On Monday morning, the Deseret News Marathon will celebrate its silver anniversary, marking a milestone in the life of a race that has been colorful, varied and sometimes just plain strange.
And educational. During the past 24 years, Deseret News race officials have learned much about marathoning and runners. For instance, they now know what a marathon is, which wasn't always the case. When the idea to sponsor a marathon was first proposed to the powers-that-be at the Deseret News, they were, uh, fairly clueless."What's a marathon?" they asked.
They also discovered something else. "No one can run 26 miles," the Deseret News bosses said. Ha! What do bosses know. In 24 starts, 84 percent of the 14,540 runners who have entered the Deseret News Marathon have actually finished, including a seven-year-old boy, a 74-year-old man, a 68-year-old lady, a man with no feet, a man with one arm, a man with no sight, an NBA basketball player, a convict on a day pass and even, most miraculously, several Deseret News writers and editors, thus providing a sense of hope for everyone.
In the end, the people who make these kinds of decisions at the Deseret News decided to sponsor the race, at least once. "It will never last," one of them recalls thinking at the time.
Wrong again. The marathon has endured. It is the oldest marathon in the Intermountain area and believed to be the second oldest in the West. It has lasted through six Presidents, from Nixon to Clinton. It has lasted through hippies and yuppies, leisure suits and bell bottoms, and several changes in the width of ties. It also has survived a series of misadventures - cheating, wrong-way turns, traffic jams, mass barfing and all sorts of other weirdness (see accompanying story on page D3).
For all its durability, the race had an inauspicious start. On July 24, 1970, 73 runners, all men, gathered at the Farmington courthouse for a 26.2-mile race back to the Hotel Utah in downtown Salt Lake City.
"We felt like we were paving new ground," recalls Keith West, who served as race director for 24 years.
And they were. The running boom hadn't quite begun and this was the first marathon run in the Intermountain Area. It showed. There were no aid stations - translation: no water for the runners - and it was hot. Temperatures would climb above 90 degrees before the race was done. Forty-three runners managed to finish the race.
"It was a low-key, social event," recalls West. "It was a pioneering event. We didn't know what to expect. We were actually quite surprised that so many registered. We expected half that."
Ray Barrus, a health teacher and coach at the College of Eastern Utah who was winding down a career as a world-class steeplechaser, won the first race easily, with a time of 2:49:47. By 18 miles he had a 10-minute lead and a huge thirst, so he stopped and walked much of the latter part of the race.
The following year the Deseret News moved the marathon to a course that followed the Mormon pioneer trail, which seemed appropriate since the race was held on the holiday that honored the Mormon pioneers. The course was measured by backtracking 26.2 miles from Liberty Park up through Emigration and East canyons. After a year of traffic jams on the narrow two-line highway in East Canyon, the start was moved to its current location in Parleys Canyon.
The marathon grew steadily until it peaked in the late '70s and early '80s. Some 1,400 runners entered the race annually from 1979 to 1982, and then the running boom, and particularly the popularity of marathoning, faded. The number of entries declined annually from 1980 until 1989, bottoming out at 381, but, curiously, the entries have increased annually in the four years since then, reaching 496 last year.
From its inception, the Deseret News Marathon has been largely the domain of grass-roots runners, although a few world-class performers, such as Jane Wipf, Demetrio Cabanillas, Paul Cummings and Scott Bringhurst, have dropped in occasionally. But they're exceptions. World-class marathoners, able to run only two or three marathons a year anyway, tend to look for fast marathon courses and fast times to promote their careers, and they're unlikely to get either on a mountainous course at altitude in the heat of July.
Nevertheless, fast times are possible. The Deseret News Marathon has produced several marvelous performances, particularly Wipf's 2:45:35 in 1980 - which she did with grace and ease - and Cabanillas's 2:16:57 in 1982 - which he did running virtually alone, and on a course in which no one else has even broken 2:20. Bob Wood, chairman of the long distance running for USA Track and Field, calls Cabanillas' mark "incredible. That record will stand until we're all under the sod."
That's just one more challenge for local marathoners, along with the demanding course itself. By next week some 15,000 runners will have tried the Deseret News Marathon, and who knows how many more will try in the years ahead. A few years ago, the future of the race (and marathoning everywhere) was in doubt, but the increased entries, along with a new co-sponsor (Granite Furniture), has given it new life. After 25 years, the Deseret News Marathon, like those who run it, has proved to be nothing if not durable.
*****
Additional Information
Marathon man
Demetrio Cabanillas, who made his name winning nine Deseret News Marathons, owns the four fastest times in the 25-year history of the race.
2:16:57 Demetrio Cabanillas 1982
2:18:13 Demetrio Cabanillas 1981
2:19:24 Demetrio Cabanillas 1984
2:19:35 Demetrio Cabanillas 1979
2:20:04 Scott Bringhurst 1974