Sy Mah

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 1988.)

REMEMBERING MAH. The sudden and stark way I heard the news made it all the more shocking. It came as a two-line, just-the-facts report from the back
pages of USA Today in November.

“Marathoner Sy Mah, 62, died in Toledo, Ohio, from a blood disease. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Mah as number one in marathons run with 524.”

I hadn’t even known Sy was ill. Suddenly I had to write a tribute to him.

At the risk of losing sight of the man in the numbers, the report begins with those incredible numbers. He accumulated those 524 marathons (almost 200 more than his nearest pursuer) in just 20 years – averaging one every two weeks in all those years and, more recently, racing almost weekly. But the spirit of Sy Mah goes far beyond those statistics.

I first met Sy in 1982 at the University of Toledo, where he worked as a physical educator. He’d already passed 300 marathons by then.

He neither looked nor acted the part of Supermarathoner. He weighed little more than 100 pounds, and he spoke in the quiet way of his Chinese ancestors.

We last met at Boston a year ago. Sy ran number 500 there.

He would run two dozen more between April and September. Then on Labor Day weekend he tried three marathons in three days.

Sy couldn’t finish two of those races. He was ill – more gravely ill than anyone knew then.

While racing in Mexico, he had contracted hepatitis. This illness so weakened him that lymphoma, a cancer that Sy apparently had lived with for some time without knowing it, suddenly grew worse.

After hearing of his death, I dug out my only letter from Sy. He’d answered a request for an updated marathon count with an eight-page response.

He wrote to me shortly after his 60^th birthday in 1986. He’d just run number 434, putting the Guinness record out of anyone else’s reach for a long time to come.

“I am frequently asked why I continue to run so many marathon races,” he wrote. “I have many childhood friends who are now dead. They worked hard all their lives, but they never got a chance to retire and do things they wanted to do.

“I don’t want my life to end before I do the things I enjoy. And marathon running is a great source of pleasure for me.”

He added that “I am also perhaps trying to prove something. I have been told by many people, many times, that once I reached 50 years of age I would not be able to continue running as much as I do.

“I am now 10 years past 50, and I find that my body is more physically capable than it was at age 40. I believe that Americans have been brainwashed with the idea that they must do less because increased age will result in less energy and diminished capability. I have found that this is simply not true if a person does not allow his mind to accept the traditional view of aging.”

Before entering marathon number one, Sy coached a record-setting marathoner. In 1967, 15-year-old Maureen Wilton ran 3:15:22. That made her the world’s fastest woman to date, but she retired soon afterward She’d had enough running “to last a lifetime,” Wilton said on the 20^th anniversary of that record.

“I wish I had emphasized keeping fit for life,” Sy said on that occasion. “But I was a coach like other coaches, and we wanted good performances. Now I tell everyone this [running] is good for your health, and it’s for life.”

Sy remained a teacher and helper. He eased countless people into running and helped many of them get through marathons. In his hometown he’s revered more for that work than for his race count. Toledo long ago named its marathon for him.

“I feel extremely honored,” Sy once said, “because most people have to die before they have an event named after them.”

Last summer, shortly before Sy’s illness struck, Toledo’s mayor proclaimed a “Sy Mah Week… for the commitment and dedication he portrays to physical fitness in our community.” The University of Toledo has since set up a Sy Mah Memorial Fund for improving running facilities on campus.

Runners who knew Sy can honor him another way. If you’ve entered a U.S. marathon in the past 20 years, you probably have run with him. Run your next one for him.

UPDATE. I couldn’t have imagined while writing this piece that so many marathons would become available in years to come, and that so many people would run them so often. I didn’t really think Sy Mah’s lifetime count would ever be topped.

Today that record is more than twice as high. Thousands of people have run more than 100 marathons, and many of them have joined the Fifty States and Marathon Maniacs clubs that didn’t exist in Sy’s day. Going fast means less to them than returning often.

[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 Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, 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.]