Routes of a Revolution

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from June 2007; continued from last week's blog.)

Two major and separate streams – running for fitness and training to race – came together to produce Running 1977. Two of the founding fathers, who both get credit for this revolution and earned it, were Kenneth Cooper and Arthur Lydiard. Fittingly they had dipped their feet into both streams (as had Bill Bowerman; see previous chapter).

Dr. Cooper was a college miler, then he ran the Boston Marathon while in medical school. As an Air Force physician he began researching fitness, which led him to praise endurance activities such as running, which led to his best-selling book Aerobics, released in 1968.

This book inspired hordes of new runners, because running was simple and time-efficient. Many of them reached Cooper’s prescribed amount – two to three miles, three to five days a week – and looked to go longer and faster.

Lydiard was the New Zealander who exported fitness running (“jogging,” as it was called then) to the U.S. by way of Bowerman. Lydiard was better known, though, as a coach of Olympic medalists: three runners with three golds and a bronze among them, all coming from his Auckland neighborhood.

This coach turned away from the standard training of his day – almost all of it fast and on the track. His runners trained long miles on the roads and trails. Their success bred imitation, and soon runners everywhere were training longer and slower.

The two separate streams joined in the 1970s to flood the roads with runners. Aerobics graduates took the next logical step up, to low-key road races. Lydiard devotees found they liked training on the roads and began to race there, a welcome step down from the intensity of track.

Others are credited with igniting this boom, but are at least equally products and beneficiaries of it. Breaking the gender barrier at the 1967 Boston Marathon lit a promotional fire under Kathrine Switzer, and she has done more than anyone to create new racing opportunities for women. But a critical mass of women had to jump into the fitness-running stream before they could think of entering a race.

Frank Shorter inspired multitudes of Americans to try the marathon when he won this event at the Munich Olympics. Bill Rodgers later did the same with his wins at Boston and New York City. But if not for a mass leap into the Lydiard-instigated stream of road training, Shorter and Rodgers might not have stepped into road racing.

Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running, sensational as its sales were, didn’t cause the running boom but rode its crest and spurred it to new heights. Fixx himself was a boomer, having come to the sport via the Kenneth Cooper route – to lose weight and control the heart disease that afflicted his family. Fixx shared 1977 the best-seller lists – for all topics, not just running – with George Sheehan and the team of Bob Glover and Jack Shepherd. The wrote good books, but also had great timing.

The same could be said for the many other businesses, events and organizations that now served this burgeoning community. Their further success depended on how many of 1977’s runners keep running, and for how long – in years, not miles.

UPDATE FROM 2015

Jim Fixx died in 1984 and Arthur Lydiard in 2004. Their legacies live on. Dr. Kenneth Cooper, Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers and Kathrine Switzer continue as active participants in and promoters of running.

(Concluding next week.)

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]