==========================
THE COOLEST RACE ON EARTH
Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the
Antarctica Marathon
by John Hanc (nonfiction)
Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781556527388
Copyright (c) 2009 by John Hanc
RACE (Part 5 of 5)
======================================
Most first-time road racers start with something relatively short,
typically a 5K run (5 kilometers, or 3.1 miles). But this was the
beginning of the 1970s "running boom," when it seemed as if every
upwardly mobile young man in America was lacing up his shoes to
follow in the footsteps of Frank Shorter, the Yale-educated lawyer
who had won the gold medal in the Olympic marathon in 1972. For
these guys, more was better. So when Gilligan agreed to train with
his friend for their race, it was not a 5K or even a 10K (6.2
miles); it was a 20K--about 12 miles. "I said, 'Wow! That's a long
way. But we'll give it a try.'" They trained together for a few
weeks and then showed up at the start of the race, which turned out
to be 25K--over 15.5 miles. "I said, 'I can't go this far!'"
recalled Gilligan. "My friend said 'just inhale and exhale and
you'll get through.'" He did. Halfway through, Gilligan thought to
himself, "This is torture. I'm never doing it again." But the minute
he crossed the finish line, he underwent a major attitude
adjustment. "I said, 'This is fun. I can't wait to do it again.' I
was hooked."
Gilligan became a running bum--a corollary to the ski variety and a
well-recognized species in the Boston area in the late 1970s. The
city had become the hub for running on the East Coast. It already
had the most prestigious race in the world, the Boston Marathon, and
one of the finest clubs in the country, the Greater Boston Track
Club. The Boston area was also home to several new running shoe
manufacturers, Etonic, Saucony, and New Balance, all pumping out
pairs of durable-but-light trainers for all the running boomers. And
they had the right demographics--lots of bright, "type A," goal-
oriented young men (and a few women) who wanted the kind of robust,
physical challenge they weren't getting in their classrooms, their
downtown law offices, or their positions in the emerging high-tech
businesses along Route 128.
Gilligan, who had watched the Boston Marathon with his father many
times as a kid, set his sights on going 26.2 miles, which he did
with success. Although he crashed and burned in his first Boston
Marathon, his compact five-foot nine-inch, 155-pound frame was well
suited for running; soon he had joined the elite Greater Boston
Track Club, coached by the charismatic Billy Squires, a college
track coach and former all-American runner at Notre Dame. Gilligan
was now training with the likes of Bill Rodgers, next to Shorter,
the greatest American marathoner of his generation; Joan Benoit, who
would go on to win the gold in the first Olympic women's marathon in
1984; Greg Meyer, the last American man to win the Boston Marathon
(which he did in 1983); Lynn Jennings, later an Olympian; Tom
Derderian, an outstanding runner and coach who later wrote the
definitive history of the Boston Marathon; Dave McGillivray, another
man from "Meffa" who is now race director for the Boston Marathon;
and a speedy, young registered nurse from Children's Hospital named
Sharon O'Hagan, who would eventually become Mrs. Tom Gilligan.
Under the tutelage of Squires, the members of the Greater Boston
Track Club (GBTC) did repeats up Heartbreak Hill so many times that
they could have run it in their sleep. They also worked together to
improve. "You did whatever it took," wrote Barbara Huebner in a 2004
article on the GBTC's history in "American Track & Field." "You
shared what you had. You kicked around ideas. And you succeeded."
They really were a team, and not just on the track: members of the
club ate together, drank together, partied together, and eventually
lived together. "We had a house in Wellesley," Gilligan said. "Right
on the fifteen-mile mark of the marathon course."
The members of the GBTC were the finely honed peak of a competitive
and single-minded movement. Although they had cardiovascular systems
as finely tuned as NASCAR engines, the running boomers were less
interested in fitness than they were in racing and having fun.
Nobody lifted weights or took yoga classes; "cross training" wasn't
even a marketing slogan yet, much less a recommended approach to
exercise. The serious boomers ran almost every day, sometimes twice
a day. They ran more miles in a week than most people put on their
car odometers, then raced on the weekends and figured that with all
that training they could eat--and drink--whatever they wanted. So
they did.
The attitude was perfect for the 1970s and, in the case of Gilligan
and his running cronies, perfect for Boston--a city that in the mid-
to-late 1970s supported two alternative newspapers, a nascent punk
rock scene, and tens of thousands of college students (me among
them). Most of the students were too busy rolling joints and
blasting their stereos out the dorm windows along Commonwealth
Avenue to want to run, but on the third Monday in April, thousands
would gather along the road to watch and cheer on the runners in the
Boston Marathon. Many of the top competitors in those years were
members of the GBTC, which by then had achieved a national
reputation in the sport. The club earned its place in running
mythology when in 1979 it claimed four of the top ten spots at
Boston (led by Rodgers, who won the marathon).
Those who were there speak nostalgically of the era when runners ran
rampant in Boston. They were a high-profile, exotic subculture, like
the hippies of a decade earlier, except without psychedelics. It was
a tight, almost communal society. "There was a terrific passion and
a certain innocence pervading the sport, and it really flowered more
in Boston than anywhere else in America," recalls Rodgers, who
became so linked to the Boston Marathon (a race he won four times)
and the city's running scene that he earned the nickname "Boston
Billy." "We felt that anything was possible," he says. "And we had
so much fun following through on that."
Whenever runners today hear that Gilligan actually trained with the
likes of Rodgers and Meyer, they conclude that he must have been an
Olympic-caliber runner. "I just laugh," he says. "I was lucky to
make the D team of the Greater Boston Track Club. I could run 2:30
in the marathon...these guys all ran 2:12 or under." Some
perspective is needed here: in no other sport is the word "good"
more relative than in marathoning. Gilligan's 2:30:42 might have
been twenty minutes slower than a world-class performer like
Rodgers; however, it would be good enough to win most local
marathons today. Any American recreational runner who can complete
26.2 miles in the low three-hour range is considered outstanding
today--and "good" now means you can break four hours!
The world of running was going to change dramatically in the next
decade. In the early 1980s, Huebner writes, the fast-growing running
shoe companies lured many of the Greater Boston Track Club's top
runners to their own teams, and the club faded. Many of the original
running boomers eventually burned out--casualties of too many miles,
too much racing, and too many overuse injuries. They would be
followed by a wave of marathon runners whose numbers were far
greater but whose times were much slower. Consider that in 1980,
120,000 Americans crossed the finish line of a marathon. About 90
percent of them were men, and their median finish time was 3 hours
and 32 minutes. Twenty-five years later, the number of finishers
nearly quadrupled, to 432,000 finishers, 41 percent of them female.
The median time for men in 2005 had shot up to 4 hours and 20
minutes; the typical female finisher took 4 hours and 51 minutes.
This was a different breed than gazelles like Gilligan and his pals
on the Greater Boston Track Club, who logged eighty miles a week and
ran 2:20 marathons. The second-generation running boomers did not
typically have high school or collegiate running backgrounds.
Indeed, many of them had no athletic background at all. Unlike the
first generation, they tended not to party hearty. As with so many
aspects of our society, running in the 1990s was a little more sober
and serious than in the 1970s. For this new cadre of runners, the
marathon would be a route to fitness, weight loss, self-
actualization, fundraising for worthy causes...or travel.
That's where, Gilligan says, "I was a classic example of being in
the right place at the right time."
Hardcover - Today's read ends on page 22.
THE COOLEST RACE ON EARTH
Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the
Antarctica Marathon
by John Hanc (nonfiction)
Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781556527388
Copyright (c) 2009 by John Hanc
RACE (Part 5 of 5)
======================================
Most first-time road racers start with something relatively short,
typically a 5K run (5 kilometers, or 3.1 miles). But this was the
beginning of the 1970s "running boom," when it seemed as if every
upwardly mobile young man in America was lacing up his shoes to
follow in the footsteps of Frank Shorter, the Yale-educated lawyer
who had won the gold medal in the Olympic marathon in 1972. For
these guys, more was better. So when Gilligan agreed to train with
his friend for their race, it was not a 5K or even a 10K (6.2
miles); it was a 20K--about 12 miles. "I said, 'Wow! That's a long
way. But we'll give it a try.'" They trained together for a few
weeks and then showed up at the start of the race, which turned out
to be 25K--over 15.5 miles. "I said, 'I can't go this far!'"
recalled Gilligan. "My friend said 'just inhale and exhale and
you'll get through.'" He did. Halfway through, Gilligan thought to
himself, "This is torture. I'm never doing it again." But the minute
he crossed the finish line, he underwent a major attitude
adjustment. "I said, 'This is fun. I can't wait to do it again.' I
was hooked."
Gilligan became a running bum--a corollary to the ski variety and a
well-recognized species in the Boston area in the late 1970s. The
city had become the hub for running on the East Coast. It already
had the most prestigious race in the world, the Boston Marathon, and
one of the finest clubs in the country, the Greater Boston Track
Club. The Boston area was also home to several new running shoe
manufacturers, Etonic, Saucony, and New Balance, all pumping out
pairs of durable-but-light trainers for all the running boomers. And
they had the right demographics--lots of bright, "type A," goal-
oriented young men (and a few women) who wanted the kind of robust,
physical challenge they weren't getting in their classrooms, their
downtown law offices, or their positions in the emerging high-tech
businesses along Route 128.
Gilligan, who had watched the Boston Marathon with his father many
times as a kid, set his sights on going 26.2 miles, which he did
with success. Although he crashed and burned in his first Boston
Marathon, his compact five-foot nine-inch, 155-pound frame was well
suited for running; soon he had joined the elite Greater Boston
Track Club, coached by the charismatic Billy Squires, a college
track coach and former all-American runner at Notre Dame. Gilligan
was now training with the likes of Bill Rodgers, next to Shorter,
the greatest American marathoner of his generation; Joan Benoit, who
would go on to win the gold in the first Olympic women's marathon in
1984; Greg Meyer, the last American man to win the Boston Marathon
(which he did in 1983); Lynn Jennings, later an Olympian; Tom
Derderian, an outstanding runner and coach who later wrote the
definitive history of the Boston Marathon; Dave McGillivray, another
man from "Meffa" who is now race director for the Boston Marathon;
and a speedy, young registered nurse from Children's Hospital named
Sharon O'Hagan, who would eventually become Mrs. Tom Gilligan.
Under the tutelage of Squires, the members of the Greater Boston
Track Club (GBTC) did repeats up Heartbreak Hill so many times that
they could have run it in their sleep. They also worked together to
improve. "You did whatever it took," wrote Barbara Huebner in a 2004
article on the GBTC's history in "American Track & Field." "You
shared what you had. You kicked around ideas. And you succeeded."
They really were a team, and not just on the track: members of the
club ate together, drank together, partied together, and eventually
lived together. "We had a house in Wellesley," Gilligan said. "Right
on the fifteen-mile mark of the marathon course."
The members of the GBTC were the finely honed peak of a competitive
and single-minded movement. Although they had cardiovascular systems
as finely tuned as NASCAR engines, the running boomers were less
interested in fitness than they were in racing and having fun.
Nobody lifted weights or took yoga classes; "cross training" wasn't
even a marketing slogan yet, much less a recommended approach to
exercise. The serious boomers ran almost every day, sometimes twice
a day. They ran more miles in a week than most people put on their
car odometers, then raced on the weekends and figured that with all
that training they could eat--and drink--whatever they wanted. So
they did.
The attitude was perfect for the 1970s and, in the case of Gilligan
and his running cronies, perfect for Boston--a city that in the mid-
to-late 1970s supported two alternative newspapers, a nascent punk
rock scene, and tens of thousands of college students (me among
them). Most of the students were too busy rolling joints and
blasting their stereos out the dorm windows along Commonwealth
Avenue to want to run, but on the third Monday in April, thousands
would gather along the road to watch and cheer on the runners in the
Boston Marathon. Many of the top competitors in those years were
members of the GBTC, which by then had achieved a national
reputation in the sport. The club earned its place in running
mythology when in 1979 it claimed four of the top ten spots at
Boston (led by Rodgers, who won the marathon).
Those who were there speak nostalgically of the era when runners ran
rampant in Boston. They were a high-profile, exotic subculture, like
the hippies of a decade earlier, except without psychedelics. It was
a tight, almost communal society. "There was a terrific passion and
a certain innocence pervading the sport, and it really flowered more
in Boston than anywhere else in America," recalls Rodgers, who
became so linked to the Boston Marathon (a race he won four times)
and the city's running scene that he earned the nickname "Boston
Billy." "We felt that anything was possible," he says. "And we had
so much fun following through on that."
Whenever runners today hear that Gilligan actually trained with the
likes of Rodgers and Meyer, they conclude that he must have been an
Olympic-caliber runner. "I just laugh," he says. "I was lucky to
make the D team of the Greater Boston Track Club. I could run 2:30
in the marathon...these guys all ran 2:12 or under." Some
perspective is needed here: in no other sport is the word "good"
more relative than in marathoning. Gilligan's 2:30:42 might have
been twenty minutes slower than a world-class performer like
Rodgers; however, it would be good enough to win most local
marathons today. Any American recreational runner who can complete
26.2 miles in the low three-hour range is considered outstanding
today--and "good" now means you can break four hours!
The world of running was going to change dramatically in the next
decade. In the early 1980s, Huebner writes, the fast-growing running
shoe companies lured many of the Greater Boston Track Club's top
runners to their own teams, and the club faded. Many of the original
running boomers eventually burned out--casualties of too many miles,
too much racing, and too many overuse injuries. They would be
followed by a wave of marathon runners whose numbers were far
greater but whose times were much slower. Consider that in 1980,
120,000 Americans crossed the finish line of a marathon. About 90
percent of them were men, and their median finish time was 3 hours
and 32 minutes. Twenty-five years later, the number of finishers
nearly quadrupled, to 432,000 finishers, 41 percent of them female.
The median time for men in 2005 had shot up to 4 hours and 20
minutes; the typical female finisher took 4 hours and 51 minutes.
This was a different breed than gazelles like Gilligan and his pals
on the Greater Boston Track Club, who logged eighty miles a week and
ran 2:20 marathons. The second-generation running boomers did not
typically have high school or collegiate running backgrounds.
Indeed, many of them had no athletic background at all. Unlike the
first generation, they tended not to party hearty. As with so many
aspects of our society, running in the 1990s was a little more sober
and serious than in the 1970s. For this new cadre of runners, the
marathon would be a route to fitness, weight loss, self-
actualization, fundraising for worthy causes...or travel.
That's where, Gilligan says, "I was a classic example of being in
the right place at the right time."
Hardcover - Today's read ends on page 22.
选择“Disable on www.wenxuecity.com”
选择“don't run on pages on this domain”
