GOOD. BETTER. BEST.

Marathoning in North America ain’t what it used to be. That’s the inevitable conclusion reached when you toss enough hoary old marathon codgers and codgerettes into the same room and let their long-term memory cogitate for a while like steeping tea. The talk gets animated, sometimes bitter, frequently exasperated.

With all the obvious advantages going for today’s long-distance athletes, where are the marathon performancesa logical person would anticipate? As we jog our way toward the butt-end of the 1990s, what do we North American marathoners have to show for it?

Of the top 20 marathon performances by American men, only 3 were produced in the 1990s: Bob Kempainen’s wind-aided but impressive 2:08:47 American record at Boston on April 18, 1994, and two races by Jerry Lawson—2:09:35 at Chicago on October 19, 1997, and 2:10:04 at Chicago on October 20, 1996. (In contrast, on one day in Boston—April 18, 1983—three Americans went under 2:10, and none of them was Bill Rodgers: Greg Meyer [2:09:00], Ron Tabb [2:09:31], and Benji Durden [2:09:57].)

On the women’s side, where serious marathoning didn’t start until the 1970s were exhausting themselves in

May/June 1999

an orgy of disco dancing, 11 of the top 20 American performances occurred in the 1990s (although just barely—7 of the 11 came in 1990 or 1991).

There just ain’t much happening these days, the veteran marathoners lament.

Your quick response mightbe, hey, the gross numbers of American marathoners are way, way up. Look, you might point out, more than 400,000 Americans performed—or at least tried to perform—a marathon last year. In fact, you might remind me, over the past half-dozen years, the increase in marathon participation has been in the range of 10 percent per year!

Well, yes . . . but we long-in-thetooth runners are quick to observe that raw numbers mean nothing if there’s no candle on top of the layer cake. Over the past decade, the median marathon finish time has slowed from 3:30 to 4:30—not exactly a move in the right direction, in spite of (or because of) increased volume.

Good, you might argue—it’s better to have so many more people participating rather than merely a handful of elites running fast times.

At this point in the discussion my eyes glaze over. Our exchange has been overtaken by the much-dreaded Repetitive Argument. You know how this argument goes. The same points are stated and restated ad nauseum;

the only direction the discussion can take is a continuous loop where the main point used to support your point is the point itself.

ButI digress. My point here is that after enough repeats of the More Participation vs. Less Performance—More Performance vs. Less Participation mantra over the past few years, a very simple question has come to mind: why do weassume these two concepts are mutually exclusive? What’s wrong with More Participation and More Performance?

Most good marathoners are born and not made (exceptions include Emil Zatopek, Derek Clayton, and Ron Daws). Unless a runner begins with excellent genes, he or she generally is not going to run exceptional times—at least not without a Herculean work ethic and a lot of smarts.

But here’s the “up” side: in America, there’s no systematic rooting out of talent, such as there was in, say, East Germany. Talent here is like gold nuggets, patiently sitting there, precious, and heavier than the dross around them, waiting to be discovered.

How do the gold nuggets of marathon talent get discovered? Not by sitting on a couch watching ESPN2. They are discovered when they take up long-distance running and marathoning, do an initial marathon, and then improve on that initiation race.

Among the 400,000+ North American marathoners, numerous gold nuggets must be sprinkled about.

Consider the great coach Arthur Lydiard more than 30 years ago pulling together a group of runners from a single New Zealand neighborhood, training them scientifically and well, then taking them to the Olympics, where they vacuumed up medals. If latent talent can be found around every comer, consider the talent concealed in 400,000+ marathoners. Statistically, there’s got to be a virtual army of national- and world-class marathoners waiting to be introduced to their own talent.

The big hurdle is that little encouragement exists today for new marathoners to make any attempt to become fast, hungry, dedicated marathoners. A tremendous manytentacled motivational machine is in place to get Americans to take part in the marathon, but there’s little motivation for them to excel.

This strikes me as incredibly ironic. For someone to be motivated to take on the challenge of running a marathon, he or she must already have the qualities of a marathon champion—dedication, focus, willingness to sacrifice, a familiarity with delayed gratification, and, of course, passion.

These “new” marathoners are usually accomplished people who in order to successfully train for and run a marathon need to be steeped in performance attributes. Demographically, we know they are accomplished in virtually every other aspect of their lives. They are doers. Innovators. Professionals. Strivers. To them, selfcritical performance is a way of life.

May/June 1999