V 10 N. 22 No Boston This Year? Here's the 1929 Race

Getting tired of the same Covid 19 on the 24 hour news?   Tired of 100 best plays of the decade?
Well here's some re-runs I bet you have never seen.

We are not going to see the 2020 Boston Marathon next month.  And we won't get those great race photos from Ned Price who lives a few blocks off the course.  But Ned came up with two great films of Boston  1929 won by Johnny Miles in 2 hr 33   with sound  and New York City 1934.    Note how little crowd control there is for the NYC race.  The leaders seem to be accompanied the whole way by an unmarked car, but the runners have to fend for themselves through the congested streets.  Holy crap.  These guys were definitely trail blazers.  At one point they go onto a sidewalk to make a right turn.

   The Boston race course hasn't changed much at all through the opening miles, a narrow country road down from Hopkinton.  In both races the crowd at the finish line keeps closing in on the runners until there is no room in NYC for the third runner to get through.   The Boston runners are escorted a few feet from the finish line into a building, possibly a hotel while reporters try to get a few words.

This Boston film and the NYC films are beautifully filmed.  You can hear the foot slapping of the runners in the Boston race and some shouted comments from the film car.

Boston Marathon 1929  Won by Johnny Miles  2 hr 33.


The NYC race is really two short films.
The second one has some of the same footage as the first, but there is a lot more film in this second  one not seen in the first.  It goes from downtown out to Long Island.  Won by Bill Steiner.  Time 2hr 23 noted on the first frames, which seems a tad fast for those days. 

Just checked.  No one got below 2 hr 25 until Jim Peters did it in 1952 with a 2 hr. 20.

NYC Marathon 1934


From Bill Schnier

That footage was awesome.  Boston went from country to city whereas NYC went from city to country.  Clearly Boston was more organized at that time because there were lead cars, spectators, and an actual plan for running the race.  It is no wonder the NYC marathon faded after that. 

   In both cases the leaders were quite good, around 2:33.  I wonder, with current training and Vaporflys, how fast they would have run?  In Boston the leader got lots of questions and attention, second place did pretty well also, but third place was pretty much ignored.  The NYC race looked more like a training run since clearly nobody had been alerted about the race except a few people at the finish line.  That must really have been an adventure.  The runners were on their own.

   Univ. of Cincinnati grad, Ted Corbitt, charted out the course for the recent NYC Marathon, first mostly in Central Park then after a few years through all five boroughs.  He was an amazing man and truly a giant in long distance lore.

From George:  A real sleuth could try to chart out the course from these films.  At one point they must be near a cemetery in Long Island, because there are several businesses advertising tombstones on their store fronts.

From Roy:Great stuff.  I would love to see the winners' training logs.  NY added an element of excitement - the threat of carnage caused by cars.  It was as if no one told city officials that a race was scheduled.  Cars crossing the street just in front of the runners made finishing a gamble.