Why was distance running so popular in the 70s (or 80s)? Was it more popular than football?

Wasn't Ruth Wysocki on the cover once as well? When she beat Mary Slaney?

Last night I watched a documentary of Fred Lebow called "Run for Your Life" which can wrap up the answer to the question pertaining to this thread.

Prize money and professionalism was brand new to running, bringing a lot of media attention.

Also Alberto Salazar points out that as opposed to today where you have a different winner every year with names you can't pronounce, in the 1970's well known winners came back every year, like Grete Waitz, Salazar, and Rodgers. These people were treated in his words, "like hometown heros."

I don't think running will every recapture that moment in history, despite the fact that college and high school runners are runing faster than ever.

F. Booth wrote:

Last night I watched a documentary of Fred Lebow called "Run for Your Life" which can wrap up the answer to the question pertaining to this thread.

Prize money and professionalism was brand new to running, bringing a lot of media attention.

Also Alberto Salazar points out that as opposed to today where you have a different winner every year with names you can't pronounce, in the 1970's well known winners came back every year, like Grete Waitz, Salazar, and Rodgers. These people were treated in his words, "like hometown heros."

I don't think running will every recapture that moment in history, despite the fact that college and high school runners are runing faster than ever.

If and when Americans start winning major American marathons such as Boston and NYC, running will get more attention. Until then it won't.

Off the Grid wrote:

Huge races from the 80s have died (Brians Run...that was a great one). Aside from Bloomsday, B2B, Bolder Boulder and a few others, and ~10 marathons, there is just much less interest in running in the US now vs 30 years ago. And the depth is just not there.

Why? No idea...soccer, football, who knows.

But this is not an old curmudgeon talking. Races are much more shallow at all levels in the US than they were 30 years ago.

Just to clarify, Brian's Run is still an annual race. Winning times are slower than years past, if I recall, but they don't have all 31 years worth of results available. Unfortunately, one thing from this thread is true there: Americans, rigidly defined as those of European extraction born in the US, are not running it fast (and I'm not complaining about this, nor trying to define someone's "Americanness"--just using the typical definition employed at LR):

1149 1 Abiyot Endale, 22, High Falls, NY 30:37 30:36 4:56

1122 2 Deresse Deniboba, 26, High Falls, NY 30:37 30:36 4:56

1701 3 Max Smith, 24, Ardmore, PA 30:53 30:53 4:58

1002 4 Abiyot Abebe, 21, Silver Spring, MD 30:59 30:59 4:59

1787 5 Ryan Fennelly, 27, Philadelphia, PA 31:00 31:00 5:00

1696 6 Mohamed Fadil, 27 31:15 31:14 5:02

1447 7 Mark Stallings, 28, West Chester, PA 31:21 31:21 5:03

1724 8 Daryl Brown, 26 32:06 32:06 5:10

1544 9 Zach Miller, 25, Media, PA 32:17 32:17 5:12

1244 10 Zereu Kelele, 27, Washington, DC 33:02 33:02 5:19

1060 11 Matt Brill, 33, East Coventry, PA 33:37 33:35 5:24

1515 12 Wylie Belasik, 24, Philadelphia, PA 34:16 34:16 5:31

1668 13 John Carroll, 45, West Chester, PA 34:22 34:21 5:32

1645 14 Joshua Embry, 30, King Of Prussia, PA 34:24 34:22 5:33

1355 15 Teyba Naser, 22*, Washington, DC 34:51 34:50 5:36

CSI wrote:

Iff and when Americans start winning major American marathons such as Boston and NYC, running will get more attention. Until then it won't.

Yes, you can point to the East African dominance of distance running as one of the key moments that America started to give a big collective yawn to distance running.

Face it, as long as it's "some Kenyan" winning, then nobody in the USA cares.

I am a 44 year old and here is how I became a runner.

My older Brother and I watched the 1976 Olympics on TV and made a homemade track with flour as the lines in our back yard and had pretend "races" with the main point of the race being heavy celebration at the finish line.

He joined the track team in junior high and I participated in the Open kids track meet because there was no team in elementary school. I was 11 years old.

Our Dad took us to watch the indoor meet at Cobo Hall (I think) in Detroit. That helped raise our interest.

There were road races almost every weekend. You acutally raced and had to train and hoped to get an age group award. People were serious at these road races, as a kid it was a big deal to get an award. You didnt get anything just for participation.

In additional to all the road races, we also particiapted in a local track club. The club had a several coaches, we did all kinds of meets, from CC to Indoor to Outdoor.

So using my experience I offer this opinion:

1) Limited exposure to running today on TV. Too many other things and other TV channels.

2) As kids were spent large amounts of time outside so to amuse ourselves we build the homemade track. Today kids have too many other things like computers, video games, Ipods to occupy their time. Also other sports like soccer weren't offered back then.

3) It seems like lesser chances today with youth track. Do they even still have "track clubs" for young people?

4) Limited/unpopularity of going to watch a track meet in real life. My Dad was no runner but he took us kids to watch the inoodr meet at Cobo Hall. The place was packed. That seems rare now-a-days. Too much other stuff for people to do. Meets are limited and poorly attended.

I dont think you can stress how much soccer pulls kids away from running.

Back then if you were of a "runner's build" (i.e. skinny geek), but still wanted to do something athletic you ran XC or track.

Yes, I think the "some Kenyan" thing is a big reason for the lack of coverage. It's not just that winenrs are Kenyans. There were Kenyans in the 70s and 80s, Joesph Nzau, Henry Rono, the unrelated Musyokis, Phillip Ndoo. But there were only a half dozen Kenyans or so. They were recognizable.

Today there are just too many to keep track of. It makes it very difficult to get interested in a race from a "weho's going to win" angle.

I guess it depends how you measure popularity.

Running participation -- both in total and as a % of population -- is currently at an all-time high. The same is true for race participation -- though you see far greater growth at 5K than you do in other events. Yes, the quality of the competition has gotten worse. This is what happens when you grow though, you pull in the slow pokes.

If you are talking about interest in running as a specatator sport, I don't know. How would you measure that...TV ratings for the Boston marathon? Number of people standing out side cheering during the New York City marathon? I didn't see any empty seats at the 1976 Olympic track trials. I didn't see any empty seats at the 2008 Olympic track trials.

HRE wrote:

Yes, I think the "some Kenyan" thing is a big reason for the lack of coverage. It's not just that winenrs are Kenyans. There were Kenyans in the 70s and 80s, Joesph Nzau, Henry Rono, the unrelated Musyokis, Phillip Ndoo. But there were only a half dozen Kenyans or so. They were recognizable.

Today there are just too many to keep track of. It makes it very difficult to get interested in a race from a "weho's going to win" angle.

Rich...this has more to do with no Americans in the front. None of those guys, IIRC, ever won a major marathon in the US....that's what most of the US pays attention to....and even in the 10ks Americans were very competitive plus there were at least two "stars" in Shorter and Rodgers plus a little later on..Joanie.

This interesting history might be a good clue: below are the top American individual and the US team finish in each year of the World Junior Cross Country Championship boys' race. (The girls didn't get to run until 1989, so they don't influence the '70s-'80s topic much.)

Yr / US leader / Place / Team place

1974 Rich Kimball 1st 1st

1975 Bobby Thomas 1st 1st

1976 Eric Hulst 1st 1st

1977 Thom Hunt 1st 1st

1978 Rob Berry 10th 7th

1979 Jeff Nelson 4th 7th

1980 Ed Eyestone 3rd 2nd

1980 Keith Brantly 3rd 1st

1982 John Easker 11th 3rd

1983 Joseph Leuchtmann 27th 6th

1984 Patrick Piper 12th 4th

1985 Jeff Cannada 12th 4th

1986 Scott Fry 15th 5th

1987 Todd Williams 23rd 4th

1988 Todd Williams 14th 5th

1989 Sean McCusker 46th 17th

1990 Mark Johansen 20th 10th

1991 Michael Cox 40th 10th

1992 Jason Casiano 17th 9th

1993 Damion Brook-Kintz 71st 20th

1994 Greg Jimmerson 50th 17th

1995 Tim Briggs 35th 9th

1996 Brad Hauser 27th 10th

1997 Abdul Alizindani 51st 12th

1998 Ryan Shay 20th 7th

1999 Fasil Bizuneh 24th 6th

2000 Franklyn Sanchez 28th 9th

2001 Dathan Ritzenhein 3rd 4th

2002 Rod Koborsi 30th 7th

2003 William Nelson 26th 8th

2004 Ryan Deak 34th 7th

2005 Galen Rupp 20th 7th

2006 Kiel Uhl 34th 9th

2007 Ken Klotz 56th Incomplete team

Here's the team from 1976, my senior year of high school, with their finishing places in that race:

1. Eric Hulst

2. Thom Hunt

5. Alberto Salazar

8. Don Moses

11. Marty Froelick

19. Ralph Serna

I was on Eric Hulst's Laguna Beach (CA) HS team at the time. Since our sophomore year, we'd been doing 10-mile morning runs at least four days a week, followed by afternoons of another 8-10M that almost always included track intervals, hill repeats, or a fast run. We did 20-mile Sunday runs, although the coach wasn't allowed to "coach" us that day--he just "recommended" that we do a long run. I rode my bike to school and back on a hilly road. Three days a week at lunchtime, Eric and I and a bunch of the other serious guys did a 45-minute weight workout: basically three sets of ten of every exercise you could do on a Universal Gym. I did everything Eric did except carry a four-pound weight in each hand on morning runs--I didn't need to handicap myself any further when my teammate could run 10,000m in 28:54.

We didn't think we were overdoing it. The guys at Mission Viejo and Corona del Mar and Lompoc and Newport Harbor high schools were all doing the same kinds of things. I ran weekend 20-milers with a Mission Viejo guy for years--"all" he did in HS was 4:14/9:10, but he'd hang onto Eric as long as he could in every race. We thought that Eric and all those other sub-9:00 2-milers got there by working their asses off, and we were going to do that, too. Like people keep saying, it was more or less expected.

I ran pretty well for a high school kid. I was also sore all the time, injured or near-injured a lot of the time, and pretty much unable to do anything else in the way of sports or games. We didn't add up weekly mileage until college, but I looked through my log from HS later and found months of consecutive 120-mile mile weeks, including a 156. Would any U.S. high school coach put kids through a program like that now? Should any? Eric had injury problems in college and stopped running. (He ran 2:20 in Boston in a brief comeback after college, and he died of brain cancer at age 34 in 1992.) Of all my teammates, one other guy and I broke 2:30 for a marathon later; no one else reached any kind of high level, mostly because they stopped running. I still don't know if I'd have been better later if I hadn't had that incredibly intense introduction to the sport, but I do think that the kids who already had the talent, like those Junior Worlds guys, and who could handle that training, rose to the top not only in U.S. meets but at the world (pre-African) level. Just as it was a given that we'd all work like hell because we wanted to be as good as we could get, we also assumed that we, or other U.S. runners, could be the best in the world; Ryun and Shorter and Rodgers had proved it, and Salazar and Decker and Benoit and Scott kept proving it. When I look at that list now, I can convince myself that the awful period from 1989 to 1997 is over and that we're going in the other direction. Maybe if we teach kids that finishing isn't winning, and that they'll probably only win anything if they put in a lot of really hard work (which is what makes the winning mean anything), we'll be back to doing as well as we possibly can. Not winning world team titles by big margins--the competition's gotten too tough for that--but getting the most out of our talent. People like Ritz and Hall and Rowberry and Flanagan look very close to that already.

• No video games

• Made skinny dudes with an acute homophobia, micro-short shorts and absolutely no skills with the ladies cool

• Frank Shorter (same as the answer above)

CSI wrote:

If and when Americans start winning major American marathons such as Boston and NYC, running will get more attention. Until then it won't.

Nail meet hammer. The running community was hyped by Ryan Hall's sub-60 half and 2:08 and 2:06 runs at London, but it's not breaking news when dozens and dozens of Africans have already run sub-60 halves and Ryan never finished better than 5th at London.

Before running was popular it had to BECOME so. It certainly wasn't as popular in 1972 as it would be only 2 & 3 years later when the number of runners & events grew several times over. Some of the tipping points have already been mentioned w/FShorter's Munich Olympic marathon win as a prime catalyst. Prior to that we have BBowerman promoting 'jogging' as an exercise for health in the mid-60's in Eugene. In '68, Ken Cooper gave us the book 'Aerobics' which assigned points to different activities as they affected health. People like simple correlations between things. Also, repetition work as an exclusive way to train was slowly giving way to longer, steady runs to complement and improve endurance.

I remember how many runners ran prior to '72 and they were almost 90% school athletes. Few people ran for competition or health beyond college. For the most part, if you ran before Frank's (BF) win, you did so because you were fast (or doing your darndest to do as well as you could). After Frank (AF), the sport's appeal extended beyond chasing PR's and attracted a new crowd drawn to the sport's simplicity and rewards available to all. Some were happy w/regular trots around the local track while others almost immediately sought Boston Marathon qualifiers. The sport was no longer viewed as the province of 'only the fastest.'

There was no ONE singular tipping point, a movement or incident that signaled, 'Yo, the sport's for everybody, not just the fast guys from gym class.' It sure became a cool thing to do in short order though. By the end of the 70's, the sport was rocking and the industry was in a tizzy trying to keep up.

Definitely, if there hadn't been US guys challenging and sometimes beating those particular Kenyans the sport would have drawn even less attention. But what the heck does "IIRC" mean?

"If I remember correctly," if I'm guessing correctly.

Running and competing was very exciting back in the 70s and early 80s. Seems almost everyone who ran back then was an avid competitor and most were very fast. I can recall typical winning times for local 5ks were in the mid 14s. Now low to mid 16s are typical on the local level.

Also I feel people were far more driven back then. With society being what it is today, generally lazy and convenient, people tend to shy away from running as it takes far too much work. Many of the people that do run today do so recreationally which is fine but that driving spirit is gone for the most part, save for a small percentage.

Seems obesity has taken the place of what was once a very active society. I also agree about the lack of participation of children in Phys ed.

Qualifying for Boston back then was 2:50 for men under 40. That's what stands out. Now every year Boston keeps getting larger and larger and more and more people are qualifying. Is it that people are getting fitter or have things gotten far easier?

I agree. Kids today are overweight and fit kids seems to be the exception rather than the norm these days. I can recall the one overweight boy and girl in my elementary school back in the 70s. Seems they look down on kids now who are fit.