The Shoulders Of History

Hello! Welcome back to Footprint. Happy Friday.

⏪ Sarah Franklin, of the Ted Corbitt Institute for Running History Research, on how the future of the sport can benefit from exploring the past

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Running is so often an individual – and, at times, solitary – activity, dominated by self-focused thoughts about the future. But what of the past?

“People are always like, oh, what’s the next best race? How am I going to get my next best time? What’s the next best carbon-plated foam shoe that I can have?,” said Sarah Franklin. “We’re standing on the shoulders of so much history,” she added.

The Ted Corbitt Institute for Running History Research, which Franklin is developing with Gary, Corbitt’s son, has been established to uncover, and highlight, the people and stories that built this sport over the decades.

“We’re getting people interested in the history,” Franklin told Footprint in an interview. “Everyone has a story, and we’re trying to share those stories, and just keeping the history alive.”

Gary Corbitt has spent years poring over the legacy of his father, often hailed as the father of US long distance running. He created The List: a running total (currently: 42) of every American-born Black woman to run a marathon in under three hours.

The institute has also been amplifying stories on social media, and conducting oral history interviews to better understand how running became the sport it is today.

Its work is driven, in part, by a belief that Ted Corbitt – the first Black American to compete in the Olympic marathon – should be much better known than he is. But it is also rooted in confidence that exploring the history of long-distance running will help set the stage for the future, and the next, more ethnically diverse, running boom.

There were times when women weren’t allowed to run in New York, noted Franklin, and when the women’s races that were organized were “almost slapdash – very little police presence, no water, rain or shine, any weather.”

Learning that context helps people to better appreciate “how fortunate we are these days to be able to have so many of the luxuries of running that we do,” she said, “and also the people that came before.”

The initial iteration of The List spans several dozen of the fastest American-born Black women to run the marathon – from Krystine Beneke, which finished the Boston Marathon in 2:59:47 in 2014, to Erika Kemp, who finished last year’s Houston Marathon in 2:22:56.

The institute recently expanded The List, which now includes honorable mentions for sub-3:15 marathoners, and sub-3:30 marathoners. It has also started compiling another list (current total: 220), of American-born Black men who have broken the three-hour barrier.

“I would love, on some level, for us to put ourselves out of business on The List – if it just becomes so ubiquitous, that American-born, in particular Black men and women, are running [so many] sub-three hours that we don’t need to keep track any more,” said Franklin. “I don’t think that's going to happen any time soon.”

“We don’t want to stop doing it per se,” she added. “But there will be some point, hopefully, that it won’t become such a groundbreaking moment for running history that people are breaking three hours.”

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