How Oprah ruined the marathon

America's competitive spirit has been wrecked by feel-good amateurs like Oprah whose only goal is to stagger across the finish line.

By Edward McClelland

Read more: Sports, Oprah Winfrey, Athletes, Life

Photo: Jeff Hyman

Photo composite of Oprah Winfrey at the 1997 Revlon Run-Walk Marathon.

Nov. 3, 2007 | In 1971, the New York City Marathon was no bigger than a grade-school field day. It was the race's second year, and a shivering cult of 245 runners gathered in Central Park to run laps around the walking paths. Paying $2 to enter, they wore cotton T-shirts, drooping socks, and Tiger racing flats, those sneakers now cherished by Brooklyn hipsters. The first-place finisher, a high-school teacher named Norman Higgins, didn't even get gas money back to Connecticut.

Back then, America was more fascinated with competitive chess than with distance running. Yet at the next Olympic marathon, the U.S.'s Frank Shorter won the gold medal, transforming his oddball sport into a fitness mania.

This weekend's marathon will be a lot different from Norman Higgins' race. Now the ING New York Marathon (after its corporate sponsor), it's going to be a cattle call of 37,000 runners, each with far more sophisticated equipment than the pioneers of the 1970s. Today's runners suck gooey energy jolts from plastic tubes. Their $150 shoes are nearly shockproof.

With all these runners, and all this technology, you'd think America would be turning out faster and faster marathoners. Instead, the opposite is happening. The more we run marathons, the slower we get -- an average of 45 minutes slower over the last 25 years. Ryan Hall is the swiftest American-born marathoner ever. His best race isn't in the top 250 of all time.

Hall is running in this weekend's other New York marathon: Saturday's Olympic Trials in Central Park. Don't expect to see him on the victory stand in Beijing, though. Since Shorter retired, only one American man has won a medal in the marathon: Meb Keflezighi, who grew up in Eritrea, where he didn't see a car until he was 10 years old. You can look at this as a triumph of the melting pot, or you can look at it as soft Americans relying on an immigrant to do their arduous running.

It makes me ask: Has this country's marathoning spirit been trampled by hordes of joggers whose only goal is to stagger across the finish line? When I joined my high-school cross-country team, in 1982, American distance running was at its zenith. For the past decade, three Americans -- Shorter, Bill Rodgers and Alberto Salazar -- had dominated the marathon. I idolized Rodgers, the long-haired runner who'd dedicated himself to the sport after quitting smoking and losing his conscientious objector's job as an orderly in a mental hospital. One Patriots' Day, Rodgers showed up at the Boston Marathon wearing a hand-lettered T-shirt and a sweatband -- and set a course record.

To schoolboys who raced three miles, the marathon was a rigorous, forbidding distance -- an extreme sport, like mountaineering. The only marathoner I knew was a friend of my father's. His narrow cheeks were bearded, he owned five pairs of cross-country skis, and he was president of the local Sierra Club. Eventually, running consumed him. He left his family and moved to Jackson, Wyo., where he could live among others of his kind.

The American runners of that era were propelled by a "double wave" of self-abnegating philosophies, theorizes Tom Derderian, who trained with Rodgers and Salazar at the Greater Boston Track Club. They were "heirs both to the warrior mentality of their World War II fathers and the new consciousness of the 60s and 70s," he told author John Brant for the book "Duel in the Sun," an account of the 1982 Boston Marathon, considered the last great American distance race.

After high school, I was a decent recreational runner -- I could break 20 minutes in the 5K -- but somehow, I got it in my mind that I wouldn't be a real runner until I did a marathon. Too lazy, too cocky or too ignorant to do heavy mileage in training, I finished the Chicago Marathon in an ignominious 4 hours and 16 minutes, alternating between cramping and nausea the last four miles. Embarrassed, I resolved to try again, but then a knee problem limited my runs to 10 miles.

I had to give up marathoning just as everyone else was getting into it. Not just the rest of the running world. Everyone. The mid-1990s gave us two new long-distance heroes. The first was Oprah Winfrey. If Frank Shorter inspired the first running boom, Oprah inspired the second, by running the Marine Corps Marathon. And it was a much bigger boom. This was not a spindly 24-year-old Yalie gliding through Old World Munich. This was a middle-aged woman hauling her flab around the District of Columbia. If Oprah could run a marathon, shame on anyone who couldn't.

When Oprah expanded the sport, she also lowered the bar for excellence. For the previous generation of marathoners, the goal had been qualifying for Boston. Now, it was beating Oprah. Her time of four hours and 29 minutes -- the Oprah Line -- became the new benchmark for a respectable race. (That was P. Diddy's goal when he ran New York.)

Once the supreme test for hardened runners, the marathon became a gateway into the sport. Soon, gravel paths were crowded with 5-mile-an-hour joggers out to check "26.2 miles" off their life lists. Team in Training, which raises money for leukemia research, promised to turn loafers into marathoners in 20 weeks. I met a lawyer who started running because, "They say if you can run a marathon, you can do anything!" The marathon was no longer a competition. It was a self-improvement exercise.

The guru of these new runners was an ex-music professor named John Bingham, who writes a Runner's World column under the handle "the Penguin." At age 43, Bingham took the admirable step of throwing away his cigarettes and signing up for a race. Unlike Bill Rodgers, he was not headed for athletic glory. He finished dead last. Bingham did not respond by training harder. Instead, he embraced his God-given lack of talent -- and urged readers to do the same. Absolving runners of the pressure to actually run was a brilliant feel-good message. Thanks to his book, "No Need for Speed," Bingham became the most celebrated marathoner in America. (If you don't believe me, go to the marathon starting chute and ask the runners if they've ever heard of Ryan Hall. Then ask about the Penguin.)

Next page: The man who lured insecure, overweight novices off their couches and into running shoes