Talk:Frank Shorter

Credited with igniting running boom?? Come off it.

"His victory is credited with igniting the running boom in the United States in the 1970s." The citations for this are pretty flimsy-not major newspapers, not wellknown sportswriters, and LONG afrer the 1970s(2009). The writers of those artickles may not have even been born in 1972, and it's typical for sportwriters to make a dubious dramatic claim to draw in readers. As a matter of fact, Shorter should of course be credited with a small part in causing the usa running boom. But it is surely more to be credited to Jim Ryun's exploits, Kenneth Cooper's Aerobics book, and to a lesser extent to The Complete Book of Running by James Fixx. I'm going to mark the quoted claim as "dubious."2601:681:4902:31B8:85D6:C4DA:397F:4283 (talk) 06:04, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

I'll stack this up with more sources and revert your dubious. If you read the article at Running boom of the 1970s (much of which I wrote), linked in this article, you will see the attribution to other phenomenon that contributed to the boom, certainly it was building effort. Shorter didn't come out of a vacuum. Ryun, Liquori, Rodgers and Prefontaine deserve some of the credit and laid the groundwork, but Shorter was the major factor. His Marathon win was seen by the Olympic TV audience. It showed an audience of millions that an American can succeed at the Marathon distance and that is why the 26.2 became the distance to run, not the Mile or the 10K. Assuming you were there at the time, you should remember the attitude, how 10Ks and 5K were treated as the "also ran" events if you're not ready for a marathon. Billy Mills was a hero, but didn't get that reaction, 10Ks didn't boom in the 60's. Marathons started to boom in 1973. People prepared using Fixx's book. Runner's World went monthly in 1973. Bowerman's jogging became popular. Gerald Ford was the first president you ever saw jogging, not Nixon or Johnson. Something happened in 1972 that caused this surge. Trackinfo (talk) 10:51, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

I have no idea how old either of you are, but I'm 51, and I was a high school long-distance runner in the late 1970s and early 1980s, having run three marathons in under three hours while I was still in high school, and I continued to train and run while I was in college. And, yes, I am old enough to remember that Frank Shorter was still very much a topic of regular conversation among competitive distance runners in that era. His 1972 Olympic gold medal (and 1976 silver) in the marathon was a sports media sensation in the United States, second only to Mark Spitz's record-breaking performance in '72. It's hard to describe now, given the Cold War era emphasis on the Olympics from the 1950s through the 1980s, just how much attention the Olympics received from the average American in those years, much like the manned space program received in the 1960s. Yes, Ryun, Liquori and Rodgers contributed to the boom; yes, I owned Fixx's book (and its sequel, and the spiral-bound daily calendar/running logs that were spin-offs of them). And before them, Roger Bannister, and after them Seb Coe and Steve Ovett. No one person instigated the boom, but Shorter certainly was a very large contributor to it in the American popular culture, and that is amply supported by the linked references, and many others we could find with a simple Google search. We can argue about the phrasing, but media coverage of Shorter's Olympic success was a major contributor to the popular running boom in the 1970s and 1980s. I am removing the dubious claim (again). Dirtlawyer1 (talk) 19:14, 2 September 2015 (UTC)