Puzzle Pieces

Despite what Forrest Gump’s mother contended, life really isn’t much like a box of chocolates. It’s more a jigsaw puzzle of odd-sized pieces that interconnect in such a way that even when dozens of pieces are missing the big picture can be clearly seen. This was the analogy we faced as we worked over the past several months to put together what we’ve been calling The Encyclopedia Marathonia, a collection of roughly 200 encyclopedia listings related to the marathon, each limited to 25 words or less. Our goal was to construct a (relatively) clear picture of the marathon as an event made up mostly of very real, very human people.

As the listings expanded toward our limit of 200, we wrestled with thousands of potential listings from which the 200 that said the most about the sport and lifestyle of marathoning could be culled. In some cases, narrowing our selections was an excruciating process.

In 1983, Americans took the first three spots at Boston (the last year an American male won Boston), all of them under 2:10: Greg Meyer, Ron Tabb, and Benji Durden, in that order. We decided to go with Greg Meyer and Benji Durden but not Ron Tabb. Why? Greg Meyer was obvious: a consistently strong finisher and compatriot and competitor of Bill Rodgers, he won the big one, and it didn’t come as a surprise. Also, often overlooked, his marathon PR is actually quicker than his friend “Boston Billy’s.”

Benji Durden was worthy of inclusion because of his consistency during his era: besides going under 2:10 at Boston in 1983, he was also one of the three U.S. Olympic marathoners who qualified to go to Moscow in 1980 but never got the chance. He continues his involvement in marathoning as a respected coach in the Boulder, Colorado, area.

Ron Tabb was a real surprise at Boston in 1983. He’d been a decent marathoner, but nobody expected him to take second in under 2:10; he never did anything close to it again. And, yes, he was married to Mary Decker, but that had nothing to do with marathoning.

At the other end of the spectrum were gotta-includes: Abebe Bikila, Boston Marathon, carbohydrate loading, Nike, Runner’s World, Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers, Derek Clayton, Joan Benoit, Kathrine Switzer. Each of their puzzle pieces is large and impossible to ignore. The puzzle missing those pieces would not hold its edges together, much less its center.

There will be some observers of the scene who will make arguments—no doubt good arguments—against some of those we’ve included, and certainly for many of those we’ve left out.

Why Frank Zuna and not Kirk Pfeffer? The tall, slim, tough Coloradan was on world-record pace at that very hot New York City Marathon back in 1979. He was prone to injury, but he was a frontrunner who stood out in a crowd. We concede that he was a frontrunner and he stood out. But his lack of constraint in pacing set him up for the injuries that bedeviled him, and as a result he never won the big ones. Zuna, on the other hand, a very laid-back runner for his time (even Clarence DeMar, as staid as an Episcopalian bishop, referred to Zuna as “bohemian,” although DeMar considered him a friend and an inspiration—especially when he shattered DeMar’s archrival Mike Ryan’s Boston record.), did deliver at Boston and at other American marathons, and he made an Olympic team. And ya gotta love the photo of Zuna posing as a part of the six-man 1924 U.S. Olympic marathon team behind his friend DeMar. Zuna, the brawniest guy in the lineup, is sporting a hand-scrawled race number while the rest have their official number pinned on (see M&B May/June 1999, page 96).

“Zuna always interested me,” DeMar wrote in his autobiography, Marathon. “At preparation for the Interallied Games in order to be on the mile squad it was necessary to do the distance under five minutes. As Zuna could do this, he didn’t bother to try 10 miles. Why run 10 miles when you could have all the privileges of the squad by doing just one? And when Zuna went places he usually wore his track suit for underwear and jammed his track shoes in his back pants pockets.”

Ya gotta love the guy. His very uniqueness (and the fact that so few people impressed DeMar as Zuna did) makes his puzzle piece bigger than it might have otherwise been.

Naturally, if we had unlimited space (say 500,000 words), we’d delve into much of the minutia of marathoning and we’d construct an essay for each entry in direct proportion to the listing’s importance. Derek Clayton might receive 2,500 words; Kirk Pfeffer would certainly be worthy of 250, and Ron Tabb a few more.

Abebe Bikila? Several pages. The same for Pheidippides, more in an attempt to clear out the fallacies of his supposedly dying at the gates of Athens rather than to further propagate and string out the myth that sells the guy’s talents way too short.

The exercise of creating The Encyclopedia Marathonia was more of an emotional wrench than most stories we do, taxing what objectivity we could muster for a sport we obviously love and cherish.

Several times in the process we came very close to hitting the wall, putting off the project until we recuperated a bit from the effort and in the meantime subbing in something else of a lighter nature until we could whip up the additional energy and resources to again face the task. But that would have been like dropping out of a marathon at 18 miles because we’d encountered a dirty section.

Like any marathon performance, even a particularly good one, in the wake of pulling it off we do tend to ask a lot of “What if?” questions. What if Pfeffer had gone out a little more intelligently at New York City 1979? What if Zuna had been a church deacon? What if the New York City Marathon had been left inside Central Park? What if…? Unfortunately, when you consider the history of the sport of marathoning, “What if?” doesn’t make the cut.

—Rich Benyo