Gary Corbitt is a man with a mission. Son of the legendary running pioneer Ted Corbitt, he seems to have inherited good doses of the vision and the quiet persistence that made his father such an influential figure (as a founder of New York Road Runners, innovative course measurer, African American Olympic marathoner, and pioneering ultrarunner). With the contemporary sport now thriving beyond the dreams of Ted's generation, Gary's focus is on preserving that era's groundbreaking history, and recognizing the legacy of those—like his father—who led it.

Last week Corbitt circulated a draft document that is the culmination of five years' patient consultation and research. Titled “The state of track and field and long-distance running history,” it reports on the urgent need for that history to be valued and preserved, right now, in libraries and universities across the land. It confronts the challenges of coordinating that process in such a huge nation and in such a diverse and booming sport.

The urgency is all around us. The generation that created the first great running boom in the 1960s and ’70s is now aged in their late 60s and up; or already gone. The sport grew with such spontaneous energy, and in a spirit of such independence, breaking free of all the old official constraints and controls, that there was never any central process for recording its growth. No one had time to think about posterity. Active runners, busy with their own training, created every innovation. The documents of that era—race results, reports, newspaper coverage, magazine articles, committee minutes, proposals, personal letters, journals, scrapbooks, printed photographs—date from before the digital age. All these dog-eared yet vital records of the era are scattered in countless folders and cardboard boxes in dusty attics and under spare beds across the nation.

Even more vulnerable are the personal memories and stories. Corbitt is looking to capture those histories. He has begun an oral history project, interviewing athletes and officials from the 1950s–60s.

Do runners in our age of selfies even care about history? Yes, is the surprising answer.

The Boston Marathon and other long-established races keep their allure. Bill Rodgers, Joan Benoit-Samuelson, and other founding icons attract ever more admiring crowds. And there's a spike in registrations every time a race celebrates a significant anniversary. They flew in thousands to Athens for the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon. Watch for the 50th anniversaries of women at Boston from 2016 to 2022. Runners do value history, and they enjoy the sense that they are making their own contribution to a long and significant story.

That significance goes beyond running. Only now are we recognizing that running is so much more than a sport. In universities, the story of modern running is increasingly a component in the history of women, African Americans, professionalism in sports, the leisure apparel industry, destination tourism, immigration, society's attitudes to health and aging, and even the very concept and function of the modern city.

Could you write a history of Boston or New York since 1970 without mentioning their marathons? Could any account of the social emergence of women omit their growing dominance in the running movement that has transformed so many of their individual lives, and given such public proof of their physical capability? For all these reasons, the documented history of running needs to be available to the future.

Corbitt has organized his ideas partly as a SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) analysis.

He identifies strengths that include the archives and collections already acquired by various halls of fame and some universities; the Road Runners Club of America's oral history project in women's running; and the possibility of tax deductions for donated collections where value can be established.

The U.S.'s greatest problem or weakness is its sheer size, Corbitt considers, with no adequate central leadership within a complex sport that spans high school track, the Olympic Games, masters marathons, mountain, trail, and ultrarunning, and everything in between. Another weakness is that it is so difficult for halls of fame in a non-spectator sport like running to attract enough visitors to be financially viable.

Opportunity comes from the graying of the running boom's first generation, coinciding with the emergence of sports history as a legitimate scholarly area, and digital technology that is revising the concept of a research archive. Corbitt also astutely points out that wealthy not-for-profit races might be persuaded that giving financial support to historical research is legally appropriate to their mission. Running is too powerful and too rich, he implies, to be neglectful of its own legacy.

The greatest threat, Corbitt says, is death itself, and surviving families who may not understand the significance of dusty old collections of running scrapbooks, or who will dispose of valuable items piecemeal on eBay.

Corbitt himself has begun to fill the biggest need. His draft paper provides a painstakingly compiled list of relevant public and private collections, archives and libraries, an essential starting point for any researcher. The list may not be comprehensive, but is the best available. It extends from coast to coast, and internationally includes the AIMS Marathon Museum in Berlin, the British Columbia Sports Hall of Fame Museum in Vancouver, the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, the athletics collection in the library of Birmingham University, UK, and many more.

It also lists a range of remarkable individuals who have spent their lives in running—officials, coaches, journalists, broadcasters, as well as runners—and have built private collections that need to survive them.

His fifteen recommendations cover the need for a coordinating committee, financial support, and a national process that starts regionally, with centers probably located in supportive colleges, and with endowed funds to ensure ongoing custodianship. Above all, he wants the sport to take a coordinated approach. This would cover things such as identifying college libraries where running-related collections might be established, and working with estates to make it easier for families to donate materials and receive tax benefits.

Privately, Corbitt feels he has probably gone as far as he can. He wrote in an email:

“I’ve been attempting to build this movement since 2010. There have been some successes, but we need new blood and energy. Personally, I’m limited in the time I can put into this big picture project, at the expense my own history agenda items, such as Ted Corbitt, New York Pioneer Club, African-American long-distance running, early women pioneers, and my oral history project. I’d like www.tedcorbitt.com to grow into a running history repository.

So I offer this document with the hopes that it can be a catalyst to grow this movement.”

The draft is out for comment. For a copy, and to contribute ideas, email corbittg@comcast.net.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io