So gather 'round children, and I'll tell you a tale of ancient history . . . .
Toward the bottom of this message is a link to a short 4-minute video on Ron Bentley, filmed in January 1974.
I doubt if the name Ron Bentley rings a bell with even 1% of the readers on this UltraList. However, when I first became interested in ultras, he was a giant in the sport. In the past I'd only read about Bentley and seen a few photos of him, so I was delighted when England's Andy Milroy informed me a few days ago of the existence of this video, showing Ron being interviewed soon after his greatest race, a 24-hour which unfolded 40 years ago.
To place things in context, we need to go back decades, long before most readers here were ever active in the sport.
At age 65, I am far from being the oldest member of the UL. However, I'm pretty sure that in terms of when we all began running organized ultramarathons, no one else here has a personal resume dating further back than mine.
My first ultra was in 1974, and the running world was vastly different then. The opportunity for people to try races longer than 26.2 miles was extremely limited. According to my records, there were only 13 ultras held in the United States in all of 1974, and four of them were shorter than 50 miles. Of the other ultradistance competitions to choose from, there were seven 50-milers and a pair of 100-Ks. That was it. One of the 100Ks had an option to continue on as a stage event for a 3-day 300-K (which future Ultra Hall of Famer Park Barner and racewalker extraordinaire Alan Price did), but the longest continuous distance offered in America that year was only 62.1 miles. There had been a couple 100-milers held in the past, but there wasn't a single 100 put on anywhere in the U.S. in 1974.
At least the few races we had back then were not all concentrated in the same place, although they were almost all clustered on the east or west coast. The 13 ultras were held in 9 different states: there were 3 in Maryland; 2 each in California and New York; and one apiece in Washington, Georgia, Ohio, Virginia, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
My ultra debut was in the C-&-O Canal 100-K. It started at the base of the Washington Monument in D.C., and headed to where the C-&-O Canal towpath begins in Georgetown; and then followed the towpath along the Maryland side of the Potomac River for 60 miles, to a point opposite Harpers Ferry, W.Va. Seven men entered the race, and six completed the 100 kms. I finished in 2nd place, behind Park Barner (a clubmate of mine from the little Harrisburg Area Road Runners Club), who won in 7:52:43.
If present-day ultrarunners feel as though they occupy a small pond, compared to an ocean of runners doing shorter events, back then the entire running population was merely a pond, and with ultras forming no more than a tiny puddle. Of the 13 ultras held in 1974, the JFK 50-Mile was the only event with over 40 starters.
It was almost an entirely male preserve, too. That whole year, only 5 females finished any race longer than a marathon. In Santa Monica, California, Eileen Waters became the first woman to ever break 7 hours for 50 miles, smashing her world record for the distance with a 6:55:27. In the same race, Donna Gookin also came in under the old mark, at 7:12:51. At JFK, Nancy Keplinger persisted through a horrendous ice storm to finish that 50-miler in 13:48:05.
(In its first 12 years, JFK was held in March. That is, until the hyperthermic conditions of 1974 wreaked havoc on the race, with 84% of its field dropping out due to a daylong deluge of wintry sleet and freezing rain. After that weather disaster, race founder Buzz Sawyer switched its annual date to November.)
Oddly, while I noted that only 5 American females finished an ultra in 1974, Waters, Gookin and Keplinger were the only women to do so. That's because the only other representatives of their gender in this tiny group were a couple little girls, as sisters Linda and Suzanne Bottlik, ages 11 and 9, trotted through the Southern Pacific AAU 50-K in California in 5:32 and 5:38, respectively, shepherded along by their father!
Lest people get a mistaken impression of the toughness of ultrarunners back then ("Gee, we all run lots of 100-milers nowadays, and that's way beyond what those oldtimers used to do. . ."), it needs to be pointed out that although the sport was in its infancy here, its pioneers were primarily men in their 20s and 30s who were serious athletes. They came out of a roadracing tradition, and the competition in these "short" ultras was frequently both fierce and fast. Quality, not quantity. It was only for a lack of opportunity that this small band wasn't doing 100-milers, too.
The most dramatic example of this fact is evident from that year's national championship 50-mile. Held on a relatively hilly loop in New York's Central Park, only 12 men finished the race. However, 7 of those 12 runners broke 6 hours, with the great Max White winning in 5:28:15 and Park Barner taking second. In other words, the race was open to anyone in the whole country who was an AAU member and wanted to run . . . but if you showed up and took 6 and a half hours to cover the 50 miles, you were going to find yourself in the back of the pack! (Similarly, when I ran the National 50 in Central Park in 1976, the race that time had only 17 finishers, but my 5:51:38 was only good for 5th place, and nine men in all broke 6 hours.)
Meanwhile, despite the paucity of available ultras here, the U.S. was still more advanced than all but one country in the the rest of the world. Continental Europe had some annual mass 100-Ks, but these were mostly hiking treks which a few runners would also do. Japan was dormant. South Africa had its enormous Comrades 56-miler, but its national apartheid policy kept that a segregated, whites-only event which was shunned by all but a few foreign runners.
It was only in the British Isles that ultras had flourished. The 52.5-mile London-to-Brighton was the most hotly-contested ultra in the world, and during the 1960s Ted Corbitt ("The Father of American Ultrarunning") had travelled to England five times to do that premiere event, as did some other Americans who lacked many ultra options in our country.
Most British ultras were in the 35- to 50-mile range, but every couple years the British RRC would host a special longer race. In 1969, it was a 100-miler, and John Tarrant ran the second fastest time in history, a 12:31:10, which trailed only the world record of 12:20:28 set in 1953 by South African Wally Hayward. Meanwhile, the 50-year-old Ted Corbitt placed 3rd with a U.S. 100-mile record of 13:33:06.
In 1971, the British RRC held another top quality 100-mile, and this is when Ron Bentley rose to great prominence in the ultra world. He won it in 12:37:55, the third fastest time in history, beating John Tarrant (12:51:38) in the process, while his brother Gordon Bentley claimed the third spot in 13:14:17.
This long-winded intro brings us up to Nov. 3-4, 1973, when the British RRC held their next big extra-long ultra, a race in which Ron Bentley broke Wally Hayward's world record for 24 hours.
Here's a link to the short video about it:
http://www.macearchive.org/
This brief look at Ron Bentley was filmed two months after his 24-hour world record. The mark he had to beat at the time was the 159.3 miles Hayward had run in England twenty years earlier.
Bentley's 50 and 100-mile splits were 6:08:11 and 13:09:52. He passed Hayward's record at 22:59:38. At that point, he stopped running, and switched to a slow and painful walk, covering only 2 more miles in the final hour.
In the video, Bentley seems like a fine chap, and a bull of a man. I'd read before that he was built like a fighter. He looks the part, yet the shots of him on the move show an impressive running form. He'd be a fairly intimidating competitor to race against, with his powerful physique. Most runners don't have his upper body!
The food intake cited in the video is questionable, to my mind. I suspect the filmmakers may have asked him to set up everything he possibly could have had available at trackside during the race, not what he actually consumed:
3.5 gallons of a kind of glucose drink
3 jars of honey
4 pounds of solid glucose
a loaf of bread
5 tins of soup
2 jellies & a custard
12 chocolate bars
4 pints of tea
1 tin of pears
½ a tin of oranges
He does comment that he lost 14 pounds in the course of the event. That's a slight exaggeration, but not far off, as he dropped 8% of his body weight over 24 hours. Beforehand, he was weighed in at 156.5 pounds, and afterward he weighed 143.8, for a total loss of 12.7 pounds. So it's hard to believe he lost that much weight, if he also ate as much as the list above contains.
The race was on a cinder track (tough surface for an event lasting so long!) but had mild temps for a race in November in Britain, with a low of 52 and a high of 61. But, it was also damp and had a chilling wind at times (6 PM start); but what had to make it very tough was that there was a cold downpour at Hour 19 of the event, and part of the track was 2" deep in water for several hours after that.
Of particular U.S. interest is that this same race gave Ted Corbitt the only opportunity in his career to attempt a 24-hour event. Ted entered the race with a goal of 150 miles. For any other 54-year-old runner that would seem preposterous, but in Ted's case 150 miles sounded reasonable. He'd run 13:33 in his only 100-miler just four years earlier, and then done 5:34:01 for 50 miles at age 51, and 5:35:03 at age 52.
Unfortunately, while Ron Bentley triumphed that day, the result for the American was a disappointing performance. Ted hit 50 miles in 6:50:41, but struggled from there. He passed 100 miles in 15:22, but deteriorated more the rest of the way, eventually settling for 134.4 miles for his 24 hours' work. Our national record at the time was very soft (since hardly any Amercans had ever done a 24-hour), so Corbitt's distance actually established a new U.S. record, but he was nonetheless disappointed with the outcome, as it fell so far short of his goal for the day.
(Sadly, unbeknownst to Ted, at this point he was approaching the end of his elite competitive career. He ran a couple quality ultras after the 24-hour in England, including doing a 5:53:09 for 50 miles at age 55 in November, 1974. That was his last hurrah, however, as he subsequently developed breathing difficulties which reduced him to only very slow jogging or walking, although he continued to walk occasional ultras into his 80s.)
Incidentally, in the film it appears Bentley is wearing Tiger Boston shoes (originally named Tiger Joggers; later the same model was renamed the Tiger Nairobi). They were among the first shoes with nylon uppers, but were racing/training flats that were lightweight and had very little of the "support" that you find in modern shoes. They were mostly just a flat sole with hardly any heel lift, attached to an almost-all nylon upper, except for thin, flimsy leather strips at the heel counter and toe box. Although I doubt my old legs could tolerate them now, back in 1973-1979 (until they went out of production) the Tiger Jogger/Boston/Nairobi was my favorite all-purpose shoe. I added a lightweight Spenco insole to them to provide a little more cushioning, and wore them both for training and racing. I'd rank them as one of only 3 shoe models (of the many I've tried in the past 40 years) that I actually liked (the others being the Nike Terra TC in the early-to-mid '80s, and the Nike Air Zoom in the late '90s).
Finally, IF ANYONE WANTS TO READ A LOT MORE ABOUT RON BENTLEY AND HIS HISTORIC 24-HOUR, SEND ME AN EMAIL REQUEST AND I'LL SEND YOU A LARGE PDF FILE OF A GREAT ARTICLE ON THE SUBJECT. It was written by Chris Holloway of England. Chris just finished it a couple weeks ago, and wrote it to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Bentley's world record, coming up next week.
The article is very long, and I don't recall ever seeing a more comprehensive account of a single ultra. Holloway tracked down a bunch of people who were either in the race, or helped officiate at it, etc., and who can still recall the day well. There's an hour-by-hour retelling of the event, plus charts breaking down its statistics, all augmented with some wonderful old photos from the race. There are individual shots of most of the competitors, including a couple nice pictures of Ted Corbitt and a neat photo of the winner slogging through the water on the track after the downpour.
Also, the piece begins with a biography of Ron Bentley, showing his childhood was a very hardscrabble one. Born on Oct. 10, 1930, he grew up during the Depression era in a home without electricity, in a family of 11 children, etc. That's quite a different background from most of us!
Charmingly, though, at the end of the article there's a current photo of Bentley in his track suit, smiling broadly and looking very hale and hearty, at age 83.
---Best,
Nick Marshall
Camp Hill, PA
