Running Beyond the Boom

(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.)

Hindsight is always clearer than foresight. Which is to say, it’s easier to report a trend than to predict one.

In preceding chapters you’ve read one reporter’s views on how much running grew in the 1970s, and why. Here are my confessions of how badly I underestimated running’s growth and change, along with forecasts on where we might go next.

Take the Boston Marathon as one example of surprising change. I first ran there in 1967 and thought the field might be the biggest I’d ever see. Seven hundred of us started. By 1977, despite qualifying times designed to limit entries, the number there is 10 times larger.

The time standards would go even higher as Boston struggled to control its size. Meanwhile other races would welcome all the runners they can get – at first, anyway. Fred Lebow’s New York City Marathon would overtake Boston in size in 1977.

New York would soon match Boston in prestige, but as a different style of race. There would never be another Boston.

In 1967, I thought that ancient marathoner Johnny Kelley might be the oldest runner I’d ever meet. He was 59. Kelley still ran Boston in 1977, and others his age were there with him.

This wasn’t a young-man’s game anymore. The median age was climbing, along with the quality of some runners. Jack Foster was their hero, an Olympian after turning 40 and the world record-holder for masters marathoners.

Someday someone this old would win a major marathon outright. Maybe he – or she – hadn’t yet started running today, as Foster hadn’t at 35.

Two women ran the 1967 Boston, one with a race number that her gender wasn’t yet welcome to wear. While I applauded what Kathrine Switzer did, I thought then she might have innocently set back women’s running by embarrassing certain officials.

Just the opposite happened. That monumental run-in inspired other women to run marathons. So many now did that the biggest prize of all, an Olympic Marathon of their own, would inevitably be theirs before long.

I thought in 1967 that American marathoners couldn’t compete with the best of the rest of the world. U.S. men had won at Boston just once since World War II. Fortunes then changed. Between 1972 and 1977, three of the winning men were Americans, along five of the six women’s winners.

Plus, of course, this country sent Frank Shorter to his golden run at the 1972 Olympics. With Shorter still in his prime, Bill Rodgers yet to peak, Americans would keep winning – at least until East Africans turned to the marathon en masse. They hadn’t yet done much of that after Ethiopians won three straight Olympic titles in the 1960s.

I once thought that long-distance running would always be officially amateur as the stodgy AAU blocked any cash flow? By 1977 the best runners were slipped more cash than ever before, and therefore had more time to train.

Bill Rodgers said then, “I’ll never be beaten by someone who works 40 hours a week.” Rodgers ran for the quasi-professional Greater Boston Track Club, and other top runners grouped up at well-supported Athletics West.

Races such as Peachtree in Atlanta and Bloomsday in Spokane added elite fields that didn’t come for free. Soon the AAU would be forced to surrender its governing powers to a progressive group; then the cash would flow and the good times would roll.

The fast runners would get faster, but by definition the elite would always be few in number. Running would grow from midpack on back, and the future health of the sport would largely be governed by the size of the pack.

That said, everyone should always welcome the older, bigger, slower and less serious runners. They create more visibility for the sport, bring more dollars into it and give running a firmer foundation than ever before. The wider the base of the our pyramid, the higher its peak will push.

UPDATE FROM 2015

If you ask me now where running as a whole is headed, my most honest answer is that I don’t know but can only guess. As you’ve seen, my crystal ball has always been cloudy.

But if you ask where my running is headed, the answer is easy: straight ahead for as long as possible, no matter how many of today’s runners continue – or don’t.

I’m not unique. The same forces that first attracted me to running still keep me going.

Many of you also will decide that you never want to stop. This will assure a good long run into the future that will count the most. Your own.

[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.]