By Richard Benyo · May 1999 · pp. 1-2 · 7 min read

Editorial: Good. Better. Best.

EditorialVol. 3, No. 3 (1999)May 19994 min readpp. 1-2

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 performances a 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 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 might be, 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-the-tooth 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.

But I 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 we assume 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 corner, 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 many-tentacled 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, self-critical performance is a way of life.

Yet when they transfer their attention and considerable talents to the marathon, they have been brainwashed to think that just to participate is the height of accomplishment, when (ah, the beauty of the marathon!) in fact participation is merely the drawbridge to the castle.

Where do we place the blame for these developments? On those “motivators” (both organizations and individuals) who infer that participation and performance lodge in radically different dictionaries. Forget the sports organizations that are supposed to be promoting and instigating increased quality in American distance running; Americans have always been antiestablishment in that regard anyway.

For the new marathoner with inherent talent, the racing scene is no longer welcoming and no longer inspiring from the top. There are few accessible role models. Instead of welcoming and encouraging competition from within the ranks of the hoi polloi, the “elites” tend to guard their tiny fiefdoms.

In 1980, when America had marathoning heroes (from Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter to Greg Meyer and Jeff Wells to Ron Wayne and Steve Hoag to Gary Tuttle and Alberto Salazar to Jon Anderson and Tom Fleming to Garry Bjorklund and Tony Sandoval to John Lodwick to Kyle Heffner to Don Kardong and Kenny Moore to Kirk Pfeffer and Bob Hodge, and so on and so on), a runner visiting Boston could drop by Boston Billy’s store on Cleveland Circle and be invited by Bill to join the first couple of miles of his workout before he blasted away. Elite American marathoners (then some of the best in the world) ran together, raced against each other often, and welcomed up-and-comers to their ranks. There was a brotherhood (and a rising sisterhood) among them. (That welcoming camaraderie, come to think of it, wasn’t too far removed from what the Kenyans are doing today—imagine that.)

When elites or would-be elites dig a chasm to protect themselves, they isolate themselves from challengers who make them better in the process. When so-called motivators paint the marathon as ritual rather than race, they shortchange their charges and expand the chasm.

It’s time to begin encouraging marathoners to translate the performance from the other aspects of their lives to their marathoning. Which marathoner, truth be told, wouldn’t trade fifty 4:30s for one 2:59? It’s the rare marathoner who wouldn’t. The problem today is that nobody who the new marathoners have been taught to respect is holding that prospect forth as a possibility. And the chance of the new marathoner learning that on his or her own is reduced by the mass sheep-think that characterizes today’s marathoner culture.

The talented, hard-working Kenyans seem from another planet as far as most American marathoners are concerned. But of course they aren’t. They aren’t too much different from the 17 American men who finished in the top 20 at Boston in 1982.

Not to worry, then. Everything goes in cycles. All it will take for America to rush back to the foreground of marathoning is one or two new marathoners who don’t know they can’t. Someone with Alberto Salazar’s focus or Bill Rodgers’s raw enjoyment of the sport. Someone with Dick Beardsley’s philosophy of racing anywhere at any time as an excuse to get better. Someone with a few like-minded friends to push him or her along.

When those one or two talented and eager runners emerge from the vast reservoir of American marathoners, they will be able, literally, to write their own financial ticket. Then, as long as they keep the dollars-and-cents aspect in perspective and stay hungry for better performances, they’ll be there to throw open the floodgates. At long last, Americans will go retro big time and say, “Hey, I think I can do that, too!”

It was, after all, a psychological and not a physical barrier that protected Derek Clayton’s 2:08:34 record for a dozen years. And (if you’ll allow one last metaphor) psychological barriers are always anchored in sand.

—Rich Benyo

Wineglass Marathon logo — wineglass illustration

Designated as one of the Top Ten Most Scenic Marathons by Runner’s World

Special Guest John “The Penguin” Bingham will be signing his new book, giving a talk at the expo and running a five hour pacing group.

$4,500 in Prizes

Course Records:

Male Open:	Andrew Herr	2:22:52	(1997)
Female Open:	Leslie Carson	2:49:09	(1998)
Male Masters:	Jeff Foster	2:30:22	(1998)
Female Masters:	Mary Burns Prine	2:49:46	(1997)

The Marathon starts at Philips Lighting in Bath and finishes at Corning Glass Center in Corning, New York. Expo/Packet Pick-up is at the Glenn Curtiss Museum in Hammondsport.

USATF Certification Code: NY95032AM
Marathon & Beyond Score: 839, May 1997 Issue