Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe
in America to “raise kids for less.” But in the late nineteenth century, the DeMar family had no choice but to get by on less. Clarence was born into poverty and hardship. His father died when he was ten years old; his mother moved the family to Massachusetts and put her son in a school for orphans.
Many years later, DeMar’s son wrote in a letter to the Boston Athletic Association that his father hated the school so much that when he was asked about it, he flew into a “three-day rage.” It was a “hard and somewhat squelched life,” the elder DeMar said. But he performed well enough to earn a spot at the University of Vermont, where he chose to run cross country because he knew he didn’t have any talent for football, baseball or boxing. After winning a ten-mile race, he decided to enter the 1910 Boston Marathon, where he finished second.
A physician who examined him later that year announced, “You have a bad heart.” The doctor said he should give up running. “You shouldn’t even walk upstairs.”
DeMar demurred and was back at the starting line the following year. Before the marathon began, race doctors listened to his heart. According to one account, they told him, “You have a murmur. We must recommend that you drop out if you feel fatigued. And you really must stop running any more races.” Less than two hours and twenty-two minutes later, DeMar crossed the finish line in first place, setting a course record.
It was an outcome he had foreseen. Just a few nights before the race, he wrote in his autobiography, “I dreamt distinctly that I had won the big race. Of course, I know such things are just a coincidence, but I was glad of the encouragement.”
Not long after competing in the 1912 Olympic Marathon, DeMar did take a break from competitive racing for several years; his reasons included work, his studies at Harvard and Boston University and, to some extent, the nagging but unfounded concerns about his cardiovascular health.
DeMar did compete in the 1917 Boston Marathon without significant training. He had learned he would be going off to war and figured, “Why not have a little fun at marathoning first?” He finished third.
After World War I, he started training seriously again and became the most famous and prolific marathon runner of the Roaring Twenties. DeMar won Boston three straight times, in 1922, 1923 and 1924. He won a bronze medal in the 1924 Olympic marathon. He won races all over America. He regained the Boston title in 1927 and repeated as champion in 1928. His seventh and final Boston victory came in 1930, nineteen years after his first, when he was forty-one years old. No one else, man or woman, has won more than four times.
He became known as “DeMarvellous” and “Mr. DeMarathon.” The Globe compared him to a Hollywood starlet: “His legs may not be as shapely as Claudette Colbert’s, but they are equally famous.” His status in running was so unrivalled that he titled his autobiography simply “Marathon.”
But DeMar didn’t like too much attention; while he had both a sense of humor and a sense of duty, he was notoriously stern and occasionally bad-tempered. He often accused spectators of distracting him. “Any word or deed aimed to get my attention would be like throwing a monkey wrench into a fine piece of he wrote. “Just a personal word like ‘Step on it there’ or ‘Get going, Clarence’ and I felt furious.” Once a drunken spectator jumped onto the course to shake hands with him; DeMar punched him.
If he didn’t like being watched or too loudly encouraged, he did love to run. DeMar didn’t just train for events. He ran to work. He ran to Boston University, where he continued his education and eventually earned a master’s degree. He ran everywhere, one of his friends once said.
Over almost fifty years, he entered races of virtually every possible distance, from one mile to forty-four. He finished almost one hundred marathons. According to the Boston Globe, he once ran and hitchhiked more than a hundred miles to participate in a ten-mile race, only to find out he had arrived a week early. So he ran and hitchhiked home.
When he was forty-nine, DeMar finished seventh at the Boston Marathon. When he was fifty-four, he still made the top twenty. In 1951, DeMar ran his one thousandth race, a ten miler on Columbus Day in Boston. His crotchety humor showed up in a quote in the New York Times: “It was a good race. It’s the first race I can remember in which I was almost hit by only one car. These American motorists, you know, anything to save a minute.”
He finished thirty-first out of forty-two men, at the age of sixty- three. “I just ran because I like to run,” he told the Times. “I expect to continue running until I feel like stopping. And that’s when I no longer get a kick out of it.” DeMar ran Boston for the thirty-third and final time in 1954, when he was sixty-five. He finished in less than four hours.
Clarence DeMar died of stomach cancer in 1958, a few days after his seventieth birthday and a year after his final race, a fifteen- kilometer event in Maine. A few days later, his heart was examined by a renowned cardiologist named Dr. Paul Dudley White. White was an early advocate for the benefits of exercise to the cardiovascular system and was an avid walker and cyclist. He also served as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s physician and would later receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson.
According to the New York Times, White told students at Boston University that the organ that had almost kept DeMar from running was actually in wonderful condition and had not been damaged at all by years of distance running.
The doctor who in 1910 had first suggested DeMar stop running died of heart disease less than a year after issuing his dire warning. According to the Boston Globe, DeMar was fond of saying, “I’ve always insisted that the physician had been listening to his own heart, not mine.”
CHAPTER 6
Clarence DeMar was one of many heroes of the first seven decades of the Boston Marathon, when the race drew significant attention but a small number of participants, at least in relation to modern marathons. In a time when everyday life was more laborious and running gear and training techniques were primitive, endurance running was largely an obscure sport populated by a small but committed community of amateur athletes.
Of the roughly 650,000 people who have crossed the finish line of the Boston Marathon in the past one-hundred and twenty years, more than 600,000 have done it since 1980. Prior to 1964, the race never had as many as even three hundred participants in one year. The fastest athletes raced for glory, not cash; there was no prize money until 1986.
Tom Longboat, an Onondaga runner from Ontario, was described as “the most marvelous runner who has ever sped over our roads” by the Boston Globe when he won the 1907 marathon. Canadians won seven of the first nineteen Boston Marathons, including three of the first five. Finishing third in 1907 was Johnny Hayes, who went on to win the 1908 Olympic marathon, touching off a period known as “marathon mania,” when worldwide interest in the distance spiked and showdown events among the planet’s best runners were regularly scheduled.
In 1917, there were calls for the Boston Marathon to be cancelled. Less than two weeks earlier, the United States had entered the Great War and there were fears that Boston Harbor might be under attack by German submarines that had recently sunk supply ships in nearby Atlantic waters. It was determined that the marathon should become a show of fitness and solidarity and so the race proceeded. New York bricklayer Bill Kennedy won in a showdown with two Finnish runners. In a display of American patriotism, Kennedy had said before the race, “We must repel the Finns.” The Globe suggested the crowd was the largest at any marathon in history.
Along with Bricklayer Bill, among those early Boston champions were a mill weaver, a milkman, a plumber and a delivery boy. Many in the 1920s were military veterans. In 1925 Chuck Mellor of Chicago beat Clarence DeMar, running with a wad of tobacco in his cheek and having placed a copy of the Boston Globe under his shirt to protect him from the wind.
In 1934, Johnny Kelley, a florist’s assistant from Arlington, Massachusetts, battled with a Finnish-born cobbler from Ontario named Dave Komonen. Kelley challenged Komonen for the lead several times until finally falling behind with five miles remaining. It was the first of a few disappointments for Kelley, including the one that was immortalized in the name