I ran my first road race at the threshold of the running boom. I was working in Atlanta in July of 1972, and a local YMCA was organizing a four-mile race on nearby residential streets. I ran the course a few days earlier, to get a sense of how far four miles was. It took me half an hour.
On race day about 100 runners showed up. Before the start, the race director announced that the field included Lee Fiddler, who had just returned from competing in the U.S. Olympic Trials marathon. When I got a moment to speak with Lee, he was friendly, recounted how Frank Shorter and Kenny Moore had won the Trials in an agreed-upon tie, and asked how I liked the Arthur Lydiard shoes I was wearing.
I finished the race in 28 minutes, but the time meant nothing in particular. What mattered was that I finished and enjoyed it. A month later, on the last day of the troubled Olympic games in Munich, Shorter won the gold medal and a new era in American sports began.
It was a boom, yet not the explosion that came later, when big-city marathons and races like Washington’s Cherry Blossom 10-Miler or Maine’s Beach To Beacon 10K became major corporate investments. The first road race I ran in western Massachusetts was in 1976, in the quiet town of Wales, hidden between Wilbraham and Sturbridge. I think it was six miles. There were a dozen spectators. I ran most of the race in solitude, looking back occasionally to see whether the guy 50 yards behind me was getting closer. He wasn’t. In the field of 45 finishers, I placed exactly in the middle, 23rd, which turned out to be good enough to win a trophy.
The race director was Walter Childs, a local legend in the sport, officially the chairman of the Western Massachusetts branch of the Amateur Athletic Union. In those days it seemed as though Walter organized most of the races around here, and it also seemed that he maintained a large supply of trophies.
Now a relic of times past, in 1978 AAU membership was required for anyone running the Boston Marathon. Cost: $12. There were 4,271 finishers. For 2026, the Boston Marathon has received 33,267 applications from runners who have clocked times fast enough to qualify. Given the complexity of the current qualifying system, about two thirds of them will be accepted to run, for a $260 entry fee. Others will get into the race by being part of substantial fundraising team efforts.
Thanks to numerous races’ popularity, field size limits are increasingly common. The Seven Sisters Trail Race on the Holyoke Range used to be an obscure affair, but as people started looking for extremely rugged conditions in races, its popularity swelled. Now the field is limited to 500 which, after all, is about as many people as anyone should want to squeeze onto that narrow, rocky path. The 7.6-mile all-uphill Northeast Delta Dental Mt. Washington Road Race in New Hampshire used to have a limit of 1,000 entries, chosen by lottery, but recently organizers have considered limiting the field to 500, to prevent overcrowding of the summit building where finishers huddle to get warm after the grueling ascent.
Fortunately, the small-time local road race has not disappeared. Last week’s Don Maynard Road Race in Greenfield is a good example: easy parking, nice refreshments, pleasant course. If anything, a race this like this could use more runners; the field this year was just 41. Race director Chuck Adams had shortened the course from five miles to 5 km., figuring that many people who don’t think of themselves as hardcore runners consider a 5K to be a fun physical activity, but many runners were resting to be ready for the next day’s Summit Run — also a 5K, but with the appeal of being an ascent of the road to the Summit House on Mt. Holyoke. This year’s Summit Run attracted 244 runners, after 200 in 2024 and 155 in 2023. “It’s all about marketing,” said race director Dave Theoharides. Could the Summit Run grow so much that limiting entries could become necessary? “It’s a possibility,” Theoharides acknowledged.
In any case, there’s still room for you in Sunday’s Covered Bridge Classic 10K in Conway, part of the annual Festival of the Hills. Starting time is 10 a.m. Day-of-race registration closes at 9:40 a.m. to give runners enough time to walk from the registration/finish area near the Field Library to the start at the bridge, which is nearly a mile away.
John Stifler has taught writing and economics at UMass and has written extensively for running magazines and newspapers. He can be reached at jstifler@umass.edu.