One source I would definitely recommend that I haven’t seen mentioned yet, is Bill Rodgers' own autobiography, "Marathoning". I think it is out of print but you should be able to find it in a library. It came out in '80, I think. So although I have not re-read it for a long time, it would certainly have the 70's as the time of reference.
When I started running in 1978, it was just suddenly becoming the cool thing to do on the UofI campus in Champaign. Body & Sole was not around yet, but there was an adidas-only store on Green Street called Stripe 3, and up at Alexander’s Sporting Goods in Urbana they had the Nikes: Waffle Trainers, and the entry-level Roadrunners; mine were blue with a silver swoosh. The Illinois Track Club had “fun runs” (now there’s an expression that has fallen into disuse) every week at Crystal Lake Park. Part road, part sidewalk, and I think three loops made 5k. Maybe 15 or 20 people every week. Every finisher got a certificate. I would actually take mine and fill in the blanks for name, date, distance and time with my typewriter. Still have those somewhere.
Road races were popping up like weeds in central Illinois. My first race was the first running of the “Run for Fun 10,000” in Rantoul. That would be fall of ’78. Very shortly thereafter, a guy named Lynn Swango started up the “Sage City 10,000” in Monticello. Sage City became one of the destination races in that area, drawing people from Decatur, Springfield, Danville, Bloomington and even Indianapolis, besides Champaign. That race stayed on my calendar well into the 80’s, even after I graduated and had to come from Chicago to run it. For a few years there I had a great “tour” every May: Sage City, always on Kentucky Derby day, then Syttende Mai in Madison on the Saturday closest to the 17th, then the 500 Festival Mini-Marathon, which at that time was on the Friday before the 500 mile race, not in the beginning of May, and had one of the greatest, most fun courses ever, point to point and finishing on the speedway instead of going around the track in the middle of the race.
At roughly this same time, besides the new Mayor Daley Marathon, you could choose between the Hinsdale Marathon and Freedom Marathon in the fall, and the DeKalb Marathon in the spring. Freedom was at Allerton Park near Monticello, and had a beautiful course. It was the Illinois Track Club’s signature race. All those events except Chicago are gone now. I think some of the last ITC people became the nucleus of what is now Second Wind, which has much less of a student emphasis.
St. Louis had two well-respected marathons, Third Olympiad Memorial in the spring and St. Louis in the fall. When St. Louis was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, it was reliably a good cool weather race.
Besides the Diet Pepsi races and Natural Light races that have been mentioned, there was the Dannon Yogurt Road Runners Club Series; and, for a while, the AT&T “Spirit of America 5K Series”. The Dannon race in St. Louis was a fixture for a while, a good quality event.
Races were starting up in Chicago, too, of course. The WLS 8.9 Mile Run for the Zoo was a huge event by the standards of the day. If you could average six-minute pace for nine miles, that would probably NOT get you into the top 100 overall. Same with the Bank of Ravenswood’s Ravenswood 10 miler. About this time, Erma Tranter from Friends of the Parks, and Wendell Miller, who put on a great New Years Day 30K in the north suburbs, got together with a few other people and started the Chicago Area Runners Association.
For me as for some others who have posted in this thread, Bill Rodgers was the most inspirational guy. I was a little too young to be able to relate to Shorter. I probably knew about him but had other things on my mind at the time. And Frank was kind of an ascetic, a little aloof and not a guy who seemed as approachable as Bill. Frank did show up at the First Chicago Distance Classic 20K year in and year out though. That was really the first mega-race in Chicago and Frank was the first winner.
When Bill was winning all those marathons, and then all the way through the 80’s and beyond, he was also road racing all over the place, almost every weekend. I don’t know how many people realize how much Bill raced – way more than the top road guys race today. I think Bill’s presence and his approachability had a big impact on the sport.
There used to be a winter 10K race in downtown Chicago called “Mayor Byrne’s Loop the Loop”. You still see the ski hats that they gave away, once in a while. Bill would sit on a folding chair in a corner of the lobby of the federal building, there in Daley Plaza, after the race and sign stuff for people for as long as they wanted. No shoe company made him do this, that I know of; he did it because he wanted to. He would sit there for however long it took. And every single person who came up, Bill would engage them in a little conversation about their running. Some people might take only 30 seconds of his time, others he would just talk to for as long as they wanted to talk to him. It didn’t matter how long the line was; Bill was just there for us. That made a huge impression on all of us at that time. Bill made a direct connection with each person – and this was the guy who won NY and Boston, like, every year! He made you feel like what you were doing with your own running was really, really worthwhile. It was MASSIVELY inspirational. And he did this almost every weekend, all over the country. Every year at Bix he still does the same thing. So for me, with all due respect to Frank, and to people like Fixx and Bowerman and Lebow, the “first running boom” in the US was really energized by Bill Rodgers.