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AIMS - Looking back on 30 years: The Rise of AIMS - Running visionaries attempted to herd the cats. BY RICHARD BENYO in "MARATHON & BEYOND" ©AIMS
AIMS – Looking back on 30 years – 1982 – 2012: The Rise of AIMS – Running visionaries attempted to herd the cats. BY RICHARD BENYO in „MARATHON & BEYOND“
Most forms of sport are contested in a tightly controlled field of play: soccer, football, tennis, wrestling, track and field, basketball. Baseball is a hybrid: a strict 90 feet between the bases within the diamond but an arbitrary distance to the outfield fences. Then there is the other extreme: road and trail running, from cross-country through the marathon and out beyond to the ultra, over hill and dale, down country or city streets, off into the country’s tallest peaks and its deepest valleys.
Although the marathon in 2010 celebrated its 2,500th anniversary, and although cross-country and ultrarunning (on roads, trails, and closed courses) have been around for well over a century, big-time road racing is relatively new. Yes, there have for well over a century been road races, but they have primarily been smaller club-type races. Even the esteemed Boston Marathon fielded fewer than 1,000 runners until the late 1960s.
The rise of the modern big-time road race began in the 1970s. Some would cite 1976, the year the club-type New York City Marathon was brought out of Central Park and onto the streets of the five boroughs to resounding applause and to the inevitability of copycats around the world.
Since that time marathons have proliferated, and many in big cities have grown enormous. The trend pretty much started when Brit Chris Brasher visited New York City and decided London needed a similar spectacle. With such growth in the 1970s came a bandolier of potential problems, not the least of which was standardization and enforcement of the 26.2-mile distance.
An inherent problem was that the overnight growth of road racing in America and then the rest of the world caught the IAAF (International Amateur Athletic Federation) napping. Its concentration had always been on track and field, as had the American federation, the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union).
The closest thing amateur road racing had to a guiding organization was the Road Runners Club of America, founded in 1958 to harness the fledgling road-race movement. But by the late 1970s, the inherent growth within the sport had outpaced the grass-roots RRCA. And the whole affair was complicated by the fact that virtually every marathon (and every road race) had a race director who was unique unto himself—a cat with his own ideas of how things should be run, a cat who saw an inherent schism between the remote official dom of the IAAF and the AAU on one side and the growing horde of road racers on the other.
(At several points in the 1970s, the AAU attempted to require road racers to purchase a membership to the AAU before they could compete in American road races. The response from the road racers was typically, “What has the AAU ever done for me? They barely acknowledge that road races exist.” The AAU evolved into the USATF—USA Track & Field—and the IAAF into the International Association of Athletic Federations, which these days concentrates on professional athletes.)
Seeing a protracted battle ahead bringing a clash between the rebellious road racers and the establishment IAAF/AAU, a group of the “cats” at the head of some of the most important marathons of the time decided to be proactive by forming AIMS (at the time the Association of International Marathons, more recently the Association of International Marathons and Distance Races).
“AIMS was founded to improve the quality of road running by standardizing course measurement techniques as well as many other factors of races which all members have adapted,” stated Allan Steinfeld, at that time right-hand man to Fred Lebow, honcho of the New York Road Runners Club and the New York City Marathon and one of the “cats” present at the creation of AIMS in 1981.
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Source: AIMSworldrunning.org
