US Collegian beats heat, wins 80th BAA Marathon
In a race of attrition, Jack Fultz ran through a rainbow of garden hoses and wall-to-wall people clad in Bermuda shorts and bikinis, in record heat, to win yesterday’s 80th BAA Marathon race.
It was a formidable accomplishment for the superannuated Georgetown undergraduate (Fultz being 27) to win this race in 2 hours, 20 minutes, 19 seconds (2:20:19) by almost two minutes from a grim “hot weather” runner from Mexico, Mario Cuevas.
A pigtailed blonde named Kim Merritt, 20, from Wisconsin, came within five minutes of the women’s course record in 2:47:10. Since Jack Fultz was 10 minutes away from the men’s mark—well, you take it from here, Kim had vim and vitamins.
One hour before the noonday start in Hopkinton the thermometer read 100 degrees, in the sun. Scores of the 1,898 competitors huddled in the shade of the Hopkinton HS building. Some sought surcease in the shadow of buses lined up in the parking lot. A few even showered before running.
It obviously was going to be a hotter day the famous “Inferno” race of 1909, when 26 cases of heat prostration were treated by hospitals en route.
The officially recorded temperature on that long ago day was 91 degrees.
This—and a bevy of heat-tempered rivals from Mexico, Puerto Rico, Swaziland, and Costa Rica—is what Jack Fultz had going against him yesterday.
He took them all down with a remarkably even racing tempo, ducking in and out of the proffered streams of water that home owners supplied along the course through Ashland, Framingham, Natick, Wellesley, and the Newtons without a break in his racing cadence.
Fultz ran a steadfast 1:10:02 first half to Wellesley Square, where he was lying seventh to the struggling leaders—Richard Mabuza from Swaziland and Radamos Veja of Puerto Rico.
It should be posted for immorality that he ran the last half of the race to Big Pru in 1:10:17—pretty astonishing when you consider that he’d been through the inferno that was the first half of the foot race.
Jack came into the lead on the Brae Burn hill in West Newton, 18 miles out.
“Mabuza was coming apart on that hill,” the ultimate winner recalled. “When I went past him I felt that if I could get over the rest of the hills (three) with the lead, I could win this Marathon.”
What Fultz had done in the five miles from Wellesley Square to the Brae Burn hill—seventh to first—was not in the sense a dramatic charge.
Rather, despite the Hell’s Angels role in which the meteorology had cast the runners, his steady tempo overcame those ahead of him who faltered in that interval.
“I began picking off runners in the top 10 just before Wellesley,” he related later. “I knew then that I had hit the right tempo for the heat and the 26 miles we had to run.
“If I got off the hills at Boston College okay I knew I could do it. When I did, I was suddenly very grateful for the tough hill training I had done preparing for this race. (In Arlington, Va.)
“I hadn’t focused on any particular runner at any time. For me it was more of a matter of judging the race properly. Mabuza was really struggling when I went past him into the lead.”
The bouncy little cop from Swaziland who’d made such a big try for 18 miles ultimately finished far down the track in 36th place.
The tough, steady little Cuevas from Mexico was second, little Jose De Jesus from Puerto Rico, third, and Jack Foster, 43, of New Zealand was fourth.
If Jack Fultz had not persisted in attempting his fourth Boston Marathon yesterday (his first since 1973) the foreign delegates would have dominated the event once more.
Jack is one of the 20 top-ranked Marathoners in the USA—and the only one of them who did not bypass the historic Hopkinton-to-Boston race because of the Olympic team tryout test at Eugene, Oregon, next month.
Why was he willing to gamble his middle-drawer chances of making the Olympic team by taking on yesterday’s pot boiler?
‘Well, I plan to make the try at Eugene, but I looked at it this way,” he replied.
“For the past few years I’ve been listening to some of the top runners from around the world and they’d tell me:
“Boston is the epitome. If you are going to win a Marathon race be sure it is in Boston!’
“Now that I’ve had about 10 minutes in which to reflect, the shock waves that go with being the Boston winner are starting to reach me.
“I recognize the physical handicaps and problems of taking on a second Marathon race within five weeks, but I’ll go to Eugene and make the Olympic-team effort.
“Meantime, I have myself a target of making the first 10 today—and came out of it a most grateful winner. I assure you.
“Those people out there along with their garden hoses—let’s give every one of ‘em a medal!”
This was a foot race the conditions for which got progressively more comfortable to live with, oddly enough. A bit of an overcast provided relief from Natick to Wellesley. The footing was perceptibly less like trotting on hot coals from Wellesley to the first hill, in Auburndale.
And once over the crest of Heartbreak, at BC, and east breeze cooled a lot of feverish browns and mustaches, including Jack Fultz’s. But if you had the choice of a day to run 26 miles, 385 yards, it would not be April 19, 1976.
