That time a 17-year-old Mike Dukakis ran the Boston Marathon in Keds
“I was in pretty good form in those days.’’
At 82 years old, former Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis remains healthy enough to bend over and pick up trash on his way to work each day. To understand where that physical ability comes from, look no further than his running of the Boston Marathon in 1951.
In low-top Keds.
Without drinking water.
In a winding conversation with Boston magazine, Dukakis relayed his marathon run as a 17-year-old high school senior. Those were the early days of marathon running, long before people knew the basics of exercise science, he said.
I ran Boston when I was 17. I was a high school senior, and one of my cross-country buddies named Buzz, we ran the thing. This was in 1951. We ran it in low-top Keds sneakers. There were no shoes made for it at the time. They had running shoes for indoor track, but not hard surfaces.
We ran 26.2 miles in low-top Keds sneakers and didn’t do too badly. Three and a half hours. The whole town is out there. [My wife] Kitty claims she gave me water at Beacon Street, but I didn’t know her at the time. It’s entirely possible. I was dying of thirst. We knew nothing about exercise science in those days. You never drank water while running a race, right? Here’s some advice: When you’re running 26 miles, drink water.
Good tip, governor.
Dukakis, who was also captain of the tennis team, had to play a tennis match the next day. First, though, he had to walk down the stairs. Neither went well.
Ran the race, came home, had something to eat, slept for 12 hours. Woke up, hobbled to the bathroom, and my thighs had kind of locked on me, so on the top of the stairs on the second floor of the house, my mom is downstairs making breakfast for me. I literally can’t walk down the stairs. So I finally sat my rump on the top step and bounced down on my butt and had breakfast.
I have breakfast, get into the car, drive over to the tennis courts, and we beat ’em 8–1, I don’t want to tell you who the one was. All I could do was serve and come to the net, I couldn’t move laterally at all. If the other guy hit the ball to either side of me, I was done.
Dukakis finished 57th overall in the race out of a field of 191, a fraction of the 30,000 competitors who ran this past year. That wasn’t a fluke, he said.
I was in pretty good form in those days. I’d run cross-country, I was a basketball player, and I’d train for seven or eight weeks and we were averaging a 6:50 mile for the first 10 miles—we weren’t fooling around. The Newton Hills were a bit of a problem.
Spoken like a true Boston marathoner.
You can read the rest of the story at Boston magazine.
Gallery: The Boston Marathon through the years
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