The Bunion Derby

Maybe as a counter-balance to watching speedy athletes hurtling around 200m tracks all winter, I recently finished reading "The Bunion Derby," an account of a 3400-mile stage race across America.

It was on this day in 1928, 80 years ago, that 199 men set out to race from Los Angeles to New York, a distance of 3422 miles to be covered in 84 days, an average of 41 miles a day.

It was billed as the First Annual International Transcontinental Footrace and it was the brainchild of a somewhat unscrupulous sports promoter named C.C. Pyle. Pyle had big dreams of capitalizing on the public's interest in the race and in the new highway -- Route 66 -- which stretched from L.A. to Chicago. He planned the race to hit many of the big and little towns along the way, and hoped to make money with a traveling sideshow that would follow the runners from town to town.

The field included some of the best long, long distance runners (and walkers) of the day, including Arthur Newton, one of the all-time great ultra-distance runners and many-time winner of South Africa's Comrades Marathon. It also included a lot of near destitute young men hoping to persevere long enough to claim one of the top ten places and a cash prize. This was not an amateur race.

After only a few days of racing, several runners had dropped out. Conditions were very hard, and there was little in the way of practical support for the runners. Pyle had promised to feed and house them, but when the race started losing money, he looked for every excuse to shirk this responsibility. After a few weeks, the race had turned into a slog. Almost without exception, the best athletes had retired from the race, and the athletes who were left wouldn't have known an Olympic medal if it dropped out of the sky and hit them on the head.

As a spectator event, watching bedraggled men stumbling along at 10-minute mile pace was less than compelling for many. Heres how one modern day scribe described it:

"C.C. Pyle’s First Annual International Transcontinental Foot Race, better known as the Bunion Derby, was a plodding, disorganized event that taxed the health and sanity of the runners and was largely greeted with indifference by the American public."

However, public indifference has never been the true test of a worth endeavor, and th longer the race went on, the more the participants earned the right to be remembered. They were everday people with an extraordinary ability to put up with almost anything, and continue to move along the highway.

In a particularly cruel twist, to bring the race to a "swifter" conclusion and save money on food and expenses, Pyle lengthened the stages as the runners crossed Ohio, trying to "kill off" the slower runners. If they couldn't make the midnight cut-off time, they were out. During one three-day stretch, the "bunioneers" covered 173 miles - 58 miles a day.

The race produced some genuine heroes. The winner was Andy Payne, a 19-year-old from Oklahoma who had entered the race against the wishes of his father and who showed a patience beyond his years -- rarely winning a stage, but rarely having a bad race. Johnny Salo, a Finnish immigrant and policeman from Passaic was second. Third place went to Phillip Granville, a championship walker who had switched to trotting after the first few weeks. Fourth was Mike Joyce, a bricklayer from Cleveland.

The story of Andy Payne has been told in books, and even a documentary. You can see a preview here: The Great American Footrace