Some WICKED GOOD writing (NOT here, lol) that makes for an absolute MUST-READ!
Marc Bloom is STILL the G.O.A.T. at covering high-school cross-country
This post consists of a fawning—if meandering and mildly self-stroking—review of an item recently uploaded to the Internet for all to see. It’s a pleasant reminder of what long-form articles about running were once like, even if few observers have ever crafted these as well as the author of the item under review.
Please note, despite its irrelevance to this entry, that I am henceforth and forever avoiding bulleted lists that include bullet-points more than one paragraph long, having noticed that a failure to do this introduces minor but annoying formatting errors. Instead, I’ll use bold text to set off different sections.
I’m happy to clear up any other unsolved mysteries you’re not worried about.
Marc Bloom began writing about high-school cross country approximately two hundred years ago, when print magazines still retained their relevance and the industry term for a cross-country runner was “harrier.” While looking up top overall and individual-venue performance lists today is a snap and their very compilation semi-automated, Bloom was an early popularizer of assembling such lists by hand. Even an unimaginative person can fathom what such a task was like before not only computers but microfilm, VCRs, fax machines, electrical power, the wheel-and-axle, and the stone tablet of Moses.
Bloom has an article on Dyestat about taking part in a race in Van Cortlandt Park in New York City almost fifty-nine years ago, on November 11, 1963. (Bloom doesn’t mention that U.S. President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas eleven days later. November 22, 1963 remains a grim date in world history, but November 22, 2016 was the last day I shot myself in the head with alcohol, establishing a natural KMB-JFK bond.)
The race saw the first sub-thirteen-minute performance on VCP’s notably bitchy 2.5-mile course. Bloom dryly describes reading a newspaper article about the race the next day that had obviously been thrown together by one or more editors fielding one or more calls from on-site coaches, as no one bothered sending reporters to prep cross-country events:
The story reported that Leahy, a 17-year-old senior at Catholic Memorial, had set a course record of 12:58.6. No specific mention was made of being the first to break 13 minutes — at the time something like the 4-minute mile in Van Cortlandt cross country annals. But the breakthrough, while not ballyhooed, was obvious, as the story cited the former record of 13:01.6 set the previous year by James McDermott of Archbishop Molloy in Queens.
(When I worked in the Concord Monitor newsroom twenty-five years ago, this is exactly how most information about high-school running made it into the public domain, even for some championship events, as the paper didn’t have staff members available to send to Derryfield Park. This is irrelevant to running fans today, but in the days of an almost unsearchable Internet, it sucked.)
The story centers on Bill Leahy and the enduring meaning of a “sub-13” at VCP, which gets quotes for the same reason “BQ” (Boston Marathon qualifying time) does: It’s a thing. Even though the course record now stands at 11:55.4 and the 100th-fastest runner’s time is 12:28.0, no one without running chops goes under thirteen minutes on that rolling rump-hump of a layout.
Bloom oscillates in the piece between inviting readers to picture what the cross-country racing environment was like in the early 1960s, thus allowing contextualization of VCP performances in those days, and cheerfully acknowledging that technological advances and expanding support systems have produced far superior runners. In other words, no traces of “back in my day” or “all these freakin’ selfies now!” exist in Bloom’s appreciative recapitulation of the timeless joy of footracing as a sporting yet essential test of the self, no matter who might be watching and unconcerned whether the at-large populace even notices.
This excerpt concerning the rest of Leahy’s 1963 season is of special interest to me:
He placed third in the Massachusetts state meet at Boston’s Franklin Park — there was no actual state meet then so Catholic and rival schools considered the Eastern Massachusetts Champs the state finals — and then, a week later, on Saturday, Nov. 9, Leahy lost the New England title on a rainy day in Burlington, Vermont.
Roger Maxfield, undefeated, from Concord High in New Hampshire, dropped his front-running style in favor of a tactical race. Trailing at the mile, he then caught Leahy, gave him a confident glance, and took off to win in 14:17 for 2.5 miles. Leahy nabbed second in 14:27.
Reflecting the period’s training M.O., Concord’s go-to workout was 10 to 12 x 440 yards. Maxfield told me the team started in the low 70s with a lap recovery, and worked down to the low 60s with a 220 rest. Maxfield clocked 4:18 and 9:31 in track and went on to run for Idaho State, once racing Gerry Lindgren. He became a career military man, serving in the regular Army with a stint in Vietnam and then the National Guard, retiring as a full colonel. He lives close to where he attended high school in New Hampshire, still serving, as a town selectman.
Maxfield graduated from Concord High School one year ahead of my mom and twenty-four ahead of me. As a teenager, I occasionally ran by his house in the tiny town of Loudon, which borders Concord to the northeast and now sends its kids to Merrimack Valley High School. At the 1986 Capital Area Championships, I was fourth and Maxfield’s son, running for MVHS, was fifth; I could say I outkicked him, but what I recall is him outjogging me in the last 50 yards or so.
On June 4, 1988, as I was preparing to run a subpar but not dismal 3,200 meters at the New Hampshire State Meet of Champions at Spaulding High School in Rochester, I watched Maxfield’s by-then-graying CHS mile record fall—allowing for converted 1,600-meter times—to Christopher Basha, who set a Meet of Champions record (then required to hold a state record) in the event.
Chris Codero, Stephanie Ulciny, John Ingram, John Nixon, Kristen Gobb (really? There was no everlasting Gobb-stopper on hand at the results table?) and Matt Systrak are all misspellings, although a different instance of the latter’s name in the same results set is correct. I’m omitting the correct spellings of these names in case their owners Google them. But Zephyr Teachout, seemingly an easy name to mangle, wouldn’t care a bit as she’s become widely known for a variety of other things.
There was a now-sorta-famous New England Championships qualifier at the previous year’s Meet of Champions, too. This one was at Keene High School, and hours earlier, I had, unbeknownst the entire world, scored an 800 on the math portion of the SAT. I was also struck in the face by a bee (not on purpose) on the fifth lap of this race. I never should have finished third in the 3,200 meters that day, but most of the field chased Lacombe through an opening lap of 66 and later boarded charter struggle-buses at various inopportune points in the race.
“Davy” Kitchel was a better runner than this—I’m almost positive he ran 1:55 at the Hanover Invitational one year. But having shed his signature coonskin cap sometime after college, he now goes by Davis Kitchel and is one of the co-founders of Strava.
New York state politics versus a hyperWoke GPS vanity platform. Who wore it better?? (In full confidence, both Kitchel and Teachout are the G.O.A.T.s of their respective fields.)
Notice as well that in both 1987 and 1988, Concord was the only school to send qualifiers to the New Englands in all three boys’ distance events. A prom, one wrestling match, and rollicking liquor intoxication, however, conspired in the week following the 1987 MoC to produce both incomplete and ramshackle participation at the corresponding New Englands.
Leahy attended Catholic Memorial High School. At the 1988 New England Championships at Boston College, a Catholic Memorial kid named John Finn won the 3,200 meters, outsprinting Scott Cody of Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School and the fabulous flying Butler twins of St. Raphael’s Academy in Rhode Island. I finished second in the unseeded heat and, I believe, 11th overall. It was balls-hot on one side of that oversized track and ass-hot on the other, conditions that became increasingly impossible to distinguish from within as these races progressed.
Unbeknownst to Cody and his teammate Jamahl Prince, who won the 1,600 meters that day, one of their classmates, Matt Damon, would later appear in, as well as help produce, moving pictures. Another CR & L student at the time, Ben Affleck, would later be enrolled at the University of Vermont at the same time I was; he never earned a single credit, choosing instead to become a film star like Damon as well as a serious drinker like me.
I was okay in high school—more so than most people, even; Roger Maxfield was exceptional, and the Concord teams in those days nonpareil (emphasis mine):
Catholic took third in team scoring. The victory went to Concord, one of the best teams in New England history, buttressed by its perfect 15-point team sweep in the state meet. That fall Concord went on to “face” Jim Ryun of Kansas in the high school nationals. Well… in those days, Track & Field News orchestrated a 5 x 2-mile “postal” (the results were mailed in) competition on the track, something of a national championship. Concord placed fifth that season. Ryun, then a junior, had the fastest individual time of all, 9:24.
Bloom describes Leahy making his way through Harvard Law School and building a career around defending accused criminals who, to put it too gently, lacked advocacy (Boston was a viciously racist city in the 1960s and well beyond). But since the setting for his article is Van Cortlandt Park, I can’t end this without mentioning one of the most impressive cross-country runs in American high-school history, Cathy Schiro’s 16:46 on the 5K VCP course at the 1984 Foot Locker Northeast Regional Championship.
To this day, no one else has even run under 17:00. Schiro’s time was only 8.64 percent slower than that of boys’ Northeast champion John Trautmann, who would go on to place second at the National race in San Diego (Schiro easily prevailed in the girls’ race, in which Lize Brittin was seventh). Imagine a Diamond League meet with a men’s winning 5,000-meter time of 12:50 and a woman’s winning time of 13:56, and that’s how good Schiro was in the Bronx that day. Motherfreaking SHIT, did I call her the G.O.A.T. yet?!
I’ll have more to say about Schiro’s senior season (which was my freshman one) as the current New Hampshire campaign approaches its climax. She’s still the best girl the state has ever produced, while its best-ever boy is about to embark on the final races of his senior season.