Why running matters: Ted Corbitt, the soul of a city, and jogging in a pandemic

Why running matters: Ted Corbitt, the soul of a city, and jogging in a pandemic

Story by Rustin Dodd

The Athletic.com - April 2020

NEW YORK — Every morning, Ted Corbitt ran to work. He pulled on sweats, said goodbye to his son and took off from his home in the Marble Hill section of the Bronx. He headed north, taking a detour through Yonkers before returning south via the Grand Concourse. His office — the ICD Rehabilitation and Research Center — was on East 24th street in Manhattan, six blocks from Madison Square Park. The trek measured 20 miles. In the evening, Corbitt pulled his sweats back on and jogged home.

Corbitt, the chief physical therapist at the International Center for the Disabled, made the round trip for years, starting in the early 1950s, even as onlookers gawked and colleagues marveled and almost nobody understood the pastime of jogging. Corbitt ran to work because he was a runner — a former Olympian in the marathon — and the city was his track, and because he couldn’t shake the urge until he was back pounding the pavement again. “He felt like a king,” says Gary Corbitt, Ted’s son.

Corbitt ran the city before joggers took over Central Park, before the running revolution captured America, before the New York City Marathon changed the sports calendar. At one point, he maintained his twice-daily workouts for 13 straight years. For Corbitt, one friend said, life was a series of tests.

His most legendary workout consisted of a 31-mile loop around Manhattan Island. He started at his home, jogged south through Riverside Park, ran all the way to the Battery on the southern tip of Manhattan, and then headed back toward the Bronx along the East Side. When he returned home, he pulled a juice and a snack from the mailbox, and then headed off for another loop.

When his training schedule peaked — when another 50-mile road race beckoned — he could top 300 miles in a week, an astounding number even for a seasoned ultramarathoner. Yet it wasn’t only the miles that separated Ted Corbitt. It was the way he made running seem cool.

Back before 5Ks, half-marathons and running clubs were the norm in every American city, Corbitt led a devoted group of running pioneers in New York City throughout the 1950s and ’60s. They trained in Van Cortlandt Park, preached inclusivity and never imagined their sport would conquer America.

“My neighbors and relatives and my mother used to think I’d drop dead from running,” Corbitt told the New York Times in 1978. “Now I see these gray-haired ladies running in the park, not only looking like runners but really fit. It continually amazes me.”

Not long ago I was out for a run in Brooklyn, the streets quiet except for solo joggers and families out for a walk. It was the third week of isolation as the novel coronavirus spread through New York, almost two weeks before the death toll in the city would surpass 10,000, according to state authorities. At once, everything had changed. I ran past discarded hospital masks on the ground and shuttered bars and saw people waiting in line for groceries, positioned 6 feet apart on the sidewalk. I completed my usual six-mile loop around the perimeter of Prospect Park, and then — perhaps out of boredom — I decided to keep going, to a quiet neighborhood where the streets were empty. For a moment, I looked at the runners on the sidewalks near the park, each searching for a lift, the normal ratio of joggers to pedestrians way out whack.

For a moment, I thought about Ted Corbitt.

The grandson of a former slave, Corbitt was born on Jan. 31, 1919, the same day as Jackie Robinson. He started running on his family’s cotton farm in rural South Carolina. It was, he would say, a means to an end. He ran to the store; he ran to school. When his family moved to Cincinnati, he ran sprints in high school, inspired by Ralph Metcalfe and Jesse Owens, the Olympic champion from Ohio State. He then headed to the University of Cincinnati, where he continued to run, even as racism and segregation limited his opportunities to compete in meets.

Corbitt would serve in World War II. He moved to New York. He got married, earned a graduate degree in physical therapy and turned his eyes to a new challenge: distance running. Inspired by Ellison “Tarzan” Brown — a Native American who won the Boston Marathon in 1936 — and addicted to the feeling of training, Corbitt logged miles in Prospect Park, experimented with distance and made the 1952 Olympic team in the marathon. He was the first black American to compete in the event.

The marathon, Corbitt would say, was simply a test, a challenge that demanded patience and resilience. If you were willing to suffer, you were ready. If you just kept going, you could reach the finish.

“Running is something you just do,” he once told the writer Gail Kislevitz, for a book about the marathon. “You don’t need a goal. You don’t need a race. You don’t need the hype of a so-called fitness craze. All you need is a cheap pair of shoes and some time. The rest will follow.”

One day in late March, I went out for another run. The sun was out. The temperature in the low 60s. It was supposed to be Opening Day at Citi Field.

It was a beautiful day, except it wasn’t, and miles six through nine proved troublesome. My hamstring wouldn’t loosen up. No music sounded right. I kept wanting to stop and walk.

I moved to New York last summer, and a friend suggested a simple way to understand the city: running. There is no better way to know its rhythms, its people or its landscapes. Sometimes that meant a jog through Fort Greene Park. Sometimes that meant a long, unplanned route through Brooklyn. Sometimes it meant a subway ride to Coney Island or Riverside Park and four or five miles before heading back.

The neighborhoods bleed together, and the people pass in the distance, and the streets unspool before you. Sometimes the light hits a building just right. What I did not expect, of course, was that running would be the only thing quieting my anxiety during a pandemic. The basketball rims are gone and the soccer fields empty. Yankee Stadium is closed. The Billie Jean King National Tennis Center is a temporary hospital. In some ways, running in isolation — face covered, alone — feels like the only sport we have left.

One morning when Corbitt was on a loop of Manhattan, George Hirsch was out picking up his newspaper. Hirsch, a member of the New York running community and a future publisher of Runner’s World magazine, lived in the East 30s then. Just as he headed outside, he saw Corbitt running by.

Moments later, he had joined in, trying to keep up with Corbitt as they jogged down the East Side. When they got down to the Battery, Hirsch told me, he found a pay phone. He decided he better call home. “I ran into Ted,” Hirsch told his wife. “I’m OK, but don’t expect me for a while.”

They ended up doing one of Corbitt’s patented loops, and Hirsch, a journalist at heart, kept asking questions along the way. But that was the thing: If you didn’t ask questions of Corbitt, you rarely got answers. He was always pleasant and always friendly but he seldom talked about himself. “You had to listen carefully when Ted was talking,” Hirsch told me. “He never raised his voice.”

Corbitt was modest and humble, even as he served as the guiding force for a community of runners. In 1958, he became the first president of the New York Road Runners. Before that, he was a member of the Pioneer Club, an integrated organization that started in Harlem in the 1930s and served as a prototype for future running groups.

Corbitt liked to say he was addicted to running. He excelled in ultramarathons before the term was widely used. (He finished fourth in the 52.5-mile London-to-Brighton road race in 1962.) He was the first editor of the New York Runner, one of sport’s first publications. He developed a method of course measurement that propelled running forward, offering weekend warriors an accurate way to test themselves. He helped Fred Lebow found the New York City Marathon in 1970.

Corbitt wasn’t quite a full-throated evangelist for the sport; he was too reserved for that. Yet he was a force all the same. Before the running boom of the 1970s, before Bill Bowerman published a book titled “Jogging,” before Frank Shorter won gold in the marathon at the 1972 Olympics, Corbitt ran 20 miles to work. His friends, Hirsch said, were “in awe.”

“Ted was one of those people who just loved running,” said Michael Capiraso, president and CEO of the New York Road Runners. “Without Ted, I don’t think we’d be here.”

In the early days, Hirsch said, of the revolution that followed, Corbitt was almost like an oracle for runners. If you had a question about interval training or what to wear on a cold day, you asked Ted. “We knew that he knew,” Hirsch said.

They also knew where to find him, zooming through the streets of New York, piling up the miles, never late to work. Corbitt would say that he was stopped by police so many times that he lost count. Other folks just figured he was crazy. But the thing was, he never wanted to stop.

Hirsch is 85 now, and one day this month, he told me, he went for a run in Central Park. The truth was, like many people, he really needed it. “It means a lot,” he said.

The city feels different now, in ways that are hard to explain. The streets feel desolate. The energy — that intoxicating life force — is gone. The ambulance sirens feel ubiquitous.

On Monday, the death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 10,000 in New York State, according to numbers from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s latest briefing. Cases in New York City have topped 106,000.

For Hirsch and others, the daily runs offer an hour or so of normality, a respite from quarantine, a sport that can be done in isolation, safely away away from others and with the endorsement of health officials. “We need some structure in our lives,” Hirsch said, “and to have that one piece of the day where you get in some running, it’s worth a lot.”

Corbitt liked to say that there was no better feeling than putting in a workout. Many others feel the same way. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a captain of the coronavirus response and a native New Yorker, once said that running was one of few things for which he didn’t need motivation. “Mostly,” he added, “I think the benefit for me is a stress reliever.”

In the 2018 book “Running Is My Therapy,” a study of running and its health benefits, author Scott Douglas described how running not only increases endorphins, leading to momentary euphoria, but also can change the brain structure over time, combating anxiety and depression. The chemical benefits, though, are just one facet of the relationship between running and mood.

“When you’re running, you’re required to do some deep breathing, and deep breathing is one of the best skills for promoting relaxation,” said Julie Vieselmeyer, a clinical sport and health psychologist at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle. “And when the body relaxes, so does the mind.”

Vieselmeyer told me she had seen an increase in anxiety in patients across the last month. In addition to quieting the mind, she said, running can increase oxygen to the brain, which can heighten focus and clarity. “For a lot of individuals who struggle to quiet their mind,” she said, “running almost becomes a form of meditation or a practice of mindfulness.”

If you are a runner, you know that feeling — when the endorphins kick in and the brain fires and the ideas flow; when you can’t wait to get home to get started on a project or make a call. It never feels so good until it feels so bad. “I find that my best time thinking — my best creative time, my most enjoyable time — is when I’m running,” said Capiraso, the president of the NYRR.

Corbitt knew the feeling before most. Suffering, he said, wasn’t just a byproduct of the experience. It was the experience.

“On a good day, the running seems to flow effortlessly,” he once told Kislevitz. “On a bad day, it’s the pain that flows.”

Corbitt died on Dec. 12, 2007. He was 88. In the final decade of his life, he once walked more than 300 miles in six days. As always, his friends said, life was a series of tests.

These days, of course, you can see his legacy in the parks around the city, in the joggers with strollers, in the early risers who put in their miles before dawn, in the more than 53,000 people who completed the New York City Marathon in 2019.

So on a Saturday evening two weeks ago, I went out for another run. I did this because I wanted to, of course, but also because I needed something to take my mind off the virus. I ran south toward Prospect Park, cut West toward the Gowanus Canal, headed back south through Park Slope, weaved away from pedestrians, and eventually ended up in Ditmas Park, where the front lawns are bigger and families were out walking.

On the way back home, I saw restaurant owners filling to-go orders and bars selling cocktails out their front window, trying to hang on. At 7 p.m., I heard people clapping and banging pots and pans for the front-line medical workers in the distance. As I finished up my run, I thought about something that Hirsch had said about the New York City Marathon. The 50th anniversary is scheduled for Nov. 1, and no matter when it happens, Hirsch has already thought about what it will mean. “It’ll be an incredibly emotional and special day,” he said, “in terms of uniting and healing.”

A few blocks from my apartment, I pulled up an app on my phone: 9.7 miles. It was not exactly a Ted Corbitt distance, but as he once said, I felt lucky to have the shoes and the time. And then, as I walked the rest of the way home, I decided: I’m running New York next year.

Link:  https://theathletic.com/1724854/2020/04/14/why-running-matters-ted-corbitt-the-soul-of-a-city-and-jogging-in-a-pandemic/

Best Wishes!

Gary Corbitt

Curator: Ted Corbitt Archives

Historian: National Black Marathoners Association (NBMA)