100-man, 100-mile record. Key requirements were that it had to be accomplished by 100 different men who all belonged to the same club and everything had to be documented (for example, three timing watches). Bob was also working at a running store at Harbor Place in downtown Baltimore that had just opened, and he got fellow employees and friends interested in the project. Remember, this was the era before cell phones and e-mail, and 100 runners was and still is a big group. First they signed up all their high school and college running buddies and runners in the Baltimore Road Running Club—‘“anyone who could run under five-minute-per-mile pace.” Then they enlisted local sportswriters to spread the word and put ads in the paper as well as chatting up everyone who came into their running store. They signed up about 106 runners because several of the runners “seemed iffy.” They predicted that in the best-case scenario, we would beat the old record by more than six minutes.

The event was held at the Towson State track and was to last about eight hours. Each runner had to be present only long enough to warm up and run the mile, soa tight schedule had to be drawn up as to who would run when. Telephone reminders were called in the night before, and early on race morning all the preparation seemed to pay off. The first 40 miles went like clockwork, and after 25 miles (coincidentally my leg) we were ahead of the record by more than three and a half minutes. As we approached the halfway mark, scheduled runners were no longer lining up on deck, and on more than one occasion spectators in the stands were pressed into service to fill the gaps. Toward the end there were fewer holes in the schedule to fill, but the cushion over the old record had shrunk to only a minute and a half. Many of those who had run earlier in the day returned to the track in time to watch the last few legs as our world record was secured. The final margin ahead of the old record was less than two minutes out of a total elapsed time of almost eight hours.

For each individual runner, this was not a race. Each leg was a solo run with no other runner on the track

Bob finishing the lead-off mile in what
would be the world record 100-man/100mile relay that he organized in 1981.

© Joe Herget

The world record
certificate from the
Guinness Book of World
Records.

to focus on or compete against. The average age of the runners was 22 1/2 years. The oldest runner was 41, and five of the 100 runners were 16 years old. At least two of the runners went on to compete in the US Olympic Trials. This

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was no group of neighborhood Olympians, but we didn’t even get cardboard medals! The 100-man, 100-mile world record that was set by our team in 1981 lasted for 16-plus years before it was broken, and the subsequent record lasted

only a little over a year.

A Super Bowl ultra

After the record attempt, I saw a lot of Bob, since we were both running every local race we could. In fact, Bob was the open-division champion for the Baltimore Road Running Club (based on a series of races, five miles to 20 miles long) in 1981, and I was the champion in 1982. Bob was also running college track events in this era, which was a strong reason to stay away from ultras at least during

cross-country and track seasons. In 1983, in his last college semester, Bob came up with a plan to run from Baltimore to Washington, DC—about 30 miles. Unlike the Greensboro to Winston-Salem marathon that I had run, there was no formal race between these neighboring cities, but the course was straightforward as well as unique! Bob knew that this run would also complete the last section of his career goal of running from the Pennsylvania border all the way to Washington, DC. Bob and his friend Bryan Denson drove the course in advance and spray-painted mile

marks on the highways, which apparently wasn’t frowned upon in those days. On Super Bowl Sunday 1983, Bob and Bryan started off from their home track in Baltimore with no fanfare—or bus fare for that matter. Bryan’s girlfriend had been enlisted to drive the route and check on them at certain points. The run was uneventful except for seeing a running buddy while passing through the University

of Maryland campus in College Park and seeing a passing car containing two girls briefly run onto the shoulder of the road. The boys like to think that “they