Just before the Bionic Man established himself as my hero and years before my parents’ divorce made them all too human, I wanted to be my father. My father was a marathon runner. He ran with a crew then known as the Thundering Herd. Officially, they were members of the University of Toronto Track Club, but they could have been part of any number of grassroots organizations that dotted the late 1970s; clubs inhabited by a who’s who of running’s elite guard. It was the best kind of name because it was earned, not chosen. Maybe the name evolved because footfalls just sounded different on the Hart House indoor track, a track that took 11 1/2 tight, concentric circles just to equal a mile. Or maybe it was the rumour that the Thundering Herd had literally run someone over who had refused to yield right of way. Regardless, The Herd was the one constant in my father’s life and provided my first iconoclastic standard for what my young mind would later understand as a rare kind of commitment. During the working hours of the day, they were ordinary men with regular jobs and regular lives but on the track, at the starting line and in those fluid minutes and hours that contained a race, they were different. Out there, they were wholly unreconstructed men.
But things are different now.
Culturally, people who value the kind of ethos that celebrates pain, reveres high mileage and venerates speed over distance, are quietly relegated to the fringes of polite conversation. Most running today begins with an apology. In a nation full of citizens that express gratitude to bank machines and say sorry to people who bump into them on the street, this diminutive nature should not be surprising, and its arrogate assumption of Canada’s once proud mantle should provoke no revelation. An outsider might be forgiven for assuming that Canada never did anything significant in long distance running and is, indeed, a nation of hockey players and hewers of wood. The past 30 years certainly would not suggest otherwise.
If we are truly committed to developing world-class runners, then it has to be a factory of runners and lots will drop off.
Since 1977, and definitely since Jerome Drayton’s record-setting race in Japan in 1975, Canadian distance running has quietly moved on. The grassroots running club has been commercialized and many of the values and essentials prevalent now would have been not only laughable to my father’s generation of athletes, but incoherent. In 1977, my mother and two older sisters travelled to Boston in order to set up a water station for my Dad. Today, one would be hard pressed to find a five kilometre race without water, power gels and an aid station. Medals are awarded for completion and prize money for winning. In a sport whose first boom was fuelled by flat Coke, chocolate milkshakes, high mileage and beer, running’s new philosophy of inclusion and celebration of unremarkable achievement has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.
Despite an unprecedented increase in participation, 35 years later Jerome Drayton’s record stands uncontested. The last time Canada sent someone to the Olympics was 10 years ago in Sydney. The last time a Middle School student could name a Canadian distance runner is beyond reckoning. The answer to this puzzle may not be the kind that is palatable to the current running culture that has moved in a strikingly different direction.
