The Bad Old Days of Running
Road Racing Has Come a Long Way
“You’ve gone too far,”
he shouted. “You were supposed to turn around two miles back.”
The course description never mentioned dirt roads. That should’ve been the first clue something was amiss. We were dodging potholes and loose gravel when a car came racing up alongside us and the anxious driver leaned out the window. It was the race director.
“You’ve gone too far,” he shouted. “You were supposed to turn around two miles back.”
It was an Ontario provincial 20k championship race sometime in the late 1970s. It wound up the 28k title that year thanks to the absence of a marshal at the turnaround point. Though I was none too pleased I felt especially sorry for Brian Maxwell, one of the best Canadian runners of that era. Far ahead in the lead, he ran out of gravel road and was navigating his way along a forest trail when the race director finally caught up with him.
Road racing certainly has come a long way since those days when race directors crossed their fingers and hoped everything went smoothly. Course measurement was often suspect. A “big race” numbered in the hundreds. Race managers designed courses not with a fast time in mind but so as not to inconvenience city roads and police departments. As a result, many of the courses were run at the edge of town. Beauty was not a selling point of many road races in the bad old days of running.
My road racing debut was at a windblown Metro Road Runners event at Toronto’s York University. I was a high school kid. I didn’t sign up, I got invited. In return for the $1 entry fee, I was given a 5x7 f lash card with my name on it. At the finish the cards were collected and put on a board. There were less than 100 cards on the board after the race.
As road racing grew in popularity sponsors got involved and races suddenly had start and finish banners to replace a chalk line on the asphalt.
One of the highlights of my road racing career was winning the Toronto Star Trek 20k. It was held at the hilly and smelly Toronto Zoo. They jammed the official pace car on the cart paths for the leader. Canadian Olympian Peter Butler was way out in front of us quickly. Then, he just disappeared. The pace car had made a wrong turn. I went from being more than 30 seconds down to awkwardly breaking the tape at the finish line, wondering what happened to the real winner.
Winning that race earned me an invitation to a race in Staffordshire, England and I was to discover the British road race scene in those days had similar shortcomings. The race director picked me up from the train station and described the course as “undulating.” He was nice enough to drive the race route on the way back to the town to give me a sneak peak. One section in particular troubled me as he needed two attempts to get up the hill without stalling.
The race was two laps of a five-mile loop starting at the “second telegraph pole past the church” and ending at “the fourth pole.” The race was timed by a volunteer using a hand-held stopwatch measuring fifths of a second. When the gun went off, I still wasn’t sure what pole to sprint to at the end. I made the mistake of crossing the finish line 11 seconds ahead of the local hero. I stopped my wristwatch at 48:57. The official time I was given was 50:27. I angrily protested, but was met with a dismissive laugh: “48:57? That would be a very fast time!”
Chip timing, T-shirts, water stations, energy bars, road closures, barricades, hired police, well laid-out and accurately measured courses are all features we have come to expect. Sure, those luxuries come at a significant price, but paying $50 for a 5k sure beats not being able to find the finish line of a $1 race.