How Oprah Ruined the Marathon

Note: This article originally appeared in Salon, in a very different form. You can read the original here. What follows is what I wish I had published.

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November 3, 2007

In 1971, the New York City Marathon was no bigger than a grade-school field day. It was the race's second year, and a shivering cult of 245 runners gathered in Central Park, to run laps around the walking paths. Paying two bucks to enter, they wore cotton t-shirts, drooping socks, and Tiger racing flats, those sneakers now cherished by Brooklyn hipsters. The first-place finisher, a high-school teacher named Norman Higgins, didn't even get gas money back to Connecticut.

Back then, America was more fascinated with competitive chess than distance running. Yet at the next Olympic marathon, the USA's Frank Shorter won the gold medal, transforming his oddball sport into a fitness mania.

This weekend's marathon will be a lot different from Norman Higgins's race. Now the ING New York Marathon, after its corporate sponsor, it's going to be a cattle drive of 37,000 runners, each with far more sophisticated equipment than the pioneers of the 1970s. Today’s marathoners suck gooey energy jolts from plastic tubes. Their $150 shoes are nearly shockproof. With all these runners, and all this technology, you'd think America would be turning out faster and faster marathoners. Instead, the opposite is happening. The more we run marathons, the slower we get -- an average of 45 minutes slower over the last 25 years. Ryan Hall is the swiftest American-born marathoner ever, but his best race isn’t in the top 250 of all time.

Hall is running in this weekend's other New York marathon -- the Men’s Olympic Trials in Central Park. Don't expect to see him on the victory stand in Beijing, though. Since Shorter retired, only one American man has medaled in the marathon: Meb Keflezighi, who grew up in Eritrea, where he didn't see a car until he was 10 years old. You can look at this as a triumph of the melting pot, or you can look at it as soft Americans relying on an immigrant to do their arduous running. It makes me ask: why have today’s marathoners, with all their advantages, fallen strides behind their parents’ generation of runners?

When I joined my high-school cross-country team, in 1982, American distance running was at its zenith. For the past decade, three Americans -- Shorter, Bill Rodgers, and Alberto Salazar -- had dominated the marathon.

The runners of that era were propelled by a "double wave" of self-abnegating philosophies, theorizes Tom Derderian, who trained with Rodgers and Salazar at the Greater Boston Track Club. They were "heirs both to the warrior mentality of their World War II fathers and the new consciousness of the 60s and 70s," he told author John Brant for the book Duel in the Sun, an account of the 1982 Boston Marathon, considered the last great American distance race.

The mid-1990s gave us two new long-distance heroes. The first was Oprah Winfrey. If Frank Shorter inspired the first running boom, Oprah inspired the second, by running the Marine Corps Marathon. And it was a much bigger boom. This was not a spindly 24-year-old Yalie gliding through Old World Munich. This was a middle-aged woman chuffing around the District of Columbia. If Oprah could run a marathon, shame on anyone who couldn't.

And everyone did. Not just the rest of the running world. Everyone. Once the supreme test for hardened runners, the marathon suddenly became a gateway into the sport. Soon, gravel paths were crowded with runners who … weren’t necessarily into running. They wanted to lose weight, or quit smoking, or notch a triumph to burnish their overachiever images. I met a lawyer who started running because "They say if you can run a marathon, you can do anything!"

Others were raising money for charity. Team In Training, which funds leukemia research, promised to turn loafers into marathoners in 20 weeks. The cause was admirable, but these rookies were being rushed into the marathon. It was a recipe for injury and disillusionment with what should be a life-long pursuit, not an “I Conquered Everest” stunt. (It seems to have been that for Oprah, who has never run another marathon.) They were egged on by the running industry, which saw the race as a cash cow -- a vehicle to sell shoes, training programs, books, and vacation packages to “destination marathons” like Honolulu and Disney -- and promoted it as the be-all and end-all of the running experience.

Craig Virgin, the two-time world cross-country champion, was briefly involved with Team In Training, but turned his back on the group when he determined it was getting runners just fit enough to do “the Bataan Death March.”

Virgin was runner-up at the 1981 Boston Marathon, but he considers the distance “overrated” and thinks fitness runners should race 5Ks and 10Ks rather than beat themselves up in marathon training.

“If you want to slog through a marathon to say you did it once, fine,” he said. “But there are two forms of satisfaction in running. Number one is going a distance you’ve never gone before. The next logical goal should be ‘How much faster can I get?’ Just running the distance, hammering your legs four or five or six hours--if that’s your first marathon, that’s OK, but if it's your third or fourth, that’s just stupid.”

When Oprah expanded the sport, she also lowered the bar for excellence. For the previous generation of marathoners, the goal had been qualifying for Boston. Now, it was beating Oprah. Her time of 4 hours and 29 minutes -- The Oprah Line -- became the new benchmark for a respectable race. (That was P. Diddy's aim when he ran New York.)

The guru of these new runners was an ex-music professor named John Bingham, who writes a column for Runner’s World magazine under the handle "The Penguin." At age 43, Bingham took the admirable step of throwing away his cigarettes and signing up for a race. This did not lead him to athletic glory. He finished dead last. Bingham didn’t respond by training harder. Instead, he decided that if he couldn’t run fast, he’d preach that running slowly was more fun. Absolving runners of the pressure to actually run was a brilliant feel-good message. Thanks to his book, No Need For Speed, Bingham became one of the most famous marathoners in America.

A few years ago, I had a chance to jog with Bingham, on Chicago's lakefront path. As we puttered along, a young man bounded past, with a kudu stride.

"I call those 'nylon shorts guys,'" Bingham said, with a touch of disdain. "I could run in under four hours. But I don't want to. The price would be so high it's not worth it."

Yet Bingham was better known than Alan Culpepper, winner of the last Olympic Marathon trials. Celebrity marathoners have stolen the spotlight from champions. Everyone remembers that Lance Armstrong and Mike Huckabee ran last year’s New York Marathon, but no one remembers who won. (It was Marilson Gomes dos Santos, of Brazil.)

“Somewhere between the first and second running boom, respect and admiration for the competitive and elite athletes died,” wrote Robert Johnson, founder of the website LetsRun.com “Instead of Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers as the ultimate role models, we now have John ‘The Penguin’ Bingham and Oprah Winfrey … People like John ‘The Penguin’ Bingham can serve as the inspiration to get off the couch and start running, but the sport's very best athletes should still serve as the ultimate role models. We may not be able to run as fast as they do, but we should be inspired to try.”

(America’s classic marathoners are divided on Bingham’s influence. Shorter wrote the introduction to his book; Rodgers tells readers of his blog to be “hawks, not penguins.” Salazar, who now jogs four miles a day, just regrets the event’s popularity: “It is too bad that runners equate the marathon with running success,” he’s been quoted as saying. “The marathon has nothing to do with health. At least run a few years before you do one.”)

Like Oprah, Bingham deserves praise for luring insecure, overweight novices into running shoes. He's also terrific for business. In the last 15 years, the Chicago Marathon field has increased tenfold, to 45,000. But with this change in the running culture, the average finishing time for men has dropped from 3:32 to 4:15 -- not far from The Oprah Line. Last month's ghastly Chicago Marathon had to be shut down mid-race, because undertrained 5- and 6-hour marathoners couldn't handle that much time in the 85-degree heat. Mega-marathons have grown so large they can no longer meet the needs of every entrant, from elites to charity walkers. It may be time for a qualifying standard: say, proving you’ve completed a 10K.

And you can't just blame the Penguin Brigade for messing up the curve. The last year an American-born man won a major marathon? 1983. (We have produced one first-class female marathoner -- Deena Kastor has won in Chicago and London -- although we're still waiting for another Joan Benoit Samuelson, gold medalist at the first Olympic women's marathon, in 1984.) The Running Bum -- that post-collegiate drop-out who works in a shoe store so he can train 100 miles a week -- has almost disappeared. High rents, heavy college loans and a better job market make that lifestyle less attractive than it was 25 years ago. Despite marathon fields are the size of Sauron's host, more guys were breaking two-and-a-half hours in the 1980s.

From the point of view of American fitness, I can understand why 40,000 marathoners are better than one gold medalist. But I don’t think we have to choose between the two. If the marathon is populist enough for everyone to pin on a number, it's also populist enough for everyone to kick ass. If you're running the New York City Marathon this weekend, remember, it's a race. True, no matter how hard you run, you're not going to win a gold medal. But maybe a kid in high school will, someday. Every runner has a role to play in making American marathoning great again. The pack can push the best runners forward. I'm ready to do my part. I’m mostly a 5K racer, but I have run a marathon -- Chicago, in 1996. Next year, I'm going to run another -- and I'm going to run it in the spirit of the First Running Boom, in under three-and-a-half hours. I may even wear a cotton t-shirt and a sweatband.