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The Unforeseen Gifts:
Frank Shorter, a Running Movement, and the Bolder Boulder
By Melissa Field
Long before I moved to Philadelphia and started writing for Philadelphia Runner, I fell in love with running in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado with a race we call the Bolder Boulder and a running movement led by our local legend, Frank Shorter. Shorter won the U.S. Olympic gold in 1972 for the marathon and is credited for leading the running boom we enjoy today.
It’s easy to forget that running wasn’t always the sport we now know. Waffle running shoes, technical shirts, altitude training, road races, and the pursuit of professional running as a career were the dreams of previous generations. It wasn’t about fame, money, or adoration because runners had little of that. What they did have was a vision for the future.
So as we celebrate the 2008 Olympic season, it seemed fitting that I go home to find out what happened when an Olympian gave back to his community and to his sport. The ripples from this particular gift have spilled into our everyday lives as runners, but the story is still being written.
Frank Shorter started running in high school where his talent eventually brought him to Yale and to coach Bob Giegengick in 1966. Giegengick coached the men’s track and field team in the 1964 Olympics and was known for teaching athletes how to coach themselves. At the time, there was no such thing as a “professional runner”. Runners didn’t have sponsors like Nike. Bill Bowerman, in fact, was still crafting the Nike running shoe on his wife’s waffle iron. For these reasons, Shorter knew the life of a post-collegiate runner would be difficult. What he didn’t know was that he would write the script.
During his sophomore year at Yale, Shorter’s family moved from upstate New York to Taos, New Mexico. While training in Taos over the summer, Shorter began to experience the benefits of altitude training. He returned to Yale and won the NCAA title in 10,000 meters. He also made his first traveling US team where he met and befriended several runners from the University of Oregon, including Kenny Moore and Steve Prefontaine. The men started training together, and Shorter moved to Boulder soon thereafter.
Boulder offers over 300 days of sunshine a year, miles of untouched acreage, and an elevation of 5,391 feet, an ideal elevation for altitude training. Shorter came upon the city now universally known as an outdoor endurance athlete’s paradise and never looked back.In the early 1970s, Boulder was the only city with both a high elevation and a year-round indoor track. Shorter immediately set his sites on the 1972 Olympics and began trading off between training in Boulder and attending law school at the University of Florida. Giegengick had given him the ability to coach himself, but Shorter learned much about racing through trial and error.
Training in Boulder proved to be such a success that Shorter sought to train at an even higher elevation and invited a group of runners to join him in Vail, Colorado. The runners soon discovered that Vail was too high, and that elevations over 6,000 feet can actually reduce a runner’s ability to recover. The athletes came back to Boulder, applied this lesson, and all proceeded to qualify for the US Olympic team. They had successfully written the blueprint for altitude training and Shorter progressed to win the 1971 Fukuoka Marathon, the only big city marathon in the early 1970s. The next year, he made history.
Shorter remains the only American male to win the Olympic gold for the marathon. He finished over 2 minutes ahead of the second-place finisher, and went on to win the silver medal for the marathon in the1976 Montreal Olympics. He is the only American to win multiple medals in the Olympic marathon.
He returned to Boulder a champion, but his career was far from over. He had a vision for running that went beyond Olympic victory. He pursued this vision for himself, for future athletes, and for his friend, Steve Prefontaine. “I was the last person to see Steve before he died,” Shorter recalled. “We sat in front of Kenny Moore’s house talking about what we were going to do to change the sport. We wanted to open it up professionally, and this is what I continued to do, but it started with Steve and me and our conversation that night. Steve died within a minute of my saying goodbye to him. I’ve always felt like I’ve been carrying on for him.”
One champion’s last sentiments, perhaps most fittingly, spurred the beginning of another champion’s movement.
After the 1976 Olympics, Shorter opened his own running store in Boulder and worked to improve running clothes. During the 1972 Olympics, Bill Bowerman and Shorter sourced the singlets worn by the entire US track team. As Shorter explained, “The original singlets were made of wool with sewn on letters, and so, Bowerman bought better material and had the letters screen printed. He even paid for it all, but we both made them.” As with altitude training, Shorter experimented with clothing until he found what worked. The shirts he and Bowerman created are now in the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
Keeping true to his conversation with Prefontaine, Shorter also researched ways to open the sport professionally. He was 28 years old in 1976, the year of his second Olympic win. By the standards of the day, he should have been well into a professional legal career but he wanted to alter the existing rules that blocked athletes from earning a living through competition. In 1981 he developed a trust fund proposal for amateur athletes and approached the federation. He studied the International Olympic Committee rules and discovered they allowed for a national federal trust fund to which individuals or corporations could contribute. This money could be doled out to athletes for education and living expenses. Shorter advocated and won the right for American athletes to have access to a similar system. Over time, this idea devolved and athletes today are now able to win prize money.
Shorter’s business savvy also eventually made him the first sponsored runner. He once again approached the federation and asked permission to work with Hilton Hotels, marketing running classes and healthy menus for guests. “It was a time for trying new things and setting precedence,” he remembered. “I had to do more because running was a different sport; it was an amateur sport, it wasn’t a professional sport.”
In this era of new things, Shorter and his banker stumbled upon what would be their grand gift to the Boulder community and to road racing. This gift marked the beginning of what Shorter now believes is the greatest thing to happen to running in the past thirty years: the “demystification of the sport.”
Shorter was introduced to Bank of Boulder president, Steve Bosley, through a mutual friend. Bosley had five children and was disappointed with the lack of organization at children’s sporting events. He approached Shorter with the idea for a local children’s track meet. In the late 1970s, several road races had begun to materialize across the country and Shorter thought the races served as exceptional community events. “How about we do a road race instead?” Shorter suggested. “What’s a road race?” Bosely asked.
Bosley immediately began running and researching the few road races available and, 10 weeks later, he hosted the first Bolder Boulder. The year was 1979 and 2,700 runners participated. In addition to collaborating in the development of the race, Shorter legitimized the event by running it. “No one ever expected the Bolder Boulder to take off like it did,” said current race director, Cliff Bosley, son of Steve. “It was a labor of love from the beginning,”
Steve Bosely hired a race management company to assist with the development of the race that first year and, disappointed with the quality of the company’s performance, declared, “By God, if it’s going to be screwed up, we’re not going to pay someone to screw it up, we’ll screw it up ourselves!” From that moment on, the Bolder Boulder belonged to the citizens of Boulder. Bosley utilized local organizations, schools, and scout troops as volunteers and fed race proceeds back into these groups.
Bosley’s five children, his inspiration for the race, have worked or run every Bolder Boulder since 1979. Cliff Bosley still remembers registering race participants at Shorter’s running store in the 1980s. During those early years, Frank Shorter Running Gear provided the race shirts, making the Bolder Boulder the first race to offer technical running shirts. Shorter won the race in 1981, and the Bolder Boulder celebrated the 20-year anniversary of Shorter’s Olympic gold in 1997 by inviting a generation of his running companions to run the race with him. When Shorter crossed the finish line that year, an entire stadium, filled with upwards of 50,000 runners,erupted in applause.
In 2008, the race welcomed its 30-year anniversary and hosted, among its nearly 55,000 participants, an array of elite athletes, including Ryan Hall and Deena Kastor. Since the race began, the Bolder Boulder has motivated an entire generation of runners and continues to hearten the road race explosion. The citizens of Boulder treat the race like a local holiday. Streets packed with performers and cheering crowds provide the event with all the ambiance of a massive block party. If there is one 10k race worth traveling for, the Bolder Boulder is certainly it.
Shorter is a huge fan of both the road racing explosion and the demystification of running. “Running has expanded into the general population as more people now see how easy it is. It’s an activity where the effort you put in can really come back,” he said. “We didn’t set out to create this huge thing and that’s what makes it all the more satisfying.” “Oh Yes You Can!”—the motto of the Bolder Boulder—became the motto of a movement, and Shorter still derives satisfaction from watching all runners as they cross the Bolder Boulder finish line, fast or slow.
It’s natural to hold Olympians in high regard. We hope they are as humble as they are diligent, as generous as they are ambitious, as committed to the betterment of the sport as they are to personal achievement. Frank Shorter is that Olympian and, lucky for us, he is a runner. He served as chairman of the National Anti-Doping Agency and continues to ferociously fight for drug testing. He also chats with high schools runners, applauds neighbors as they jog by, and readily offers training advice and encouragement. He is the caretaker of our sport. He may not have foreseen the future of running, but he knew that winning a gold medal meant more than just personal gain. As he said, “Running is a sport that brings people together, and I think runners have an instinct to give back.”
Special thanks to Frank Shorter, Cliff Bosley,and Ryan Van Duzer for letting me tell this story.