First Boston

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 1967.)

GO OR NO-GO decisions either open the gate to a good long run or lock it, at least until later. I almost made the wrong choice in early 1967, which would have delayed or blocked my entry into marathoning.

While moving from Iowa to California and settling in there, I quit training for the Boston Marathon. Three days before the race I told new boss Dick Drake about being entered but not going because I’d earned no vacation time for this midweek trip.

                                                     

“Not going!” he said. “You have to go. You can’t miss a chance like this, because you might never get another. Take two days off, then come back and work the weekend.”

Boston wasn’t then the Monday race that it would become later, but was whenever April 19^th happened to fall, which was a Wednesday that year. I would spend less than 24 hours in marathon city.

I erased most of my savings account for my first coast-to-coast plane ticket. Two friends from Iowa, fellow first-time marathoner Tom Murphy and Boston vet John Clarke who’d come east to watch this race, let me crowd into their hotel room at the Lenox.

A short night’s sleep, a light breakfast, and I boarded a bus for the start in Hopkinton. So much had happened so quickly that I didn’t leave time to worry about never having gone this far before and not having trained long enough lately.

That isn’t to say I was calm. Pre-race concerns always send me looking for a restroom, often repeatedly. This search led to my first meeting with a man who didn’t know how famous (or infamous, depending on who’s commenting) he would become that same day.

I ducked into a locker room at Hopkinton High School. A dozen extremely fit and serious-looking runners sat on benches or the floor. They glanced up as if asking themselves, “Who’s this one?” then retreated back into themselves.

Suddenly a wild-eyed little man burst through the door. “What are you doing here?” he shouted. “This room is for top runners, not bums like you!”

I stammered, “But… but… just need a bathroom.”

He shoved my shoulder while yelling, “Use one out there. Wait in line like everybody else. Out! Out! Out!”

A little later we met again. This time I stood too close to his starting line. “You again!” he roared. “If you give me any more trouble, I’ll pull your number. I don’t want rule-breakers in my race.”

With the race about to start, he shoved me back into the crowd where I belonged. His race was how Jock Semple viewed the Boston Marathon in those years. It was his greatest source of pride and frustration.

At the time this race was his year-round passion, and its storms usually centered on him. In 1967, Semple made international news for a momentous shove.

He would later argue that he didn’t jump from a bus that day to rip off a Kathrine Switzer’s number because he thought that women shouldn’t run marathons. He would say he did it because she had entered illegally, and he would have done the same if a man had given him cause.

He and Switzer would forever disagree on his motive. But both would come to realize that he gave women’s running its first great push forward.

HAVING A GOOD time is just as important as running one. In the long run the times had are more memorable than the times run. Boston Marathon 1967 brought me both.

My time ambitions were modest: to average the eight-minute miles needed to sneak in under 3:30. This had been the pace of my longest run of 20 miles. Now I hoped somehow to squeeze out another half-dozen miles at that same pace.

Neither the watches (which still had hands) nor Boston’s checkpoint distances (Boston took them at traditional crossroads such as 6¾ and 13½ miles) were reliable back then. The few times I heard along the course either meant nothing to me or sounded too fast to be trusted.

Roughly halfway at a sub-three-hour marathon pace? Impossible.

About then, passing the midpoint in Wellesley, I basked briefly in the roar that rolled along with every Bostonian’s hero Old Johnny Kelley. I almost topped Heartbreak Hill before knowing this was it.

Too soon, it seemed, the Prudential tower loomed in the near distance. The race would finish there in another couple of miles.

My watch said, and an occasional building clock confirmed, that nowhere near three hours had passed since the start. Could this be happening?

I can’t say those final miles were easy. Marathon finishes never are. But neither were those miles slow.

Coming down the homestretch, I saw no time displayed. (Digital clocks wouldn’t appear at finish lines until the 1970s.)

Confirmation that I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating finally came from my Iowa friend John Clarke. As I walked away from the finish line, he rushed up, thrust his stopwatch into my face and shouted, “You broke 2:50 – by 12 seconds!”

I couldn’t bask in any of this on that Patriots Day afternoon. With work to do the next morning in California, I fled the finish line for the airport.

I would never better the clock time run that day. But I would keep coming back to repeat the good times had on my first day as a marathoner.

Photo: One of the most iconic shots in running history shows Jock Semple trying (and failing) to pull Kathrine Switzer from the Boston Marathon course.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, 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.]