By Martin Dugard
It wouldn't be fair to say the marathon is an overnight success in our culture. After all, people have been running long distances for thousands of years - most notably in the case of Pheidippides, who supposedly ran about 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to tell the Greek city about a military victory ... and then dropped dead.
Admittedly, it probably didn't happen that way. But as they say in Hollywood, if you have a choice in a story between legend and reality, print the legend. The legend was powerful enough that a run of a similar distance was introduce to the first Modern Olympics in Athens in 1896.
That tale marks the start of Martin Dugard's fine book, "The Long Run." It is something of a biography of the marathon as a race, which in itself sound interesting. But more to the point, Dugard is more interested in how the marathon captured the imagination of so many people in recent years, to the point where thousands and thousands of people test themselves against a great physical challenge. As Dugard mentions in the book, the marathon has become "the suburban Everest," which is a simply lovely phrase.
Once the marathon was introduced to the Olympics, it always seemed like an event that was a little out of place and appealed only to certain types of personalities. After all, track and field events in the Games ran from 100 meters to 10,000 meters (6.2 miles). It was a big jump from there to try an event that required running 26.2 miles. That's a distance that was put in stone at the 1908 Olympic Games in London. Dugard does a nice job of exploring some of the myths in how we came up with 26 miles and 385 yards as the classic distance.
The Boston Marathon paid tribute to the Olympic event when it began in 1897. A few other marathons came along eventually, such as Poly Marathon in England in 1907 and the Kosice Peace Marathon (the first on the mainland of Europe) in 1924. But the event and distance was always more of a curiosity than anything else. Men, and it was always men, who ran that far had their sanity questioned by some.
Dugard considers President John Kennedy as an author in the story of the turning point of physical fitness. He tried to convince Americans of all ages that it was time to get in shape. One of the techniques was a song especially written for the occasion called "Chicken Fat," featuring Robert Preston of "Music Man" fame. The 45 rpm record was handed out to school children, who were told to put it on a turntable and exercise to it. Take it from someone who can still recite the lyrics ("Go, you chicken fat, go!"), it was catchy.
Kennedy had some company. Soon-to-be-legendary Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman had a side job of organizing a group of "civilians" into an army of people who were willing to run/walk their way to fitness. He even put out a pamphlet on how to approach the matter. Soon many Americans were trying to run slowly - or as it was labeled then - jog.
By 1972, we were ready for the turning point in the story. The Olympics received a massive amount of publicity that year, in part because of the terrorist killings of Israeli team members that signaled a new chapter in world history. But there were reasons to celebrate during those Games as well, particularly in America. The biggest of them might have come in the marathon, where Frank Shorter became the first runner from the U.S. since 1908 to win a gold medal in that event.
Dugard takes the unusual step of asking readers and even book reviewers about who was the key figure in the marathon's trip to the mainstream and the running boom of the 1970s in general. To me, Shorter is the clear winner. There's an argument to be made for Steve Prefontaine, a charismatic personality who was on his way to a great track career under Bowerman at Oregon. He died young in a car accident, making him the James Dean of his sport. But he never won an Olympic medal. Shorter showed Americans could be a champion in the marathon, and he had soon company in another great U.S. runner in Bill Rodgers. Americans followed in their footsteps, sometimes literally.
What's more, some of those runners were women. It took a while to knock down the stereotype that physical fitness was somehow unfeminine. Running associations also had put up barriers to discourage participation. But that wave of women's runners wouldn't be stopped, particularly after receiving a good-sized boost in the form of Title IX in the U.S. in 1972. The pioneers knocked down the walls, and women ran over them. Finally, the Olympics sanctioned a women's marathon in 1984, and Joan Benoit of Maine won going away. The revolution was unstoppable.
And when something catches on in the United States, the world often follows. Before we knew, cities around the world were hosting their own marathons that were major events on the yearly calendar. I'd argue that once the other countries of the world caught up and eventually passed America in terms of producing world-class marathons, interest here in the actual races dropped off a little. We like to root for our own at times.
But we're still running. People who lace up their running shoes and head for the streets no longer have to dodge debris thrown from moving vehicles and insults from pedestrians. The Running Revolution has evolved, just as we might have expected.
Credit goes to Dugard, who did a fine job of researching this book. He talked to several principals who were part of the era, such as Rodgers and Shorter. I thought I knew a great deal on the subject, but he introduces several facts and discussion points that are new and clarifying. Dugard has a slightly odd writing style, sometimes using brief sentences that are downright choppy. Well, some runners use short, frantic strides to get to the finish line, while others use longer steps. They both can work. Dugard also throws in some of his own personal history with running, which is a bit of a distraction from the purpose of the book but nothing more.
Overall, there's plenty to like in "The Long Run." It covers a subject that has been written up quite often in the past in a fresh way. Even better, you'll feel like lacing up the running shoes and heading outside after reading it.
Four stars
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