Metro Pulse/Cover/Knoxville Track Club

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Knoxville Track Club, one of the nation's largest, keeps growing

by Jack Neely

Last Thursday morning just after 9 a.m., most Knoxvillians were still in bed, sleeping in for the holiday, recovering from tens of thousands of bottles of cheap champagne. Neighborhoods were silent as cemeteries; Kingston Pike was, for the moment, a sleepy country road. But down on Neyland Drive at Volunteer Landing, something was askew, out of keeping with the first daylight hours of a new year. Police cars flashed blue lights, there was amplified Top 40 music and someone speaking on a PA too loud for hungover ears, and, most surprising of all, several hundred people were standing right out in the street. Exactly 499 of them were wearing running shoes and numbers pinned to their shirts. The event was the Knoxville Track Club's annual New Year's Day 5K.

It was overcast and chilly, in the 40s, but the remark of the morning, overheard throughout the crowd, was about the wonderful weather. "This is great," says Allan Morgan, KTC's director. "We've had this run in the snow, in the rain."

Like most of its events, it was an all-comers proposition. Some were more serious than others, in shorts and tank tops in the cold weather. Some wore wool fleeces; at least one man ran in long dungarees. Several women wore plastic Happy New Year tiaras.

Whether there were more men or women racing that morning wasn't obvious. The age group of this event was about the same age group as mankind. At least one of the competitors was 8 years old. The oldest wore a blue track suit and a white mustache trimmed in the dapper fashion of the 1940s. He's the aptly named Max Springer, a retired soil-science professor, and he's 90 years old.

Asked what keeps him entering these races, he answered frankly. "Pigheadedness," he said. "Stubbornnness. I ought to have better sense than to run." He was, in fact, one of four over-80s who are running this course of 3.1 miles. (Later, they'd each be rewarded with commemorative bottles of champagne.) "Age is a relative thing," added Springer. "Some people get old at 45, sit on the couch and get fat."

At about 9:30, one of the runners, a woman in black tights and a white athletic headband, stepped forward to sing the national anthem into the microphone. She sounded like a pro, and maybe she is, but as soon as she finished, she was, as far as the KTC is concerned, just #189. She took her place in the pack and waited for the starting gun. There came a sharp pop, and the crowd rolled forward like a wave in the ocean and distended as it moved west underneath the Henley Street Bridge.

As large a group as this is, these 499 who paid up to $30 for the chance to leave their warm beds and run more than three miles on a chilly holiday morning, it represents only about a fifth of the total membership of the Knoxville Track Club. It numbers well over 2,000.

It may seem very odd Knoxville is home to what is claimed to be the fourth largest track club in America. (Some say sixth. "We're somewhere in the top 10," says Morgan; "It fluctuates.") Knoxville is not one of America's larger cities. Knoxville's streets aren't known for being particularly amenable to pedestrians at any speed. Humidity's often oppressive in the warmer months, our terrain is beset with troublesome angles, and our air is famous among asthmatics for its pollen, leaf mold, and urban pollution. But over 2,000 people are members of the Knoxville Track Club, and most are active runners. They participate in one or more of the club's almost-weekly long-distance running events.

Knoxville offers a lush variety of footraces to choose from: 50 a year that are open to the public, nearly one a week averaged out over the year. Twenty of them are sponsored by the Knoxville Track Club; the KTC participates in the other 30. At every one, even on New Year's Day morning, hundreds were downtown, waiting for the starting pistol, and one more chance to improve their personal best.

"There's a misconception that you have to be a great athlete," says Morgan. After almost 18 years as the club's full-time staffer, a position relatively few track clubs can support, he'll soon be retiring. "We are still a club open to the casual runner." KTC events have hosted everyone from serious, even professional athletes to tubby middleagers just looking for a challenge to get a few pounds off. There may be no other sport that embraces such a diversity.

The question of why Knoxville has supported such a large club and such a vigorous program, for all these years is perplexing to some. Cyndy Spangler, a longtime runner and popular volunteer coordinator for the KTC, says "There's no logic to it. We've got the worst air in the country, the worst humidity; but then, New Orleans has a large track club, too."

Morgan offers, "perhaps it has something to do with the history of UT track." Spangler notes that UT students and faculty account for only a minority of the club's members, and the university itself isn't formally connected to the club.

"Or, moreso with our geographical location: we have a moderate climate that attracts folks. And we hired a full-time director, who helps with publicity." He mentions the KTC's award-winning bimonthly magazine, Footnotes, and their illustrated calendar. He mentions the KTC's large youth programs, especially the summer running clinics, and its involvement in officiating many other organizations' running events. And he mentions that they've been fortunate to take a leadership role in several high-profile running events, hosting the national convention of the Road Racers Clubs of America in 1997, and involvement in the AAU Junior Olympics.

Then he offers a comment that seems to be the consensus of those we spoke with: "On the other hand, who knows?"

Some attribute the Knoxville Track Club's unusual size and vigor to the club's unusually deep history. Forty years ago, long before The Complete Book of Running, Jim Fixx's 1977 bestseller that made long-distance running a national craze, it was unusual for civilians to run when they weren't being chased by bandits. In the '50s, people would shake their heads in wonder that President Harry Truman was known to walk a whole mile with no particular destination.

But in early 1962, a group of eight track enthusiasts met at the home of Fulton High track coach B.E. Sharp to organize an amateur team to compete in Amateur Athletic Union's summer meets that year.

Most of them were teenagers, but a few, like Hal Canfield, were older professionals. A civil engineer for TVA, Canfield had run track for Syracuse in the 1940s and, after college, found he had a hard time quitting the running habit. He was involved for a time in the Denver Athletic Club's running programs, but when he moved to Knoxville in the 1950s, he found running was a pretty lonesome business. As he ran Knoxville's streets, he recalls, "People would stop along the way and say, 'What on earth are you doing?' Sometimes people would try to stop me, think that I had robbed a store or something."

The fledgling and yet unnamed track club practiced three evenings a week at old East High's track. They fielded 20 athletes to go to Furman to compete. The Knoxville upstarts won a second-place trophy.

Encouraged, the group formally organized as the Knoxville Track Club, practiced running cross-country on the UT experimental farm, and hosted an open track meet at Evans-Collins Field in East Knoxville in early '63, with assistance from a new recruit, UT's new track coach, Chuck Rohe.

By early 1964, the KTC boasted 52 members and claimed to be the only year-round track organization between Washington and New Orleans. They began hosting their own running events, several of them held on Cherokee Boulevard.

KTC events like the Cades Cove 10-miler, launched in 1966, began to draw competitors from other states, even other countries, some of them celebrities of track. The same year, national record-holder Earl Eblen of Alabama set a new 20K U.S. record in a KTC event. In 1976, Bill Haviland set a national record in an unusual event, the one-hour run, covering over 12 miles in that time. Two years before he won the Boston Marathon in 1974, Irish runner Neal Cusack broke a national record for the 15-mile run in a KTC-sponsored event on Cherokee Boulevard in 1972.

"We started the running program before anybody had a running program going. People came from Atlanta, Huntsville, North Carolina. Some of them formed their own track clubs through their connections with Knoxville's."

By the latter '60s, the KTC was regionally known, and inspiring imitations in Atlanta, Nashville, Birmingham, and Chattanooga.

For some track-club members, there is one woeful blot on Knoxville's reputation as a running city. There is no Knoxville Marathon.

Since the Boston and New York Marathons began getting national attention, cities all over the country have started running 26.2 miles, once a year. Atlanta, Memphis, Charlotte, and Nashville host annual marathons. Even some cities smaller than Knoxville, like Huntsville, Ala., have one; their recent marathon drew over 1,000 runners from all over. Knoxville, in spite of its venerable and popular track club, does not.

To be fair, Knoxville did try a marathon sometime between 1965 and 1974; sources differ about exactly when.

Canfield recalls, "It came out of the track at Central High, went through Fountain City, down Broadway, on the roads, an out-and-back course." He says there were 18 runners in the first one, including six to eight locals. Canfield, a veteran of 38 Boston Marathons, wasn't among them; he was busy organizing the thing. The winner, he recalls, was a "college kid from Dayton, Tennessee."

"We ran that course for, I would guess, three or four years. It was a little bit too dangerous, with car traffic on the roads."

They dropped the Knoxville and began calling it the Smoky Mountain Marathon, settling for a time in Oak Ridge before moving on to Townsend. For a time in the late '60s, the KTC had been involved in a very popular 10K run around the Cades Cove loop, and running a marathon in the park itself seemed the natural next step. However, Canfield says, "the people in charge of the Smoky Mountains didn't want any competitions there. They were afraid that if we ran a road race, then people with motorcycles, bicycles, or cars would want to race there too. They decided to restrict all types of competition in the park.

It earned some notoriety anyway, drawing runners from around the world. The record was set in 1979 when Kerry Ragg of New Zealand finished in 2:19:21.0.

By some accounts it sparked interest in a Smoky Mountain Marathon which was held annually for a couple of decades in the Townsend area until TDOT construction waylaid it in recent years, and may have drained away some of the motive for a Knoxville contest. But some runners we spoke with report that the course was difficult and monotonous. And it wasn't in Knoxville.

KTC board member Zane Hagy is leading the latest effort. When he's not wearing running shoes, Hagy is director of development at WUOT-FM. Though he has been a member of the Knoxville Track Club for only three years, he is a member of the club's board of directors, and has become known as the club's Marathon Man, at least in terms of promoting the idea here. He's hoping to work with the Haslam administration on the project. The new mayor, more athletic than the last one, is a sometime participant in KTC events.

"The city will want to know why they'd have to close down so many streets for so long," Hagy says. "Rather than annoy the city before we're ready, we are looking at the economic impact of marathons."

Hagy wants to have a marathon in part, just as a point of pride: "We have a very strong track club which has been recognized nationally," he says. The Knoxville Track Club, in Hagy's opinion, should be represented by a Knoxville Marathon.

Longtime KTC member Betty Schohl and her husband, Jerry, coordinate the KTC's longest current race, the Whitestone 30K, an 18.6-mile trek held every March in Kingston. A marathoner herself, Schohl has high hopes for a Knoxville Marathon. "The hope is to get it done by 2005," she says. The course is under discussion, she says, "but we'd like to finish it in the stadium."

Hagy sees it as a way to promote the city itself. "I want people from around the region to come and see Knoxville," especially downtown and the older neighborhoods which might be along the route of a marathon. It might even be a way for fit Knoxvillians to discover their own city.

For now, the track club just sponsors a wide variety of shorter runs. The KTC's year-round events range from the venerable Expo 10K, the race that began in the '70s to promote the upcoming World's Fair, to the after-dark Fireball 5K in July, to a variety of smaller events, some of them rather odd, like the October Run for the Pumpkins, a Bearden 5K in which participants are encouraged to run wearing frightening costumes. There are tentative plans for runs to celebrate the city's history. The next scheduled KTC-sponsored event will be the Calhoun's Ten Miler in Lenoir City on Jan. 31, but before that will be two other associated runs, the Norris Dam 12K/5K on Jan. 17, and the YWCA Race Against Racism on Jan. 24. (You can keep up with all this, and more, on KTC's website, www.ktc.org.)

Back at the New Year's Day 5K, the first runners start appearing just 16 minutes after they left. The first finisher is a thin young man named Eric Vandervort, who finished at 16:48. Others were right behind. A hefty man who looks like he hasn't run in a good while shouts into the microphone like a carnival huckster: "Kick it! Kick it! Don't let 'im git ye!" and "That's superfantabulistic! Way to start out a new year down by the river." Looking at their faces, it's hard to know if the runners find his words inspiring.

The finish line is a study in individuality. Some are cheerful, even laughing as they cross the finish; others could pass for Jacob Marley's ghost, struggling with invisible chains. One runs perfectly erect, like an Eton-bred Olympian. One runs in staccato hops, as if Neyland Drive were paved with hot coals. The next one weaves his head side to side like a bellydancer. Another approaches holding his head half sideways as if regarding the finish line with suspicion. Some are practically just walking at a running pace, their feet hardly leaving the pavement. One prances like a woodland sprite. Another holds his elbows secretively close to his body. None of them are being judged on style or form.

One woman's wearing an orthopedic neck brace. Some look like they're swimming through an atmosphere composed of molasses; others look like they might leave the pavement. Some are sweating profusely, and look like they might collapse. A few, knowing their limits, stop running before they get to the line. Ask many of them how they did, and they'll either mention that they set a new personal best or, if they didn't, that "I finished vertical." To many members of the KTC who won't be among the top 150 runners who receive champagne flutes, that's plenty.

But others are cool and dry as they finish, and you wonder if the grimace on their faces is annoyance that it's already over, as if they'd like to keep going, maybe take I-40 out toward Strawberry Plains. They look like marathoners.