FOUR DECADES OF ULTRA RUNNING
THE 1980S: IN THE BEGINNING
April 1981: Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated to his first term as president, James Michener’s The Covenant topped the New York Times best seller list, and Hall and Oates had the number one song with “Your Kiss (Is On My List).” Fernando Valenzuela, a 20-year-old rookie from Mexico pitched a shutout for the Los Angeles Dodgers in his Major League debut and, 400 miles to the north, the first confirmed diagnosis of AIDS was made in San Francisco.
In Massachusetts, three veteran ultrarunners (but neophyte magazine publishers) were putting the finishing touches on the first issue of a new periodical which they called, simply, UltraRunning. Fred Pilon, Stan Wagon and Peter Gagarin would be the voice of the sport for the next 18 years. In the pre-internet era, UltraRunning became the source authority for ultrarunners to find out what was happening across the country.
The sport was quite different then. Trail races, which would eventually come to dominate the sport, were in their infancy. The Western States 100 had been held as an official race but three times, and the previous year, 124 intrepid souls made the trek across the Sierra Nevada Mountains to Auburn. There was no lottery, and the race wasn’t considered particularly important – the article on the 1981 Western States was limited to six column-inches and only the top eight men’s and top eight women’s times were published. Old Dominion 100 was two years old and the Wasatch Front 100 had its inaugural race the year before, with all of two finishers (hello there, Greg Rollins and Laurie Staton). Leadville wouldn’t be run until 1983, and Vermont not until 1989.
The two largest races in the U.S. – the JFK 50 and American River 50 – were hybrids: part trail and part road. But road races dominated the scene, with Stu Mittleman, Bernd Heinrich and Sandra Kiddy leading the charge among the elite. For the most part, the scene was centered in New York and New England.
Running gear was basically non-existent. Among the things we take for granted these days – waist packs, hydration vests, headlamps, energy bars and gels, sophisticated electrolyte drinks, GPS watches (okay, GPS anything), even handheld water bottles – had yet to be invented. Squirrel’s Nut Butter? Nope. Vaseline was the lube of choice. It was messy and didn’t work very well, but it was all that there was. Runners wore very short nylon shorts, tube socks (if they wore socks at all), and often lightweight, white cotton dress shirts.
Despite this, runners ran fast. Many of the top times from that era still appear on the all-time list of best performances. Barney Klecker set an American record for 50 miles in 1980 with a 4:51:25 clocking – a record that stood for 39 years until Jim Walmsley broke it in 2019. Janis Klecker’s American record 50k from 1983 tops the women’s list to this day. Highly competitive road events included the AMJA 50 in Chicago, Strolling Jim 40 in Tennessee, and a variety of events put on in New York City by the New York Road Runners Club and followers of the Indian spiritual leader, Sri Chinmoy.
In 1982, the Skyline 50K was started by Steve Justice, who owned a running store in the San
