Expect the running sport to undergo profound changes
in the next 100 and 1,000 years--but what will they be?
By Hal Higdon
SEVENTEEN RUNNERS APPEARED for the 1899 Boston Marathon. Blacksmith Larry Brignolia won that Nineteenth Century race in 2:54:38, one of only two runners to break three hours on a course that was only 25 miles long. At 161 pounds, Brignolia remains one of the heaviest runner ever to have won Boston. Today's champions are feather-light, rarely over 130 pounds.
The first Boston Marathon of the Twentieth Century produced somewhat better results. Twenty-nine runners appeared in 1900--an increase of 58 percent. Canadian Jack Caffrey won in 2:39:44, one of five runners to break the three-hour barrier. Author Tom Derderian would write in his history of the event: "After only four years, the Boston Marathon was already an international event that was beginning to draw a fierce and fanatical following of men who would live and breathe for it."
Increases in numbers on the order of 58 percent and time improvements of 15 minutes would not often be repeated as the century continued. Change would come much more slowly, not merely to the marathon but to running in general. Sixty years later in 1959 (the first year I ran Boston), only 151 runners started, all of them still "fierce and fanatical…men!"
That's correct: no women. Until the 1960s, women did not run marathons--or any other races with men for that matter. Women were not yet accepted in running races any further than 2.5 miles. They even were prevented from entering events longer than that distance, or mixed races, because the men who wrote rules feared the poor dears might hurt themselves. When in 1966 Roberta Louise Gibb broke the sex barrier by running Boston unofficially, many connected with the race seriously doubted that a woman actually could run as far as 26 miles 385 yards. Attitudes quickly changed. By 1975, Boston had grown to 2,392 starters with women officially welcomed (although only 52 started).
Boston would attract a record number of 38,000 for its 100th running in 1996, 9,239 of them women. At the end of the century, marathon fields with more than 10,000 runners have become, well, almost ordinary. In 1998, seven U.S. marathons had fields that large, including: New York, Honolulu, Chicago, San Diego (Rock 'n' Roll), Los Angeles, Washington (Marine Corps) and Boston. With a world best of 2:20:43, women are not yet running as fast as men, whose record is 2:05:42, but females have begun to dominate the sport with their presence. Nearly 40 percent of the 29,256 entrants in this year's Chicago Marathon (where Khalid Khannouchi set that world record) were female. More than 60 percent of the 1,300 who enrolled in my training class for Chicago were female. Two out of every three new subscribers to Runner's World are now female. (The magazine's current circulation of 515,000 is another testimonial to the current running boom.)
As we move into the new millennium, who knows what profound changes will occur within our sport during the next 100 years, much less next 1,000 years?
Charting the Booms
Certainly, standing at the starting line of that 1959 Boston Marathon (one of only three marathons conducted in the United States that year), I could not have predicted changes in running that would occur in my lifetime. In fact, I'm not sure that as recently as 1995 I could have accurately predicted the changes I've just witnessed in the last five years!
The explosion of interest among females is one trend I failed to anticipate. And five years ago I never would have suspected that so many young people would suddenly catch marathon fever. Certainly, the first running boom of the late 1970s was fueled largely by middle-aged men. These baby-boomers of about 35 or so years had begun to gain weight; they grew concerned both about their health and their physical appearance. They started to run--and run aggressively. Speedwork was not foreign to this group. They entered 10-K races and focused on running progressively faster, setting Personal Records (PRs), qualifying for Boston.
On the other hand, the second running boom of the late 1990s has been fueled by kids just out of college. Just starting new careers, they are more often unmarried--or at least do not yet have children. They say, "Hey, let's have fun. Let's go run a marathon!"
Typical of persons fostering this attitude is Kerry Strug, gold medalist in gymnastics from the 1996 Olympic Games. (Who can forget those TV images of Strug, injured ankle, being carried off the mat by her coach Bela Karolyi?) Earlier this year, Strug, a student at Stanford University, finished the Houston Marathon in a time just over four hours, quite respectable, but hardly world class. Afterwards, reporters asked Strug why she had decided to run a marathon. The Olympian admitted that for most of her early life she had competed in a sport where she was driven (internally as well as externally) to succeed at the highest level. Having won her gold medal, Strug finally was free to do what she wanted. Strug told the reporters she decided to run a marathon, "because it was cool."
The marathon as "cool" is one symptom of today's running fever. Today's X Generation is less driven by numbers than their running predecessors, both in numbers of miles run and in a drive for fast times. "To finish is to win," is their motto. I anticipate this trend continuing at least into the first few decades of the new millennium. Our sport will be driven by the back of the pack, rather than by the front. Most runners, unfortunately, return home from their first marathon not knowing, or caring, who won and whether he or she set a world record. In fact, making this group <I>care</I> is one of the greatest challenges facing Twenty-first Century race directors.
Predicting the Future
Technical advances will be much more easily accomplished. High on the list of recently realized technical advances is the ChampionChip that records your actual time on course rather than your time beginning when the gun sounds. If it takes you ten minutes to cross that line, no problem; that "lost" time will get deducted from your official time, the one you can use to get into the Boston Marathon.
That is, if you care. Most of today's runners have only begun to understand the significance of the Boston Marathon, the fact that you need to post a specific fast time to qualify for that race. Today's nouveaux runners have not heard yet of Roberta Louise Gibb, or do the females among them understand that they might not be standing on the starting line in Chicago, or any other marathon, without her pioneering efforts. They don't know names yet like Clarence DeMar and Emil Zatopek and Frank Shorter. Stick around in the sport long enough and they will learn, but in the meantime they can take advantages of products and procedures and training methods unknown to runners for most of the last century.
Never before have runners been better served than at the end of the millennium.
Your Chip Will Dial 911
These trends will continue. Use of the ChampionChip will expand even to smaller races. Runners will own their personal chips and use them for workouts as well as races. It will begin with posh sports clubs, which will installing electronic rugs on indoor tracks so their members don't have to count laps. It will expand so even rugs along popular training paths will offer up accurate split times as runners do their long runs. Soon, running shoes will have built-in chips to compute pace and distance and maybe even your heart rate, checking the pulse in your big toe. Have a heart attack while running? Your Chip will dial 911 and identify your exact location on the running path by overhead satellites. Help is on the way.
That same satellite technology can be used to keep you on pace. While the pacing team concept, pioneered by Runner's World and picked up first by Chicago, will be utilized at more and more races, continuous Chip readings on wrist monitors will keep you exactly on pace during workouts and races.
Training advances will continue with the emphasis less on improving world records than on making life easier for those in the back of the pack. The success of Virtual Marathon Training is one example of how runners are well served by technology. More than 7,000 signed up to receive this free on-line training service. I figure that I probably trained one-third of the runners who ran Chicago this year, either on-line or in person.
Most impressive to me about Virtual Marathon Training and other interactive forums on the Internet are the Bulletin Boards that allow runners to find and contact each other. As moderator of the Virtual Boards, I provided answers to questions, but so did other marathoners who had been there, done that! I am delighted to see runners seeking training partners and obtaining information on running routes on-line. The social aspects of running will continue to be aided by the new technology.
Breaking the 2:00 Barrier
As for those runners in the front of the pack, how fast can they get? I can recall an era when the world marathon record was slower than my Personal Record of 2:21:55 and some pundits predicted that the 2:20 barrier would never be cracked. Now the question is not whether someone will crack the two-hour barrier in the marathon, but how soon? I'm not certain a 1:59:59 or faster marathon will occur in my lifetime, but I'm willing to bet that men (and maybe women) will be running that fast well before the end of the century. I suspect that the first sub-two marathoner will be a native of Peru, born and raised around 14,000 feet, who will find his way down to the lowlands to run times that will awe even the Kenyans and Ethiopians.
But can we predict with any accuracy the nature of our sport in the next 100 or 1,000 years? If we could predict the nature of civilization during those time periods, we might be able to make a more educated guess? During my early years as a runner, the Cold War was on with the U.S. and the Soviet Union pointing their nuclear weapons at each other. Some people predicted that civilization might not survive to the year 1999 or 2000, because of the danger of a nuclear holocaust. Now, it appears Y2K computer gridlock is more a threat. But what about the threat of a meteor landing, or global warming that might cause water levels to rise above our jogging paths? The only ones still running might be those natives up in the Andes in Peru. A more worrisome threat to running, as well as civilization, might be rampant drug misuse, which might cause people to tune out. Certainly, some of us already have begun to tune out what goes on at the cutting edge of our sport and other sports, because chemically-fueled champions don't appeal to us.
What will be the results of the 100th Chicago Marathon in the year 2075? Will there even be a 200th Boston Marathon in the year 2096? Standing at the starting line at the first Boston in 1896, or at the first Chicago in 1977, nobody could have predicted the events of this final year of the Twentieth Century. Unless scientists come up with the secret of eternal life within the next few decades, none of us will be around at the end of the next century or at the end of the next millennium to witness changes in our sport and in civilization. Perhaps that is for the best.
Copyright © 1999 by Hal Higdon. All rights reserved.
HAL HIGDON is a Senior Writer for Runner's
World, and the Training Consultant for The LaSalle Banks
Chicago Marathon.