Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe
400-meter titles. He took six weeks off from his law studies at Boston University to travel by steamship to Greece, compete in the Olympics, and return home as the first 100-meter and 400-meter champion in modern history.
It’s unlikely any of the fifteen men he beckoned to the makeshift starting line would have even heard of a marathon two years earlier. While they might have been eager to participate in a race, they didn’t relish the long-distance journey to Boston quite the way tens of thousands covet it today. It’s likely that most of them had little idea what they were in for, having never run even half as far in one stretch as they were about to on that spring day. There would have been no talk of fueling or hydrating, pace bunnies or split times.
According to a marvellous account in the next day’s Boston Globe, the athletes ate in the dining room of a hotel just before the race, the competitors from New York at one table, those from Boston and Cambridge at another.
At 12:19 p.m., Burke started the race by simply shouting “Go!” The Globe reported that the contestants went away quickly, “but after going about 50 yards they seemed to realize they had just 25 miles of hard road before them and settled down to a comfortable jog.” So new was this race to its readers that the Globe put the word “Marathon” in quotation marks.
The crowd in Ashland was strong and supportive: “The sleepy old town rang with the cheers of her lusty sons,” the Globe wrote. Many of the spectators took the morning train from Boston to Ashland to see the start, then returned in time to witness the finish. They stretched in a line from Ashland to South Framingham, along with local residents who waved handkerchiefs from their doorsteps along the route.
Somewhere beyond Framingham, a convoy of bicycles, carriages, wagons, motorcycles – “in fact, every conceivable form of conveyance” – fell in behind the leaders. It was “as if the heavens had suddenly opened and rained wheels,” the Globe said.
The course was designed to match the original route in Greece, a race back to downtown from almost twenty-five miles outside the city, over hills and dusty roads. The finish line would be in the Irvington Street oval, a 220-yard track that was the closest thing Boston had to the Olympic stadium in Greece.
The early lead was shared by Dick Grant, a Canadian student at Harvard, and Hamilton Gray of New York, with John McDermott of New York, the man who had won the marathon in his hometown the previous autumn, in third place. The runners continued to receive ovations along the route, to which they raised their hands or even bowed. The order didn’t change much in the miles ahead, but on a hill between Wellesley and Newton Lower Falls, McDermott caught the leaders, then passed them on the downward slope.
“He evidently took the heart out of Gray, for he stopped running and walked,” the Globe reported. It would be decades before the heartbreak that immortalized another hill in Newton. Grant continued to chase McDermott and the two raced each other for about a mile. Eventually, at the next big hill, Grant too stopped running, watching the New Yorker disappear around the next turn. Grant then beckoned the driver of a passing street-watering cart. “He laid down in the street, requesting the driver to let the water run over him.” He tried to resume running but eventually gave up.
McDermott later described Grant as “the hardest man I ever beat. He held me for a mile, although he was all pumped out. If he had trained for the race he would have given me a hard race. As it was it was hard enough to shake him. He ran the pluckiest race I ever saw.”
It took some effort to keep the road clear of spectators so McDermott could pass. The Globe reported he was running “like clockwork. His legs seemed to rise and fall like a phantom Greek and his little body was bent just the least bit forward, his arms were at full length at his side, and his face was set with determination.” Apparently as McDermott ascended the next hill, he laughed at the cyclists who had a hard time keeping up with him. “He breasted the long hill manfully, still maintaining the beautiful form, and he laughed at the wheelmen who were pounding their pedals in their endeavor to keep their machines in motion.”
But after twenty miles, McDermott started to experience a cramp in his leg. He stopped to rub the aching limb on more than one occasion, testing it out for a few hundred yards only to halt again. Some spectators thought that he, like Gray and Grant, would have to quit, but a combination of running and walking brought him closer to the finish, where he was advised that another runner was approaching. “He shut his teeth, set his face, and leaning well forward, he dug his shoes into the hard Beacon Street surface and started on his last spurt. He ran up the hill like a half-miler, down the other side to Commonwealth Avenue and across Massachusetts Avenue, breaking a funeral procession and stalling two electric cars.”
At the Irvington Street oval, which stood just yards from the present-day Boston finish line, the cheers of the crowd were reported as deafening. “Every available foot of standing room in the oval was crowded,” the Globe reported. “The policemen forgot their duty in the excitement, and the track was soon swarming with excited people, all wishing to grasp the hand of the victor of the first ‘Marathon race’ ever held in Massachusetts.”
McDermott arrived on the track “with a bound” and circled it in exactly forty seconds to become the first Boston champion. He had now won the only two marathons ever raced on American soil. The Globe says he was lifted to the shoulders of the crowd. McDermott had finished in a time of two hours, fifty-five minutes and ten seconds. It was better than the winning time in Greece, so it was proclaimed as a world record. The first of many headlines in the Globe was “Record Time.” But the courses were not exactly the same length and it was years before the marathon distance was standardized.
“Yes, I feel pretty tired in my legs,” he told the reporter at the finish line. “My body is all right, but my feet are pretty sore, of course. My toes are blistered and the skin has peeled off the bottom of my feet.”
McDermott was not a big man – the Globe called him the “little champion of champions” and the “little New Yorker” – but he claimed to have lost nine pounds in the race, from the one-hundred and twenty-three pounds he carried to the start. He went on to praise the route, saying it was “the best in the country. It is just uneven enough to make it interesting. It is a great deal better than the New York course.” He added, “Everything connected with the race was managed a great deal better.”
Then McDermott vowed he would never run another long- distance race. “I hate to quit now,” he said, “because I will be called a quitter and a coward, but look at my feet. Do you blame me for wanting to stop it? I only walked about a quarter of a mile in the whole distance, and it was 20 miles before I lagged a step.” He soon added, “I think I shall be all right tomorrow.”
Like so many future marathoners, McDermott broke his finish line promise. He was back the following year to run Boston again.
Ten of the fifteen men who started the race finished the first Boston Marathon. The detailed and dramatic account in the newspaper was accompanied by a collection of illustrations under the headline “Incidents of the marathon road race.” One picture portrayed spectators, including one woman, watching the runners lining up at the start. Another drawing showed “The Ambulance Corps,” a handful of men on bicycles with crosses on their arms who, reports say, distributed lemons, water and wet handkerchiefs to the runners. A sketch labelled “A Stragler” showed a comically and profusely sweating runner next to a signpost for Boston. Finally, the winner was shown with his head held high as he strode confidently to the finish.
The “Marathon” race, the Globe reported, “proved a great success and is an assurance of an annual fixture of the same kind.” Little did the newspaper know how prophetic was its prediction.
CHAPTER 5
It turned out to be a good thing that Clarence DeMar didn’t follow his doctor’s advice. After being warned more than once that a heart murmur and long-distance running were a recipe for an early death, DeMar went on to become the most successful runner in Boston Marathon history and one of distance running’s first and biggest stars.
DeMar was born in 1888 in Madeira, Ohio, a small town