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Though he had been dead for eight years by the time I was born, we still cherished the legend of “Bricklayer Bill,” as he was known. The Kennedys had plied the mason’s trade since at least the 1840s, when the first of us landed on these shores, during Ireland’s Great Famine. And according to the family lore, Bill, then an itinerant worker, rode the rails to Boston and slept on a pool table the night before the race. He triumphed in the marathon while wearing a homemade Stars-and-Stripes bandana and enlisted in the Army not long after his victory.

The story was that pride in the United States spurred Bill to beat the favored Finnish runners, lest the world see the Yanks as weaklings as they entered the Great War. But there was more to my uncle’s triumph than national pride. Bill, it turned out, held a rich and sweeping definition of Americanness that embraced all creeds and colors, and his feat helped convince the country that Irishmen could be loyal Americans. Sometimes, I think his victory could have been the moment when Irish Americans lost their hyphen.

My father Larry—a historian—and I started digging into Bill’s story after a seafood dinner with our cousin Ann Louise McLaughlin, who had started working at the Harvard University Press in the 1960s, and had received a manuscript of Uncle Bill’s memoirs, written late in life. We were amazed to hear this, but didn’t do anything about it at first—Ann Louise hadn’t exactly promised to hand the papers over. My wife and I often drove to Ann Louise’s house to plant tomatoes in her garden, or to lug laundry baskets up and down her stairs. Eventually, perhaps when she’d felt we’d done enough chores, she handed us Bill’s manuscript. It had been sitting in a box in her cellar for almost five decades.

Using Bill’s typewritten recollections as a starting point, Dad and I pieced together his story, which went far beyond the shorthand legend we’d always heard.

Born in New York City, Bill struck out on his own at the turn of the century, when he was 17 or 18. He spent years kicking around the country—from the Great Lakes to the West Coast to the Gulf Coast and back to the Northeast—riding the rails, following bricklaying jobs, and his passion: amateur competitive running.

When we started our research, we had no idea that Bill had won marathons in St. Louis, Chicago, and Long Island, New York. That Chicago race took place during a heat wave that killed several people, caused many of the 18 runners who entered to drop out, and forced organizers to cut the race short at 22 miles. But Bill chose to continue running until he’d completed the full distance of 26 miles, 385 yards. In Arkansas, he once beat a horse in a 10-mile race. We also found contemporary newspaper accounts of Bill’s fall from the roof of the Des Moines Coliseum, a tumble from a moving train, and other mishaps. Bill was even hit by a motorcar during a marathon in St. Louis in 1910 or ’11, and again in a shorter road race in New York City in 1922. Courses were not blocked off then.

We delved into Bill’s Irishness. His paternal grandparents landed in Boston with the first wave of famine refugees; his mother had come over later, as a child. Bill himself reportedly spoke with a bit of a brogue, and he used locutions like “of a Tuesday” in his writings. In his memoir, he recalled a brief visit to the Ould Sod—the old country—in middle age, when he heard an Irish musician play “Come Back to Ireland” on a cornet, and “needless to say, it sound[ed] beautiful.”

Growing up in Harlem and Port Chester, New York, in the 1880s and ’90s, Bill almost certainly would have followed the Irish-American Athletic Club, whose amateur runners, jumpers, and hammer throwers were wildly popular in Irish neighborhoods. Fans collected cigarette trading cards with images of IAAC stars—many of whom had won Olympic medals—and filled the seats for track-and-field events and Gaelic football and hurling matches at Celtic Park, the club’s stadium in Queens.

Bill running, May 1913, in St. Louis. Photo courtesy of the Kennedy Family Collection.

Bill joined the IAAC when he returned to New York in 1916, after his two marathon wins in the Midwest. It was a tumultuous time for the club: A still-neutral United States was leaning toward backing Britain as World War I raged in Europe—but the Irish in America were loath to take the side of their old foe. Many joined organizations like Clan na Gael to support the cause of independence for their ancestral homeland, and wanted the United States to have no part in the war. If anything, many Irish Americans were rooting for the Kaiser, just to stick it to the English.

This undercurrent of rebellion ran through the IAAC. The group’s nickname, the Winged Fist, came from its logo, a raised, winged fist similar to the black power salute of later decades. Track meets and hurling matches at Celtic Park raised thousands of dollars for the Irish nationalist cause. The brother of IAAC star and Olympic shot put medalist Martin Sheridan was married to a sister of Michael Collins, the famous Irish revolutionary. New York Justice Daniel F. Cohalan, an active member of the club’s board of directors, was the in-house counsel for Clan na Gael, which like many independence groups, wanted an alliance with Germany and worked with German Americans to lobby for neutrality. These were the “hyphenated Americans” that President Woodrow Wilson and former President Theodore Roosevelt attacked with special scorn in speeches at the time.

So it struck Dad and I as a marvel that just a year later, with the United States officially at war with Germany, Bill was running—and winning—the marathon wearing the Stars and Stripes.

By 1918, he and his two brothers were serving with the Army in France, along with tens of thousands of other Irish Americans. How had their opposition to the war evaporated so quickly?

For one thing, Wilson had sold the war as a fight to protect small nations like Roman Catholic Belgium from imperialist powers like Germany—perhaps something that struck a chord among Irish Catholics. Secondly, the church hierarchy was eager to show that its flock was not a pack of rebellious Romans with divided loyalties, and that “hyphenated Americans” didn’t deserve the treatment that German Americans were suddenly subjected to—tarring and featherings, beatings, and (in one case) lynching.

But there were less calculated reasons for Bill and his kind to join fellow Americans in the war effort, too. Irish Americans were genuinely grateful for the opportunities the New World had provided—and proud of their American accomplishments. They figured they had built half the nation’s railroads, for example, and the bravery of the “fighting 69th” and other Irish regiments in the American Civil War was legendary.

Bricklayer Bill also embraced America’s diversity. Returning to Port Chester after the war, he encouraged Italian friends to pursue citizenship, and he fought for their right to join his bricklayers’ union local. In 1925, he co-founded the Cygnet Athletic Club and invited African Americans to join—this at a time when such a thing was unthinkable in many towns. He introduced black athletes to sportswriters as his teammates and friends. Bill thought this was only right. After all, when he was recovering from a vicious bout of typhoid fever in Chicago, the Hebrew Institute had crossed ethnic lines to take him in, letting him use its gym, pool, and track to get back in shape. Bill liked to silence bigots with the tale of a young Jewish runner in St. Louis who gamely finished a marathon though his feet were bleeding, blistered, and swollen.

“Don’t tell me that any one race has a monopoly on grit,” he wrote.

We discovered that the Irish-American Athletic Club’s only criteria were athletic prowess and pluck. It didn’t restrict membership by race or ethnicity, instead welcoming blacks, Jews, Italians, Hispanics, and others who were excluded from high-toned outfits like the New York Athletic Club. During the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, the IAAC “adopted” Cuban marathoner Felix Carvajal, initially an object of the crowd’s derision. Carvajal, finished fourth and was “the real hero of the race,” Bill wrote.

It’s true that the communal exuberance that marked the early days of America’s entry into World War I devolved into a shameful hysteria in many quarters. This took forms ranging from the goofy, like renaming sauerkraut “Liberty cabbage,” to the deadly, like the aforementioned lynching. But it is not the case, I realized while researching Bill’s story, that earlier generations were uniformly, automatically more prejudiced than we are today. “Bricklayer Bill” wrapped his head in a homemade American flag on the day he won the Boston Marathon in 1917, but to him, and many others, those colors symbolized inclusion, not exclusion.

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I hadn’t expected to run anywhere near that. My best 1,500 time going into the race was 3:42—still a very respectable time by collegiate standards, but far from record- breaking. As one of the athletes who had to beg his way for a spot on the starting line—it was a late-season race, held specifically for some of the country’s top runners to lock down good times—I was just there to play follow the leader, and hopefully get carried along to a personal best, maybe even a qualifying time for that year’s Olympic trials. Instead, I won.

I can recall key parts of the race, but much of it is a blur. The last of the evening’s raindrops splashed against the track as the athletes peeled off their warm-ups. A surprising number of fans lined the track’s perimeter. After the starter fired his pistol, I fell into position toward the back of the 15-person field and focused only on the damp jerseys in front of me. I knew fatigue was due to set in soon, but once we passed the halfway point, instead of losing ground, I began to move through the field. Soon the leaders were in sight. There was life still in my legs around the final turn (how did we get here so soon)? With my eyes forward and my head up, I made my bid for the front.

Engulfed by the moment, I crossed the finish line oblivious to what I had just achieved. My legs were numb. I turned around to see who came in behind me. Then one runner a few strides back yelled to me in disbelief. He must’ve seen the clock. My coaches sprinted toward me with their hands in the air shouting just how fast I had gone.

Euphoria always follows a great race—a validation of all the work and sacrifices leading up to that moment. But this performance was different. It was difficult to understand what had happened. On paper, I was seven seconds faster than I had been when I woke up that morning, a difference that takes most competitive runners years of chipping away to achieve. Suddenly, I was part of an entirely different tier of athlete. Now I had to convince myself I belonged.

Three weeks after setting the record, I had the most devastating race of my career. At the NCAA National Championships, I bombed out of the preliminary rounds of the 1,500 meters, not even making the final. With the echo of the stadium’s crowd still audible through a tunnel and my breath still heavy, I had to compose myself before facing the media. What had happened? I was supposed to be among the best now—people wanted great things. How does the American collegiate record holder run so slow?

I’d had one goal going into those championships: to win. But entering a race with a win-or-lose attitude is a dangerous approach. With new personal records come new expectations, and after I failed to live up to mine, I quickly became haunted by doubts and disillusionment. Would that lightning ever strike twice?

The ecstasy of just a few weeks earlier began to feel like a dream.

It took me three years to run as fast as 3:35 again. After graduating from college, injuries, missed chances, and bad luck plagued each season. Eventually, I had to go back to the basics. Keep it simple. Stop the overthinking. Staying healthy became my first priority; putting one foot in front of the other the second. There was no curse to be lifted, I told myself. That quiet track in the backwoods of Pennsylvania was the same distance around as every other. I just needed the right opportunity.

It finally came last May, when I found myself just off the leader’s shoulder in the final stretch of a 1,500 in South Carolina. The race’s pacers had been hasty, and the field was competitive. Now was my time. The impulse to win overrode the pain of each step, and once again, I felt those chills shooting through my spine, masking the temptation to let up. The numbers on the big clock by the finish were lower than I had ever seen. I leaned my head forward to cut a few hundredths of a second as I crossed the line. Occasions like this are rare, and I wanted it all.

In track, as in all other sports, failure is determined by the level of success you achieve—where you set the bar for yourself, based on past accomplishments. If I hadn’t run that one extraordinary time in college, I’d have been thrilled just to be at nationals that year. But once I proved what I was capable of, I had to try to live up to it.

In this way, paradoxically, a runner’s victories are forbidding as well as euphoric. Success means new goals to obsess over and fall short of.

Last May, with the ghost of my college-self behind me, it didn’t take me long to forget my recent years of frustration. Finally, I’m able to look ahead—specifically, to next year’s Olympics. But I’m already starting to sense once again the creeping demons of my own ambitions. How do I suppress them? So far, the only trick I’ve found is to embrace the disappointment—to recall the crushing moments, and to use them as fuel to never feel that way again.

Then: keep it simple. Take the next step.

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When I got the diagnosis, the doctors used unfamiliar words and carried on as if I understood them. Lobular, ductal, receptors. Malignant. That’s the one that stuck.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I approach seven years of good health. Many of my friends have not been so lucky.

When I was pregnant with my first child, many years ago, a maternity nurse told me that some women during childbirth try to get up from the bed and leave. As if you could just decide you’ve had (or “enough is”) enough. That’s the same instinct I had when I got my cancer diagnosis. Staring at a business card in my hand with the word “oncologist” on it, I wanted to toss the card and run. But there was nowhere to go.

“Come autumn,” said the surgeon on the day of my diagnosis, “you’ll put this behind you and get on with your life.” That helped.

“It’s not a death sentence,” said my friend Holly. That helped, too.

Friends who had survived breast cancer gave me things before I knew I needed them. Lotion, soft cotton shirts, food, advice. “You’re in the sisterhood,” one said. “You can ask us anything. Nothing is too private.”

Despite these kind gestures, I felt estranged. One thing that people don’t talk about much with cancer is how it sets you apart. It casts you under suspicion. You can’t help but feel that you’ve become unreliable in others’ eyes, unlikely to meet your obligations. It’s subtle, but pervasive. Even as friends reached out with loving assistance, I felt that I was in a bell jar, unable to make contact.

Of all the worries that come with serious illness—fear of loss of job, income, health insurance—it was the fear of losing credibility that was most troubling. Fear that family, friends, and colleagues would lose their trust in me. That they would see me as an emblem of sadness, maybe even bad luck.

Long ago, in a college psychology class, I was startled to learn that a bee that has lost its capacity to contribute to the normal activity of gathering pollen will be murdered by the hive. I feared I might be that bee.

So I shared my news as sparingly as I could, in concentric circles of those who needed to know—my husband, my kids, my mom, my siblings. Then coworkers and close friends. People inevitably asked, since they saw me with hair one day and bald the next. You want to project assurance and allay fear, but that’s hard to do when you’re in the middle of it. You’re wrestling with your own doubts.

I wanted to spare my mom, who was 86 when I was diagnosed, but how? I also wanted to spare my kids. My daughter was 14 when I was diagnosed, my son 9. In the six months prior to my diagnosis, my daughter had seen two of her friends lose their mothers to cancer. It took me some days to find the courage to share my news with her, and when I did, she retreated silently to her room and burrowed into her bedcovers, in tears.

“This isn’t the same,” I tried to tell her. “This is treatable, I’m going to be fine.” I knew I didn’t sound very convincing.

Convincing people is a big part of living with cancer. Reassuring them. Masking what’s really going on—which is that you are spinning almost out of control.

Outward signs of treatment make it an uphill battle to dispel the doubts of friends and family. Like many women, I experienced most of the possible side effects of chemo—flushed complexion, hair loss, dry eyes, mouth sores, nausea, night sweats, sleeplessness. I also had some that weren’t expected—a surge in blood pressure, migraines, and an infection in the breast that meant the implant had to be removed.

I wanted to spare my husband, too. In truth, I think spouses get the worst of it. When you’re the one in treatment, you’re allowed to collapse. But not your spouse. My husband was stalwart and steady throughout. I got flowers and cards. He got extra chores.

I gave my kids presents on each of the chemo days—small things: a book, a CD, a game, movie tickets. I told them it was to thank them for putting up with me on the down day. But more than anything, it was a way to mark the countdown: one down, five more to go.

Thank God for work. I kept on working full-time all the way through. When I look back at my calendar now, I’m amazed. It’s packed with the usual array of business meetings and deadlines, albeit less travel. I also took to gardening. I planted two olive trees, a peach tree, five roses, and more than 150 bulbs on our small lot.

I thought the family was getting through relatively unscathed, until one day my daughter’s blues caught me off guard. She was in eighth grade, and she was going through a rough patch in school. “I don’t know what the point of any of this is,” she told me one night. “I’m just going to get cancer anyway.”

It took my breath away.

“No, Sweet Pea,” I said. “That’s not true. There’s no other family history. This isn’t your future. You are healthy, and you have a strong life ahead of you.”

I didn’t know what to do except to press on, hoping my progress might diminish her sense of doom.

Friends were my ballast, even when I felt beyond their reach. They got together and pooled their cash to help my husband and me with medical bills and told us to save up for some post-treatment indulgence. The kindness of that gesture left me in a puddle of tears.

People said things along the way that stuck. Wonderful things. “It sounds scary,” said my general practitioner, “but it’s remarkably treatable.” “We got it all,” said the surgeon. “When this is over, you’ll put this behind you and go on with your life.” “Will you come with me to Paris?” said my husband. Yes. And we did. For our 20th wedding anniversary, we got that indulgence our friends had told us to save up for.

If I could do something as improbable as go to Paris with my husband—just the two of us—why not other improbable feats? Why not run a marathon?

A marathon! That would be really hard. But I thought about my daughter and my mom and others and how I appeared to them—as an unreliable body. This would be a persuasive way to allay suspicion. My friend, Jim, who faces his own health battle, told me that a marathon is about 50,000 steps. Fifty thousand affirmations of Yes. Fifty thousand jubilant declarations of being alive!

So I trained. And on March 15, 2012, I ran my first marathon, in L.A. I’m still running, and I’ll be on the course for L.A.’s 26.2 again on March 9 of this year.

Some days, I run because I believe, in secret, that it’s my inoculation, my amulet, that it keeps me two paces ahead of a possible recurrence. Some days, I run because I have found a new community of friends among runners. Some days, I run just because it makes my heart pound, so I know I am fully alive.

It’s been 2,500 some days since I was diagnosed. There are no guarantees with cancer. I worry about a relapse one day, but for now I am grateful to have regained my credibility with friends and family. They no longer seem to look at me askance.

So much life has happened in this span. My daughter turned 21 in November, and we got to mark the occasion with my mom, her grandmother. The cake was adorned with a decoration that was on my mom’s own cake on her 21st birthday—a bone china key, with the number 21 in gold leaf—a symbol of passage to adulthood. My mom celebrated her birthday during the blitz in Britain during World War II. A bomb dropped during the party, and the blast threw my mother off her feet and smashed the cake. But somehow the key survived, and since then it has been on every family member’s birthday cake—my sister’s, my brother’s, mine, my niece’s, and now my daughter’s.

I’m wildly grateful to have been alive to see this celebration. I am mindful that so many friends and colleagues have not been so lucky. And so, I remind myself: Take nothing for granted. Say I love you in the morning. Say I love you at night.

My mom has had two strokes and heart surgery in the past 12 months but fights on. Every day is gold. God willing, she will turn 94 in April. She’s a survivor. We’re all survivors. We must all trust one another. Ninety-four years, 50,000 steps, 2,500 days. Well, 2,557 actually. But who’s counting?

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“What’s going on?” I asked.

“They’re going to race,” someone told me.

“Who’s going to race?” I asked.

Paul Hargrove, a sprinter and the ninth-grade varsity quarterback, and Dave Galloway, a sprinter and the eighth-grade starting tailback, were going to race a mile against a girl.

I knew about long runs. To my classmates, I was the egghead who wanted to be an athlete. Captain of the history team and backup center on both the varsity football and basketball teams, I was six feet tall and broad-shouldered–but terribly near-sighted. In many ways, I was still the kid the school psychologist had described five years before as “the most uncoordinated child I have ever tested.”

But spring was track season, and I was the second-best long-distance runner in the school. Unfortunately for me, long-distance running wasn’t a popular sport in Orange or in the U.S. In 1970, the New York Marathon had a budget of $1,000, and only 55 competitors crossed the finish line. In the spring of 1973, even as I was winning races and opposing coaches were working out strategies to box me up in dual meets, I knew that the third-best hurdler and the fifth-best sprinter at Portola Junior High School would get far more respect for their athletic accomplishments from our fellow students than I did.

My problem wasn’t only that long-distance running was weird and unpopular. What probably most hurt my case for being considered a real athlete was that the best long-distance runner in the school was a girl. That her nickname was “Little Mary,” and that the moniker was appropriate, didn’t make things any easier. Mary was short even for a fourteen year-old, and she was so leanly muscled as to seem scrawny to junior high students whose idea of a real athlete was a quarterback or halfback.

In the early 1970s, today’s explosion of opportunity for female athletes wasn’t visible on the horizon. Some girls played sports, but everyone knew that girls weren’t athletes. Girls were cheerleaders. After any football pass that came up short, or any baseball throw that bounced before reaching its target, at least one opposing player or fan was all but guaranteed to say, “You throw like a girl.”

Both sports and American society were changing, though. In 1972, Frank Shorter, an American, won the gold medal in the marathon at the Munich Olympics. That same year, the Boston Marathon–the oldest race of its kind in the United States–permitted women to compete for the first time. Until then, race officials had always denied applications from women on the grounds that no woman would be capable of running that far. Internationally, the prejudice against women lasted even longer. As late as 1980, the longest running event for women in the Moscow Olympics was 1,500 meters–the so–called “metric mile.”

Not only women’s liberation but also the backlash to it hit the world of sports hard in 1973. Bobby Riggs–a 55-year-old former Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion and world number-one–began to mouth off in the press about the ridiculousness of the very idea of equality between the sexes. Women’s tennis was a joke, according to Riggs, and he’d recently challenged the great women’s champion Margaret Court to a match. Although he’d been coached for many of his teenage years by one of the top women tennis players in Los Angeles, Riggs played the old man-versus-woman angle for all the publicity it was worth. Later that spring–playing a game of tactical lobs and spin shots–Riggs would beat Court.

That morning at the track, though, I was still trying to figure out what this race between two boy athletes and Mary was all about. I spied Mr. Burnett, the head boys’ P.E. coach, a bit ahead of me and to my left. I cut over and picked up my pace. “Why are they the ones who’re going to race her?” I asked.

“Because they’re the ones who challenged her,” he said, and then he shook his head.

I think Coach Burnett and Miss Hawkins (the girls’ P.E. coach, whom Mr. Burnett later blamed for setting up the race) might have been the only ones that morning who didn’t expect the guys to win. Well, them and Mary.

That is: my classmate Mary Decker.

Actually, I had a sense that Mary was going to win, too. My junior high classmate was already competing against–and beating–adult women in international track meets. But when I discovered that the two guys were running a relay, their consecutive half-miles to her mile, I had my doubts.

The race started, and Hargrove, the ninth-grade quarterback, took off at a dead sprint. He was pulling away, and the crowd was enjoying itself as it cheered him on. His speed didn’t last long, though, and after maybe half a lap Little Mary began gaining ground. The cheers turned to shouts of, “Come on, Paul. You can do it!” Then the exhortations turned to groans as Mary Decker passed Hargrove without a glance. When Hargrove finished his half-mile, Mary Decker’s lead was larger than Hargrove’s had been at the peak of his sprint.

The exhortations picked back up a bit when Hargrove passed the baton to Dave Galloway, the eighth-grade quarterback. Galloway took off quickly, but–having seen what had happened to his predecessor–he paced himself somewhat. He gained a fair amount of ground on Decker in his first hundred yards. But, with every hundred yards he ran after that, the distance he was gaining diminished until, on her fourth and final lap, Little Mary Decker began to expand her lead.

Most of the girls were cheering for her now. Aside from a few muttered curses, most of the guys in the crowd had fallen silent. As Mary crossed the finish line to mostly muffled applause, the second sprinter–glorious representative that he was of male athletic dominance–wasn’t even on the final straightaway. Most of the crowd was already heading back to the blacktop to buy a snack or get ready for their next class by the time Galloway finished the boys’ relay.

The next week, across town at the final dual track meet of the season at Cerro Villa Junior High School, near the end of the three-quarter-mile race, I heard something I’d never heard before. My teammates were cheering for me. And this time it wasn’t just the coach and my buddy Vince Deveney, the sarcastic shot putter, urging me on. To my amazement, as I began my kick past the last of the Cerro Villa runners just after the start of the final straightaway, it kept getting louder. The whole team was shouting.

“Come on, Hearle!”

“Go! Go! Go!”

My supporters were the same guys who six months before had tossed me out of the back of the gym without my clothes on (in full view of one whole row of classrooms), locked the door behind me, and stolen my favorite shirt out of my football locker.

I sprinted to the finish line for a victory, and, for the first time all season, my schoolmates came up en masse, clapping me on the back in congratulations. “That was great! I thought he had you beat until the last hundred, but you showed him. Way to go. Really, way to go.”

I was flabbergasted. It hadn’t occurred to me that Mary Decker’s trouncing of the two sprinters would change how anyone thought about me. I’d never run with her or against her. We’d never had a class together, and I don’t think we ever had occasion even to speak to each other. But Mary Decker had shown not only that girls could be athletes but also that long-distance runners were tougher than sprinters, and in the process she had changed the way our corner of the world saw me.

Mary Decker Slaney went on to far greater victories. A year after her race against the boy sprinters of Portola Junior High, she set her first three world records. Eventually, she would set thirty-six U.S. records, seventeen world records, and–in the same meet in 1983–win World Championships at both 1,500 meters and 3,000 meters. She is the only athlete ever to have held the American record in every competitive distance between 800 meters and 10,000 meters.

Thanks to Mary Decker, I finally learned what it felt like to have a crowd cheering me on. I never won another race. The next school year, at my new high school in Irvine, I blew out my knee early in cross country season, came down with mononucleosis and encephalitis during track season, and decided perhaps the world didn’t need me to be a great athlete. But that fall, when Billie Jean King crushed Bobby Riggs on national TV in the Astrodome, I was rooting for her all the way.

Kevin Hearle is a poet, essayist, Steinbeck expert, fifth-generation Southern Californian, and a visiting scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.

*Photos courtesy of Kevin Hearle and HarryAKA.

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You wouldn’t have known it existed from the Los Angeles Times or local television and radio. But a vibrant distance running community emerged in the 1960s. This community was linked by a network of all-comers races, weekly road races and newly established marathons. Most importantly, new attitudes were emerging among these runners: about long distance running as a lifestyle, as well as about workout regimens, diet, lifelong training and the inclusion of women.

My older brother Jim, then a senior at Fairfax High, introduced me to long distance running in the summer of 1967, a few months before I was to start my freshman year. My first run was from our house in the Fairfax district to the top of Mt. Olympus in the Hollywood Hills. Though I ran only the first two miles and walked the rest, I was hooked.

Fairfax did not have a strong tradition of long distance and track athletes. According to Gabe Grosz’s history of Fairfax track, the school lost every track meet between 1962 and 1965. But all that changed in the fall of 1967 with the arrival of a new coach, John Kampmann.

Like other successful high school coaches, Kampmann brought a commitment and passion to the sport that was contagious. Running was not done part-time or occasionally; it was a daily, year-round regimen. Running was one part physical, and a larger part mental. Running was linked to diet, sleep and focus.

Long distance training under Coach Kampmann was a mix of approaches: speed-play techniques from Finland, repetitions on the track, and long slow distance (LSD). We ran in the Hollywood Hills, on the trails of Griffith Park, at the La Brea Tar Pits near Fairfax. We ran at the area’s golf courses, throughout Brentwood and UCLA, at the Santa Monica beach. On weekends, we ran through the canyons north of Sunset. We’d start at Burton Way and La Cienega and each week choose a different canyon: Franklin Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Benedict Canyon, Beverly Glen Drive – 12, 14, 16 miles. Often on Sundays, we’d do a canyon run in the morning and come back at night with a three- or four-mile run at the Los Angeles Country Club.

By the next year, Fairfax was among the top cross country and track teams in the city. In the spring of 1968, Mike Wittlin set a city record with a two-mile time of 9:17. The following year, Dan Schechter won the city mile championship with a time of 4:16. In dual meets, the half-mile squad, led by Gary Shapiro, regularly ran in the 1:50s. Fairfax lost only one dual track meet in 1969. During the next two years, Fairfax won 14 straight dual meets.

Beyond competing as a team, we were part of the region’s distance community. We traveled throughout the region on weekends to compete in road races in Montebello, Pacific Palisades, Diamond Bar, Toms Peak and the Los Angeles Police Academy. We ran the Culver City Marathon in 1967 and 1968, and the Palos Verdes Marathon in 1969 and 1970. We traveled in a van to San Diego to run the Mission Bay Marathon in January 1970. During the summer, we competed in the all-comers meets at Venice High, Pierce College and Los Angeles Community College.

The region’s distance community was not large. Each road race might have 100 runners, and even the marathon races rarely had more than 200 or 300. The runners, though, traveled to the same races, met at the same handful of stores that sold running shoes and read the same books and articles on running, particularly the running bible, Track and Field News. Through these interactions, the running subculture grew.

Mainstream athletic culture in 1960s Southern California focused on a few team sports, primarily baseball, football, and basketball, in which a small number of athletes actually competed. Most high school athletes and non-athletes did not continue active exercise after graduation. But in distance running, everyone trained and competed. A main part of the sport involved reaching “PRs” (personal records), pushing yourself to improve your own time. Coach Kampmann gave as much attention to each runner’s personal record, from the slowest to the fastest runner, as to the team score.

Running did not stop in high school. It is a lifelong pursuit. At the road races, you’d see runners of all ages, and from a wide range of occupations. Further, the groundwork was being laid for the establishment of women’s high school and college teams, and for the full participation of women in all distance races.

Most of us from that running era at Fairfax have continued to find value in the distance running culture and continue to run daily. My own running career would have its ups and downs over the years. On a Saturday morning in May 1970, I ran my second Palo Verdes Marathon, finishing in 2 hours, 42 minutes – among the top 20 high school marathon times in the United States that year. Later that year, I went east to Harvard, where I joined the cross-country and track teams. My participation, though, ended after two mediocre years. A few years later, I competed again as a graduate student at Oxford University in England (where graduate students could compete on university teams), but stopped after an undistinguished year. In both cases, running had lost its cultural ties: the sense of purpose, the broader lifestyle, the camaraderie.

Since returning to California in 1976, I’ve continued to train, almost exclusively long slow distance, increasing my weekly miles over the past 10 years. Today, I run twice a day, around 40- 50 miles per week. If you’re on the Presidio roads and trails in San Francisco, you’ll see me at 6 a.m. and 8 p.m., usually with a Nike hat and a hiker’s light, running at a nine-minute-mile pace, alone and in thought.

Similarly, if you look around the streets of Southern California, you’ll see others from the 1960s Fairfax teams who continue distance running: Gary Shapiro, Eli Kantor, Jeff Rothman, Bobby Sherman, Mike Wittlin, Irwin Merein, Roy Cohen, Tom Flesch, Dale Lowenstein, Sam Kiwas.

But the full legacy of those Fairfax years stretches far beyond our teams. Long-distance running has soared in popularity, and today attracts thousands of runners, both men and women, to major races. Thanks to the coaching and life philosophy of John Kampmann and other Southern California running advocates of the 1960s, for many of us reminiscing about high school sports isn’t an exercise in remembering things long gone, but rather reflecting on the birth of ongoing life-affirming habits.

Michael Bernick, an attorney in San Francisco, has served in several government positions in California, including director of the state labor department, the Employment Development Department, 1999-2004, and director of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), 1988-1996.

*Main photo originally published in Track and Field News, May 1969

**Photos courtesy of Michael Bernick.

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