ran below my best in the senior world championship in the past. Nothing can change those results, but it felt good this time to get it right. And the sense of achievement is something that few things in the last years of life are ever likely to equal.

Boring Courses No More

World Athletics, under President Seb Coe (who learned cross-country in England in his early teens), has grown tired of holding its cross-country championships on boring flat safe horse-race circuits, like those I encountered in my days in the main race. They decided to take some security risks to revitalize the sport. American senior administrator David Katz now acts as course consultant for each World Cross-Country, and insists on the real thing.��

“Cross-country has one distinctive thing, the course. That has to be the talking point, and each one must be unique as the race moves around the world. The media and the public need to understand that cross-country is special in its challenges, not just another long race,” Katz said in Bathurst.��

The previous , set the world chattering about a course that included loops over the steeply-sloping grassed roof of the Moesgaard Museum. This time (after several Covid-related postponements) the Aussies gave us a course that was a raw slice of the Australian outback. On the side of Mount Panorama, it was broken and unpredictable, rusty dirt, grey raggedy scrub grass, and diabolical hills. Scattered blue gum trees provided the only shade. Each morning, you could find fresh kangaroo poop.��

They added some challenges to make it even more uniquely Australian. There was a “billabong,” of treacherous ankle-deep wet mud that caused many runners to skid and flop to a slimy downfall. (Some of the slower kids in the scholastic races lay down and daubed themselves heroically.) There was a dash through the straight vines of a winery, followed by tight turns, and, in honor of Bathurst’s motor-race circuit, a “chicane” where you had to steer through a forest of car tires.��

High on a dry hillside there was a stretch named “Bondi Beach,” deep shifting sand decorated with lifeguard flags and “Beware of Sharks” signs. An Aussie joke, yet for the runners, another testing change of racing rhythm, another response to the challenge of contours and terrain. No other kind of running does that. Cross-country is the closest our sport gets to true interaction with the earth.������

Heat, Lightning, and Courage

Added to all that was the Outback summer heat, 95 degrees for the main races on the Saturday late afternoon. In the different races, several runners were taken to hospital, and at least four passed out during the race, including, it seemed, the women’s favorite and race leader, Letesenbet Gidey (Ethiopia), who collapsed dramatically and glazy-eyed as she was passed by Beatrice Chebet (Kenya) within strides of the finish.��

As a serious evening storm approached, its clouds like dark riders, the men’s race was hastily moved forward, and 22-year-old Ugandan Jacob Kiplimo had to win his first major title while lightning flashed behind the mountain and brutal wind gusts sent runners staggering. Slower runners were caught in torrential rain.�� Australia does nothing by half measures.��

For me and many others, Australia was an unexpected opportunity. Three months before the race, World Athletics and World Masters Athletics announced that they were combining to add masters championships, part of a new and excellent policy to make the event a full cross-country festival, as well as the world’s elite team and individual championships. Hundreds of spectators doubled as competitors. I met so many old friends out there, it was like a global runners’ reunion.��

In addition to the usual competitors from Europe, North America and Africa, there were teams from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, and other Pacific nations, none of them obvious participants in a sport that is essentially one of cold winter.

Seizing My Moment

I guess an 83-year-old who last ran the World Cross-Country in 1977 was another less-than-obvious participant. I never imagined it. I gave up cross-country for good, I believed, when my orthopedic surgeon confessed, after he watched me and the knee he had implanted struggle over a muddy course, that it gave him nightmares for weeks.��

But a lifetime of racing has taught me that you have to seize the moment. Before committing, I watched videos of the course, which like a good actor came across looking much more attractive than it was. When I actually saw the steep downhills, I thought I was out of my mind. But another thing I have learned is that in running, only one thing is absolutely certain—you won’t run well if you’re not in the race.��

I registered. I did the work. I seized my moment. I got the sheer thrill of winning a race. I was lucky in that the course’s surface proved (mostly) not too lumpy or too soft, and I was lucky in some top Europeans and South Americans not making the journey. In every race, you can only compete against those who show up.��

Young readers, please note. In January 1953, aged 13, I ran my first cross-country race, in my high school’s inter-house league, well back in the field. Seventy years a runner. You never know what a high school race might lead to.��

Being called world champion at 83 is a nice way to celebrate that small private anniversary—and at this age, I can surely be forgiven a memory lapse, if sometimes I forget to add “over-80.” It could also be a nice way to round off seventy years of running. Round off, except for the next race, that is.

Roger Robinson ran the world cross-country championship for England and later New Zealand, and set a Masters record of 2:20:15 at the Boston Marathon.�� He is regarded as the outstanding historical writer on running. He recaptures history from personal observation in When Running Made History (Syracuse University Press) and he researches vivid and accurate accounts of the sport’s best stories in his new book,��Running Throughout Time: the Greatest Running Stories Ever Told��(Meyer & Meyer). Available through�� and all online outlets and bookstores.��

The post How I Won the World Cross-Country Championship at Age 83 appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Latest weather forecast for the World Cross-Country Championships (February 18) is sunny, 82 degrees. And that may be the most sensational statement ever made about the great old race in its 120-year history.��

In most of the world, cross-country is a cold-weather sport. Unrepentantly. Cross-country proudly goes ahead when all other sports are cowering under shelter from storm or snow. In the UK, where it all began, and in Europe, championships come after the holidays, and hardy club harriers plan their training to peak for their biggest races in the bleak late winter of February and March.��

The grand climax of the season each year is the world championships, typically run in the northern hemisphere’s frigid March, the thoroughbred elites fighting cold winds and floundering through mud, slush, and frozen grass. The “World Cross” has been at that time of year since its first running on March 23, 1903, in Hamilton, Scotland. Traditionally, teams are selected from each nation’s own championship two or three weeks earlier—even in the U.S. and Canada where the scholastic cross-country season wraps up in December—doubling the chances of a blizzard or downpour on one of the big days.

Why does World Athletics schedule this terrain-dependent championship in the coldest, wettest season of the year?

Foxes, Hounds, and Hares

It started when a bunch of boys at an English private school, in the fall of the year 1819, wanted a game that would replicate their father’s winter pastime of hunting foxes or hares. Merging fox and hounds with hide and seek, they devised what we call paper-chasing. They sent two runners off as “foxes” with bags of shredded paper that they dropped as “scent,” and after an interval, the “pack” followed the scent and hoped to hunt down the foxes, for what they called “the kill.” They named themselves “The Royal Shrewsbury School Hunt,” and the school’s cross-country club still proudly retains the name, racing with “RSSH” on their shirts.

The lively teens of the 1830s recorded every run in handwritten ink in what they called the Hound Books, which make fascinating and often hilarious reading. Like many runners, they liked to combine their running with fun, festivity, mischief, and sometimes maverick rebelliousness. They trespassed, they incensed farmers, they stopped mid-run to drink beer and sherry, or sometimes eat a full meal (“a substantial repast at Mother Wade’s”), and they defied Dr. Kennedy, the pompous school Principal. When he tried to ban them and confiscated their scent bag, they tore up copies of his newly-published masterwork, Kennedy’s Latin Primer, and used it for the paper trail.��

The Hounds’ outings were group runs, with the whole pack collaborating in tracking the scent, and holding “all-ups” to allow the slower runners to catch up. They were not races, except at the very end, when the hound who was first to catch the foxes was awarded “the brush.” (I prefer not to know exactly what that meant.) After the mid-winter holidays, in January to March, the boys introduced real races. Staying with the horseback game, they switched from imitation hunting to imitation steeplechasing. That is, they copied their fathers’ risky old hedge-leaping horseback races from village to village, church steeple to church steeple, not hunting now, but racing. The teenage boys had no horses, so again, they foot-raced across the agricultural countryside (cross-country), scratching their legs on stubble, struggling over wet plowed land, vaulting gates, scrambling over thorn hedges, and wading through streams.��

Their pattern of low-key pack runs in the fall, followed by true cross-country races from January to March, is exactly how the sport is still structured—outside North America.

Other schools quickly caught on to the new sport, most famously Rugby School, where the novelist Thomas Hughes, in his best-seller Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) gives a vivid account of the “Barby run…nine miles at least, and hard ground,” forcing “many a youngster to drag his legs heavily, and feel his heart beat like a hammer.” Tom and his friends get back to their dormitory “limping and shivering,” but still think “Hare-and-hounds the most delightful of games.” At Rugby, the (paper) scent was laid by “hares,” not foxes, leading to cross country runners being known still as “harriers,” which originally meant hare-hunters.����

Winter Running Club

Cross-country running began its path to becoming an organized adult sport in 1867, when some members of the Thames Rowing Club in south London held steeplechase races on Wimbledon Common to keep in shape during the winter. Inspired by Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and remembering their own rambunctious running days at Shrewsbury, Rugby, or other schools, the young crew oarsmen formed themselves in 1868 into a winter club, Thames Hare and Hounds, the world’s first post-high-school running club. It still flourishes 155 years later, the members racing on the same ground, wearing the same black and white club uniform, with the black saltire or X. (I once heard an American runner describe me as “the guy with the kiss on his shirt.”)��

Other clubs quickly sprang up, enough to hold an inter-club championship of England in 1876, in Epping Forest, north London. Unfortunately, they still used paper-trail to mark the course, and it all washed away in torrential rain, leaving the runners adrift. One later remembered being, “quite at sea in the forest, wandering about for hours in a frozen condition.” When he finally staggered back to race headquarters, they rubbed him with brandy. “But personally,” he recalled, “I thought internal application would be better and I snatched the glass. The next thing I remember is waking up in the Old Pavilion Music Hall.”����

The sport spread. Already, running showed the strengths that make it so successful in our own time–the fun, challenge, flexibility, low cost, contact with nature, health benefits, and balance between deeply individual fulfillment and an inclusive and supportive community. In 1903, England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland (as it was then) formed the International Cross-Country Union (ICCU) and that March, held the first international championship in Scotland. Over 8.5 miles, it was won by the great Alfred Shrubb, multiple world record holder on the track.��

France joined the ICCU in 1907, bringing great runners from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, like Alain Mimoun, who won four times. When those nations became independent, they entered their own powerful teams. Farther-away nations began to appear, South Africa in 1962 (pre-apartheid ban), New Zealand in 1965, and the USA in 1966, on the sandy racecourse of Rabat, Morocco. That was when the unknown Tracy Smith, from California and the University of Oregon, stunned the hardened Europeans by placing third.��

Milers and Marathoners Meet in the Mud

The championship quickly became the world’s premier annual footrace, team and individual. It was both inclusive and elite. It thrust together the best milers and best marathoners, steeplechasers and road runners, Olympic track medalists and inspired club harriers in a single seething contest over 7.5 miles of unpredictable terrain during the off-season for track and road competitions.������

The sport outgrew the old anglo-dominated ICCU, which dithered about admitting women. In 1973, it was all taken over by the international federation (now World Athletics). Cross-country, the maverick winter sport, populated by eccentric skinny people who were no good at football, became the first official world championship of running. Track and field and the marathon followed dutifully ten years later.��

Different Down Under

The 2023 races, for the first time, will be down under in Australia, at Bathurst, out on the New South Wales goldfield tablelands, where the maximum recorded February temperature is 107 degrees F. It’s bushfire season. Resident wildlife includes emus, rat-kangaroos, death adders, the duck-billed platypus that blew Charles Darwin’s evolving mind when he visited in 1836, and the bare-nosed wombat, which drops its poop in perplexingly perfect cubes.

It’s going to be different.

Why Bathurst? Besides the scenic Mount Panorama overlooking the town, it is Australia’s top motor-race circuit. No cross-country course would deign to set foot on the smooth asphalt or concrete that fast cars require (a wuss sport by comparison), yet the grandstands, social facilities, hotels, and the steep grassy slope of the mountain make it a smart choice. The course description talks of a “billabong” (stagnant muddy pool, as in the song “Waltzing Matilda”), and a “boomerang” (curved wooded weapon lethally hurled by the Aboriginal people), and, more conventionally, a rough-footing hill to climb and descend, all part of the technical skills that give true cross-country its unique identity.��

This year’s race in Bathurst will be highlighted by festivities for the fiftieth jubilee as a world championship. Those fifty years have seen two great changes, unforeseen in the early years: the advent of women, which has given us such icons of cross-country brilliance as Doris Brown Heritage and Tirunesh Dibaba, and East Africa’s meteoric rise to dominance, with superlative Kenyans, Ethiopians, and Ugandans at the front of every field. And this year, for the first time, the program includes masters’ championship races, bringing in serious elite runners aged up to 80 and over.��

With 82 degrees of Aussie sunshine—and six-sided wombat poop—it might seem all to be very different from the romp over rain-soaked hills and wintry farms on the scent of the paper trail 204 years ago. Yet every runner will be on the grassy slope of Mount Panorama for the challenge of racing at high tempo over varied natural terrain, exactly the same challenge that so enthused those inventive schoolboys.����

Roger Robinson ran the world cross-country championship for England and later New Zealand, and will race in the 80+ masters grade on February 19. He is regarded as the outstanding historical writer on running. The seminal story of cross-country’s beginnings is in his new book, Running Throughout Time: the Greatest Running Stories Ever Told (Meyer & Meyer, available through and all online outlets and bookstores).����

The post Why World Cross-Country Is Proudly a Winter Sport appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

The first marathon to get the world’s attention was the 1908 Olympic race in London. Dorando Pietri, a resilient little Italian cake maker in a��white shirt, baggy red shorts, and a knotted handkerchief on his head entered the stadium with a big lead. But the day was hot and Pietri had reached the edge of exhaustion. Staggering confusedly, he collapsed on the track. Helped to his feet, dazed and wobbling, he collapsed again, and again, six times in all, until the vast crowd thought he was going to die. Steered and supported by officials, Pietri reached the tape, but inevitably he was disqualified for “assistance,” and the Olympic title went to the coolheaded New Yorker Johnny Hayes. The elemental human conflict between Pietri’s physical weakness and his indomitable willpower caught the world’s imagination.

Pietri’s story is . But the world has forgotten the era that his courage inspired. Suddenly, the marathon became big business and a . Highlighting this “” was a series of spectacularly successful professional marathon matches. Held mostly in New York City, they attracted huge crowds and media interest and created a multinational generation of elite runners. Because they ran for prize money, with betting permitted, they are largely omitted from history books, which, dominated as they are by the Olympics, deal exclusively with the amateur sport. Thus their fascinating story exists only in brief newspaper references and family archives that have been unnoticed for generations, and has never been fully told.

For six months in late 1908 and early 1909, promoters put on “match races,”��man against man, like a boxing championship, around and around tiny smoke-filled indoor tracks for strictly 26 miles 385 yards (the “London distance”), with huge crowds bringing their betting money, their cigars, and their noisy partisan patriotism. The Italian Pietri against Irish American Hayes, Pietri against Native Canadian Tom Longboat, Longboat against Brit Alf Shrubb, with bands playing and national flags flying.

Then promoter Pat Powers had another new idea: a “marathon derby,” the six best runners all together in one race. He put up the biggest prize money ever known. The bookmakers had a bonanza. To accommodate even bigger crowds, the Great Marathon Derby of April 3, 1909, was staged at New York’s famous baseball venue, the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, which squeezed in 25,000, with more overflowing to every vantage point. They were clinging in their hundreds to Coogan’s Bluff and perched six deep along the Speedway and the heights above it, hanging on every ledge and branch and chimney that offered a glimpse of the track. Boys beyond number, nearly all Johnny Hayes devotees, prowled the adjoining Manhattan Field searching for illicit ways in.

Longboat, the Onondaga First Nations Canadian, started favorite in the betting, at six-to-five. He was a Boston Marathon champion at age 19 and had won both his prize-money marathons in New York at a seemingly easy lope, looking well in charge as he beat Pietri and then Shrubb. Pietri was at eleven-to-five. Boston put its money on Shrubb, at eight-to-five. A multiple amateur-world-record holder on the track and famed as a fearless front-runner, Shrubb had moved to America after being debarred for accepting expense money and was now coaching cross-country and track at Harvard.

The Irish money was on Hayes or Matthew Maloney, who turned professional after winning a muddy amateur marathon from Rye to Manhattan. They were outsiders, but stronger in the betting than the unfancied sixth runner, Henri St. Yves.��The unknown Frenchman, a waiter and chauffeur who had earned his place by winning a marathon in Scotland, had trained for three weeks at Princeton��with the student cross-country team, who ran with him in relays. Loyally, they backed him at very long odds.

The setting for this battle of six heroes was an outdoor grass track, five laps to the mile. Viola’s Italian Band and Bayne’s 69th Regiment Band were hired to “alternate in a concert,” which continued throughout the race. Money flew to the bookmakers. Everything was set for one of the most spectacular sporting entertainments since the Coliseum in Rome was closed.

And then it rained.

The baseball field was so soggy that the size of the track was reduced to improve the footing, making it six laps to a mile, marked with little Stars and Stripes flags. The crowd sat intrepidly on open banking, getting soaked, and “cheered madly” as the competitors one by one made theatrical entrances, all wearing dressing gowns like boxers. Pietri trotted over to the Italian block and bowed operatically, Longboat beamed a big amiable grin, his gown open to show the Canadian maple leaf on his chest. Shrubb was stiff with English restraint. St. Yves, short and unnoticed, astutely eyed the bigger stars. Hayes entered last, after Maloney, and got the loudest and most Irish applause as he posed for the photographers.

A prerace photo suggests it was misty drizzle rather than heavy rain. The runners wore short sleeves, so it was cool and damp, not serious New York winter cold. The crowd expected two hours of tactical caution, with the familiar stars in control. They were wrong.

After Pietri and then Shrubb had led briefly, the foolish little St. Yves surprisingly took over on the fifth lap. The crowd “laughed in derision as the French runner took up the lead … setting a heart-breaking pace,” reported . A mere beginner among celebrities, almost wholly unsupported in the betting, and running with a pattering stride and low knee lift, St. Yves made it look like a French farce. He set off at 5:14 for the first mile and well under six minutes��per mile from then on.

The crowd knew he would kill himself at that ridiculous pace on sodden grass. Shrubb thought the same, running cautiously for once, keeping company with Pietri. Farther back came Hayes, again using the negative-split tactics that won him the 1908 Olympics, and Longboat, whose patience had paid off in his duels against Pietri and Shrubb. Maloney also watched and waited.

To everyone’s surprise, and reluctant admiration, tiny St. Yves stayed in front, lap after pattering lap. His action, said the Times, “seemed to glide rather than run over the grass track.” Still, they had seen Pietri and then Shrubb run in front like this for 20 miles and end on the doctor’s table, while Longboat plodded home the winner. The boys in the crowd still whooped for Hayes, who smilingly refused to be more assertive, even when the band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” to stir him.

In the tenth mile, Shrubb, who had never been behind in a race for so long in his life, grew impatient, reeled St. Yves in, and took over the lead. The crowd cheered. They wanted action, aggression, tactical change. St. Yves, unperturbed, tucked in behind Shrubb. Longboat stayed cautiously 50 yards back, with Pietri another 50 behind him and Hayes and Maloney trailing, all awaiting their moment. Ten miles is still early in a marathon. The overeager ones would burn out. That was how it was supposed to go.

But it didn’t. Shrubb led, as he usually did, but this time St. Yves stayed right there, sitting for eight miles. Everyone in the ground expected both to fade, especially the impudent little outsider. But at 18 miles, the unthinkable happened. St. Yves slipped past Shrubb and was in the lead again. The reporters tried to do justice to what they were seeing. “His feet scarcely left the earth, and he ran with less apparent effort than any man seen here before,” said the Times .��Even the increasing sloppy mud didn’t seem to trouble him. The rain had stopped, but the track was getting churned.

It became more incredible. St. Yves moved away from Shrubb, still setting world marks for every intermediate distance. Pietri and Hayes looked more focused now but never came close. Longboat was in trouble at 18 miles. He stopped to change his shoes (which were like light boots, ankle-high), but he was done and walked off the track before 20 miles. The other excitement came at about the same moment, when St. Yves lapped Shrubb. Now he was at least a lap clear of the entire field, and he looked a lot better than those who should have been threatening him.

Shrubb was drifting. By 22 miles, he was paying for that reckless midrace surge, when his patience had cracked. He slowed to a walk, staggered, then quit. The irrepressible St. Yves scampered on. A pistol shot announced the last mile, and the little Frenchman responded by picking up the pace. He lapped several of his famous rivals yet again, charged briskly around his last lap, and finished with a splendid flourish of a sprint, pure French panache. The crowd wildly acclaimed St. Yves, even though he had cost most of them a lot of money. Both bands, after some hasty research, broke into the “Marseillaise.” St. Yves had run 2:40:50.6, the fastest at that date for these multi-lap marathons.

While there has to be doubt about the exact accuracy of a track that was reconfigured in the rain just before the race, there’s not a shadow of doubt about the brilliance of the victory. St. Yves had surely run the greatest marathon ever. In the equivalent to a modern world championship, with the best in the world all there and highly motivated, with big money at stake, he had thrashed them. He controlled the whole race in a way we associate with Paula Radcliffe or Eliud Kipchoge. Pietri was nearly five minutes back (2:45:37), Hayes and Maloney another five, and Longboat and Shrubb were in the dressing room of despair.

In Times Square, a huge crowd gathered around the Times bulletin board, the biggest ever assembled there for any event except a national election. Race progress was shouted by those closest to the notice boards, who had claimed their spots hours beforehand, and was passed back through the massed crowd that filled Broadway and Seventh Avenue. Even the streetcars and taxis slowed down to hear progress reports. Half-heard news was garbled, rumors flew and grew. They expected to hear about Pietri, Longboat, Hayes, or Shrubb, the celebrity names. The unexpected race leader was shouted out as being Spanish, Mexican, Hungarian, before being finally identified as French.

No one had heard of Henri St. Yves. No one, that is, except the Princeton University cross-country team, who had run with him, and won a great deal of money on him. They were to be “jubilant.”

Excerpted and adapted with permission from Roger Robinson’s (Meyer and Meyer, 2022)

The post The Story of the First World Marathon Championship appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Last night I raced 3,000 meters on the track. I finished last, way out the back, lapped and re-lapped by the entire field. But I ran hard and broke a record that had stood for ten years. That’s the strange duality of racing at age 82. A pace that was once was a warm-up jog can set a record. Success overlaps with humiliation, fulfillment is interwoven with frustration.

To explain: I ran in a mixed open field at a midweek twilight meet in my current hometown of Wellington, New Zealand. I lined up alongside 19 others. Apart from me, the oldest competitor was 49. The moment the horn sounded, they were gone, and I was running alone, until the leaders came pounding by with a whoosh to lap me soon after I’d completed one circuit. I used to run faster than that, I thought, briefly flashing back to the day I ran my PR for 3,000 meters in 8:10, but it’s little consolation.

At this age, every track race is a solo time trial. Social joggers don’t often do track, so there’s no one my pace. To make it feel like a competition, I aim for age-group records, so it’s like a virtual race��against someone my age who posted his time ten years ago. My 16:03 broke the Wellington record for men aged 80 to 84. That competitive fun is mixed with a sense of inadequacy. I clutter the track. I’m in a different dimension from the young runners, like pedaling a bicycle in a Nascar race.

Not that they complain. “Go, Rog,” they gasp kindly as they fly past. They cheer for me as I finish, and then we hang out and compare times. Some say they find me inspiring, a role model for how they want to age. Often their kindness makes me feel good. Other times I feel like a decrepit but willing old dog who gets a pat when he still tries to chase his ball.

Much is new and good. I’m busy learning. I’ve been competitive and often elite since 1953. I’ve raced on six continents, set masters records at the Boston and New York City marathons, run a 5K in 14:12, and written seven books about running, yet this obscure little 3,000-meter event��on a windy evening was another learning curve. By racing after 80, I’m still learning about the sport, about aging, about today’s society, about myself.

I learn that one of the joys of being a long-term runner is that every season is an experiment, a new experience. Year by year, you test your changing body, your mind’s ingenuity, and your spirit’s resilience against each inevitable stage of getting older. Those who choose to retire at their peak may think they evade the losses time brings, but they can only look back, not forward. They miss this ongoing journey, which truly is an exploration of the whole of life, its last 6.2 miles as well as the first 20.

I’m learning the hard way that age is not just a number. Age is a biological reality. It’s inescapable, even cruel, if you see nature in that personal way. Age brings decline that is almost mechanically predictable. In the long term, the best I can do is slow down the process of slowing down. The challenge is how to encounter that process, how to live with it, and running is the best way I know. I train and race to the limit of my will just as I always did, and that brings me the small triumphs of improvement gained by training. Don’t underestimate the effect of that on mental attitude. Today I’m eager for the next arduous challenge, plotting how to do better next week than I did last night. How many 82-year-olds can say that?

That triumph—outwitting time for a while—is one of many. Being in race shape gives me overall health, the respect and friendship of men and women 60 years my junior, the delight of an activity that is stimulating and full of change, and, above all, the feeling of being totally engaged with life’s journey, not merely lingering in its departure lounge. One of my regular training venues is a sports field overlooked by a large retirement-community building. I run my repeats in constant terror that staff will mistake me for a resident, dash out with a big butterfly net and capture me.

My slow pace at full effort teaches me that our running performances are always about relativity–run better than last week, last year; beat your rivals, the record, or your PR. That doesn’t change. The next time you see a white-haired old man or woman running at the back of the pack, please do not dismiss them as shuffling at some standard, meaningless, old-person pace. They may be as immersed in the race’s drama and significance as any other competitor, battling for the few seconds that will measure this day’s result as successful.

The big picture is that we older runners are leading a major change in society’s perception of aging. “How old are ya, mate?” asked the friendly teenage groundsman the last time I ran interval 400’s at his park. I told him. His surprise was expressed in a monosyllable. The public is beginning to get used to seeing old runners just as they once got used to seeing any runners, and then women runners. That’s how change happens. And change is long overdue. The marginalization and stereotyping of older people is arguably the last great prejudice of our society. When the retirement home enters a team in a local 10K, I’ll know that my prediction is fulfilled.

Why do it? The simple thing at 82 would be to run without competing. But for me, that would only be half the pleasure. I don’t race track to lead a social movement, or for the attention, or to feel humiliated, or to be an inspiration. I merely want to race. Even at the back, that makes me a participant with others who share the same impulse. I race because I still love its challenge and commitment, its drama and its finality, the ways it tests the spirit. During times in my life when I couldn’t race (after knee-replacement surgery or when mending broken bones), I felt like a pianist whose hands had been crushed. Now, since I am again fortunate enough to be able to race, it feels almost like a duty.

My next race is a festive-season one-miler. Senile folly. Four minutes won’t even get me halfway. I’ll be dead-last again. But I’ve done my 400’s, and I’m as ready as can be. Hey, maybe I can “run my age”: 80 and two-tenths would give me a finish time of 8:12. There’s always another incentive. I can’t wait.

The post Why I Still Love Racing at Age 82 appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Running went professional 40 years ago. Most of us know the story – how the 1981 Cascade Run Off 15K in Portland, Oregon, with funding from Nike, defied the stuffy old federations, paid prize money to the top runners, and overcame one hundred years of restriction and hypocrisy. This year, we celebrated the date, June 28. A 40th anniversary “Cascade Run Off Redux” was held, and Don Kardong, leader of the Cascade rebels, published on Road Race Management, 10 June 2021, an authoritative narrative of “”��

But what if it didn’t? What if there is another narrative of how things changed that year, an alternative story that no one seems to know? What if another, possibly better, version of professionalism was on the table, and some of the despised villains were, in fact, silent heroes? What if the date we should be celebrating is not June 28, but September 2, 1981?

That was the day the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF, now World Athletics), at its Congress in Rome, voted to change the meaning of the word “amateur,” and succeeded. This is the untold story of how that decision happened.����

How Kiwis Spearheaded the Reformation of Amateurism

The IAAF began to debate amateurism in 1974, and in 1976 dropped the rules forbidding commercial enterprises or endorsements. That meant Ron Hill in the UK, and Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter in the US, could create apparel lines, and in New Zealand John Walker became the well-paid front man for “it’s gotta be good for you” Fresh-Up fruit drink, with a share of the fee going to his national federation.��

The reform process continued in 1980, when the IAAF set up an “Amateurism Working Group.” That group consulted the IAAF’s more than 200 international members, asking for responses to a proposal to delete the word “amateur” from the constitution. In other words, to end amateurism by simply removing the word. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The powerful Soviet bloc was eager to keep their rivals constrained by old-fashioned amateurism, while popping its own full-time elites into cosy berths in the military.������������

More liberal nations jumped at the chance to drop amateurism. On March 5, 1981 (three months before the Cascade Run Off ), the New Zealand Amateur Athletic Association (NZAAA) voted to inform the IAAF that it was in favor of “liberalising the amateur laws” (NZAAA Annual Report, 1980-81, p. 17). After consulting its members and producing a visionary sub-committee report that received almost total consensus, NZAAA was able to inform the IAAF by July 7 that New Zealand agreed to “liberalise the amateur laws by permitting the payment of prize money and the arranging of advertising contracts.” You can’t get more specific than that, nor more utterly radical. It was all happening rapidly.����

And so onto the Special IAAF Congress in Rome. There, six motions were passed, the key one amending the “amateur rule,” Rule 51. Instead of deleting “amateur,” they redefined the word: “one who abides by the eligibility rule of the IAAF.”����

It was semantic nonsense but political genius. It outwitted the Soviets and it dodged the Olympics hurdle, since the IAAF would be able endorse athletes as “amateurs,” yet had only to amend its “eligibility rule” to make “amateur” mean whatever it wanted. An “amateur” could thus accept prize money, for example, and remain eligible.

Another vote extended the “material assistance” permitted to amateurs to include not only travel and accommodation, but “education and professional training,” at last putting all nationalities on equal footing with the Soviets. And another vote acknowledged the transitional device of prize money being held and disbursed by federations, when “Congress agreed in principle to permit members to set up Trust Funds.”��

That useful idea came in part out of the Cascade crisis. No one (well, almost no one – we’ll get to that) wanted to see great runners banned, so there was a lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating. Frank Shorter in America is known to have proposed the Trust Fund device, but it was also discussed in England in July 1981 between IAAF secretary John Holt and Ian Boyd, later chairman of New Zealand AAA. Those talks came after three New Zealand athletes had been prominent in the Cascade rebellion.

That is the alternative storyline, every detail a matter of fully-documented record. Change was proposed, debated, amended, voted on, and accomplished. Not as sexy as the story we’ve all come to know, but agendas and minutes can be exciting reading if you understand the issues. Even more exciting if you know the personalities who did the debating and voting, since their characteristics and perspectives can (and did) change history. But media attention in 1981, and received history ever since, have been all about the Cascade rebellion.��

The Sensationalization of the Cascade Rebellion

The perplexing thing about Cascade is that no one involved in its act of passionate defiance seemed to be aware of what was happening internationally. The global consultation process was as good as completed by June 28, but no one at Cascade had noticed. New Zealand forwarded its proposal for direct prize money to the IAAF on July 7, most other nations’ responses were similarly supportive, and it was only two months to September 2 when changes as fundamental as deleting the word “amateur” were on the agenda. Yet the Cascade rebels truly believed they were “changing everything” and bravely standing for their rights against an intransigent establishment.��

The main reason for this disconnect was perhaps that Cascade was only about road running: a vigorous new-born giant that was symbiotically related to track and field athletics, yet on a wholly different model. Mass city marathons and road races boomed worldwide in the 1970s, and their sheer participant numbers, and related sponsorships, created a new industry, and potential income stream for top road runners.��

Furthermore, Cascade was only about the United States. It was a complication no one had thought of when three New Zealanders took the top women’s places and prize money. All the wrath of the ARRA (Association of Road Racing Athletes) before and at Cascade was directed against The Athletics Congress (TAC), today named USATF. No one ever mentioned the IAAF.��

The Role of Commercial Corporate Interests

And Cascade was not only an idealistic challenge on behalf of ill-treated athletes. In his 2008 book, “Out of Nowhere. The Inside Story of How Nike Marketed the Culture of Running,” Geoff Hollister of Nike wrote of seeing the need in 1981 “to take a stand [against the IAAF].” Kardong’s informed article reveals, “On the eve of the Cascade Run Off, ARRA [funded by Nike] announced a six-race series that included the Cascade Run Off, Nike Marathon, Virginia 10 Miler, Boston Marathon, Lasse Viren International and Orange Bowl Festival Run, with prize money ranging from $30,000 to $100,000. ARRA had thrown down the gauntlet.”

That sounds more like D-Day than a throwing down of the gauntlet. If those takeovers had come about, Nike would have occupied some of the most strategic territory in the booming economy of American road running. It’s intriguing to see the Boston Marathon as part of the plan.����

Consequences resulting from Cascade, some of which have become part of the familiar narrative, need to be investigated in the light of the official documents now available for the first time.��

The minutes of New Zealand’s management board on July 7 reveal how the two storylines ran in parallel. They agreed to forward to the IAAF their radical proposal to permit direct prize money. At the same meeting, they also had to consider the problem of the three New Zealand athletes who had infringed the existing rules by accepting prize money at Cascade. You can understand why the ardent proponents of professionalism felt Cascade was ill-timed. The delicate global process could have been derailed by the threat of commercial corporate interests taking control of the sport, displacing democratic national federations (the “stand” or “gauntlet”).����

The IAAF itself, led at that point by the moderate Adriaan Paulen as President, was only too aware of this political context. Another big shoe company was lobbying for a coup by Italy’s Primo Nebiolo to take over the IAAF Presidency. A September vote for professionalism would help the Federation retain control of the developing sport against these commercial challenges. To try to find a smooth progress around the Cascade confrontation, Holt of the IAAF proposed the compromise device of having two separate finish lines at Cascade. The race declined.����

New Zealand had an awkward problem: dealing with the defiant infringements by three of its most beloved athletes against rules that it was leading the global campaign to change. That story has often been told, but not with the new hard evidence. It was quite a roller coaster.��

The Fates of the Kiwi Rebels and Amateurism

NZAAA’s sensible first decision on July 7 was to delay action on the rebels and seek further information. They invited all parties to comment. The responses are archived.����

The three rebels wrote various explanations, each indicating that they had put the prize money in Trust Funds or a special account. The IAAF, via Holt and Paulen, urged caution. The Athletic Congress’s chief executive Ollan Cassell, by stark contrast, sent a blunt pronouncement that the athletes had already been banned:��

“We have withdrawn the authority for [the three] to participate any further in USA TAC-sanctioned events. They have violated international rules…and since their participation is under our authority, we have removed that from them…I would hope you would advise them as soon as possible not to compete in any further events in the United States” (Cassell/TAC to NZAAA, 20 July 1981).��

A curious, rather passive-aggressive way to end such a dictatorial statement. It sounds like Cassell was simply urging other people to tell the athletes that he has banned them.��

Very strangely, so far as I can establish, none of the Cascade rebel athletes were ever told by Cassell/TAC that he had banned them. Anne Audain and Lorraine Moller report gleefully in their books that they were able to go around the United States competing as usual. Some race directors became anxious because a so-called “contamination” rule in theory enabled the IAAF to ban any athlete who competed in the same race as a “professional.” Part of the sensible Holt’s response was to question the practicability of that rule, when it would mean banning six thousand innocent runners.��

Cassell’s draconian rigidity unfortunately found receptive ears with the new chairman of NZAAA, a fair-minded but old-fashioned rules-oriented official called Geoff Jackman. Sometimes personality alters history. This is one of those times.��

At the August 4 monthly management board, Jackman, whose style was authoritarian, insisted that by defiantly breaking the rules, the three rebels left no option but to ban them, which he believed, from Cassell’s messages, TAC had already done. Concerned about the risk of all New Zealand athletes being banned in the United States, including students on scholarships, the meeting voted with him.

The deed was done, and quickly repented. The media went into a frenzy. The next day, another fax from Holt arrived, questioning the “contamination rule” and, significantly, distancing the IAAF from Cassell’s belligerence.

“Ollan is pushing very hard for a hard line to be taken and will no doubt have a lot to say in Rome…We will discuss this with Ian Boyd and others in Rome.” Side-stepping Cassell’s “hard line,” Holt hoped for�� “clear thinking and positive safeguards for the future.” (Holt for IAAF to NZAAA, 5 August, 1981).��

Four days later on August 9, a bombshell letter arrived from Allison Roe’s (one of the rebels) lawyer. Scathingly, it exposed NZAAA for failing to follow the IAAF’s own required procedures for imposing a ban (one week’s notice, right of representation, right to attend, etc). The letter threatened High Court action.��

At that point, Jackman, with a legal egg on his face, went on holiday leaving a large, noisy, and very smelly baby for someone to hold. The job fell to Alan Stevens, a conscientious, astute, and athlete-oriented official. (And still a fully active runner himself.)�� Stevens called an emergency meeting on August 18: “In view of new information received from the IAAF, it is considered that the decision made on 4 August may have been made precipitately.”����

Working from handwritten notes, Stevens covered the IAAF’s flexibility, its distancing from Cassell and hope for clear thinking, the threat of legal action from Roe’s lawyer, and the importance of not damaging the move to professionalism at IAAF. Concluding that “our athletes were badly advised,” Stevens was able to persuade the meeting to rescind the August 4 bans.��

So the historical record is that the three athletes were banned for two weeks, August 4 -18, 1981. For several reasons there was some confusion about whether an international ban was still in effect, but essentially Jackman’s mistake had been patched, the Kiwi athletes were free to compete (Roe won the New York City Marathon on October 25) and the IAAF was able to move forward to its crucial decisions in Rome.����

Not that it was perfectly smooth sailing from there. Reports have it that Nebiolo thumped the table and demanded that the Cascade rebels be banned. But the inevitable prevailed. On September 2, 1981, the word “amateur” was redefined, and the sports of track and field and running were opened to prize money and professionalism.��

—

About the Author��

Roger Robinson’s����has won international��acclaim��as one of the best books about running ever. An elite runner who set Boston and New York masters records, he has also been Olympic television commentator, stadium announcer, coach, journalist, author, and historian. “My goal always is to find the best words to describe running, because running is so important in so many lives,” he says. He wrote��Running in Literature, Heroes and Sparrows, 26.2 Marathon Stories, and literary-scholarly works. He is Emeritus Professor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, which awards annual Roger Robinson Scholarships.

The post What You Know About How Running Became a Pro Sport Is Only Half the Truth appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

This article was first published by .

Can Sifan Hassan win three golds in Tokyo? She’s officially confirmed her bid for the Olympic distance triple on the track and has won the first of the three events, the 5,000m — on the same day when she fell in the heat of the 1500m, got back up, and chased down the pack to win.

Sifan Hassan has decided to include the 1,500m in her campaign for Olympic glory. The 2019 World Champion, who doubled and won both the 1,500m and 10,000m will showcase her range again at the Tokyo Olympic Games,” said a press statement from her agency,����released Sunday evening. “She looks forward to tackling the enormous feat and wants to challenge herself in her favorite distances.”

No runner has ever won the 5,000m, 1,500m, and 10,000m at the same Olympics.����That treble would let Hassan step on to a very special podium,��with Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zátopek, and other multi-victory giants whose golden shadows still shimmer over the Tokyo track.

Olympic Trebles

Paavo Nurmi��was ready for the same treble as Hassan in 1924, and more. In Paris, he won the 1500m, and 5,000m,����plus the 10K cross-country, and team gold in that race. With four distance-running golds at one Games he stands unmatched. But Finland’s team management left him out of the 10,000m, where he would have been defending champion. Nurmi was so infuriated that while the Olympic race was in progress, he went to the training track and ran a solo 10,000m, faster than his team-mate Ville Ritola’s gold medal time in the stadium. That story may be Olympic urban legend, but with Nurmi, driven as he was by Finnish��, it’s totally credible. Nurmi also won golds at 10,000m and cross-country in 1920, and 10,000m in 1928.

Emil Zátopek��also stands unmatched, for his three golds at 5,000m, 10,000m and the marathon in 1952. He alone has won the marathon and another gold at the same Games — two other golds in his case, an unmatched triple. On the track, the indefatigable Czech was called the “Colossus,” set 17 world records up to 30K, and in the three-year build up to the Games he compiled a streak of 69 wins over 5,000m and 10,000m. But the Olympic marathon was his first try at the distance. Some debut! To win it, Zátopek had to break the heart of the world record holder, Jim Peters (GBR) by innocently asking a novice’s questions about the pace, as they raced (with Swede Gustaf Jansson) a minute ahead of the rest of the field. Zátopek won by 2 minutes 32 seconds (2:23:03.2).

Hannes Kolehmainen��(Finland) in 1912 also won three – 5,000m, 10,000m, and cross-country. Finland were edged by the Swedes for the cross-country team title, depriving Kolehmainen of a 4th gold medal. To seal his place among the multi-victory legends, he won the marathon eight years later, in the post-World War I Games in Antwerp in 1920. Trivia question: which American won the 1920 Olympic marathon? Answer: Kolehmainen at that date had become a U.S. citizen fully resident in New York City, but Olympic rules then did not permit switching national affiliation, so having won for Finland in 1912, he more reluctantly won for Finland again in 1920.

Olympic Doubles

Lasse Viren��(Finland) took his special place with a double double, winning the 5,000m/10,000m twice, 1972 and 1976. To do that, he had to overcome two generations of the fiercest competition, outsmarting and outracing the likes of Miruts Yifter, Mohammed Gammoudi, Steve Prefontaine, Carlos Lopes, Brendan Foster, and Dick Quax. The ultimate Viren race was the first of the four, the Munich 10,000. With Dave Bedford setting world-record pace, Viren was tripped, crashed, fell to the track, got back on his feet, chased, closed, took the lead at 6k, broke most of the field, and won by one second in a world record-setting 27:38.35. One of sport’s great comeback stories, but for “Mr. Cool” Viren, only the first of four.

Mo Farah��(GBR) emulated Viren’s double double, winning 5,000m and 10,000m in 2012 and 2016, showing amazing ability to control every race to give scope to his unbeatable last mile acceleration.

Hicham El Guerrouj��(Morocco) in 2004 is the only runner other than Nurmi to bridge the middle-distance/long-distance gap by winning the doubly challenging 1500m/5,000m double. Like Viren, he really had to work for it, having to beat Bernard Lagat (then Kenya) in the shorter race, and double-hungry Kenenisa Bekele over 5,000m, with a youthful Kenyan called Eliud Kipchoge in third.����Guerrouj was defined by his kick, and how precisely he used it. The total margin of those two victories was 0.32sec (0.12 and 0.20). Blink once and win two Olympic gold medals!

Tirunesh Dibaba��(Ethiopia) is the only woman to double at long-distances, taking the 5,000m and 10,000m at Beijing in 2008. She followed up by repeating at 10,000m in 2012, plus third in the 5,000m, and a 10,000m bronze in 2016. She was also one of history’s most immaculate cross-country runners. What a treble she could have given us, if cross-country had been back in its deserved place on the Olympic schedule. Women of course have had very limited opportunity to join this special club, with the full range of distance events not available until 1996 (and the steeplechase not till 2008). The only other women’s double so far was by Kelly Holmes (GBR), 800m/1500m in 2004.

Distance Double Honor Roll

Surprisingly, doubles have been achieved (including 800/1500) by 16 runners at 17 Olympic Games.

Here is the full honors list, in chronological order:

1896��Teddy Flack (Australia) 800/1500�� ��

1904 James Lightbody (USA) 800/1500

1908 Mel Sheppard (USA) 800/1500

1912 Hannes Kolehmainen (Finland) 5,000/10,000/cross-country

1920 Albert Hill (GBR) 800/1500

1924 Paavo Nurmi (Finland) 10,000/cross-country/XC team

1928 Paavo Nurmi 1500/5,000/cross-country/XC team

1952 Emil Zátopek (Czech) 5,000/10,000/marathon

1956 Vladimir Kuts (USSR) 5,000/10,000

1964 Peter Snell (New Zealand) 800/1500

1972 Lasse Viren (Finland) 5,000/10,000

1976 Lasse Viren 5,000/10,000

1980 Miruts Yifter (Ethiopia) 5,000/10,000

2004 Hicham El Guerrouj (Morocco) 1500/5,000

2004 Kelly Holmes (GBR) W800/1500

2008 Kenenisa Bekele (Ethiopia) 5,000/10,000

2008 Tirunesh Dibaba (Ethiopia) W5,000/10,000

2012 Mo Farah (GBR) 5,000/10,000

2016 Mo Farah (GBR) 5,000/10,000

Roger Robinson tells running’s best stories in his acclaimed����and forthcoming (2022)��Running’s Greatest Stories.

The post As Sifan Hassan Attempts Olympic Triple, a Look at Historic Multi-Medalists appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Gather ’round, runners, for a lesson as old as the Olympic Games.

Once upon a time there was a man who ran only junk miles, very very slowly. And he ran the Olympics and became the first great marathon winner in history. Here is the story of Spiridon Louis, in support of the need for logging base mileage.

Louis grew up in a poor family in Amaroússion (or Maroússi), about eight miles to the north of Athens, Greece, not far off the route supposedly taken by the messenger Pheidippides as he approached the fatal end of his legendary run from Marathon. It’s a suburb now, but in the 1890s, it was a peasant village surviving mainly because of its fresh-water spring.

The Louis family had a small business transporting barrels of water from the spring into Athens, using mules or a cart. Spiridon, a son of the family, spent much of his youth walking or jogging alongside the mules, eight miles each way, every day, year round. Probably the return journey was faster, with empty barrels and mules eager for home. We can only guess.

In the revived Olympic Games that they hosted in 1896, the Greeks could not match the college-trained overseas athletes in any track and field event, but they had high hopes for the new “marathon race.” One enthusiast was Colonel Papadiamontopoulos, who would be the official starter for the marathon. He looked up some men who had shown promising running talent when they did military training under his command.

One was Spiridon Louis, now 24 years old, still jogging from home to the city and back every day. Louis ran pretty well in the second of the Greeks’ two trial marathon races, finishing fifth out of 38, and so was among the thirteen Greeks who joined four overseas track stars on the start-line in Marathon, on April 10, 1896.

Three of the foreign runners had swept the 1500m, the longest track race in those Games. They confidently expected to do the same in the new marathon race. Instead, they discovered how different from track twenty-five miles on hot, dusty, hilly roads can be. Albin Lermusiaux (France) had a huge lead at nine miles, but by sixteen he was out of it in every sense, dazed and cramped. Then Teddy Flack (Australia), who had won the 800m and 1500m, took over, looking sure of his third win. But at eighteen miles (as usual in the marathon) the real race was only beginning.

Two Greeks, who had been minutes behind at half way, began to close. Kharilaos Vasilakos, an Athens customs officer, had won the first Greek trial, so was the local favorite. With him was the unknown Spiridon Louis. He had eight miles to go, on foot into Athens, just like every other day of his life.

As Vasilakos slowed on the last uphills, Louis moved calmly away, and soon passed the faltering Flack. Thanks to the daily jogging journey, Louis possessed the greatest marathon asset—miles in the legs. And on the big day, he also showed the greatest marathon virtue – patience. Not until 23 miles did he increase his pace, perhaps because his fiancée Eleni appeared, to give him orange segments and encouragement. Soon he was escorted by shouting boys.�� A cyclist pedaled ahead crying “Ellene! Ellene!” [“Greek! Greek!”]

As he entered the stadium, the crowd “went mad for joy.” Hats and bouquets were tossed in the air. Instead of mules, two royal princes jogged alongside. Showered with flowers and jewels, Louis attained more than ordinary fame. In Greece, even today, if you urge someone to great endeavour in any field, you still say “Run like Louis!”

Louis had no coach, no training schedule, no gym, no special diet, almost no race experience, little education. Only those years of daily jogging made him the first great marathon winner.

Many successors have learned the mileage lesson. Tom Longboat logged long runs on the Brantford, Ontario, Onondaga reservation before his surprise win at Boston in 1907. Clarence De Mar was probably the first to total a hundred miles a week, and collected seven Boston titles and an Olympic bronze medal as a result. Naoko Takahashi was the first woman to break the�� 2:20 barrier because she ran more miles than any woman before her. Ed Whitlock was reticent about how he became the greatest over-70 runner in history, but running three or four hours non-stop around his local cemetery must have something to do with it. Gene Dykes, who is chipping away at Whitlock’s records, credits his breakthrough to adding ultradistance races, and training, to his schedule.

It’s not only marathoners who need a base of miles. Arthur Lydiard became a legendary coach by insisting that even for 800m, you need a base, ideally 100 miles a week, before you begin the faster work. These days, we know that a mix of elements in required to fulfill a runner’s potential. But you can’t build a house without a .

As Spiridon Louis’s story reveals, there’s no such thing as junk miles.

—

Roger Robinson’s , after endorsements as the best running book ever, will soon go into its third printing.

The post A Training Truth from the First Olympic Marathoner appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

“The important thing in the Olympic Games is not so much to win as to take part.”

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, quoting a sermon by Episcopal Bishop Talbot of Pennsylvania, in a guest sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, July 19, 1908.

The ultimate Olympic ideal dates from that sermon. With many athletes and officials in the congregation, it was delivered during the first London Olympic Games, and became for the whole Olympic movement: “The essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.”

De Coubertin, founder of the�� modern Olympics, always gets the credit, but it was the American bishop who said it first, backing it up in his sermon with texts from St Paul (“Though only one may wear the laurel wreath, all may share the equal joy of the contest.”) More than a century later, we all know it as an ideal. But ideals can get rusty and the world loves a winner, leaving many non-medalists who deserve more admiration than they receive.

Who is on your personal Bishop Talbot list?

Dorando Pietri: Fall down five times, keep running six

Let’s start in the context in which the good bishop spoke. His words were a peace offering, in hopes of soothing tempers after a turbulent week. Throughout those 1908 Games in London, from the moment when the American team was required to march in just ahead of “British colonies,” the hosts and their most successful guests had traded insults and protests, disqualifications and boycotts.

It all came to a head when the exhausted little Italian, Dorando Pietri, reached the finish of the Olympic marathon only because he was supported and steered around the last 385 yards, and lifted five times back on to his tottering feet, by British officials determined to prevent the American in second place, Johnny Hayes, from winning.

Inevitably, Pietri was disqualified and became the first runner to be world famous for not winning. The Brits never did quite accept that he lost. For the next two weeks, he made celebrity appearances at a music hall theater, promoted on the posters as “Signior Dorando, first across the line in the Olympic marathon.” He deserves his admired and legendary place in Olympic history. To get back on your feet once after collapsing near the end of a marathon takes will-power. To do it five times, as Pietri did, even with a lot of help, was a miracle of courage.

Will-power, courage, persistence under disappointment, grace in defeat, these are the qualities we think of when we subscribe to the ideal that the important thing is “not to have won, but to have fought well.” Not every Olympian will agree. Young elite athletes who aimed to conquer the world do not always accept failure cheerfully. There’s a story of one runner (nameless, as he was young) who flung his bronze medal at the wall in disgust when he got back to his room. He’s not on my Bishop Talbot “joy of contest” list.

The 800m Four: Record breakers remembered for un-ladylike effort

After Dorando Pietri, next come four women 800m runners whose names are almost unknown, but who are notorious as a group for what happened after the finish line. Jenny Thomson (Canada), Bobbie Rosenfeld (Canada), Florence McDonald (USA) and Marie Dollinger (Germany) placed fourth to seventh in the 1928 800m in Amsterdam, and all ran faster than the existing world record. (Two better times were awaiting ratification, and the first three in the Olympics of course went even faster.)

The world’s all-male media, in one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of sports journalism, ignored how fast and how determinedly all seven women had run, and instead wrote lurid and invented accounts of how they “collapsed” at the finish (or dropped out before the finish, some reports fictitiously claimed). “Sobbing,” “distressed,” “terrible exhaustion,” “a pitiful spectacle,” “a massacre” — that’s how the press saw it, not as seven athletes running their hearts out and lifting their event to a new level.

All had run in hard qualifying heats the previous day. Both days were hot and humid. That was the first Olympics when any track events were available for women, so all the runners were inexperienced at 800m. Thomson and McDonald were only seventeen. Rosenfeld was a sprinter who was trying middle distance for the first time. Yes, several fell on to the grass infield after the finish, but they were not the first or last runners, male or female, to do that after a big PR on a hot day.

To put the record straight, Thomson, Rosenfeld, McDonald and Dollinger won no medals, but they fought well, in the words of the Olympic creed. Along with the top three, they proved that women can indeed race middle distances. For that, and for their commitment to the contest, they deserve to be on this list of non-podium Olympic heroes.

Marathon Foot Soldiers: Giving their all far from the podium

The Olympic marathon has given us some heart-breaking non-medalists. Watch Bud Greenspan’s great film footage of the last man in the 1968 Olympic marathon, John Stephen Akhwari (Tanzania), cramped, bandaged, and limping agonizingly to the line, as the voice-over calls him “a young African runner who symbolizes the finest in the human spirit.” We all admire that spirit, and the resolve of other exhausted marathoners, like Gabriela Anderson-Schiess (Switzerland) in 1984, who on the very edge of collapse enacted Akhwari’s dictum, “My country did not send me 5,000 miles to start the race. They sent me 5,000 miles to finish the race.”

That philosophy has been enacted many times with equal courage although not always with such wrenching visible drama. High on my Bishop Talbot list are those in the Olympic marathon who didn’t collapse or finish last or make us cry, who gave their all but were simply one year past their peak, and beset now by injury or merely the passing of time. Buddy Edelen (1964), Derek Clayton (1972), Ron Hill (1972), Alberto Salazar (1984), Rob de Castella (1984), and Steve Moneghetti (1996) competed with as much courage and resolve as if they were winning, but it was simply the wrong day, the wrong year.

A special place for Joyce Smith (Great Britain), who had been a world leader for twenty years but was 46 when the Olympic marathon first became available for women, in 1984. She ran 2:32:48 for eleventh place. Checking the World Masters age-graded tables, that converts to 2:16:04, good enough to take the gold medal by six minutes. Sorry, Joanie, but today we’re honoring those who didn’t win.

We’re also honoring those who labored to the limit and ran an Olympic race among the best of their life. What more can be asked? Theirs was no failure, yet still they came a little short. Among Americans in the marathon, that would include Kenny Moore (fourth, 1972), Don Kardong (fourth, 1976), (fourth, 2012), Shalane Flanagan (sixth, 2016), Des Linden (seventh, 2016) and (ninth, 2008). All fulfilled the creed by fighting well.

None has ever fought better than Keflezighi that day in London, undauntedly pushing up through the field in the last miles, determined to make the best of an opportunity that all the way had been a half-fit struggle. I was with coach Bob Larsen as we watched the coverage, so knew about the . Of all Meb’s many admirable races, that for me is the one when his result — fourth! — most outstripped what should have been possible. We are giving credit here to true competing, not winning, and that run was one of the finest examples of pure competitive spirit in my lifetime.

Pre and Paula: A reach that (just) exceeded their grasp

Did anyone in Olympic history try harder without getting a medal than Steve Prefontaine? On the Olympic track, places on the list go to those who did everything to grasp the moment, but encountered others equally resolute and a fraction faster. In the 1972 5000m, Pre blazed into the lead with four laps to run, and, fired as ever by competitive desire, he raced the last mile in 4:04, maybe the longest kick in history. In any previous Olympics, that would have won it. But this was a new, more highly trained generation, the early pace had been too slow, and Pre misjudged his resilient strength by a few yards. He ended fourth. Failure? That race still makes emotional viewing, as we watch such a fervent man discover that his reach for once exceeded his grasp.

Another on the Olympic track who did all that could be asked but was left outside the medals was Paula Radcliffe (GBR) in the 10,000m in 2000. With a ton of endurance and fervor but little sprint, Radcliffe led at a searing pace and finished almost forty seconds faster than the Olympic record (with 30:26.97). Like Prefontaine, she ran her best tactic, executed it almost to perfection, and took the event into new territory. Yet, like Pre, it wasn’t enough for a medal. Three sat on her for twenty-four laps and outkicked her on the twenty-fifth.

Radcliffe moved to the marathon, but her Olympic luck was never right. She is one of a handful of unquestionably great athletes who won much, but never an Olympic medal (Roger Bannister, Dave Bedford, Steve Scott, Toshihiko Seko, Ingrid Kristiansen…) All the more reason to include her (and them) among those who enhanced Olympic sport by their endeavor.

Many have given that endeavor while knowing that circumstances at the Olympics left them with little chance of a medal. My subject is not hard-luck stories, but the images of world record holder Ron Clarke (Australia) being given emergency oxygen after pushing himself to the edge for sixth place in the high altitude Mexico City 10,000m are as haunting as those of poor dazed dehydrated Dorando Pietri in 1908.

Flanagan, Linden, Rowbury: Determined despite the dopers

Heat, altitude, injury — many have persisted when they knew they could not win. Add the sadly increasing numbers who have been deprived of their medals by dopers. To imagine their frustration, I look back to a cross-country race once that I lost to a rival who sliced twenty yards off every curve and corner. I keep a private podium of honest Olympians.

For instance, with the 2016 women’s marathon, leave out those who have since been suspended or banned for doping and you get Shalane Flanagan and Des Linden (officially sixth and seventh) in fourth and fifth. A special podium place in those terms also to Shannon Rowbury, who finished a brilliant sixth in the 2012 women’s 1500m in London, a race when we could almost smell the dope from the stands. Disqualifications have since moved Rowbury to fourth (so far).

“It’s a bit mind-blowing to know that half the field shouldn’t have been there,” Rowbury said.

Her restraint is to be admired. Yet she ran her heart out for sixth, or fourth, or third, or whatever it was (and we’ll never truly know). She, not they, observed the Olympic creed.

The faith in the sport shown by runners like Rowbury might enable the Olympics to survive this dire existential crisis. It’s not only doping. Money for winners surely subverts the Olympics’ own creed. Shoe contracts often pay by results. Television is at fault, too, as only too often (as in the 2021 U.S. Trials) it obsesses with winners and shows us only the first across the line.

The Field: Deep courage, commitment and love

As we watch the races from Tokyo, let’s remember what Bishop Talbot told us, that the Olympics are not only about winners. Deeper in the field, we will find stories of courage, commitment, and sheer love of the contest.

After the Olympic 5000m in Munich in 1972, Dave Bedford (GBR, twelfth) met Steve Prefontaine (USA, fourth).

“Steve, you are the toughest little prick I ever saw,” said Bedford.

“How about us losers have a beer in the Hofbrau House later? Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about?” said Pre.

It is. And they did.

—

Roger Robinson tells great stories in his highly praised and forthcoming (2022) Running’s Greatest Stories.

The post Olympic Heroes Who Never Stood on the Podium appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

Was Roger Bannister’s first sub-four in 1954 truly the greatest mile ever? Would you know, if no one told you the final time? Here are five mile races that are less known, but no less memorable and historic. Together they prove that the mile is a perfect drama, to race, to watch, or to re-live in words.

August 6, 1958:��Five Under Four

“It’s best not to limit yourself.”

“All Dublin wanted to see the mile. People abandoned their cars and walked to Santry Stadium. Some of the athletes had to run there,” Dan Curbery remembers. In 1958, he was nineteen years old, Dublin’s top miler, so he provided the local interest in the greatest mile field ever assembled.

The raw new stadium and the race were the work of a quirky genius called Billy Morton, an optician, 2:48 marathon runner, and hon sec of Clonliffe Harriers, who had charmed and bullied Ireland into constructing its first cinder track. Now he wanted a race there to make the world take notice. The reigning Olympic 1500m gold medalist, Ireland’s own Ron Delaney, was the star attraction, and Morton went to the British Empire Games at Cardiff and wooed three Aussies and one Kiwi. In that era, the epicenter of world miling was down-under. Legend has it that Morton concocted an Irish story that the trees around the Santry track release extra oxygen just at the time of evening when his “Miracle Mile” was scheduled.

For sure, something miraculous was in the air. Herb Elliott’s 3:54.5 smashed the world record by 2.3 seconds, an incredible margin, matched in history only by Walter George in 1882. The first four finishers ran under the previous world mark, which also has never been done again. (“I ran 3:55.9 and still finished second. I’m going to concentrate on tennis,” complained Merv Lincoln.) The first five broke four minutes. Consider the impact of that, only four years after Bannister.

Yet this was Ireland. Elliott had spent the previous evening getting fully acquainted with Guinness, there was “pandemonium” (Murray Halberg wrote) when Delaney appeared, a wildly excited dog tried to join the race on the second lap, and the post-race celebrations left Dublin’s pubs dry.

Elliott, age 20, with a capacity for intense focus, ran his usual commanding, accelerating race. He was supreme, never beaten at the mile or 1500m, and this was a performance as epic as his world record Olympic victory in 1960. Asked in an interview about the ultimate human limit, he replied quietly: “It’s best not to limit yourself.”

The track where it happened is now renamed Morton Stadium, a rare honor for a club official. Billy Morton died in 1969, and the oxygen level seems never to have been quite the same.

For the record:

• Herb Elliott (Australia) 3:54.5 WR,
• Merv Lincoln (Australia) 3:55.9
• Ron Delaney (Ireland) 3:57.5,
• Murray Halberg (New Zealand) 3:57.5,
• Albie Thomas (Australia) 3:58.6.

May 16, 1971:��The Dream Mile

American Idols Rock Philly

For American track fans, this should have been the Olympics. In Mexico’s altitude in 1968, world record holder Jim Ryun (mile 3:51.1, 1500m 3:33.1) had been humbled by Kip Keino, while the brilliant 19-year-old Marty Liquori struggled with a foot injury at the back of the field. Fans were left bereft. Ryun and Liquori had both run sub-4 in high school and were American idols.

Liquori, the master tactician, rose to the top as Ryun backed away from the sport in 1969-70, but Ryun stormed back, his eyes on another shot at the Olympics. In May 1971, the two Americans were the best in the world. But which was the best American?

There was a full house at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, and network television coverage. Interest was massive. Sports Illustrated held that week’s cover, and the TV commentator saw “more photographers than I’ve ever seen outside the Olympics.”

The race started watchfully, a crowded 2:03.2 to the half-mile. But in lap 3, coming off the first turn, 700 yards to go, Liquori moved. Ryun slipped around the pack in pursuit, and it was a new race, the two of them, and fast. The crowd roared. That quarter was under 57sec, and Liquori was still accelerating. The crowd rose to their feet. On the back stretch, Liquori was near sprinting, but Ryun was poised. Around the last bend, Ryun edged up to Liquori’s shoulder, and the outcome seemed inevitable. But it wasn’t. Liquori had a stride lead, and all down the finishing straight, stride after stride, he kept it, looking smooth as Ryun’s head bobbed. The last 880 was 1:51.4, the last 440 54.6, time 3:54.6, a masterpiece of pace judgment.

Greg Vitiello of New York remembers it only too well, an eye-witness who couldn’t see anything.

“From the bell everyone was standing. The tension was palpable. I was rooting for Ryun, and could just see him stretch out on the final turn, ready to make his decisive move. But Franklin Field has such lousy sight lines that with the crowd all on their feet, that was the last I saw, till they crossed the finish with Liquori a stride ahead, and the crowd mobbed the New Jersey hero. I have watched replays for fifty years and I still wait in vain for Ryun’s move.”

August 28, 1981:��The Most Golden Mile

Seb Coe Soars

Before the World Championships (1983) and the Grand Prix (1985) came the Golden Series, twelve big-budget glamor events, from 1978 to 1982, designed by IAAF (now World Athletics) to attract global television coverage. The twelve ranged from sprints to marathon, but the most glittering, every year, was the Golden Mile.

The 1981 Golden Mile in Brussels was the post-Olympics Olympics. The 1980 Moscow Games had been diminished by the American-led boycott. Nothing could diminish the quality of Seb Coe’s victory in Moscow, but now, a year later, for the first time a truly global elite field was assembled to challenge him. Among the twelve, only Coe and Ray Flynn (Ireland) had been in the Moscow 1500m. Gathered here were those excluded when their nations joined the boycott: Mike Boit (Kenya), Omer Khalifa (Sudan), John Walker (New Zealand), Thomas Wessinghage (West Germany), and a whole attack force of thwarted Americans, Steve Scott, Craig Masback, Sydney Maree, and Tom Byers. Add Eamonn Coghlan, fourth in the 5000m in Moscow.

Even pace-maker Byers was a threat. In the Bislett Games in Oslo six weeks earlier, the pack, including Steve Ovett, declined to follow Byers, the hired rabbit, so the long-haired American declined to drop out. He won, the rabbit who rebelled.

In Brussels, Byers did his work to perfection: 54.92 for the first lap, 1:52.67 at the half-mile, under world record schedule by just less than one second, precisely as Coe had ordered. Only Coe and Boit went with him. It’s fascinating to watch Coe, the master craftsman, follow Byers, positioned close behind but maybe three inches out, so that he has free space for his light footfall, as well as the benefit of drafting. He made one error, clipping the curb early in the third lap, but allowed only a slight stumble to disrupt that compact poise and honey-smooth stride. Boit, in black, tall and angular, looked a kind of pursuing ghost, haunting Coe.

Byers completed his day as role-model rabbit by stepping off at the bend with just over one lap to go. Coe flashed one of his quick glances to check on Boit, and took a brief respite to reach the bell at 2:51.0, slightly outside world record schedule. Another glance — in some way Coe used them to lift or fuel his desire. He must have great peripheral vision.

Imperceptibly, he moved up a gear, and Boit was five, six yards down. Approaching the final curve, Boit was thrashing himself back into contention. Only one yard. Another glance, and Coe was gliding away — that’s how it looked. How can a runner look so composed when he is breaking the world mile record by more than a second?

Boit ran wonderfully, but Coe won by more than two seconds. It was like stroking silk or hearing a master musician at work, impeccably skilful and seductively beautiful.

For the record:

• Seb Coe (GBR) 3:47.33 WR
• Mike Boit (Kenya) 3:49.45
• Steve Scott (USA) 3:51.48
• Sydney Maree (USA) 3:51.81
• Thomas Wessinghage (W. Germany) 3:52.60
• John Walker (NZL) 3:52.97.

February 20, 1994:��Sub-Four at Forty

Ageless Coghlan Joins Bannister in the History Books

Masters competition really got going in the 1970s, with the new incentives of world track and field championships and official records. Some fine older middle distance runners emerged, such as John Gilmour and Alan Bradford (Australia) and Derek Turnbull (New Zealand). As young athletes they had been good but not great, and came into their own with age. In those days, the best runners — the Roger Bannisters and Herb Elliotts — retired by age 25. In the late 1980s, a new phenomenon appeared – world-class runners, Olympic champions, world record breakers, who kept on racing fast after passing age thirty.

And so the race for the first four-minute mile happened all over again – for the over-forties. Like the original race to be first under four, this was global, fascinating to the fans, rich with strong personalities, and accompanied by doubts about whether the feat was humanly possible.

Rod Dixon (born July 1950) threatened first, with a range from Olympic 1500m bronze to winning the New York City Marathon, but the step up to serious mile racing again was too great. Then it was fellow-Kiwi John Walker (born January 1952), 1976 Olympic 1500m champion, the first to break 3:50 for the mile, and with 135 sub-four miles behind him. “Walker seems certain to be the first,” wrote Merrill Noden in Sports Illustrated a month before Walker’s fortieth birthday. A special “Night of Miles” was planned for that summer January night in Auckland, with Roger Bannister, Jim Ryun, and every great living miler invited. But the reality of injuries intervened and Walker missed the window. Life’s stopwatch is always ticking.

Then Eamonn Coghlan (born November 1952) set his Irish heart on being first. He chose to try indoors, where he always best thrived. His world indoor record of 3:49.78 from 1983 still stood. In February 1993, three months after his fortieth birthday, he ran 4:01.39 on the Madison Square Garden boards. A year later, after a course of deep-tissue massage and a program of intense 400 meter repeats in 56 seconds, he was primed to try, again at the Garden. He ran 4:04.55.

“I’m beginning to wonder what it takes,” he told Marc Bloom for the New York Times.

It took one more week, Harvard’s bigger, banked, 200m indoor track, some spot-on pacing by Stanley Redwine, and three thousand exuberant teenagers pounding the fencing and the floor to the rhythm of Coghlan’s stride. The special mile was put on during a Massachusetts high schools’ meet, and school athletes from every event became an instant Irish clamor of support.

“They created more noise than at any other track I’ve run at,” Coghlan told Bloom. Redwine took him though the half-mile in 1:59.76, three-quarters in 2:59.21, and the master pulled out a 58.94 last quarter. It was his seventy-fifth sub-four mile, and his last. Bernard Lagat expunged it in 2015 as the over-40 record with a mind-blowing 3:54.91, but Coghlan’s place in miling history, like Bannister’s, is permanent.

September 7, 2019:��Classic Clash

I Am Jenny, Hear Me Roar

It was the classic contest: The old alpha and the young usurper battling for the leadership. Jenny Simpson, 33, top American since 2011, came back yet again to New York’s Fifth Avenue Mile to defend her territory, this time against a challenger who was on the cusp of breaking through to top American status.

Simpson, astute and battle-hardened, had a World Championship gold, two silvers, an Olympic bronze, and a peerless record of seven victories at the Fifth Avenue race, in consecutive years apart from missing 2012 for the London Olympics. Elinor Purrier was riding a youthful crest, improving by the day, and launching a break-through that has since given her the American indoor mile record, 4:16.85, toppling a Mary Decker-Slaney mark that had stood for thirty-seven years, and a two-miles indoors record, 9:10.28, that is six seconds faster than Simpson’s American outdoor record. Since September 7, 2019, .

She nearly did it that day. Five seconds from the finish of the Fifth Avenue Mile, we thought Purrier had seized the crown. She and Simpson pushed the pace all the way, looking like a team, side by side in identical green and white colors, and looking, too, hungry for the race record. By halfway, the rest of the strong field were a defeated pack. Purrier and Simpson were commanding, and inseparable. The second quarter on the long Fifth Avenue straightaway is an uphill drag, and it was Purrier, the 5000m specialist, a half-stride in front. The faster third quarter, slightly downhill, brought Simpson up by a fraction, flying, it seemed.

Faster than the Fifth Avenue bus in its wildest dreams, they counted down the cross-streets, down through the seventies and sixties, flying past the Model Boat Lake, the Frick Collection, the Zoo, with the Plaza Hotel beyond the finish line rising into view. (The course ends just before intersecting with the New York City Marathon route at Grand Army Plaza.) Now Purrier looked the more composed, less tall than Simpson, a potent combination of sturdy and swift. Simpson seemed to become more rangy. Could she hold it together?

Purrier had maybe half a yard as the clock passed 4:10. In those next six seconds, Simpson found more stride length from somewhere, somehow it was she who hit the big blue tape narrowly, but incontestably, in front. Yes, the old order changes, yielding place to new. It’s Nature’s law. But not today, Simpson’s finish said. Not here.

For her seven previous Fifth Avenue Mile victories, Simpson had to beat a generation or two of fine international athletes – Hannah England, Sally Kipyego, Brenda Martinez, Shannon Rowbury, Laura Weightman, Emma Coburn. Purrier proved the toughest of them all, and went closest. Simpson’s extra reward was a race record 4:16.1. Not many do that at 33 with their eighth victory, a total that will surely survive unchallenged a long time. Purrier was also under the old record, with 4:16.2.

Street miles were a phenomenon of the 1980s, and a few survived. Some are gimmicky downhill romps, but with the famous setting of Fifth Avenue, the one mile distance exerts its unique fascination, poised, as always, somewhere between a tactical drama and a prolonged sprint.

Ten More Momentous Miles

January 10, 1719:��The First Mile Race on Record

Four hundred years ago. A cold misty winter day on Newmarket Heath, in the east of England. The race-horses who gallop here in summer are snug in their stalls. A colorful crowd has gathered for a different kind of race, the world’s first recorded one-mile footrace. Two “running footmen,” William Mawbone and Thomas Groves, in their rival liveries, toe the scratched line on the earth. Their daily job is to carry messages, and run as heralds ahead of their employer’s carriage. Those gambling-mad aristocrats have boasted and betted on the running prowess of their best footman. The mile is the first of a series of four monthly head-to-head races, the distance rising from one to four miles, the prize money and betting rising faster. The series ended tied 2 – 2.

Mawbone won the mile. Sorry, that’s all we can deduce, although there are brief reports of the two-mile and four-mile races later. Newspapers were new, hand-produced, and skimpy. This one was called “The Original Weekly Journal,” written by Daniel Defoe, preserved in the British Library. There I found that William Mawbone, running footman to the Duke of Wharton, was the first reported winner of a one-mile race in history.

July 15, 1933, Princeton, USA

Promoted as the “Mile of the Century,” world radio and mass print coverage make it probably the biggest media sports event to that time. The pride of Princeton and America, Bill Bonthron, is matched against laconic Jack Lovelock of New Zealand, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, who times his sprint to perfection and runs 4:07.6, world record by 1.6sec. Told he too had broken the old record, Bonthron remarks “Aw nuts, he beat me.”

May 6, 1954, Oxford, England.

Roger Bannister, with pacing help from Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, becomes the first to run a mile faster than four minutes, 3:59.4.

August 7, 1954, Vancouver, Canada

In the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, Bannister faces John Landy, the Australian whose 3:57.9 broke his world record. After barely hanging on to Landy’s pace, Bannister finds a finish, and wins the “Miracle Mile” in 3:58.8, with Landy on 3:59.6, two under four for the first time in the same race.

January 27, 1962, Whanganui, New Zealand

Peter Snell had unexpectedly won the Olympic 800m in 1960, benefitting from the endurance training of coach Arthur Lydiard. On a 385-yard grass track, he faces his friend, Olympic 5000m champion Murray Halberg, but it is the frail-looking Bruce Tulloh of England who startles everyone with a daring surge with 400 yards to go. Snell responds, with “a glorious feeling of strength and speed,” and breaks Herb Elliott’s Dublin world record. Tulloh, a 5000m specialist, telegrams to his wife Sue in England, “Broke 4.”

June 5, 1964, Los Angeles, USA

In the early 60s, America has a vintage of fast milers, and the best of them all is about to emerge. At the Compton Invitational, eight run under four minutes, the deepest mile race in history to that date. Winner Dyrol Burleson (3:57.4) modestly says, “The entire story was back in eighth place. What Jim Ryun did was more significant than Roger Bannister.” Ryun, a 17-year-old Kansas high school student, had just run 3:59.0.

August 12, 1975, Gōteborg, Sweden

Michel Jazy (France), Jim Ryun, and Filbert Bayi (Tanzania) have brought the world record down to 3:51.0. The next barrier beckons. John Walker (New Zealand), touring the temperate summer tracks of Scandinavia, follows the pacemaker to the half in 1:55.5, and then moves, followed by Australian Ken Hall. After 58 seconds for lap 3, Walker lets loose his extraordinary power, while nine thousand Swedes do their unique syncopated clap: “Clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.” With a 55.9 closing lap, Walker hurtles through the barrier to 3:49.4.

August 21, 1985, Zurich, Switzerland

The first Olympic women’s 3000m in 1984 ended almost as a débacle, with Mary Decker’s crashing fall and unjust condemnation of Zola Budd for causing it, while Maricica Puica (Romania) took the gold.

Just over one year later, those three protagonists meet again, over one mile. Decker-Slaney (as she now is) leads fast from the half mile. Coming into the stretch, they are in perfect arrow formation: Decker-Slaney in lane 2, Budd (still only nineteen) on her left in the inside lane, Puica on her right. It looks like Puica’s race. But from some depth of brilliance, Decker-Slaney draws another level of speed, never losing her elegant composure, and crosses in a world record 4:16.70. Whether or not it counts as revenge, it is very sweet.

July 7, 1999, Rome

Hicham El Guerrouj (Morocco) runs the current men’s world record, 3:43.13.

July 12, 2019, Monaco

Sifan Hassan (Netherlands) runs the current women’s world record, 4:12:33.

—

Roger Robinson is author of the essential .

The post 5 Most Memorable Miles in Running History appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.