The ruby is one of the most coveted gemstones of all, and within its heart is said to lie a fire that grows brighter with each passing year. One of the flowers representing a 40th anniversary is the nasturtium, which symbolizes patriotism, conquest, victory and impetuous love. Sounds about right.
1983. “A ridiculous time,” that’s what a race announcer said when Joan Benoit crossed the finish in a world record 2:22:43. How ridiculous? Well, since WWII, Boston’s men’s race had been won ten times with slower times than Joanie’s. Heck, Amby Burfoot’s winning time in 1968 was only 25 seconds faster.
Oh, but wait.
1983
The 1983 Boston Marathon produced the fastest, deepest men’s results an American marathon has ever seen–this in a marathon 30 years before the current “second running boom.” In 1983, 84 mostly North American runners broke 2:20, and 263 bettered 2:28:30.
Craig Snapp collected the following amazing facts about the 1983 Boston Marathon. [Source:RW 2010.]
1. Americans grabbed 22 of the top 23 finishes, with Dean Matthews finishing 23rd in 2:14:46.
2. Overall, 84 runners broke 2:20. That still stands as a record for a single marathon. Seventy-six of the 84 were Americans. Africans: 0.
3. A total of 313 finishers broke 2:30.
4. In addition, 2,647 runners broke 3 hours. That puts the ’83 Boston third in this category among all marathons ever run, including many since that were six to seven times larger.
5. The sub-3-hour finishers represented 49.1% of all finishers. Last year, 1342 runners broke 3 hours, totaling less than 5.8% of the field.
6. The average finishing time for all men was 2:59:51.
7. A decade after his win in 1973, Jon Anderson ran only 16 seconds slower than the 2:16:03 that brought him the laurel wreath in ’73. This time, he finished 34th. Remember, ’73s weather sucked big time.
8. One runner changed strategy moments before the starter’s gun was fired, and covered the first mile in 4:47. That runner was Joan Benoit. She broke the tape in 2:22:43, shattering the world record by 2:46.
My Dinner With Greg Meyer – Boston Marathon
I first ran the Boston Marathon, April 1973. Greg Meyer gave me a t-shirt in Honolulu, December 2014. Lot of running, love those years in between. Many many memories. Most of which I’ve forgotten. Some I have recorded. – JDW
April, 1983.
“Boston can make a person, that’s true,” said Greg Meyer over dinner a day or two before being made. “But you are only as good as the people you beat. If the field weakens, it will be a shallow victory. The top runners will recognize that. And if it comes down to running for thousands of dollars somewhere or running for nothing here, you know what they’ll do.”
That paragraph, that quotation, goes a long way toward explaining or understanding Greg Meyer. Thoughtful, outspoken, a lover of children, chocolate eclairs and off-color jokes, the bearded, balding 27-year-old winner of the 1983 BAA Marathon is nothing if not direct. If you don’t understand Greg Meyer, it must be because you are not listening or he has chosen not to share himself.
JDW: What does the Boston win mean to you?
GM: Well, I tell you, I got kinda upset after winning the marathon, with everyone telling me how much Boston was worth financially. What it does for me athletically is much more important. It opens so many doors to better races and bigger competition.
JDW: What about the race itself?
GM: I was surprised Benji [Durden] ran so hard, so early. I thought he’d wait until 17 or 18, then go for it. Actually, I was surprised at how bad I felt the first half of the race.
JDW: You’re credited with 2:09:01. Couldn’t you have found a couple extra seconds somewhere?
GM: I know I was on World Record pace for 20 miles. But a record didn’t matter. I was there for the win and that’s all. I know I can run faster. The last mile was on automatic pilot; I did 5:26 or something like that. I had been holding up well, but I was looking around quite a bit to see if anyone was closing. Then some guy on the press truck hollered, “Man, there’s nobody coming!” and I just shut down.
I was more than happy to be alone in the last few miles. I still have vivid memories of crawling on my face the last four miles in ’81.
JDW: Why run Boston at all? Alberto [Salazar] didn’t seem to think it was necessary.
GM: Al had already won it. I didn’t feel people took me seriously as a marathoner last year, despite the third-fastest time in the country. I won Chicago in 2:10 and it was a deeper field than New York’s, but it didn’t seem to get the credit it should’ve. I figured people couldn’t discount Boston. Except for Al and [Dick] Beardsley, it was a dry run for the Olympic Trials.
JDW: But you surrendered your berth at the World Championships.
GM: Looking at ’84, I did not want to run only marathons. I thought that would hinder my development. Besides, I’m still looking for credibility on the track. I’d rather go the Pan-Ams at 10 kilometers. People don’t look at the roadie as important as the trackster. That’s not fair.
Herb Lindsay, Jon Sinclair, me, we all had to build our reputations on the roads. Five years ago, it was a rare athlete who could come out of college and make a living at running. Roads were where the money was, so that’s where we went. Now I want to show what I can do on the track.
JDW: Did your 27:53 10K at the Colonial Relays tell you something? It only hinted to the rest of us?
GM: When I ran that time, I almost skipped Boston. It all seemed so easy and it was a solo. I only wanted a 28:40 or 28:30, but once I pushed the pace a little, I found myself alone. I figured why not keep the pressure on. After that 27:53, I felt confident that it would be real hard for three people to beat me out at 10K.
JDW: 27:53 is nice work, but it’s hardly a guarantee.
GM: It was really easy, but you’re right. What’s important is that it came at the end of my hardest preparation for Boston. After winning the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler unpressed in 46:13, I put in my biggest mileage week. After finishing 120 miles, I stepped on the track, I stepped on the track and ran 27:53.
JDW: You’ve got quite a range of talent, having run a sub-4:00 mile and now a 2:09:01 marathon. Where do you see yourself on the Olympic team?
GM: The event I would like to be in is the marathon. I think I can run in the low 2:08s, which I feel should be able to win a place on the team. And I feel I have a better chance at a medal in the marathon. There’s more opportunity to use that talent you mentioned. The U.S. team should be very strong at the marathon, much more capable of success at the Games than in the 10K. We’re simply more world class at the longer distance.
JDW: What got you here?
GM: You mean world class? Well, I don’t think Boston was my breakthrough. The key, if there’s one in my training, is my hard 20-milers. They’re good efforts. But the real key has to be the consistency of my training in the last three or four years. Guys like Salazar and [Craig] Virgin have always thought of themselves as world class since they were kids. I never thought of myself that way. It’s only recently that I’ve become focused, that I’ve begun to think of myself on a higher plane. I feel I have much more room for improvement.
JDW: So, you expect some great things from yourself this summer?
GM: Well, I did. I’m injured. It was at Boston actually. During the indoor season I developed tendinitis – could be an inflamed bursa – atop the Achilles. After the marathon, about two weeks after, I went for my first long run. Fifteen miles easy. The next day I could hardly walk. I did the usual stuff… ice, aspirin, etc.
JDW: How is your Achilles?
GM: Well, now the big problem is a metatarsal on my right foot. When I try to run it’s like someone put a spike in it. I guess I hurt it compensating for my Achilles. I am having a cortisone shot in the Achilles but I don’t know about the toe. And after the injection, I can’t train for ten days or so.
This conversation – not unlike the film “My Dinner With Andre” – was interrupted continually as Meyer disappeared to refill his plate. The man eats like a shotputter with a tapeworm.
The man seems to have a firm grip on life right now, almost as if it were a knife and fork.
Greg Meyer picks up the bill for half the table, including the grateful journalist, then clutches his wife’s hand, and walks off without looking back.
Track & Field News, June 1983
Benji Durden, 3rd, 2:09:57
“There were many fit runners who came ready to race at Boston that year. Many of us were at our lifetime peaks, though we didn’t know it at the time. In that era, sub-2:15 marathoners were common, and even sub-2:11 wasn’t all that rare. The weather was good: a tailwind but not too strong; cool temperatures; and just a hint of rain. It was also the trials for the first world championships marathon, which added to our focus.”
Bill Rodgers, 10th, 2:11:58
“Great weather is always the key, along with the racing experience. Look at the champions that year–Greg Meyer and Joan Benoit Samuelson. They were coming into their prime, and they both had prior Boston races. That’s a big factor: When you return to Boston, you run faster. You learn how to run the course. In 1983, Boston was a sort of trials race for the first world championships, and that made the competition even greater.”
Benoit Batters Boston
Women’s Track & Field World.
Yup, had a column in this wonderful magazine, too. Gave it away free, on Nike’s dime.
The only publication in the world devoted exclusively to Women’s Track & Field.
June 1983. On The Road Again.
No big head here. When you last tuned in, I had just made the most audacious prognostication regarding the winners of the 1983 BAA Marathon (Boston, April 18). As you remember, I predicted Greg Meyer and Eleanor Simonsick. Ah, such accuracy.
Meyer, of course, won rather easily, establishing a course record of 2:09 flat. Simonsick probably would have won, if she had entered and Joan Benoit had not. Miss Benoit – actually, I guess not all that close a friend of mine – virtually promised me, personally, she would not participate in this year’s race. Apparently, she changed her mind and only told her closest confidantes.
Benoit, the 25-year-old coach at Boston University, appeared in Hopkinton intent on breaking the world record (2;25:29) jointly held by Allison Roe and Grete Waitz. Waitz had tied the mark at the London Marathon the previous day. Just to make things more interesting, Roe was in Boston rather hopeful of re-establishing her pre-eminence. She need not have bothered.
2:22:43 is the new world record for the marathon by a woman. Oh, what a woman. Benoit blitzed the first 10K in 31:50 and never looked back. She passed ten miles in 51:38, and went past the halfway point in 1:08:23. Obviously, all of Benoit’s long splits bettered existing standards. It was quite a performance.
You may hear some discussion of the salubrious conditions which accompanied Benoit’s accomplishment – cloudy skies with temperatures in the forties, a fifteen mile per hour tailwind most of the way. Okay, optimal weather, but Benoit still had to move her legs 26 miles 385 yards. And she prepared for her Boston effort by standing in the same chill Saturday afternoon coaching her BU squad through a track meet. The kids still came first.
Coming along ever so far back in second place was Jacqueline Gareau, breaking the 2 1/2 hour mark for the first time with 2:29:27. Almost seven minutes back of the winner. Almost inconceivable.
Boston, April 18, 1983.
“A ridiculous time,” a race announcer said, describing Joan Benoit’s effort as she approached the finish line of the 87th Boston Marathon.
Destroying the World Record by 2:46 as it did, the 2:22:43 by Benoit was sublime at the very least. The 25-year-old Boston University women’s coach has added, if not another dimension, then certainly another plateau towards ultimate athletic achievement for women. She is alone.
How “ridiculous” was Benoit’s mark? Well, since World War Two, Boston’s men’s race has been won ten times with slower marks than Joanie’s. Amby Burfoot earned the 1968 laurel wreath with a clocking just 25 seconds faster. The 1975 women’s WR win by Liane Winter was nearly 20 minutes slower.
Twenty minutes!
Even Benoit expressed some incredulity, despite secret pre-race hopes for a “2:23:something.”
She confessed that passing 10M in 51:30 “scared me a little bit.”. But Benoit runs how she feels: “I felt good and thought, ‘What the heck?’ “
She had been aware of her pace early on, surrounded as she was by men with very low competitor’s numbers. Her 31:50 split for 10K has been bettered by an American only twice in open events – both times by one J. Benoit.
“The men kept saying, ‘Lady, watch it, ‘but I always felt in control,” said Benoit. “I kept listening to what my body told me and I stayed in complete control all the time.”
Despite blistered feet, she passed the half-marathon point in 1:08:23, faster by 39 seconds than her official American Record. The hard early pace – established in part to escape Allison Roe, but also to set up a new global mark – began to signal some rebellion in the Wellesley Hills.
A side stitch at 15 miles. “I slowed the pace down,” Benoit recounted. “Then I took some water, collected myself and moved on.”. Onward into history.
Benoit’s clocking clipped nearly three minutes off the 2:25:29, first run by Roe in the ’81 NYC Marathon. Just a day before Joanie’s WR at Boston, Grete Waitz had matched Roe’s mark at the London Marathon.
“Allison called me Sunday to tell me about Grete,” said Benoit. “I just told her that all I wanted to do was run the best race I was capable of running.
“I had heard that everyone expected Allison to be on my tail, but I didn’t want to play cat-and-mouse with her. During the race, I heard people say she was behind me at about five miles, but I didn’t hear anything about her after that.”
Leg cramps forced Roe out of the race at 17M. Runner-up honors went to 1980 champion Jacqueline Gareau of Canada, who ran wonderfully – yet distantly – for a 2:29:28 personal record.
It was a journey not without pain for Benoit.
“My feet are killing me,” she confessed afterward. The blisters she developed didn’t slow her record tempo, however.
Benoit added, “I ran those last few miles really hurting in general. All I could think of was last year’s race when Alberto Salazar and Dick Beardsley sprinted at the end through all those crowds and all that noise. How did they ever do it?”
This was also a triumph of will for the diminutive Benoit. Operations on both Achilles tendons in December of 1981 relegated her to extensive exercycle workouts for almost half of 1982. But she returned last September with a 2:26:11 win at the Nike race in Eugene, the fastest loop time ever.
After that race, Benoit commented, not surprisingly, “I know I can go much faster.”. This year at Boston, Joan – and the rest of the world – got a glimpse of just how much faster.
Whether TAC and the NRDC will accept Benoit’s blazer here as a record is not cut and dried, as some detractors have pointed to “illegal aid” provided by 2:13 performer Kevin Ryan, who apparently ran the full distance with Benoit, giving her constant moral support, if nothing else.
Critics claim he went beyond that, keeping her on pace and carrying a water bottle so that she could skip aid stations.
Whatever the outcome of this alleged controversy, the fact remains Joan Benoit made it on her own two feet from point A to point B faster than any woman before.
Greg Meyer destroyed no World Record, although he put some heat on Alberto Salazar’s course standard through 20 miles. On his way to a 2:09:01 triumph, Meyer passed 20M in 1:37:11, some 18 seconds faster than Salazar managed during his 2:08:13 effort.
With the win seemingly more important than the record here – the first three American finishers would claim places on the U.S. team going to the World Championships – Meyer lost some concentration. But that’s all the 27-year-old Bill Rodgers Running Center employee lost.
Ten miles into the race, Benji Durden had assumed the lead, with Meyer, Ed Mendoza and Paul Cummings in close attendance. Meyer pulled alongside Durden by 19M and a mile later, Greg went for the win.
“Before the second hill, I threw in a fake,” said Meyer of a fake surge. “But it worked. I’m sure Benji was tired. After that, I knew it would be hard for anyone to catch me, so I relaxed. I was content to be alone for the last four miles.”
Behind Meyer, Ron Tabb ran the race of his life, biding his time before sweeping past Durden around 26M to come home 2nd in a PR 2:09:32. He is now #5 American ever, while Durden’s career-low 2:09:58 for 3rd place put him #6.
Perennial Boston hero Bill Rodgers, bogged down by a heavy cold, struggled home 10th in 2:11:59, the lowest placing of the five Bostons he has finished. “This may be my last marathon,” Boston Billy offered. “There is a big gap between me and the top guys. It’s frustrating.”
And now there’s a big gap, too, between Joan Benoit and the rest of the world.
Nobody can say I didn’t warn them.
https://citiusmag.com/joan-benoit-samuelson-boston-marathon-world-record-video/