Category Archives: marathon

Boston runs on

Anyone who has witnessed the Boston Marathon even once knows what it means to that city as a rite of spring and affirmation of life. What may seem a foolhardy endeavor, running more than 26 miles for no apparent reason (since less than one percent of the participants are professional athletes with a reasonable expectation of winning prize money), in fact is a feel-good statement applied to Boston runners and spectators alike for more than 100 years.

A decade ago, the bombings at the finish line of Boston’s race devastated more than 100 lives, and has impacted race organizers’ and participants’ safety awareness ever since. But the two-way affection that exists between runners and spectators is hard-wired into Marathon Day. And that not only has been preserved but enhanced, as will be evident again on this significant anniversary of the 2013 attack.

A musician named Sal Nastasi, who was the fastest Long Island finisher at that disrupted 2013 event, spoke days afterwards of “giving high-fives [to spectators] the whole way until I was too tired to stretch my arm out. You can’t do that to A-Rod at a Yankee game. That’s the coolest thing about a marathon.”

There is no sports event, apart from the major big-city marathons, in which rank amateurs partake in the same competition on the same playing field as the world’s elite, and Boston has been doing it since 1897, longer than any other such race.

Some non-running citizens have been known to grumble about how the marathon causes traffic snafus and other temporary inconveniences every Patriots Day in Boston, but just as many have called the event a physical muse, motivating them to take up a jogging regimen and, sometimes, the commitment to try a future marathon.

This was my experience in 1973, when I covered the first of 14 or 15 Bostons for Newsday and met Johnny Kelley. He was 65 at the time, running his 42nd of what eventually would be a record 61 Bostons—the kind of streak that can’t help but serve as a dare to onlookers.

Kelley had won the Boston Marathon in 1935 and 1945 and continued running the entire distance until 1992, when he was 84. He became such a celebrity, waving to the cheering crowds along the route with a white handkerchief, that race officials encouraged him to jump into the race for its last seven miles until he was 86. (He died in 2004, at 97.)

He didn’t recommend marathoning for everyone, “but for those who are in shape and can run the thing,” he said, “I think it’s the greatest race in the world. I hope it goes on forever.”

Boston’s race has grown exponentially in the last 50 years, with more than 25 times the number of runners this year than in 1973. It could be argued that the enormous crowds—and the carefree, festival atmosphere—are what made it more attractive for evil terrorist theatrics. A soft target.

But you can’t have Patriots Day, the third Monday of April celebrating the first battles of the American Revolution, without crowds filling the village of Hopkinton and kids dangling from trees to get a better view of the marathon start; without the college women at Wellesley shrieking encouragement to passing runners halfway through the race; without lawns filled with beer-drinkers and kids with water hoses to cool passing runners at Heartbreak Hill, on the doorstep of Boston College 22 miles into the run; without the great crowds forming a corridor of noise for hours and hours as the runners reach the Boylston Street finish line.

No one will likely forget how two bombs shattered that finish-line scene 10 years ago. But the spirit of Johnny Kelley will live on. It’s the coolest thing about the Boston Marathon.

“The most famous marathoner of all time….”

Rosie Ruiz died last month, but it’s possible she never will go away. Her one audacious public act more than 39 years ago—briefly hoodwinking officials and spectators into believing she had won the Boston Marathon despite having run only the last 1/26th of the race—established that her name would live in infamy.

Proof was in the prominent obituaries by all the major news outlets. All afforded Ruiz what P.T. Barnum, another celebrated hoaxer also persisting past his expiration date, declared was more important than bad publicity: They spelled her name right.

“Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon winner who wasn’t,”… (Washington Post)

“Rosie Ruiz, the Boston Marathon course-cutter who was stripped of her victory….” (Associated Press)

“Rosie Ruiz, famous for cheating in the 1980 Boston Marathon…” (Sports Illustrated).

“Rosie Ruiz, whose name became synonymous with cheating…” (New York Times)

In her 66 years, she never ran a marathon. Yet Bill Rodgers, the 1980 men’s Boston champion who reigned as the world’s best practitioner of that event in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, once called Ruiz “the most famous marathoner of all time.”

Unheard of until she crossed the Boston finish line on April 21, 1980, Ruiz instantly became a household name. A punch line. In the chaos of a 4,900-runner field—448 of them women—the question wasn’t necessarily “how?”—how was a non-competitive 26-year-old able to pull off such a scam?—but “why?”

“I just don’t understand,” Rodgers said then.

These days, the male and female Boston champions each are paid $150,000 in prize money. But in 1980, all the winner got was a laurel wreath and a bowl of beef stew—a decades-old tradition in its final year before Boston’s cuisine evolved toward post-run treats such as yogurt. Not until 1986 did Boston offer prize money.

Boston being the oldest and most celebrated race of its kind, Rodgers was the rare soul who parlayed consistent dominance into a financial benefit with eponymous running gear and a Boston running store. But Ruiz, even had her surprise breakthrough been legitimate, hardly was in line for any windfall.

So why would she have risked the thoroughly predictable scorn that surfaced immediately with her vague, evasive and essentially clueless post-race comments? Fellow runners and officials were astonished—in fact, offended—by her complete lack of knowledge about training or the Boston course and an inability to summon any details about her participation.

Eyebrows were raised higher by her failure to have been spotted at any checkpoints along the way, and just how she had produced a Boston women’s record time that required averaging five-minute, 30-second miles for 26 consecutive miles when she previously had claimed her best time for a single mile was 5:30.

But she showed up at a New York press conference four days later wearing her winner’s medal and insisting she deserved it, even as a Delaware newspaper published a story by an author named Marty Craven that he had met Ruiz jogging in Central Park the previous month, and “she told me she knew this girl who cheated in the New York Marathon by taking the subway, and I started to tell her how easy it would be to cheat in Boston….I think the friend she was talking about was really her.”

In fact, it was.

Ruiz never gave up that medal. She never acknowledged her dastardly deed, and never responded to any of several invitations to run subsequent marathons. Still, with the news of Ruiz’ death, Canadian Jacqueline Gareau—the real Boston winner in 1980, her victory officially acknowledged a week after the race—told Canada’s National Post that she “forgave [Ruiz] completely. It’s not a big thing for me.”

“Why she never apologized—that belongs to her,” Gareau said. “Maybe she was not completely right in her mind. I’m just hoping she’s forgiven herself. Hoping that, on some kind of way, that she was okay.

“You know, she was part of my life.”

And, in a way, immortal.

R.I.P. New York City Marathon’s Truman

Might a person be more inclined to read the obituaries as he ages? If memory serves, comedian George Burns, not so long before he died at 100, said that when he got up every morning, he would check the newspaper’s obit page—and if his name wasn’t there, he’d have a cup of coffee and go about his day.

I’m not quite at that stage. But, more and more, I find the perusal of obituaries to be somehow uplifting—not because they report a death but because they celebrate a life.

That said, the exception to finding pleasure in reading such biographical material on the recently departed is when the obit is about someone I have known—especially if that someone was an admirable contemporary.

Allan Steinfeld died last week. Only 70, he was the victim of multiple systems atrophy, a neurological disease. His was not a bold-face name, which surely is why my former editors at Newsday took a pass on marking his death at all. But, in more than 30 years as the technical whiz behind staging the annual New York City Marathon, Steinfeld was heroic in directly serving more than a million of the event’s participants.

And good for the New York Times for recognizing Steinfeld with a 700-word eulogy in Wednesday’s paper.

Originally the right-hand man to flamboyant road-racing carnival barker Fred Lebow, who made marathoning irresistible street theater and sold running as a legitimate lifestyle, Steinfeld inherited Lebow’s title of race director when the latter died of brain cancer in 1994.

According to George Hirsch, chairman of the New York City Road Runners Club, which operates the marathon, the official transition to Steinfeld’s leadership was blessed by a dramatic scene shortly before Lebow’s death in which Lebow symbolically cast himself as marathoning’s FDR. “I was in Fred’s apartment,” Hirsch said. “By then, his voice was just a whisper. He was talking about Allan, and there were a lot of questions as to whether Allan was the right guy. I remember Fred pulled me close to him and said….. ‘Truman.’”

(fred lebow statue)

I last saw the event’s Truman in October of 2014, eight years after he retired and handed the race director’s job to Mary Wittenberg. Steinfeld was being inducted into the marathon’s hall of fame, without much fuss but with heartfelt praise from those who worked with him. “Allan was just the classic unsung hero,” Wittenberg told me. “He’s a behind-the-scenes person who likes it that way.”

He had been a high school math and physics teacher and already had been finding all the right pieces in the massive marathon jigsaw puzzle before Lebow gave him a fulltime assistant’s job in 1978 for $12,500. That was half of Steinfeld’s teaching salary, but he decided that operating road races was more fun, with the added bonus of not being required to wear a tie to work every day.

His mastery of timing, scoring, course management, finish-line design and tying together loose ends with computers brought countless, wild Lebow ideas to fruition. And calmly. “I tell the staff,” Steinfeld said, “that the marathon is enough to scare the hell out of you, so handle each detail as it comes, and don’t think about the big picture.”

He called the New York Marathon, which went from 2,000 entrants in 1976 to just under 40,000 by the time he left his post in 2006, the equivalent “a herd of elephants moving along. They’re not stampeding. But you can’t stop or turn them. You can only nudge them.”

He insisted that he was “the farthest thing from a jock. I was fast but I couldn’t catch. In baseball, as a kid, I was the last one chosen, if chosen at all. ‘Who wants Steinfeld?’ I couldn’t play stickball because I couldn’t catch.”

In fact, he was a varsity sprinter for New York’s City College and finished one of the two marathons he attempted in the 1970s. Born and raised in the Bronx, he claimed to have been “kicked out of two colleges”—Hunter College and Bronx Community College—“because I failed French, then failed Spanish.”

But he wound up with an electrical engineering degree from City and a master’s in radio astronomy from Cornell of the prestigious Ivy League. He was working on a doctorate at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, where he went to study the Northern Lights, when he was blinded in his left eye.

He had been wrapping an antenna wire on an Alaskan rooftop when struck by the antenna and suffered a detached retina. A series of operations failed to save the vision in that eye and, shortly after he succeeded Lebow as NYC Marathon director, Steinfeld was encouraged by a major race sponsor to wear an eye patch—“like the Hathaway Man”—as a way to give himself an identity apart from the colorful Lebow.

That didn’t last long. It wasn’t his style, either in terms of fashion or drawing attention to himself. But he deserved his due, even if his obituary came much too soon.