Kathrine: Here’s another story. After he created running travel in the late 1970s, with the Bermuda Marathon one of his first destinations, he began adding other, even more exotic, foreign events. The demand for Bermuda naturally waned. But Thom knew it was still a beautiful and accessible winter running destination for Americans, so he thought about how to revive it. Thirty years after his first venture there, and knowing the appeal of a term like “Bermuda Triangle,” he had the idea of creating a triple-challenge running festival—three races in one weekend. The Bermuda Triangle Challenge immediately became a top destination event. The point is that Thom understands that once runners accomplish something, they want to go to another level.

Roger: Inhis racing days, runners wanted to graduate to a tougher GBTC training group, a higher team in whatever club they ran for, and run better times. Now they want to make it harder, more extreme, more exotic, more original, more memorable. At the same time Thom knows they don’t want it to be a hassle to get there. The challenge has to be in the race, not the travel.

Kathrine: One other thing—he listens to his clients and he’s really current with newer runners’ interests and priorities. Like medals, something those of us who were running 40 years ago only got when we finished in the top three. Today’s runners are obsessed with medals, and in Bermuda Thom designed them personally to make the best possible reward for each race and then one for the overall Triangle Challenge. Some of us walked away with four gorgeous medals, and I’ll bet some did the trip just for those.

Roger: That skill in taking the pulse of each generation of runners is part of why he’s important as well as a very interesting man. He’s much more than an enterprising businessman. In the long term of history, Thom will go down as a significant contributor to the growth of the running movement. He’s one of a group of committed

Thom and the authors, Kathrine Switzer and Roger Robinson, at the Boston Marathon expo.

© Patrice Malloy

1970s runners who saw opportunities to develop the sport and at the same time create income, even though they were banned by the old amateur rules from being paid as runners. There were the writers and journalists (like Bob Anderson, Jim Fixx, Hal Higdon, Don Kardong, and George Sheehan), the shoe and apparel innovators like Phil Knight, and those who worked inside corporations, for shoe companies or, like you, Kathrine, inside Avon Cosmetics. The most adventurous were those who started new, independent businesses where nothing had existed before. Jeff Galloway was probably the first to invent an industry, starting Phidippides, the world’s first specialist running-shoe store, in 1973. Then came Jim Davis with MarathonFoto in 1974, and, right up there, Gilligan with the running destination-travel business in 1977.

All three did more than ride the wave. All three encouraged more and more nonelite people to try running and feel welcome and significant, and all three enhanced the experience of being a runner. Galloway with his stores gave them a social center of their own (plus running camps, coaching, and other innovations), Davis took photos that helped them feel heroic, and Gilligan took them to exciting new places and races and gave them challenging incentives that don’t demand being fast. The history of the running movement has never been written (though I’m working on it), but Thom Gilligan will have an important place. He helped running to boom. bd,