This piece was originally written for Track & Field News (1991) and appears in When Running Was Young and So Were We.
Steve Spence knew how to get ready for the day he needed to be ready.
Track and field became so mesmerizing these past few months, I didn’t give much thought to road racing. First time that’s happened since, well, before Frank Shorter’s Munich effort.
Then one morning, I walked into a friend’s living room and noticed she had a television. I don’t own a TV myself.
I immediately turned hers on. Felt like I’d won the Florida lottery as the beer commercial ended and the World Championship Marathon popped onto the screen.
There was Steve Spence. Looking strong, with a style like a cocked trigger.
“Go, Steve!” I hollered. “Show’em what you got.”
He showed them good. Real good. Man ran a smart race.
The Steve Spence who stood on that victory stand, a World Championship bronze medal around his neck, is the same Steve Spence who’s a dues-paying representative of professional road racing.
And the winner of the first WC [World Championship] medal of any kind by an American male marathoner.
Is he living proof U.S. athletes can compete on the lucrative pro circuit and still represent their country well internationally? Or, is his third place finish in Tokyo a singular random event?
I called Spence. I asked him how he’d pulled it off.
“I knew 10 months before the race I was going to run in the Worlds,” the 29-year-old pointed out. “That proved very beneficial compared to the normal situation in this country. Like the ’92 Olympics. We’ll find out 4 months before the Games if we’re on the team, then we’re expected to be ready again in Barcelona. I had 10 months to prepare for Tokyo.
“I moved to Maine for the summer, running as much as 145 miles weekly,” Spence said. He returned in August to his Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, home for heat training. “Two weeks before the race, I did a 2-hour-and-50-minute run. The first two hours were easy, 6:10s, followed by five miles at 5:15 pace, then a cool down. I felt prepared going in.”
Asked about his strategy for the race, Spence continued to stress his preparation. His training was his strategy.
“I gave up speed because I knew the race wouldn’t be fast,” he stated. “I prepared for a hot and humid race. I trained for endurance.”
Spence toed the starting line, determined to ride an evenly paced effort to a 2:15 finish and a place among the top 10. “I really wanted to be in the top five,” Steve admitted. “But I didn’t want to set my goals too high.”
Spence ran the race he wanted. He was in 25th place when he passed the halfway point in 1:07:15. “I didn’t think I’d ever even see the lead pack,” confessed Spence. “At 37 kilometers, I caught them.” He didn’t keep them.
“My first thought was ‘I am running so much faster than these guys; I’ll just go right by,’ he recalled. “Turned out half the pack was waiting for something to happen, the other half was hanging on.”
In a sense, Spence broke open the race. It was here eventual gold medalist Hiromi Taniguchi surged to a lead he’d never surrender. And it was here Steve Spence earned a place in U.S. marathon history.
“I think for where I am now, I ran the best I could run in those conditions (mid-’80s, 75% humidity),” Steve recalled. “I remember feeling like I had accomplished something definitely significant.”
Spence definitely breathed some fresh air into his country’s distance running fraternity. The first medal in a coon’s age and a pro road racer wins it. Does this end speculation the lucrative road circuit has worked to the disadvantage of many American runners?
Spence laughs at the thought. “I can’t really call the U.S. road racing circuit lucrative,” Spence said. “It’s not lucrative. It’s definitely the opposite. If the roads were lucrative, we wouldn’t have to race so much to survive.”
Spence points directly toward a $20,000 “training stipend” from the Columbus Marathon as a contributing factor to his success in Tokyo. He didn’t have to rely on the roads for his daily bread.
Besides, the road circuit was never a problem for Spence. “I rarely have a bad race. I’ve been fairly selective. I wasn’t over-raced in the past,” Spence offered. “It just took me a while to learn how to run a marathon.”
Watch for Steve Spence to learn how to run the next one faster.
