Still running and racing, marathon great Bill Rodgers will compete in the Pleasanton Double Dec. 23 on his 65^th birthday.

by Dave Prokop (Best Road Races editor)

Competitors in the Pleasanton Double on Sunday, Dec. 23 will get a chance to share the road with legendary road runner Bill Rodgers, who, coincidentally, will celebrate his 65^th birthday on that date.

If you’re not particularly knowledgeable about sports history, take my word for it, this is huge! It’s like being on the same baseball diamond with Babe Ruth, the same football field with Joe Montana, or the same basketball court with Michael Jordan. Bill Rodgers, in his prime, was that good! In fact, based on his wall-to-wall record in road running, a strong case can be made that he had the most impressive career record of any American road racer in history – four-time winner of the Boston Marathon, four-time winner of the New York City Marathon. Need we go on?

(And, as an aside, isn’t it great that in distance running, people like Bill Rodgers can still be running and competing into their 60’s and beyond?)

I first heard of Bill Rodgers many years ago – when I first moved to California from my native Canada in 1973 to work for Runner’s World magazine. My friend Amby Burfoot, who was then known for the outstanding runner he was (1969 Boston Marathon winner), rather than the fine writer-editor he was to become, wrote me to give me a heads up on a former teammate of his on the track and cross-country teams at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. According to Amby, this young runner was brimming with talent and potential, that he was someone I definitely should look out for in the years ahead. That young runner’s name was … Bill Rodgers!

Boy, did Amby Burfoot ever call that one right!

Photo: Amber Burfoot (wearing the Runner's World shirt) and BIll Rodgers in 1983.

Starting with Bill’s breakthrough race (the moment he realized he had arrived, as they say) – the 1975 IAAF World Cross-Country Championships in Rabat, Morocco, where he won the bronze medal (“That was a life-changing race for me,” Bill now says), he went on to carve out a record over the next 5-6 years unparalleled in American road racing history.

Running was exploding in the ‘70s and Bill Rodgers, leggy and lean at 5’8½” and 128 pounds, was King of the Road, as Sports foot and Bill Rodgers.

Sports Illustrated called him. He won the New York City Marathon four straight years (1976 through 1979). He won the Boston Marathon four times – the first one in 1975 only a month after winning the bronze medal in Morocco. In that 1975 Boston Marathon he set an American record of 2:09:55, and he lowered that to 2:09:29 in winning at Boston in 1979. He also won the Boston Marathon in 1978 and 1980.

When he won the Fukuoka Marathon in Japan in 1979, he became the first and thus far the last marathoner to win the big three – Boston, New York and Fukuoka – in succession. It’s a feat that likely will never be equaled.

In 1979 he set a world record for 25 kilometers on the track, running 1:14:11.8 in Saratoga, Calif.

Track and Field News ranked him the top marathoner in the world in 1975, ’77 and ’78.

In perhaps his greatest year on the road racing circuit, 1978, he won 27 of the 30 races he entered, including the Pepsi 10,000-meter Nationals (with a new world 10K best of 28:36.3), the Falmouth Road Race, and the Boston and New York City marathons.

Is it any wonder that in 1998 he was in the first group of athletes inducted into the Road Runners Hall of Fame in Utica, N.Y.? And the following year he was inducted into the Track and Field Hall of Fame in Indianapolis. Indiana?

Through it all, Bill has always remained a very accessible, down-to-earth, friendly and likeable individual. A well-educated man (B.A. in sociology, Wesleyan  University; M.S. in special education, Boston College), there are no airs about him, and he seems remarkably humble for one who has achieved so much as an athlete. He is, in essence, a runners’ runner, true blue, the real McCoy – a man who loves running and respects all runners, regardless of their ability level. He says things like “I salute all runners,” and if you know him, you know he means it.

Tyler McCandless, one of today’s aspiring young runners (winner of this year’s Kuai Half-Marathon), who also will be in the Pleasanton Double, says of Bill Rodgers, ”He wasn’t afraid to compete. He wasn’t afraid to train hard and he wasn’t afraid to compete. Which is something that’s almost looked down upon today, when runners are very selective in where and what they run.”

Given Bill’s personality and his passion for running, it seemed a perfect and natural fit for him, his brother Charlie and their boyhood friend Jason Kehoe to open, own and operate the Bill Rodgers Running Center in Boston for the past 35 years. Now, due in large part to Jason’s sudden death due to a blood clot, Bill and Charlie have decided, with regret, to close the store that has been a favorite haunt of so many Boston area runners all these years. The Rodgers brothers are now thinking of going into the sports memorabilia business.

Great piece on Bill Rodgers. It is exciting that Bill will be out for the Double Road Race in Pleasanton 23!
Bob Anderson 11/18/12 10:04 pm

Really enjoyed this . Bill offered some encouragement before my first marathon in Indianapolis in 2011 (Indianaplis Monumental Marathon). 12/23 we will be in the same AG, if not in the same pace group.
Steve Gilbert 12/15/12 4:16 am

Log In To Comment

The store may indeed be closing, but Bill’s involvement in running, both as a competitor and an ambassador for the sport, continues unabated. Just about every weekend, he’s at a race somewhere. Often he makes a promotional appearance (the man is in two Halls of Fame, for heaven’s sake), but he has run 20 races this year through the end of October.

Speaking about his approach to running now that he’s in his 60’s, Bill, who grew up in the Hartford area but has lived in Boston since 1971, says, “The major change for me as a runner is I no longer run the marathon. I now train about 40 miles a week – a third of what I used to do.

“I’ve tried to adapt as I get older. Because the main thing is to avoid injury. The first goal is to get to the starting line. The second goal is to finish. And the first goal is the hardest.”

Bill, in fact, had a very serious running injury nine years ago at age 55, one that could have ended his running career, when he broke his right tibia during a training run just after he had won his age group at Falmouth. But he did the necessary rehab and now says, “I don’t feel any pain there, but I think it has affected my stride some.”

General Douglas MacArthur, in a farewell address before the U.S. Congress, once said, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.”

If Bill Rodgers is ever invited to give a farewell speech in Congress, he could say in kind, “Old runners never die. They just find a way to keep running.”

And running pretty darn well, in Bill’s case. Bill’s last marathon was Boston in 2009, which happened to be the 100^th anniversary of the event. He ran 4:09, and talking about that race now, emotion welling up in his voice, He says, “I got a chance to see my daughter at the finish line.” The emotion comes from the fact that his last marathon before Boston 2009 had been 11 years earlier, and it had been a real struggle. So much so that when he was encouraged to run the 100^th anniversary edition of the Boston classic, he wasn’t sure he should run or could even finish. His daughter, Elise, told him, “You can do it,” and dad didn’t let her down. You wonder if it wasn’t both one of his most difficult, yet satisfying Boston Marathons.

Twice divorced, a father of two grown daughters, Elise, 27, and Erica, 24, Bill concentrates on the shorter road races now (“I still like to compete”) and does all the main races he’s run for years – Falmouth in Massachusetts, the Bix 7-Mile in Iowa, the Cherry Blossom 10-mile in Washington, D.C., and the Utica Boilermaker 15K in Utica, N.Y.  He’s now run the Falmouth Road Races 23 times and the Bix race 33 times (“I’ve run the Bix race more than any other.”).

To a runner like him, who’s been there and done that many times over, the upcoming Pleasanton Double is an event he’s particularly looking forward to, although he admits, “I’m a little nervous about it.”

He adds, “It’s really intriguing. Very, very intriguing. When I was a young man doing high mileage (typically 120 miles a week), I really would have liked to experiment with it. Now I’m kinda apprehensive. I guess the older you get, the more vulnerable you feel.

“I take my hat off to Bob Anderson, who came up with this concept. He’s a very innovative guy. He helped create the running boom back in the ‘70s and ‘80s with Runner’s World. I think this is a very intriguing idea.

“I think the challenge is interesting in that it gets people to think, ‘I wonder if I can do that?’ It’s like the challenge of the marathon, where people ask themselves, ‘I wonder if I can do that?’ “ 

Asked what strategy he plans to use in the Pleasanton Double, Bill replied, “I’ll play it by ear. I’ll run as hard as I can in both. I don’t think I can win my age division because Bob has some very good runners coming in. I hear Dick Beardsley is going to be there.

“I think the challenge for me and Dick is we have so many miles on our body. That’s a real challenge.”

As all runners know, there are many alarmists out there who preach the anti-running message that people shouldn’t run because “it’s hard on the body, it wrecks your knees, your joints, it destroys your hips” – well, you know the litany. To be sure, Bill Rodgers has had his share of injuries, the broken tibia was a particularly bad one, but the fact that here he is, in his 60’s, having run an estimated 175,000 miles in his lifetime, still training and racing, should serve to quiet those naysayers and show them they protesteth far too much. 

In his preparation for the Double, Bill says, “I will probably do some interval training from now until the race just to get sharper and improve my recovery. I’d go to a bike path or a dirt road along a river. I’ve done 10 x 400 on that bike path. I’ll do anywhere from  quarter-mile to one-mile repeats.”

At the other end of the training spectrum, he also plans to do some two-hour runs for endurance.

One wonders what strategy Bill Rodgers in his prime would have used in the Double? He answers that question, “Everything is a little bit who’s in the competition. I would have wanted to know if Benji Durden is there, Jon Sinclair, the other top runners. You’re not just running against the clock, you’re racing against other runners.”

On December 23 in Pleasanton, Calif., Bill Rodgers will be racing against other runners in the inaugural Double Road Race™ on American soil, looking forward to what he calls “A different experience.” Or as he explains it, “You don’t normally train for two races. You train for one.”

His approach at Pleasanton, in a nutshell, will be: “Pretty hard, the 10K, try to get my best time. Then see what I can do in the 5K.”

Speculating about the times he hopes to run in the Double, Bill says, “My best 10K this year is 46 minutes, but it’s been a long year. I should be in that range – 46 to 47 minutes – for the 10. If I ran 47 (in the 10K) and maybe 23 minutes something in the 5K, that would be an aggregate time of 69-70 minutes. If I could break 70 minutes, I’d be very happy.”

So it is that for this great runner, the beat goes on, like the rhythm of one’s footsteps on the pavement – only at a slower tempo than in his glory days. It is said time waits for no man. If it doesn’t wait for Bill Rodgers, who holds the American record for 15K, 43:39, and used to be able to go through 15 kilometers en route to a sub-2:10 marathon in about 46 minutes, it really doesn’t wait for any man.

DID YOU KNOW?

o Bill Rodgers and Amby Burfoot were roommates at Wesleyan in 1969 when Amby won the Boston Marathon as a college senior and Bill was only a sophomore. It was Amby Burfoot who got Bill started doing long runs. Jeff Galloway had been at Wesleyan one year ahead of Amby Burfoot – in other words, when Galloway, now a well-known running coach and writer, was a senior, Amby was a junior and Bill was a freshman. Jeff Galloway ran a 4:12 mile at Wesleyan, Bill’s best time was 4:18. In those days, a young Bill Rodgers regarded both Amby Burfoot and Jeff Galloway as his running superiors not only in age but in ability.

o Although his name is not normally associated with cross-country running, Bill Rodgers is only one of four Americans to have won a medal in the IAAF World Cross-Country Championships – Craig Virgin, Alberto Salazar and Tracy Smith are the others. Although he had the running style and obviously the talent to excel in cross-country, Bill turned his attention away from cross-country after winning the bronze medal at the 1975 IAAF World Cross-Country Championships in Rabat, Morocco. “I just focused on the marathon,” he explains, “I loved the challenge.” A month after winning the bronze medal in Morocco, Bill won the Boston Marathon in an American record time of 2:09:55.

o Some of Bill’s teammates on the 1975 U.S. cross-country team at the IAAF World Cross-Country Championships in Morocco were Frank Shorter, Gary Tuttle, Barry Brown, and Jeff Galloway. Bill was outsprinted in the last quarter mile of the race by the eventual winner Ian Stewart of Scotland and Mariano Haro of Spain, who finished second.

o Bill won the open division of the Falmouth Road Race three times, and has won his age group at least once each decade of his adult life, i.e., in his 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. He’s also become such a fixture at the Bix 7-miler in Iowa, they’ve erected statues of him and Joan Benoit Samuelson near the finish line! Joan has also competed and excelled in the Bix race many, many times.

o Believe it or not, Bill Rodgers has run only one 5000-meter race on the track in his entire running career!