The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner? Not on Weekend Mornings.

few minutes before 7:00 a.m. every Saturday, a group of a dozen or so

runners congregates beneath the carvings of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis. In the shadow of the world’s largest hunk of granite, at Stone Mountain, Georgia, the runners slowly set out precisely at 7:00. Not at 6:59, not at 7:01. These are the Stone Mountain Sumos, and from 1982 to 1987, Iran with them.

For 25 years, the Sumos have trudged out in all sorts of weather, usually heading out of the Stone Mountain Park to Ponce de Leon Avenue. The rare times they veered from this direction, they ran up the Fish Pond Hill on the other side of Stone Mountain.

The name came from a chance remark. One of the guys observed, “We look more like a bunch of Sumos than we look like runners!” The name stuck. All of the Sumos were male, though later a few summettes would break the sex barrier.

I was 32 when introduced to the Sumos by Jim Meehan, a friend from another running group, the speed workout group coached by Lee Fidler, a road racing speedster who took 11th at Boston in 1975 (2:16:51) and 14th in ’78 (2:16:14).

It was convenient to go to the mountain, 10 minutes from where I lived, while working on my doctorate at Georgia State University. I was the youngest and usually the fastest sumo. Most of the Sumos were already in their 40s with kids approaching college. Not one of them was born in Georgia, hailing instead from the Midwest, East, Florida, and Kentucky.

THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF THE SUMOS

Work was the reason everyone found themselves in Atlanta in the early ’80s, except for me. They were politically conservative, and everyone had families and 3.2 kids to provide for. They were mainstream Americans. They told dirty jokes on the run. Mike Graham, a member of the Toastmasters, sometimes practiced his speeches, and week in, week out, a male bond formed within the group that was

Courtesy of Scott Young

ee “4 . e 3 me ere

A The Sumos at the first handicap race.

akin to a squad of soldiers. Our “wars” were marathons, from which we returned with our war stories, usually of defeat by a variety of means: dehydration, sore calves, drinking too much beer the night before, and so forth.

Back then it took 2:50 to qualify for Boston if you were under 40 and 3:10 if you were a masters runner. Only one sumo qualified under those rules: Bill McManus. After several attempts to break 3:10, Bill qualified at the Columbus (Ohio) Marathon. The morning of the race, I saw him staring at himself in the mirror, repeating a mantra: “I am strong. I am strong. I am strong.” He made it to Boston but quit running soon after. I guess he had no more mountains to conquer.

We had a newsletter and an annual handicap race, which is now in its 19th year. We came up with a logo and T-shirts. But the Sumos resisted change. Several times, I brought members of my speed group to run: Lucia Geraci, an Olympic Trials competitor, and Sue Parker, a 2:50 marathoner. Some Sumos complained that it wasn’t that the women were fast that bothered them, it was that they felt they could no longer burp and fart.

The Sumos were mostly in managerial-type positions: a trucking supervisor, real-estate agency owner, an information systems analyst, a hazardous waste engineer, a school administrator, and three professional managers in assorted industries. No one was involved in politics, and we were indictment-free. Life was uneventful for all of us, until one guy went through a divorce. When he remarried, his new wife convinced him that the only reason he ran was to get away from his first wife and that if he was truly happy, he would have no need to run at all. So he quit the group. The last person to see him said he had gained so much