Trailblazers from the beginning, a group of Vancouver runners embarks on a historic journey, starting a provincial race in May 1972, calling it the British Columbia Marathon. A year later they rename it the Lions Gate Road Runners International Marathon. Their vision would eventually shape events in Chicago and Berlin.

But the sporting world takes no notice, still recovering from the finest of all football World Cups (when Pele led Brazil to its third win). It’s gearing up for the Munich Olympic Games. This is an era of track running superheroes – Lasse Viren, Kipchoge Keino, Dave Bedford, Steve Prefontaine, Jim Ryun. The crowds they draw and money they generate put pressure on the outmoded amateur rules.

The marathon is still a fringe event, attracting few runners and no crowds, although at the top level it’s beginning to be taken more seriously, with the first astounding sub-2:10 performances by Derek Clayton (Australia) and Ron Hill (Great Britain). Joining them as favourites for Munich are the winners of the two top-class marathons of 1971, Karel Lismont (Belgium) at the European Championship and Frank Shorter (USA) at Fukuoka, Japan’s annual elite invitation race. Canada’s Jerome Drayton is in a down phase after winning Fukuoka in 1969. In 1972 he skips Boston and misses selection for Munich.

At Boston, a few weeks before the Vancouver race, the big news is that women run officially for the first time. Nina Kuscsik of New York wins from Elaine Pederson and Kathrine Switzer. The women’s marathon is beginning – just beginning – to be accepted and noticed, helped by the first ever sub-3 hour performances, by Adrienne Beames (Australia) and Cheryl Bridges (USA), both in late 1971.

Two other breakthroughs are in progress in early 1972. They appear in no histories but they shaped running history. In Vestal, New York, a brainy maths-savvy runner called Alan Jones, sick of inaccurate distances in road races, manufactures the first reliable course-measurement device. (It gets named after his nine-year-old son who helped him make it, the “Clain Jones Counter.”)

And in Eugene, Oregon, university coach Bill Bowerman fiddles with his wife’s waffle-iron, puts melted rubber in it while she is at church, and dreams up waffle-soled running shoes. He’s just in time to assist the transition of a tiny local Oregon enterprise named Blue Ribbon Sports into a running-specialist company renamed after the Greek goddess of victory – Nike.

Socially, technologically and commercially, in 1971-72 the seeds are planted that will enable running to bloom into the social phenomenon of our age.

 

Ahead of Their Time

 

Looking back, it’s easy to see 1972 as the beginning of a special era for running. We know now that participant numbers would grow, then surge, then explode. But the dedicated runners who did their five laps of Vancouver’s Stanley Park in May 1972 could not have dreamed what their race would lead to. That first edition featured 46 entrants who each paid an entry fee of $1, with 32 of them reaching the finish line. The founders thought they were simply putting a well-organized spring marathon onto the local running calendar.

In fact, they were founding what became Canada’s biggest marathon (the 2004 edition, with 4,399 finishers, remains the largest marathon in Canadian history; last year’s 3,722 finishers ranked a close second to Ottawa) and contributing to the birth of one of the great social movements of our age. The future is never obvious till after it happens. They were ahead of their time.

They were, to put it more coolly, in at the beginning. Their new race was an early sign of the emergence of our bright mass-market modern running movement out of the chrysalis of an old-fashioned and unfashionable minority activity that catered to a few nerdy undersized eccentrics. In the running culture of the early 1970s, the big-city marathons that define our modern sport simply did not exist. Even Boston, though it attracted foreign runners, was still small and disorganized (no aid stations, poor traffic control, and splits given not by distance but at traditional landmarks like train stations). Boston entries only tipped over 1,000 at the end of the 1960s. The world’s other recognized elite-class marathons – Enschede, Kosice, Windsor-to-Chiswick, Fukuoka – were smaller.

Marathons mostly meant area marathon championships, under the control of federations and their sub-committees – the Ontario Champs, the Northern England Champs, etc. The predecessor of the Lions Gate/BMO Vancouver Marathon was the British Columbia Championship Marathon. That began in 1956 and was held in Vancouver spasmodically up to 1970. That’s how the sport had pottered along for sixty years.

Then, in an amazing upsurge of creative energy, the volcano erupted.

What running should be most proud of is that this energy came entirely from within. The running boom was not imported like American soccer, or engineered for TV like NASCAR, or created by sports management companies or corporate publicity agencies. It happened because runners loved running. Those in Vancouver in 1972 were typical. In cities (and some smaller places), especially in USA and Canada, enterprising and energetic local runners – like Jack Taunton, Ivor Davies and Don Basham in Vancouver – began to create new races. Not more fusty old provincial or club champs that did nothing for anyone outside the top three, but ambitious new-age events that took running into the community, made races attractive to run in, not just win, and in different ways expressed the culture of their host town.

Vancouver was not the first of these new running happenings, but it was close. The earliest of the new wave of races that went on to grow into major modern events may have been the Rotorua Marathon in New Zealand, which began in 1964 and is still going strong. Indisputably mega-races now, New York City and Seattle were both created in 1970, the same year that the Atlanta Track Club founded the Mother of All 10K’s, the Peachtree Road Race, where the field now tops 50,000.

The Portland (Oregon) Marathon began in 1971. In 1972, as well as the Lions Gate/ Vancouver Marathon, came the New York Women’s Mini, the Falmouth Road Race, and the Auckland (NZ) Round the Bays Fun-Run – and fun-runs, as they were called, were a big part of this story of a blossoming sport and culture.

The new races kept on coming. All are iconic names now, attracting tens of thousands from around the world and even more from their own community as spectators, closing the streets to traffic, transforming their home city’s economy the week of the race. In 1973 came the Cherry Blossom Ten Miler in Washington DC and the Virginia Ten Miler in Lynchburg; in 1974, the Berlin and Christchurch (NZ) marathons; in 1975, Ottawa and Amsterdam marathons, and Quad Cities-Bix road race; Marine Corps and Paris Marathons in 1976, Chicago and Toronto in 1977; Lilac Bloomsday and the Tulsa Run in 1978, Royal Victoria Marathon and Britain’s Great North Run in 1979. Of today’s biggies, London and Rotterdam came relatively late into the world, both in 1981.

Forgive all the dates (and this is just a selection) but this history has never been written, and Vancouver deserves credit for arriving so early in the picture.

Credit also to Vancouver for its inclusiveness, right from the start. At the very moment women in Boston finally won a long struggle for official acceptance as marathon runners, after untidy years of gate-crashing, protests, bans, and scuffles, Vancouver simply accepted, timed, and recorded Patricia Loveland of Oregon, USA, as its 1972 women’s winner (3:39:22.8), alongside men’s winner Tom Howard of Surrey, B.C. (2:24:08).

I got my own chance to race the Vancouver Marathon from another example of their openness and innovation – in that case giving full recognition to masters. The organizers (likely with the inventive Jack Taunton behind it) got the 1981 race designated as the North American Masters Championship. To give tough opposition to the Canadians and Americans, they found sponsorship and invited a team of three top masters from New Zealand (myself included), where we had several of the world’s best at the time. Air fares and a good hotel were unheard of perks in those strictly amateur days. They also brought in three young Australians for the open men’s race.

It was a May Vancouver morning, memorable mostly for the amount of cold water that splashed up runners’ shorts from the pools and puddles all over the road, and the soggy wind that hit after each corner. Coming from Windy Wellington, New Zealand, it was just an average breezy spring day to me, and I placed third overall, behind two Australians, and was first master, in a PB 2:18:44, at age 41. No wonder I’m fond of Vancouver, if not especially of its weather.

The next year the go-ahead Vancouver race management team, led then by Don Basham, brought in the best visually challenged marathoners to contest their world championship. Having run the previous year, I was sent the 1982 race brochure. The first page read (I hope it is not politically incorrect to report):

“Vancouver International Marathon. World Championship for the Blind. Come and see one of the world’s most beautiful cities.”

 

Marathon Trailblazers

 

In their quiet way, those Lions Gate/Vancouver pioneers were visionaries. From the start, they designated their race “international,” positioning it away from the boring old-style local championships. They included women and masters, gave them full recognition, and even found sponsorship for them. They gave opportunity to other less likely groups of runners, like the visually challenged. And above all they chose to make their new race a marathon distance. That looks obvious in 2011, when every self-respecting city has to have its marathon, but it wasn’t obvious in 1972.

I had been a serious international-level runner for twenty years but when I ran Vancouver in 1981 it was only my second marathon. The marathon just wasn’t a big deal. It was cross-country, road ten milers, and track six miles that counted. Runners identified themselves and their competitive level by those achievements, not by their marathon time, as many runners do now. That change is part of the story that Vancouver helped initiate.

Look again at those dates. Vancouver arrived at the marathon party only eighteen months after New York City. It was there to welcome later arrivals like Berlin, Chicago, Toronto, Ottawa and London. It helped shape the sport’s culture of including everyone. It helped forge the sport’s other defining characteristic, the strong link between each race and its local community. At the same time as New York in the mid-1970s, Vancouver moved its start and finish and some of its course out of the Park and into downtown. It became an open city tour, not laps of an enclosed park (Stanley or Central Park) – exactly the key factor in transforming the New York City Marathon. The Vancouver Marathon was positioned as open and international, related to the city itself, not the closed and enclosed event of an inward-looking sporting federation.

In the history of modern city marathons – and it’s a more important history than anyone has yet noticed – the BMO Vancouver Marathon, formerly Lions Gate Road Runners International Marathon, has an early and very honourable place. On May 1, 2011, it should celebrate its 40th race with pride.

 

By Roger Robinson in Canadian Running – May 2, 2011

Running author and historian Roger Robinson lives in New Zealand and USA. His books are available on www.roger-robinson.com