If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat. – Steven Wright
When I began road racing in 1972, a feared name in New England was Rick Bayko. He was that good. Rick started one of the earliest running magazines. He opened a running specialty shop. He was that important. An Original Gangster of Running.
When did you start running and why?
I started in March of 1964, when I tried out for the high school baseball team (my first love in sports). The coach wanted us to be fit, so he started each workout session with a two-mile run. The first day I was reduced to a walk rather quickly and struggled in somewhere in the middle of the pack. Also got the worst case of shin splints that I’ve ever had. I took my bitter disappointment home that afternoon and pondered the likelihood of making the team. It wasn’t good. Although I loved the sport I sucked at it. Perhaps if I dazzled the coach with my hustle it would improve my chances, so I decided to never walk again during our runs.
The next day it darn near killed me, but I slogged all the way without walking, and finished a bit higher among the ballplayers. By the time the coach decided that we needed more baseball than running I had gradually worked my way up to the second best runner among the baseballers. My hustle earned me a spot on the JV team, where I kept the bench nice and warm. No varsity letter to impress the girls.
As I started my senior year in September of 1964 and was desperate to trade my Wallflower status for Big Man On Campus status with a letter sweater I thought, “Hmm, I did pretty well at two miles last Spring, and cross-country is only a half-mile longer, so why not try that?” It felt like something that – if I was willing to endure the fatigue and sometimes pain – I could get better. By the time of the first meet I had worked my way to the lower part of the ten-man varsity, and by the end of the season was fifth man. I was hooked.
Toughest opponent and why?
Larry Olsen. We eventually were teammates on three different teams. First, during my prime years, in the North Medford Club. Then in the 1980s on Team Etonic. Then when that dried up, on Larry’s Tri-Valley Frontrunners, when he put together a boffo Over-40 team. Larry surged. All the time, throughout any race at any distance. I hated that. I probably ran as evenly paced as anyone in my peer group, usually behind when everyone blasted out at the start, but reeling in most or all of them then they slowed down. If Larry and were both running well he’d surge ahead, fall behind, surge back ahead, fall back behind, etc., etc., etc. I loved him, but he drove me crazy.
Most memorable run and why?
New England Championship 30K in 1973. I’d just come off an indoor track season at Boston State, so the pace in the early miles actually felt easy. By about five or six miles, the lead group had dwindled to just Larry Olsen (see ‘drove me crazy’ above), Will Rogers (soon to become the famous Bill Rodgers), and me. For Rodgers it was only his second race in his comeback to running, although with a third place finish a month earlier in the Silver Lake Dodge 20-miler he was a solid contender. Will was content to follow the lead, stuck to my left shoulder.
Then Olsen surged, and Rodgers followed, getting some twenty or thirty yards ahead. Olsen would ease off a bit, and my steady pace would reel them in, pass them, and Rodgers would go with me. Then Olsen would surge. This pattern repeated itself some ten or twelve times by the 14-mile mark, and I was getting pretty fed up with it. As we took a left turn I glanced back to see where 4th place was, and it was nowhere in sight. We’d gapped the field by a horizon. With some quick mental math I determined that even if I hit the wall I’d finish no worse than the bronze medal, and I didn’t want to get outkicked close to the finish and wonder if I should have put more effort in earlier.
So, with four miles to go, I decided to try to beat Olsen at his own game with the Mother Of All Surges and took off, fully intending to keep it up all four miles. Mind you, we were already running really fast. I was in one of those zones where despite an overwhelming exhaustion I nevertheless was confident that I could keep it up. I was on my own and loving it, moving faster than ever before in a long race. Without realizing it I must have slowed down some, because with two miles to go I picked up the sound of a gentle pitter-patter getting closer. A quick look over the shoulder confirmed that Rodgers had closed down on me again. Damn him!
Amby Burfoot had touted Billy as a Wesleyan teammate from college, so I figured he most likely had a great kick, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way. Having run the New Bedford course six times before, I knew the long County Street hill was coming up soon. My best shot to win was to pull a strategic move there. Halfway up the hill, after letting Rodgers get used to the pace we were at, I made my last ditch surge, hoping to catch him off guard. It worked.
We still had a long way to go, but I managed to keep pouring it on. Spectators said, when I rounded the final corner some sixty or seventy yards from the finish, it looked like I’d been shot out of a cannon. I held off Rodgers by seven seconds, 1:34:13 to 1:34:20, and in the process we became the only two runners to ever eclipse the great Ralph Buschmann’s 1965 record of 1:34:54, when he won by seven minutes.
Fast forward some twenty years, and there was a Massachusetts state trooper who would often pull his cruiser up in front of my running store (Yankee Runner) to come in a grab some entry forms. He’d comment that I looked a bit like Bill Rodgers. A surprising, to me, resemblance that happened more than I thought it should. My own father would see posters of Rodgers and insist it was me. Some people would see pictures of me from races and think it was Bill. Flattering to be sure, at least to me, but probably not to Bill.
The trooper one day got around to asking me if I knew Rodgers, and I said I did. Then with a smirk he asked if I’d ever beaten him – I assumed he assumed I had not. Well, like George Washington, I decided I couldn’t tell a lie (at least not about that), and related the tale of the 30K. He, of course, assumed I was telling a tall tale and warned me he often saw Rodgers at big road races and was going to ask him the next time he saw Bill.
A few years later Steve – that’s the trooper’s name – got in line for an autographed picture and did ask. To his utter shock Bill animatedly told essentially the same story I had. As he finished his tale, he looked Steve right in the eye and added, “But he never beat me again!” Steve was nice enough to ask for a second autographed picture to give to me, and Bill was gracious enough to oblige. Mr. Rodgers has class!
#2 John J. Kelley (The Younger) the winner and #1 Rick Bayko first runner-up.
Biggest disappointment and why?
Never winning my hometown race, the Yankee Homecoming 10-miler. My favorite race, after the Boston Marathon, that I’d first run in 1965. Over the years I placed 2nd, 3rd, 4th twice, 5th, etc. and so forth. The nadir was 1971 when local expectations were high after my 13th place finish at the Boston Marathon. Unfortunately I got a leg injury that dogged me all summer and I finished an ignominious 14th, LOWER THAN IN THE MARATHON. Embarrassing.
What would you do differently if you could do it again? Why?
I would have embraced stretching earlier. Few of us knew to stretch in 1964. The few we saw stretching we thought were not ‘real runners.’ But after ten years of not stretching my calf muscles were so tight I had the first injury I couldn’t heal. From a sharp stab of pain where the Achilles attached to the heel in December 1974, I began a deterioration that lasted some five years. Two cortisone shots, multiple doctors and podiatrists, an operation, and three sets of different orthotics later, I finally stumbled upon the solution of stretching before a run, icing the foot after, and stretching some more. By early 1980, I began reversing the trend backward, and four more years later was finally pain-free, at least from that injury. I now stretch regularly.
Favorite philosopher? Quote?
While few might consider the great Chuck Yeager (he became the first man to break the sound barrier the day before I was born) a philosopher, one of his quotes has become my philosophy. “You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing. You back up but you don’t give up.”
Special song of the era?
Depends on what I’m recalling at any particular moment. 1.) “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones; I can’ listen to it without also hearing the throbbing sound of helicopter blades in my head and carrying me back to Phu Bai, Vietnam (yes, I ran there, but usually only 3/4 of a mile to 1 1/2 miles at a time, just to keep up the routine). 2.) “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” by Bob Dylan: it came to me in a dream, after years of trying to figure out my favorite Dylan song. In my dream I met Dylan casually, and I was intimidated, and he asked me what my favorite song of his was, and I blurted out It Takes A Lot To Laugh It Takes A Train To Cry (“I wanna be you lover baby, I don’t wanna be your boss. Don’t say I never warned you, when your train gets lost.”). The story of my failed relationships. 3.) “Good As I Once Was” by Toby Keith; the lament of an aging athlete, “I used to be Hell on wheels, back when I was a younger man. Now my body says that ‘you can’t do this,’ but my pride says, ‘Oh yes, you can!”
Favorite comedian?
Stephen Wright. Deadpan. “I plan to live forever. So far, so good.” “Every place is within walking distance, if you’ve got the time.” “You know that feeling you get when you lean back in a chair, and you almost tip over, but you catch yourself just before you do? I feel like that all the time.”
What was your ‘best stretch of running? And so why do you think you hit that level at that time?
Early 1971 to late 1974. Four straight top-twenty finishes at the Boston Marathon, a win at the 1972 Philadelphia Marathon, the 1973 New England Championship 30K (above), and many other pretty good races. Probably by adopting the Shakelton family motto Fortitudine Vincimus, by endurance we conquer. Kenny Moore and others made fun of my overstriding gait, too many people to mention said I needed to do track intervals but I didn’t, too many people to mention told me I raced too much.
What I did do is run alone, close to my anaerobic threshold, no matter what the distance, through exhaustion and into injury, reluctantly rest to heal, then do it all over again longer and faster until I got injured again. It was the first thing in my life I was really good at, and I was willing to put up with whatever misery might be involved in order to reap the benefits of being physically fit and occasionally winning.
What was your edge?
Long before I’d heard a term for it, I practiced self-hypnosis and visualization. I almost always trained alone, and I imagined myself in big races, duking it out on the Newton Hills in the Marathon with Finns, and Japanese, and Ethiopians. Or in an upcoming local race with the likes of Larry Olsen, or Tom Derderian, or Peter Stipe or many other friendly rivals. I didn’t do LSD, or conversational pace, I practiced racing. I may have only been doing 60 to 80 miles per week, but they were all hard miles.
What supplementary exercises did you do?
Very little early on. Some calisthenics, or occasional dabbling with weights that never took hold during the early years. Picked up regular stretching in the 1980s. Nautilus routines on and off. Cycling occasionally. Finally in late 1999 found a new passion for the Concept2 rowing machine after a couple of years of not running because of a bad left ankle injury from indoor track racing in my first few years as a Master. I became as religious about the rower as I had been about running, and eventually it rehabbed me well enough to do some decent running in my Sixties.
What was your toughest injury and how did you deal with it?
Four fairly bad ones.
1.) The right Achilles in 1974, mentioned above.
2.) Protruded disk in the middle back in 1983 from bad stretching (yes, stretching CAN be bad as well as good). Chiropractic help, and use of a BackSwing machine got me up to speed.
3.) Left peroneal longus tendonitis from indoor track in 1990. Worsened steadily over the next seven years until I had to stop running altogether, when I was limping all day long. Medical help and rehab never did heal it, only time and later use of a rowing machine got me back to some running in 2001.
4.) Torn right rear medial meniscus in May 2011. Probably from 47 years of running on the left side of the road, and the slope causing my right foot to roll so far inward it thinned out the meniscus and wore down the bottom of the femur and chipped it away, with the chips causing the tear. Surgically repaired in December 2011 and told by the surgeon, “If it were my knee, I wouldn’t run on it, but I know that you will.”
He was right.
In 2014 I finished second in both the New England road racing and cross-county Grand Prix, off a combination of rowing machine workouts, some cycling, and a spare and sparing amount of running. Repeated as the age group runner-up in the road Grand Prix in 2018. The knee still hurts occasionally, but Glucosamine and a careful rationing of running has kept a second surgery and/or an artificial knee at bay.
After 38 Years, Yankee Runner Steps Into Retirement
By Dave Rogers for the Newburyport News. August 2, 2018
NEWBURYPORT – Over the course of 58 years, Rick Bayko of West Newbury has run around the Earth about four times.
And for the last 38 years, he’s run the Yankee Runner shop on Pleasant Street. But on Saturday, the doors will be closing for the final time as the 70-year-old Newburyport native retires.
“I’ve probably been ready for a few years,” Bayko said this week.
Bayko opened Yankee Runner in 1980 on Liberty Street, where he stayed for about two and a half years. From there, he moved to State Street where the Port Tavern now operates. He ran the shop there for five years before moving to its current and final location, 49 Pleasant St.
While there were plenty of times that a long run —he used to average about 60 miles per week — tired him to the point of exhaustion, operating Yankee Runner never became tiresome, he said.
“I can’t remember one day when I woke up and dreaded coming into work,” Bayko said.
These days, he runs about 20 miles a week and supplements his running on a rowing machine — all to keep his cardiovascular system in peak shape.
Bayko said he got into running while a member of the Newburyport High School baseball team. His coach insisted he and his teammates run each day to stay in shape. While he was a middling baseball player, he excelled at running and that fall joined the school’s cross-country team. He’s been running ever since.
Between 1966 and 1987, he ran the Boston Marathon 12 times. He’s also run marathons in Russia, Greece, New York and New Hampshire, and taken home countless medals and trophies – many of which can be seen at Yankee Runner.
Aside from the Boston Marathon, his second favorite race is the Yankee Homecoming 10K. Bayko ran in the 5K race Tuesday, noting he was battling some injuries that kept him from entering the longer race.
“It was very slow and painful but I was glad to do it,” he said.
Over the years, Bayko has gone through hundreds, if not more, pairs of running shoes. He rotates among 12 pairs that he switches daily. Shoes, he said, have come a long way since he started, with modern shoes cushioned far better than before. The cushion has helped preserve his body and kept him on the road longer.
“You’ve got to use the equipment to know how to sell it,” he said of his footwear.
Aside from new technology helping his footwear, there have been advances in clothing that prevent chaffing. With the advent of global positioning satellites, he’s been able to better monitor how many miles he covers and show where he is on his route.
There’s also a heartbeat monitor that helps give him a sense of how his body is doing “just because I am a numbers geek,” Bayko said.
As for why people should take up running, Bayko had a hard time answering.
“That’s the million-dollar question because no one can answer that,” he said.
For him, running became a way to challenge and push himself. He enjoyed seeing tangible proof of his progress and competing with runners he saw at many of the same races.
“It eventually just gets to feel good on its own,” Bayko said.
Asked what he plans to do with his spare time, Bayko said he would continue running but also spend time traveling, learn how to play guitar without banging on it, do some landscaping and basically take better care of his body.
“Bottom line, I feel really blessed I found a job that I really liked doing,” he said.
Full disclosure. At one time in my life, I helmed the masthead of a running magazine and owned part of a running store. For a few of us, it was a natural progression.
Was it difficult running a running magazine?
Yes, running a running magazine was difficult. I knew nothing about publishing or editing and just figured it out as I went along. It started innocently enough as a club newsletter Frank Niro III and I put together for the North Medford Club in 1972. When Frank and I had become road racing fanatics in 1964/65, a guy named Ben Chapinski published a weird newsletter for the club called the NMC Rag. You had to sometimes fumble through pages, and turn them upside down, to find the continuation of a race result or article, but we loved seeing our names in print. By the late 1960s Ben had left the area and the Rag died. Frank and I decided to revive it and called it Rag TWO in homage to the original. Within a year Frank left the area, too, for grad school at Cornell, and I was left to carry on.
I couldn’t help myself. From my first road race in November of 1964, I devoured Browning Ross’s Long Distance Log, and often submitted results with a short summary when I ran a race and it looked like no one else was going to do it. It seemed logical to do the same thing with Rag TWO. My mimeographed sheets (thank you, Billerica High School, who thought I was running off exams for my 9th grade science students) began making their way from NMCers hands to those of other road racers, who asked to be put on the mailing list.
When the list got so big I feared being found out in the teacher’s lounge, I figured I needed to go bigger, and decided to change the format to something more magazine-like. Something like the Long Distance Log. The easiest thing seemed to be having it printed on 8 1/2 X 11 standard paper and folding it in half, so that’s what I did. It didn’t seem that hard to figure out how to organize the pages, so that once printed and collated and stapled the pages correctly ran from 1 to 28. Then I had to drive into Cambridge to a cut-rate printer to leave off the pages, and pick them up two days later, bring them home, collate and staple by hand, address by hand, and walk them down to the Merrimac, MA post office.
By the beginning of 1975, I had 115 paid subscribers and a total circulation of 495, through the couple of running stores selling them for 25 cents per copy and my own hawking at road races.
As subscribers grew and I got more psyched, it was clear the magazine was getting too big to do along with my teaching job. Something had to give, and for me it was an easy choice to quit teaching, since I didn’t like it at all. My wife wasn’t at all happy about that, but she bit her tongue and let me give it a try. With more free time I began going to races, even if I wasn’t running them myself and took pictures and reported the results. I contacted everyone who could provide me info on upcoming races and printed out the most complete schedule anyone had seen in the area, adding the districts of Maine and Connecticut, that were not a part of the New England AAU.
Subscriptions kept growing, and I had to enlist the help of one of my sisters to help collate and staple through the night when the piles of pages were printed. Handwriting the addresses got too time consuming, so I bought a printing machine that could do it. I wanted to do actual photographs rather than photocopying the pictures my wife and I shot, and I processed and printed in my makeshift darkroom (the downstairs bathroom), and took my problem to a local printer in town. At first he graciously turned me down as being too small a job. Later, when I wanted to at least make the cover photo look better and asked him what it would cost to do just that page. I’d grown big enough the changed his mind and took on printing the whole thing. That saved me the trips to and from Cambridge, and I liked that.
It seemed time to drop the Rag TWO name, and I held a contest among the readers to come up with a new name. When I presented the several choices, the submission of Yankee Runner by John Campbell was the clear winner, which pleased me, since I thought the others were lame. As the mag grew larger yet the printer suggested – for a reasonable fee – he could hire a couple of local ladies to collate and staple for me, and I liked that even better.
Although I wasn’t earning as much as my teaching job paid, I was cash flow positive and paying all my bills on time. I still wasn’t making as much as my wife, the nurse, but I hadn’t been as a teacher either. Unfortunately, as with any somewhat successful business, others thought I was sitting on a gold mine, and competitors began cropping up. None of them succeeded, but each one chipped away at what could have been for Yankee Runner.
By 1978 the job had grown big enough to need more regular help, and I advertised for a part-time worker. Minimum wage, 25 to 30 hours per week, doing stuff that needed to be done. I immediately got an application from a frequent racing foe named Peter Wallan, who was looking to quit his job as an engineer. What? But then again, I’d quit a teaching job to earn even less than minimum wage at first. Yeah, he was overqualified, and had to drive for an hour and a half each way, and I tried to talk him out of it, but I hired him. One of the best things that ever happened to me. He turned out to be one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and I even named my son after him.
Funny story. A couple of years later I ran a race in Stoughton, MA where Peter Wallan lived, and after the race he invited me to meet his mother. I felt some trepidation, having lured her son away from a high-paying engineering job to work for minimum wage. But when he introduced me, she smiled broadly, and thanked me profusely for giving her son the first job he really enjoyed doing. I was gobsmacked!
Despite the magazine being better than ever with Wallan’s help, too many other issues cropped up. A massive disagreement with the AAU concerning their suspension of a large group of runners for having participated in a YMCA Non-AAU-Sanctioned, in which I vigorously defended the suspendees, led to AAU officials leaning on race directors to boycott the magazine both with potential advertising and letting me publish their race results. They also encouraged other potential start-up competitors and helped them to try to drive me out.
My wife had finally gotten fed up with me, for reasons too embarrassing to write about here, so I began dealing with divorce, loss of my daughter, and loss of the home we owned (and in which Yankee Runner was made every issue). My own running was in the toilet due to a bad Achilles injury from late 1974, so I was rather bummed. One day before she left, my soon-to-be-ex-wife snidely asked what I was so miserable about, and I answered, “I’m losing my marriage, my daughter, my home, and I can’t run, so if you don’t mind I’d like to feel a little bit sorry for myself right now.” She seemed to agree, and left me to my funk.
We (Wallan and me) hung on a while longer, doing the last few issues from the Winner’s Circle Sports Bar in Salisbury after the house was sold, but I didn’t have the mental attitude necessary to carry on. Despite my offering to give the whole thing to Wallan for free, he declined, and settled for taking his last minimum wage payment in the form of one of the electric typewriters we used to print results.
By the 100th and last issue in mid-1979 we had grown to 2,490 paid subscribers and a total circulation of 2,700. Not bad for a shoestring operation that functioned on little more than passion. I turned down offers to buy it, preferring to end it rather than have it turned into something I didn’t like.
A year or so later Wallan couldn’t help himself, and started a newsletter for his running club, the Brockton Striders, which he eventually morphed into the iconic magazine, the Hockomock Swamp Rat, which he self-published for nearly 30 years.
An Army Draftee Finds Solace In The Mile
Runner-up: My Most Memorable Mile Essay Contest (May 2012)
At the 2010 High Street Mile (Newbury, MA) Rick slugged out a 5:33 at the age of 62!
In 1968 Rick Bayko was a young military draftee at Ft. Dix in New Jersey. Disappointed with an easier physical training regime than expected he found solace in the Mile…
My most memorable Mile wasn’t the first, last, fastest or slowest Mile I ever did. It was done at Ft. Dix NJ in April of 1968 in Army fatigues and combat boots. When I was a reluctant draftee I was disappointed that there wasn’t as much physical training as I’d expected. During the 8-weeks of Basic Combat Training about the only things I enjoyed were the two days along the way that we practiced for the 5-event Physical Fitness Test due at the end of cycle. I was confident of beating the 6:02 necessary for 100 points in the Mile, having done 4:42 on a slow indoor track just prior to induction and 5:37 and 5:41 during the practice runs.
As the first four tests were taking place on the last day word got around that I was psyched for this and betting was heavy amongst the platoon drill sergeants. I’d been thinking sub-5 in my daydreams leading up to it and as the gun fired I went for it with gusto. After two months in Army boots I felt accustomed to them and blasted the first quarter in 75 seconds. It felt right, so I did another and hit the half in 2:30, right on pace. The PA announcer took a moment from calling the times out to interject “Wooo! Lookit that boy go!” Only two more laps, and the third was another 75 for 3:45, with one to go and nobody within a minute of me and the PA guy nearly flabbergasted as I lapped others in clusters. Then the boots got heavy, then the thighs turned to cement, then it felt like running in chin-deep water. The last lap took an exhausting 92 seconds to complete, but the final time of 5 minutes, 17 seconds, while not what I’d hoped for was apparently a Ft. Dix record, at least at that time as far as anyone knew.
Never again did I run a timed Mile in boots. Eventually some four years later I ran nearly a minute faster as a civilian in running flats, but I always considered that 5:17 to be perhaps the best Mile I’d ever run.
Performances
If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet,
what happens if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it? – Steven Wright
2:33:55 for 51st place.