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The Coolest Race on Earth
Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the Antarctica Marathon
By John Hanc Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2009 John Hanc
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-418-3
CHAPTER 1
The Boy Who Walked to the Zoo and Ran to the Ends of the Earth
Tom Gilligan was born to travel — around the block, around the world. "I always wanted to go places," Gilligan recalls. "I'd go anywhere."
As a boy, Gilligan ("just like the island," he says whenever asked the spelling of his last name) once walked five miles to the zoo in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Was it simply a way to escape the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Medford, then a drab suburb of Boston best known for being on the route Paul Revere followed on his famous midnight ride? Perhaps. His youthful wanderlust might also have been a response to the crowded conditions of his house — three boys, three girls, and mom, and a square-jawed football-coach father who, in his son's words, "ruled with an iron hand and a leather belt."
In many ways the Gilligan clan was not so different from any of the other mostly Irish and Italian families living in Medford in the postwar years. They didn't come over on the Mayflower, and they certainly weren't Brahmins, but they were as embedded in the fabric of the city as the piers sunk into Boston Harbor. Tom's dad, also named Tom, and his mom, Lucille, were high school sweethearts. Tom Sr. was a legendary athlete at Malden Catholic — all-state in both football and baseball. Lucille, who grew up in Medford, attended the girls' Catholic high school nearby. As a 165-pound lineman and placekicker, the elder Tom led Malden Catholic to a championship in the 1930s. Cartoon drawings of him and some of his teammates appeared in the Boston Globe — a great honor in those days, when lionizing caricatures of star athletes were a regular feature of the sports pages. Tom Sr. joined the navy when the war broke out, and Lucille followed him, becoming a nurse. He ended up getting wounded in North Africa, and after recuperating was on his way to the Pacific when, during a brief stopover in San Diego, he and Lucille got married. After the war he did what many young men did in that era: he got a job with the phone company, New England Telephone. It was the type of position that would guarantee a steady income, benefits, and a pension. He worked his days as a repairman, and on nights and weekends he returned to the gridiron as the coach of his old team, Malden Catholic, leading his alma mater to another Catholic League Championship.
Tom and Lucille had six kids and raised them in a four-bedroom house with one bathroom. The town they lived in was known by locals as "Meffa" — that's "Medford" the way a tough guy, a mafioso with a "Bahstan" accent, might pronounce it, gulping down the word and swallowing the d's like cups of hot espresso. However it was pronounced, Medford was a tough town, divided into different ethnic enclaves: the Italians in South Medford, the Irish Catholics in the north, the African Americans in the western part of town. But each neighborhood was proud and close knit. "It's not like there were gang fights, but we were competitive with one another," says Dave McGillivray, a friend of Gilligan's who also grew up there. "People took pride in their territories, their sports, and their ethnicity."
Young Tom had another source of pride — and sometimes frustration. Growing up as the son of Tom Gilligan Sr., the football star, the football coach, there were certain expectations. You weren't going to cry when you fell down, and you were going to play a contact sport. For Tom Jr. — who also attended Malden Catholic — that sport was hockey. Everyone knew that Coach Gilligan's son was going to be hard, and he was. Especially on defense, which in any sport is what the blue-collar guys gravitate toward. "I was pretty tenacious," Gilligan recalls. "I worked hard at it."
The year before Gilligan joined, Malden Catholic's hockey team had won the Catholic school championship — a big deal in that part of the country. They took the game seriously, and for Tom Jr. that included staying in shape in the off-season. When his hockey teammates joined the cross-country team, he was encouraged to follow along. He did, reluctantly; running was painful.
"I hated it," he says. "I was doing it for hockey."
While Tom flourished on the ice and dreamed of wandering far afield, his future, like that of most of the families around him, seemed preordained. "I was being bred to go to work for a big company," he said. That was where the union jobs were, the protected jobs, the jobs that a man could rely on to help him when he was ready to settle down, start a family, and move into a house — probably a row house like all the others that seemed to dot the neighborhoods of Boston.
The problem for Tom, and a lot of young men and women in the 1960s, was that he didn't want to do any of that, a point over which he and Tom Sr. clashed. "He was a staunch union guy, and I was very, very independent," he says. "I wanted to be more entrepreneurial, even though I didn't know that word existed back then." Tom went to college — but not some exclusive, leafy private school. He took night classes at Northeastern University, in a working-class section of Boston. After three semesters there, young Tom transferred to Merrimack College in North Andover, where he earned a degree in marketing. He graduated in 1972 and landed an interview with a large insurance company, Provident Mutual Life. The insurance industry ruled in Boston back then; insurance companies were the ones responsible for the city's largest buildings, the Prudential Center and, later, the John Hancock Tower, which for a few years was famous because of a design flaw that occasionally caused its windows to fall out.
Gilligan got a job as a sales trainee. This was the kind of job that young men from large Irish Catholic families in Medford were supposed to get — and be grateful for getting. He quit after eight months. "I learned quickly what I did not want to do for the rest of my life," he says. Tom wanted to walk to the zoo again. He wanted to wander — and while Boston is as much a part of him as his chowder-thick accent, he knew he wanted to go a lot farther than Meffa. When he saw an ad in the Globe for what was then called BOAC — now British Air — he immediately responded. The airline was expanding its office in Boston and was looking for sales trainees. They hired twelve people in March 1973, and Gilligan was one of them. For the next three years he learned the travel business. "We trained first as ticket agents, working at the ticket counters at Logan," he said. "I loved it from day one."
During the slow winter travel season, BOAC laid off Gilligan and its other trainees. He didn't mind; he went up to New Hampshire to ski for a couple of months. This schedule continued for the next three years. Seven months with the airline followed by five months on unemployment, November-March. Perfect for ski season. "It was one of the most fun periods of my life," he says. In the besotted 1970s, that meant sex, drugs, and rock and roll. "Oh yeah," he adds, almost as an afterthought, "and skiing." The exception to this snow-peaked bacchanalia came one day when the roads were clear and he didn't feel like heading over to the lodge. Instead he impulsively went for a run, something he had not done since high school. "I went two miles," he said. "It felt OK. So two days later, I ran four miles."
Back home in spring 1976, Gilligan decided to start jogging regularly to combat the effects of five months of winter fun in New Hampshire. He went over to the aptly named Marathon Sports store in Cambridge to buy a pair of shoes — not sneakers but new, so-called running shoes. Tom picked up a pair manufactured in Oregon by a fledgling outfit named Nike. While he was trying them on, he bumped into an old friend from college, Paul Sullivan, a runner who had even started to enter local road races. Sullivan convinced Tom to join him.
Most first-time road racers start with something relatively short, typically a 5K run (5 kilometers, or 3.1 miles). But this was the beginning of the 1970s "running boom," when it seemed as if every upwardly mobile young man in America was lacing up his shoes to follow in the footsteps of Frank Shorter, the Yale-educated lawyer who had won the gold medal in the Olympic marathon in 1972. For these guys, more was better. So when Gilligan agreed to train with his friend for their race, it was not a 5K or even a 10K (6.2 miles); it was a 20K — about 12 miles. "I said, 'Wow! That's a long way. But we'll give it a try.'" They trained together for a few weeks and then showed up at the start of the race, which turned out to be 25K — over 15.5 miles. "I said, 'I can't go this far!'" recalled Gilligan. "My friend said 'just inhale and exhale and you'll get through.'" He did. Halfway through, Gilligan thought to himself, This is torture. I'm never doing it again. But the minute he crossed the finish line, he underwent a major attitude adjustment. "I said, 'This is fun. I can't wait to do it again.' I was hooked."
Gilligan became a running bum — a corollary to the ski variety and a well-recognized species in the Boston area in the late 1970s. The city had become the hub for running on the East Coast. It already had the most prestigious race in the world, the Boston Marathon, and one of the finest clubs in the country, the Greater Boston Track Club. The Boston area was also home to several new running shoe manufacturers, Etonic, Saucony, and New Balance, all pumping out pairs of durable-but-light trainers for all the running boomers. And they had the right demographics — lots of bright, "type A," goal-oriented young men (and a few women) who wanted the kind of robust, physical challenge they weren't getting in their classrooms, their downtown law offices, or their positions in the emerging high-tech businesses along Route 128.
Gilligan, who had watched the Boston Marathon with his father many times as a kid, set his sights on going 26.2 miles, which he did with success. Although he crashed and burned in his first Boston Marathon, his compact five-foot nine-inch, 155-pound frame was well suited for running; soon he had joined the elite Greater Boston Track Club, coached by the charismatic Billy Squires, a college track coach and former all-American runner at Notre Dame. Gilligan was now training with the likes of Bill Rodgers, next to Shorter, the greatest American marathoner of his generation; Joan Benoit, who would go on to win the gold in the first Olympic women's marathon in 1984; Greg Meyer, the last American man to win the Boston Marathon (which he did in 1983); Lynn Jennings, later an Olympian; Tom Derderian, an outstanding runner and coach who later wrote the definitive history of the Boston Marathon; Dave McGillivray, another man from "Meffa" who is now race director for the Boston Marathon; and a speedy, young registered nurse from Children's Hospital named Sharon O'Hagan, who would eventually become Mrs. Tom Gilligan.
Under the tutelage of Squires, the members of the Greater Boston Track Club (GBTC) did repeats up Heartbreak Hill so many times that they could have run it in their sleep. They also worked together to improve. "You did whatever it took," wrote Barbara Huebner in a 2004 article on the GBTC's history in American Track & Field. "You shared what you had. You kicked around ideas. And you succeeded." They really were a team, and not just on the track: members of the club ate together, drank together, partied together, and eventually lived together. "We had a house in Wellesley," Gilligan said. "Right on the fifteen-mile mark of the marathon course."
The members of the GBTC were the finely honed peak of a competitive and single-minded movement. Although they had cardiovascular systems as finely tuned as NASCAR engines, the running boomers were less interested in fitness than they were in racing and having fun. Nobody lifted weights or took yoga classes; cross training wasn't even a marketing slogan yet, much less a recommended approach to exercise. The serious boomers ran almost every day, sometimes twice a day. They ran more miles in a week than most people put on their car odometers, then raced on the weekends and figured that with all that training they could eat — and drink — whatever they wanted. So they did.
The attitude was perfect for the 1970s and, in the case of Gilligan and his running cronies, perfect for Boston — a city that in the mid-to-late 1970s supported two alternative newspapers, a nascent punk rock scene, and tens of thousands of college students (me among them). Most of the students were too busy rolling joints and blasting their stereos out the dorm windows along Commonwealth Avenue to want to run, but on the third Monday in April, thousands would gather along the road to watch and cheer on the runners in the Boston Marathon. Many of the top competitors in those years were members of the GBTC, which by then had achieved a national reputation in the sport. The club earned its place in running mythology when in 1979 it claimed four of the top ten spots at Boston (led by Rodgers, who won the marathon).
Those who were there speak nostalgically of the era when runners ran rampant in Boston. They were a high-profile, exotic subculture, like the hippies of a decade earlier, except without psychedelics. It was a tight, almost communal society. "There was a terrific passion and a certain innocence pervading the sport, and it really flowered more in Boston than anywhere else in America," recalls Rodgers, who became so linked to the Boston Marathon (a race he won four times) and the city's running scene that he earned the nickname "Boston Billy." "We felt that anything was possible," he says. "And we had so much fun following through on that."
Whenever runners today hear that Gilligan actually trained with the likes of Rodgers and Meyer, they conclude that he must have been an Olympic-caliber runner. "I just laugh," he says. "I was lucky to make the D team of the Greater Boston Track Club. I could run 2:30 in the marathon ... these guys all ran 2:12 or under." Some perspective is needed here: in no other sport is the word good more relative than in marathoning. Gilligan's 2:30:42 might have been twenty minutes slower than a world-class performer like Rodgers; however, it would be good enough to win most local marathons today. Any American recreational runner who can complete 26.2 miles in the low three-hour range is considered outstanding today — and good now means you can break four hours!
The world of running was going to change dramatically in the next decade. In the early 1980s, Huebner writes, the fast-growing running shoe companies lured many of the Greater Boston Track Club's top runners to their own teams, and the club faded. Many of the original running boomers eventually burned out — casualties of too many miles, too much racing, and too many overuse injuries. They would be followed by a wave of marathon runners whose numbers were far greater but whose times were much slower. Consider that in 1980, 120,000 Americans crossed the finish line of a marathon. About 90 percent of them were men, and their median finish time was 3 hours and 32 minutes. Twenty-five years later, the number of finishers nearly quadrupled, to 432,000 finishers, 41 percent of them female. The median time for men in 2005 had shot up to 4 hours and 20 minutes; the typical female finisher took 4 hours and 51 minutes. This was a different breed than gazelles like Gilligan and his pals on the Greater Boston Track Club, who logged eighty miles a week and ran 2:20 marathons. The second-generation running boomers did not typically have high school or collegiate running backgrounds. Indeed, many of them had no athletic background at all. Unlike the first generation, they tended not to party hearty. As with so many aspects of our society, running in the 1990s was a little more sober and serious than in the 1970s. For this new cadre of runners, the marathon would be a route to fitness, weight loss, self-actualization, fundraising for worthy causes ... or travel.
That's where, Gilligan says, "I was a classic example of being in the right place at the right time."
The route that got him to that place — and from there to the shores of Antarctica — began in June 1977. At that time Gilligan was working for a travel "wholesaler," a firm that packaged and sold tours to travel agents. He had jumped at the opportunity, a job that would provide a chance for him to combine his college degree in marketing with the travel basics he'd learned at the airline. He diligently spent his time trying to pitch travel packages to the Bahamas to rich doctors and corporations looking for a warm place to hold their annual stockholder meetings.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Coolest Race on Earth by John Hanc. Copyright © 2009 John Hanc. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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