Running Shorts with Scott Hubbard foot in the next meet, explaining that as a kid I’d felt faster without shoes. He agreed to let me try. I was lagging well back in our next meet at Battle Creek Lakeview when I had a “Eureka” moment and made a decision that changed things forever for me as a runner. I was unhappy so far back, asked myself why and, in all of three seconds, decided to chase after a teammate I’d beaten the last three races. I quickly caught him, then passed others until I reached our best runner. I paused and made the mistake of thinking — usually a bad thing to do while racing — “I can’t pass him; he’s good and if I do, I don’t know what I’m in for.”
Scott Hubbard Trivia: Who was the first man to break 4 minutes in the mile indoors?
M
EMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS. Leafing through back issues of Distance Running News and Runner’s World is an amble down memory lane for me. I went through a bunch recently looking for column ideas and got “bogged” down reading old articles and looking at ads. It was time well spent but slowed the search for column topics. I’ll devote space this issue to looking back at what seemed important at the time and other things that helped shape the sport — sometimes in groundbreaking ways. It was fun to watch the sport grow up around me. My first memory of track and field as a sport is when I saw a San Diego newspaper headline touting the first man to pole vault 17 feet: John Pennel in August 1963. A couple weeks later I entered the sixth grade and in November President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas. A year and a half later my family moved from California to Ann Arbor. I didn’t play organized sports growing up; instead I played games with friends in the streets, canyons and Boys Club. My sport of choice was baseball, which I hoped to play in high school. Misunderstanding a sports recruiter for the new Ann Arbor Huron High School, I checked baseball and cross country on my “interest” card, turned it in and forgot about it in the spring of ninth grade. After the first day of school in 10th grade, cross country coach Des Ryan called and said he had a card with my name on it. We talked and I agreed to see what the sport was about. The meets were two miles in the day and think I ran just over 13 minutes the first two meets and 12:50 in the third. I asked coach if I could race bare-
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I finished with him and we all chattered about what I’d done. After that, I no longer ran to finish or for the experience; I ran to see how fast I could go! Our first-year team wasn’t that good, but, lucky for me, it worked in my favor. I competed barefoot through my junior year (even after getting spiked badly) before switching to spikes as a senior. I was the only person I knew of that raced barefoot. I am going to skip around now, topics appearing in no particular order: A. I was in my first year as assistant girls track coach at Ann Arbor Pioneer High School in May 1975 when I heard that Steve Prefontaine had died. The head coach asked if I’d “heard the news” when I arrived for practice. I said no and he told me about Pre dying in a car accident. I ran against him once: in the ‘73 NCAA national cross country meet, where I finished two minutes behind him. B. Before there were digital watches, there were sweep-hand stopwatches. By the late ‘70s, digital watches with split-time functions became more common and affordable. In recent years, Garmin GPS watches compile a bunch of info, including distance run. C. I owned sweep-hand wristwatches when I started running, but the wrist bands kept disintegrating. So I took to looking at a clock as I headed out the door and back in to track time, subtracting a couple minutes for hitting the road and my cool down. D. As of November 1970, only nine American men had broken 2:20 in the marathon, including Western Michigan University graduate Mike Hazilla. We’ve added a few since then. E. There weren’t any specialty running stores until the later ‘70s, so until then all my shoes came mail order. I saw a Runner’s World ad and ordered some Road Kings from La Mesa, Calif., for $13.95. They had a soft leather upper, soft midsole and bottoms that fell off on about my 10th run in them. Geesh. I didn’t know to take them to a shoe repair place to have the bottoms glued back on. F. More than 40 years before the minimalist shoe rage of today, Tiger (Asics) made the $9.95 “Marathon.” It couldn’t have weighed more than six
Michigan Runner - September / October 2012
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or seven ounces with a flexible, paper-thin bottom and nylon upper (nylon being relatively new in shoes at the time). My favorite training shoes in the day, until they stopped making them, were the Tiger Bostons for about $15.95. Loved those shoes. I don’t think they had a heel counter. G. British distance star Bruce Tulloh ran across the United States in 65 days. He shared his journey with his wife and son in the book “Four Million Footsteps” in 1970. H. Events popular in their day were three-mile postal competitions, one-hour runs and 24-hour relays. The postal comps pitted individuals and teams against each other; all would run three miles on a track in a certain time period and send their results to a central location. From there, results were compiled and sent back out via that old-fashioned mode called the U.S. Mail. Twenty-four-hour relays featured teams made up of two to 10 runners going one mile at a time in relay fashion for one day. Fatigue was an issue. I. The NCAA Indoor Track & Field Championships were hosted by the University of Michigan in Detroit’s Cobo Arena from 1965 into the early ‘80s. It was great fun to see athletes you’d only heard about. I got to run in the meet in ‘74. J. My first brush with the marathon was as a spectator at the Seattle Marathon in November ‘77. I recall being impressed by the number of runners and winning times. Bill Glad won for the men in 2:18:48 and Gabrielle Andersen of Switzerland for the women in 2:57:53. In the ‘84 Olympic Marathon, Andersen-Schiess came into the stadium 15 minutes after Joan Benoit had won. The world watched, transfixed, as she staggered, fell, got up and continued in this fashion to the finish — the officials not allowed to assist her for fear of disqualification. She eventually finished in 2:48 and recovered quickly afterward with fluids. K. Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter both owned apparel lines. Due to the archaic rules of the times, neither could appear in ads for the clothes. Though the lines were high quality, they fell victim to poor sales. Other good apparel brands in the day were Sub-4 and Dolfin. L. The Association of Road Racing Athletes pushed for open prize money in the early ‘80s in the face of rules forbidding such a thing. The rules soon thereafter were rewritten to allow prize money, with the Boston Marathon being the last major race in to go pro in ’86. M. Abebe Bikila won the 1960 Olympic marathon in Rome running barefoot, then the ’64 gold medal wearing shoes, helping open the door for the deep pool of east African distance runners. N. Muhammed Ali sponsored a track team and major indoor track & field meet in 1979. O. The Association of Intercollegiate Athletics