Meeting A Legend

I recently had the opportunity to meet Tom Fleming. He's not a household name, but he should be. Fleming, who coaches at a private school in NJ, won the NY Marathon twice in its early days. He also had two second places and several other high placings at the Boston Marathon. So, why don't you know of him? Fleming had the misfortune of running in the shadow of perhaps America's best known marathoner, Bill Rodgers. (Yes, for those of you who are marathon fans, if you want to claim that Frank Shorter deserves that title, I can't really argue against it.)

Among the stories that I heard Mr. Fleming tell, my personal favorite was a tale about his winning a car in 1981. In those days, he was training at a very high level. His weekly mileage was about 140/week (yes, that is 20 miles a day!) and he walked to the running store that he operated. The result was that most of the mileage on that car built up driving to races. His annual mileage on the car was about 2500, while his annual training mileage was about 7000! How many of us can make a statement like that? I know that most weekdays, I drive more than my weekly mileage.

You'll find a capsule biography on Fleming by scanning down to the three asterisks (***) in the article recognizing his induction into the Ogden Newspapers 20K race's hall of fame. You'll also find Fleming listed several times among the top finishers in the early years of the NY City Marathon. You can also find a nice article by Running Times republishing of their story on the 1979 Boston Marathon. Fleming is also mentioned in Marc Bloom's book, God On The Starting Line. (I might add that Bloom's book is excellent, and likely an inspiring gift for any young runner you know.) Fleming is truly one of the great ones, yet his accomplishments go virtually unrecognized except by true students of distance running.