50th Anniversary of the First U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials

Sunday, August 18, 1968 was a momentous day for Alamosa, the small rural south central Colorado city nestled in the San Luis Valley. But this day would also be a historic one for the nascent sport of American long distance running. On this day, Alamosa was the site of the first ever U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. Prior to 1968 a committee selected the U.S. Olympic marathon team after their review of performances. But this was the year that Mexico City would be hosting the Olympic Games at an altitude of 7,350’ above sea level.

Past marathon trials athletes met at Adams State University in Alamosa, CO. Back Row (left to right): Robert Deines, Dr. David Costill, Bill Clark, Amby Burfoot, Ellen Clark, Hal Higdon, John Peterson, Tom Heinonen, Jan Frisby. Front Row (l to r): Frank Shorter, Kenny Moore, George Young, Billy Mills, Coach Joe Vigil, Steve Gachupin.

Joe I. Vigil, coach of the cross country and track and field program at Alamosa’s Adams State College, saw an opportunity. Alamosa had a 7,544 foot elevation. So why not take advantage of this and bring America’s best long distance runners to town to train at altitude? Vigil teamed up with American marathon record holder Leonard “Buddy” Edelen, who was already on campus as a graduate assistant, and some Alamosa businessmen who were interested in bringing Olympic activity to the city. For two and a half years Vigil and Edelen traveled to wherever the American Athletic Union (AAU) had a meeting to promote their idea. At the AAU 1967 annual meeting in Chicago, Alamosa was chosen to host the first ever Olympic Marathon Trials.

According to Vigil, “We wanted to make it fair with head-to-head competition. There were also other places in the U.S. that were at a high altitude and may have been interested in hosting the trials, but they weren’t as well organized as us.”

Under the auspices of the AAU, individual long distance runners and teams from all over the country were invited to train in Alamosa and compete in the marathon trials. There would be no qualifying standards – anyone who believed they could go the distance could register. Entry fees were set at $2 for individuals and $5 for teams. First class housing would be available on campus for $3 a night.

The AAU required that all participants undergo a medical examination. Physicians in the area refused Vigil’s request for pro bono services. Dr. David Costill, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University, and a few of his friends, accepted Vigil’s invitation to perform physiological tests, including hydration, on the trials registrants.

went on to represent the U.S. in the Olympic Marathon in Mexico City.

Vigil and Edelen brought in Ted Corbitt, a pioneer in the accurate calibration of racecourses, to measure and certify the route. The course would consist of five 5.2 mile loops on roads east of the campus. The start time was 3:00 p.m. to align with Mexico City’s Olympic Marathon race time. By race day afternoon, 113 runners registered. They included a number of individuals who would soon become icons in the burgeoning American sport of long distance running that would eventually ignite a worldwide boom: Amby Burfoot, Ron Daws, Hal Higdon, Kenny Moore, Billy Mills, Gary Muhrcke, Tom Osler, Frank Shorter, and George Young. When the event was over, only 63 runners had succeeded in crossing the finish line. The rest had dropped out for a variety of reasons, including dehydration. Olympic steeplechaser George Young had won. Young was immediately followed by Kenny Moore, and Minnesotan Ron Daws. These three men

Vigil’s experience with the 1968 Olympic Marathon Trials had a deep and lasting impact. “I had never been to a coaching clinic or attended a coaching school. I already had a good education with a Masters degree, but being around guys like David Costill got me all fired up. I decided to pursue my Ph.D. in Exercise Physiology from the University of New Mexico, which I got in 1971. The rest is history. The Trials in 1968 motivated me to dedicate my life to coaching, teaching, and service to sharing information with other coaches. That’s what I am still doing today. I give clinics all over the world.” The 1968 Trials and Vigil’s leadership also transformed Adams State into a long distance running powerhouse that won 19 cross country and track and field national championships.

More recently, Vigil was the driving force behind the organization of a weekend of events to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the trials as an epic historic event in the world of American distance running. Vigil invited all the 1968 trials participants to return to Alamosa’s Adams State University for a reunion, which included speech presentations by Olympic marathon medalist and American record holder Deena Kastor and husband Andrew, an 8 kilometer “Race With the Legends” using the original trials route, and a banquet. To honor Coach Vigil for bringing the trials to their city in 1968 the Alamosa City Council proclaimed July 28 to be “Joe I. Vigil Day.”

Some of the trials veterans were asked to share their recollections of the 1968 event. This is what they had to say:

Amby Burfoot

Amby Burfoot grew up in Groton, Connecticut and won the Boston Marathon in 1968. Burfoot served as Executive Editor of Runner’s World magazine for many years. “In 1968 I was 21 years old and a senior at Wesleyan University. A month after winning the Boston Marathon I won the New England Championship three mile and 3000 meter steeplechase on the track, but pulled a butt muscle. I had no business running the race because it was not my event. I just wanted an adventure that I might not have again. A lot of us were obsessed about the upcoming marathon trials in Alamosa, so instead of resting for a few days or weeks and getting over the injury, I trained through it and it never got better. I hate to say my running career peaked at age 21, but that’s pretty much the case.

I was in the group of roughly 20 of the best marathoners in the country at the time that received a modest amount of funding from the U.S. Olympic Committee to live in Joe Vigil’s dorms at Adams State in Alamosa for a month. They knew that we were going to have to try and get adapted to altitude a little bit. Significantly, among us were not the guys that later went one-two in the race, George Young and Kenny Moore, because they had already found independent altitude training for themselves. That might have been a very smart thing for them because the rest of us were in the boiling pot of Alamosa where we were all staring blankly at each other for 30 days before the trials.

“Honestly, I was pretty miserable the whole time because I was injured. Alamosa was the antithesis of everything I had grown up with in running, which was cross country, hills, state parks, forested trails to run on whenever possible, and the Long Island Sound lapping at the edge of my training routes. There I was in Alamosa where there was nothing but godawful roads that went on for miles and miles and miles in one direction straight as an arrow with no elevation change at all. Now I was running through the desert chafing against cactus, blowing tumbleweeds, and jackrabbits. This didn’t help my emotional state in any way.

“Being injured and not getting better, I knew I was going nowhere fast. Here I was surrounded by all these guys who were doing epic workouts that were getting reported back to us by word of mouth in the small circle of runners there. We all knew that Ron Daws was doing crazy great workouts with Ed Winrow. Steve Matthews was off on his own somewhere doing faster, longer workouts than anyone else. It was all just a big psych out for me.

“Fast forward to race day. I was able to start and be in the group that went slow. I figured that was my only and best chance. I ran three laps of the race. My leg hurt, my butt muscle was tight, constricted and not functioning like it should. So I dropped out after three laps, at about 15 or 16 miles, and sat on the sidelines to watch the winners come in an hour later. That’s my trials story.

“The trials were important in terms of both their effect on me and the sport of road running and marathoning in America. I had Olympic ambitions, as we all did. Having the opportunity to go to something called an Olympic Trials, although not the Olympic Games, increased my ambition, motivation, and desire to run better. I don’t think there’s been another time in American distance running history when 20 of the top marathoners in the country lived in dormitory rooms across from each other for a month, trained their butts off, and went out drinking beer in the evenings. It was a very tight, competitive, fantastic group of athletes there. Running poorly and dropping out made me want to train well, get back in shape, and run fast again. So it was very motivating to me in that regard.

“Secondly, was the trials effect on American distance running. As far as I know, it was really the first marathon in the U.S. where actual talented athletes entered. By that, I mean George Young and Kenny Moore. George was equal to any distance runner in the U.S. for decades and here he was in the marathon. That just never used to happen. For example, the 5000 meter runners, like Bob Schul and others, didn’t run marathons. They only ran track events. [Track runner] Kenny Moore was a tremendously gifted athlete and fast runner. He was at the trials. Bill Clark and some of the other guys there were young and fast as well. So it was the first time you got real talent there. Of course, Frank [Shorter] wasn’t a challenger yet. Nevertheless, some strange force of the universe pulled Frank into that circle of marathoners. Even though he got himself going in cross country and track for a few years he was clearly drawn to the marathon. Undoubtedly, the marathon was where he made his big mark on U.S. and world running. So the trials were a very important event on a lot of different levels.

“Also, when one considers the impact that Coach Joe Vigil has had on running in America and one further considers that he spent most of his life in Alamosa, Colorado and not in Boston, New York, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles, or wherever, it’s absolutely astonishing. It’s almost impossible to believe that one man in a godforsaken out of the way place like Alamosa had the influence he had and continues to have on American running. But he did…and it began a few years before 1968 when he and Buddy Edelen began cranking things up for the trials and it has continued for more than 50 years. I believe Joe is one of the unsung heroes of American distance running without having a name like Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers, Meb Keflezighi, or others on anybody’s list. He has just been there forever helping people, such as Pat Porter and Deena Kastor, achieve tremendous things. There’s no question he’s relied on his scientific study and knowledge, but his magic is the force of his personality, which is unbelievably strong. It’s tough, but it’s not the cliché of the military toughness. It’s toughness based on wanting individuals to accept the philosophy of running and life that is necessary to get to the highest levels. I really admire that.”

Gary Muhrcke

Gary Muhrcke was the first winner of the New York Marathon in 1970. In 1976 he started selling running shoes out of a van, which eventually became the Super Runners Shop, a chain of successful specialty running stores in the New York City area.

“I had run cross country at a high school in Brooklyn, where I was a 5:10 miler. In 1968, I was 28 years old, working as a New York City firefighter, and living in Freeport on Long Island. My wife Jane and I had two daughters and a son born in the span of just two years that were ages 3, 4 and 5. We were a young family just trying to survive. We were a one VW Beetle car family and I was actually commuting to and from work by running about 10 miles from Freeport to my job. Running was a reasonably serious thing, but it wasn’t the most important thing in my life.

“Aldo Scandurra [co-founder of the New York Road Runners Club] was the key influence in my running the 1968 Trials. I believe he was head of the AAU track and field committee at the time. Aldo was an older runner, but I used to train with him where he lived in Port Washington because of the hills there. He encouraged good local runners to go out and run the trials in Colorado.

“I arrived about a month prior to the event. To be honest, I got really homesick. It wasn’t satisfying for me in any way, shape, or form. I called Jane and told her, ‘All these guys do out here is eat, run, and sleep.’ So I was coming home unless she wanted to come out to Colorado. We had no money at the time, so she went to the bank and took out a $500 home improvement loan to finance the trip. Then packed up the car with the three young kids and took three days to drive out.

“Two weeks before the trials, Amby, Ed Winrow, Bob Deines, and my family drove up to run the Pikes Peak Marathon. They were in one car and my family and I were in ours.

“All I wanted to do at the trials was run a decent performance. My race strategy was to stay with McDonagh for a while, see how I felt, and then move up if I still had it. He was an ultrarunner and had previously represented the U.S. in the Pan Am Games Marathon. If you want to make sure you’re going to finish you run with someone with that kind of experience. Norbert [Sanders] went out and ran pretty hard because he thought he could make the team. I ran with Jim McDonough for three laps and then I moved up a little bit. We both caught Norbert at some point because he was struggling. I finished in 16th place with about a 2:40 time. So that’s how it went down.

back home. It was all definitely an experience.”

“Jane had taken 8mm home movies of the finish. When Norbert crossed the finish line you see him look at his watch and then a look of disgust on his face. We laughed every time we watched that film and saw Norbert’s face. After the trials we sold our car and flew

Boulder’s Frank Shorter at the starting line of the race with the legends 8K.

Frank Shorter remains one of America’s greatest runners of all time. He is best known for winning a gold medal at the 1972 Munich Olympics and a silver medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. He is largely credited with igniting the running boom in the U.S. during the 1970s and for making Boulder a training mecca for world class athletes from all endurance sports. He has written several books, including his most recent, “My Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Medal Life.”

“At the time I was 20 years old, going into my senior year at Yale, and wouldn’t turn 21 until the following October. I was a track racer who also ran cross country in college. At that point in time I had been gradually increasing my distance, but had never run more than 10 or 12 miles in training. I was just coaching myself and was experimenting with altitude training. My younger brother and I were in Taos that summer and we saw that the Olympic Marathon Trials were going to be in Alamosa. So I said to my brother, ‘Let’s go up and watch. It’s only 110 miles from Taos to Alamosa.’ Then we put our sleeping bags in the shell on the back of our Dodge pickup truck and drive up to Alamosa about two days before the race. It was a time when not many people in Taos or Alamosa knew what was going on and it’s importance.

“After we arrived I go to where the sign up was and I met Buddy Edelen. I knew who he was because he had broken the world marathon record in 1963 with a 2:14:28. The sign up was right across the street from the race start and the university dorms. During my sophomore year we had a practice cross country race against Wesleyan at Yale. Jeff Galloway, Amby Burfoot, and Bill Rodgers were rooming together at Wesleyan. So I knew all these guys. Amby was sort of my idol because he had been cross country champion for several years. Then he wins the Boston Marathon in the spring of 1968. I knew Amby was in Alamosa so I walked over to the college dormitory and found him. I learned that there’s no qualifying time for the Trials…you don’t have to prove anything. All you had to do was sign up and run.

“This would be my first marathon attempt. Guess what I didn’t have? I had training shoes from college but no racing shoes. So I say to Amby, ‘I want to jump into the race, can you loan me a pair of shoes?’ He says, ‘Yeah, sure.’ The problem was I wore a 10 1/2 shoe at the time and he wore a 9 1/2. So Amby gives me a pair of his 9 1/2 Tiger racing shoes, which everyone wore at the time. I jumped in the race with those shoes that were a size too small. We’re five miles into the race and Bill Clark says to me, ‘Who are you?’ I responded, ‘I’m a friend of Amby’s.’ We kept running and the pack spreads out over the race course. Soon, I’m totally blistered. Amby was not having a good race himself. At the 15 mile point, Amby and I looked at each other and say, ‘We’re done.’ We both stoped there, droped out, and watched the finish of the race.

“What stuck with me about the trials was that these other runners were just people. Buddy Edelen did so much for the marathon in this country and he’s the least recognized contributor. He was just a little too much before his time. You had marathoners before him, but he was the first to hold the world’s best time in the event. Later Kenny Moore, myself, and others broke the record. But Buddy is the least recognized and appreciated of that early group. Those of us in the sport knew about him, but we were a small group that could pretty much be counted on one hand at the time.”

Jan Frisby

Jan Frisby lives in Grand Junction and is in his 60th year of running. At age 35 he finally ran a “respectable” marathon with a time of 2:33. As a Masters runner he has won 29 USATF age group national championships at distances ranging from 800 meters to the half marathon.

“I started running distance as a freshman miler at a small high school in Southern Illinois. My family moved to Colorado my sophomore year of high school and I won the Colorado Class AA state championship in the half mile in 1962, coincidentally on the Adams State track. At the time of the trials, I was 24 years old and teaching high school mathematics in my hometown of Cortez, Colorado.

“I remember a number of things about the trials experience. They weighed us before and after the race, and performed caliper tests for body fat. I was in line right after Amby Burfoot, who was that year’s Boston Marathon winner, so I was somewhat in awe. I remember Dr. David Costill, who was doing all the skin caliper tests, asking me if I had ever run a good marathon. This would be my fourth attempt at the marathon, having previously DNFed at two marathons and only completing the Denver Marathon, which I finished in about three hours after about 12 laps in Washington Park. So I answered, ‘No.’ Costill then suggested that my 10 percent body fat might be the reason. That was a pretty high body fat in those days. Most of the guys were about four percent.

“It was quite hot the day of the race, we had a late start, and the sun was high. Add in the altitude and the slow finishing times were inevitable. I dropped out after the third of the five laps of 5.2 miles each. But I did get a great ringside seat to the finish and see George Young win. I was somewhat disappointed that my friend and occasional training partner, Steve Matthews, finished in fifth place and failed to qualify for the Olympic team. Although never a great marathoner and can’t claim to be in the class of the great runners who graced the road in the 1968 Olympic Trials Marathon, I’ve had a joyful time along the way and done the best I could with gifts God has given me. I look back in gratitude that I was able to be involved in this inaugural event.”

Marathon trials winner George Young was awarded at the 50th anniversary banquet.

George Young is a four-time U.S. Olympian best known for bringing the steeplechase event into American prominence. In 1968 Young won the first U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials and a bronze medal in the 3000 meter steeplechase at the Mexico City Olympics.

“Before the 1968 Olympic Trials I had been teaching high school in Casa Grande, Arizona. As soon as the school year ended my family and I temporarily moved to Flagstaff, Arizona so Billy Mills and I could train at 7,200 feet altitude for the upcoming Olympic Track and Field Trials.

“I had just turned 31 years old and had never run a marathon before. I had met Billy Mills at the 1964 Olympics. Billy was real mild mannered, funny, and fun loving and we had a good time together. Billy said to me, ‘Do you mind if I do the same workouts as you?’ I had been training by myself. Not many people I knew wanted to or could train the way I did. Once a week we would go out and do a 17 mile out and back training run up the mountains outside Flagstaff. Billy said to me, ‘Your training is harder than the training I did before I won the gold medal in the 10000 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.’ Then I told him, ‘We have plenty of time before the track and field trials. So why don’t we go and run the Olympic Marathon Trials? It’s just a short drive from Flagstaff to Alamosa.’

“By that time I had already been on two Olympic teams. I could do tremendous workouts one day, but the next day I might not be able to do much. I just wasn’t organized with my training. So I took on a coach, a math teacher in Silver City, New Mexico, where I had grown up. That made a big difference for me. He kept it under control. When I got up in the morning I didn’t have to worry about what kind of workouts I was going to do. I just took it one day at a time. I had some pretty good races after that. It taught me the value of a coach having confidence in his runners.

“Billy and I followed the same program from my coach. We had a well-organized, progressive workout schedule. Every morning was a 7 1/2 mile run except for the weekends when we would do 15 to 20 miles one day. The afternoon workout would be interval training every other day with a long fartlek workout in the days in between. When I got to Flagstaff, I was still doing the same thing. Except it was at altitude and my morning run was 8 to 9 miles. To prepare for the marathon trials I ran about 100 miles a week. I found I could train week after week if I kept it around 100 miles because it didn’t wear me down. I only felt stronger and stronger. So I kept up the same mileage but concentrated on speed by running faster and faster. I believe the real key [to racing well] is speed work. It’s pretty simple. To run fast you have to put the speed training together with the long distance running. I don’t believe in LSD [Long Slow Distance] training. You could run 150 miles a week slow, but you’re not going to beat anyone in a race. If I were to do it all over again I would still train the same way.

“Billy and I drove out to Alamosa and showed up the day before the trials. I didn’t know any of the other guys there. I think they were pretty surprised when Billy and I showed up, but don’t believe they were worried about us. One of them commented, ‘Hey, what are you sprinters doing here?’ Billy just laughed.

“I told Billy before the race, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here, so I’m just going to run right along with you.’ We’d already been running side-by-side for a month or longer. He said, ‘Okay.’ So we just ran along and talked. The first time we come to an aid station, Billy said to me, ‘Make sure you take these liquids.’ I told him, ‘I’m not thirsty.’ So he responds, ‘No, you gotta do this.’ I didn’t know what it was, wasn’t planning on slowing down or stopping, so I just tried to drink it and I stuck it in my eye. I thought Billy was going to die laughing at me, but he says to me, ‘That’s alright, they’ll give you a sponge to wipe your face off.’ It was all a learning experiment for me.

“About the third lap we turn a corner and we’re about 100 to 200 hundred yards behind each other. Billy says, ‘Don’t worry about it, my back is beginning to really hurt.’ Billy had a bad back. Whenever we drove anywhere he had a specially made cushion to use for his back when sitting for long times. Soon Billy told me, ‘My back is killing me, I can’t go any further. You can go out and take off after those guys [in front of us] if you want to.’ I picked it up a little bit and passed some of them coming into town, including Kenny Moore. Then I realized I was in first place and asked myself, ‘Now what are you going to do?’ But then I ended up winning it. I wasn’t overly concerned about winning and didn’t expect to win it. I was just thinking, ‘I wonder what it’s like to run a 26 miler?’ Although I had run some pretty good 20 milers, I had never raced that far.

“But I never got into a race since I was a little kid that I didn’t have the intention to win it. Thanks to Billy for keeping me under control because otherwise I would have been racing. That’s what happened to me in the Olympic Marathon. I got carried away, got to racing, and messed myself up. I didn’t change my training at all for Mexico City. I just kept on doing the same thing. The reason why I had won the trials was not because I had put in more mileage than other people in the race. It was because it was quality mileage.

“In Mexico City, I was able to recover pretty fast from winning the bronze medal in the steeplechase. I was physically ready for the marathon being held just four days later and was mentally excited about doing it. I didn’t have Billy around to tell me to get those fluids in me, so I didn’t drink nearly enough. At about 4,000 meters to go, I decided to pick it up and catch up to the leaders. Then I got cramps from my buttocks to my heels in both legs. I was near an aid station and got down all the fluids I could. I was just walking stiff-legged the last 400 meters and it was downhill into the stadium. I was afraid I was going to fall down on my face before I made it all the way around the track for the final lap to the finish line. I think I finished in about the same time as I did in the trials [Young placed 16th overall in 2:31:15]. I was really sore for a few days after that.”

The 50th anniversary weekend in Alamosa included a Race with the Legends 8K.

John Peterson

John Peterson grew up in Lockport, Illinois and was a successful collegiate runner. He spent most of his professional career in administration at Joliet Junior College in Illinois. Now 74-yearsold, John lives in Crest Hill, Illinois and still regularly competes in sprint duathlons.

“In 1966 I read an article in Sports Illustrated magazine by Buddy Edelen about him going to Alamosa to train at altitude. I had already won and set a record in the Small College Nationals at Northern Illinois University. So I graduated from college and decided to go out and train in Alamosa for the 5000 meter event and start graduate school at Adams State. I pulled into town and looked up Buddy and Joe Vigil. Buddy and I would go trout fishing and out to drink beer together. Joe had already been coaching and teaching there for several years and he became my graduate student advisor. I helped him coach track and cross country as a 23-year-old graduate student. The townspeople in Alamosa were also fantastic and would invite the runners to barbeques and just do nice things for us all the time.

“I had twisted my ankle hopping over a sagebrush during a run in the desert and as a result, missed the 5,000 meter Olympic Trials. So I said to myself, ‘Why not sign up for the upcoming marathon trials and run it just for fun?’ I knew a few of the guys that came in for race. When Kenny Moore was a senior and I was a junior in college we ran against each other in the 5,000 meter event. I remember him and Oregon runners wearing these homemade shoes [read: early Nike prototype running shoes] at the time.

“My mindset for the Marathon Trials was, ‘I’m going to go out with the leaders and see how long I can last.’ Kenny Moore and these guys pass me up in the first lap. I tried to stay with them. That was a mistake because I had gone out too fast. Going on the third lap, probably at about the 12 mile mark, I thought, ‘I’ve got a couple more laps to go, this isn’t going to happen.’ I was behind them and hung on with them for a while. I realized I wasn’t going to keep up and was probably ready to drop out. I really just wanted to say that I finished the race. I eventually finished in 3:07 for 43rd place. Heck, I figured I beat Billy Mills, Frank Shorter, and a bunch of other guys that had started and dropped out.

“I left Alamosa not much later in 1968 after getting a joint Masters degree in Physical Education and Secondary Education.”

Bruce Kirschner has been a runner for over 45 years. He has been a race director and volunteer in the Colorado running community and a member of the Boulder Road Runners team that won the 2017 USA Track & Field Masters Grand Prix national championship race series.