The Marathon That Marines Built
By Colman McCarthy
Should they have a moment to go beyond being grateful for their healthy lungs and still functioning knees, runners at this Sunday’s 25th Marine Corps Marathon might call out a word of thanks to Jim Fowler. He will be among the generals and assorted luminaries at the reviewing stand near the starting line at 8:30 a.m., near the cannon that booms the Vaselined masses down the fast lanes and slow lanes to glory.
A quarter-century ago, it was Fowler’s idea that created the race. He was a Marine colonel then, a Dartmouth College and Georgetown Law graduate who was twice wounded in Vietnam. In October 1975, he proposed to the head of the Corps, Maj. Gen. George Ryan, that the Marines involve themselves in something more than war preparation and warmaking. Why not stage a marathon?
“After the Vietnam War,” he wrote in a memo to Ryan, “the popularity of the military services declined in the eyes of many. At the same time, distance running was gaining considerable positive attention.”
The brass signed on. Fowler was appointed race director and managerially was off and running. In 1976, 1,175 athletes covered the 26.2 mile course that ran from the Iwo Jima statue south to Alexandria and back. The next year, the number more than doubled. Fowler, rerouted the course to cross the Potomac into Washington, circle the U.S. Capitol, wind around Hains Point and finish at the statue.
Though small compared with today’s mass marathons, the 1,175 runners on hand in 1976 represented the country’s largest first-time race ever held. The New York City Marathon had only 123 at the first running in 1970.
I came to know Fowler when I was in the field for the 1997 race. That would be the first of my nine Marine marathons, along with nine others in Boston, New York and Baltimore. As with hordes of others who took to the open roads in those days, I became a cardiovascular wonder but orthopedic wreck.
Though wary of each other at first—Col. Fowler, a warrior, and me a pacifist—we formed a friendship that has lasted. I admired him greatly for diverting some of the Marines’ energy into running. Personally, he had an easygoing manner and treated slowpokes as graciously as frontrunners. Many years, he would greet me at the finish line.
Organizationally, Fowler threw himself into the world of running. In the weeks before races, he would travel the course by a bicycle equipped with a calibration device to measure the exact distance, necessary to be certified by the Amateur Athletic Union. He let it be known that everyone was welcome to the race regardless of projected times.
One of these was Peter Strudwick, a California junior high school teacher who wasn’t certain he would be allowed in the marathon. He wrote to Fowler explaining that due to a birth defect he had no feet. Fowler told him to come, a race number was waiting. Effort, not speed, was what mattered.
One year, I asked Fowler if he could find space along the course for my three little boys and their nine-year-old pal Jimmy Ryan to get a close view of the action. Sure, he said, bring them along. Somewhere up the chain of the Marine Corps command it was mistakenly thought that young Jimmy Ryan was the blueblooded grandson of Maj. Gen Ryan himself. Space was found. A driver and limousine were dispatched from the Pentagon motor pool to haul the four kids around.
I forget my time that day but I do remember the boys asking how I arranged for the limo. “It’s a cost overrun,” I explained, “one of the Pentagon’s finest traditions.”
Jim Fowler, whose wife Betsy retired recently from the Prince George’s County library system, is now an executive with Unilever United States. In 1976 in the prehistoric days of the marathon boom—they’re everywhere now, including the Antarctica marathon 2/5/01—he couldn’t have imagined that 25 years later hundreds of thousands of thoroughbreds, plodders and shufflers would have crossed the line he first drew.
A large debt is owed Jim Fowler. A good man has had a good run.