DOWNHILL RUNNING

The main feature of this issue is a survey titled “Where Are America’s World-Class Marathoners?” The survey was inspired by the increasingly abysmal showing of current U.S. distance runners on the world marathon stage and in comparison to the performances of the previous generation of American marathoners.

As we headed to deadline with this issue of M&B, Dr. Dave Martin, who put together the extensive statistical analysis of performances—or rather, lack of performances—by current U.S. marathoners (see p. 28), frantically faxed us to see if we could include the 1996 statistics in his analysis. The results of Martin’s 1996 compilation of marathon times changed the question mark at the end of our survey’s title to an exclamation point! In 1996, all U.S. men combined ran fewer sub-2:20 marathons than the 76 sub-2:20s Doug Kurtis has run by himself throughout his long-running career.

This nosedive in U.S. marathon performances screams out to be examined, yet some runners take great pains to avoid even acknowledging the situation, much less discussing it. It’s as though not discussing the problem will make it go away to a secret garden to magically find a solution.

There are all sorts of rationalizations jerry-rigged to explain away the problem, most of them centering on the lack of organizational or corporate support. These two excuses might work—barely—if we were only looking at devolving American marathoners versus today’s worldwide crop of constantly-evolving top marathoners. But such rationalizations are completely bogus if youcompare the current performances with the long-static records that fellow Americans set between 1968 and 1984. When Frank Shorter won gold in Munich, and Billy Rodgers won four Boston Marathons, the organization then known as the AAU didn’t even know the sport of long-distance running existed, much less supportits practitioners. To the AAU, marathoners were eccentrics, best ignored. Corporations during that period thought that marathons were Checker cabs.

Back then, marathoners held fulltime jobs, lived in run-down apartments, ate cold, two-day-old pizza, and held together their decade-old cars with baling wire and curses. They occasionally ran sub-2:10 marathons, but they always ran sub-2:15 marathons. And they ran them in shoes that by today’s standards would be considered cruel and unusual punishment.

Besides enjoying infinitely better running shoes, today’s U.S.

marathoners have better diets, know more about total body training, receive massage therapy, can readily find coaches and other sports specialists to spiff up their training, can make a decent living running without having to hold down a full-time job while running on the side, and have more— and better organized—races to choose from. Yet they appear to see themselves as victims on the world stage and victims of what now appears to be the excessive accomplishments of their elders.

Arguments are made that today’s marathoners are receiving too little support from the sport’s governing body and U.S. corporations. So what else is new? We spend too much time coming up with reasons why U.S. marathoners can’t be competitive instead of focusing on how they can be.

America’s most successful male marathoner in the past decade is “Dr. Bob” Kempainen, who seems more like a throwback to the previous generation than a member of his own. He was able to pursue his medical studies while focusing on running well, and he was willing to occasionally run within and against a phalanx of dreaded Kenyans.

Some apologists contend that there would be more world-class American marathoners if the runners were given more press. Considering how little running press there was in the late ’70s compared to today, there has never been more press exposure for less performance in the history of the sport.

First of all, performance doesn’t result from press exposure; and secondly, such thinking furthers the notion that if you give a gold star to every second grader in the class, regardless of their performance, you’ ll raise the self-esteem of all students. Self-esteem—whether for 8-year-old second graders or 28-year-old distance runners—can’t be “bestowed”; it must be earned if it is to be valued. Recently, one writer in a national running magazine concocted an incredibly humorous rationalization for poor performances among today’s 28year-old runners, claiming that the baby boomer runners were spoiled, growing up in a time of plenty, while today’s younger runners have grown up inanera of want. The analysis does point out that there is a serious “want” among 28-year-old runners, that is, regarding history. The marathoners of the baby boomer era were frequently the first in their larger-than-today’sfamily to go to college, usually had to work one or two jobs to stay in college, and enjoyed the promise of job security—if their gradepoint average dropped below 2.0, the draft board was waiting for them with the morethan-full-time-job of staying alive in Vietnam. John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were assassinated during the formative years of the baby boomers, yet these runners still went through the 1960s with an idealized view that they could make a difference in the world, which is why many of them took low-