The First New York City Marathon: September 13, 1970

The first New York City Marathon took place on a warm September day in Central Park in 1970. Just 127 runners started the race and 55 finished. The course was four-plus hilly laps of the park’s six-mile loop. The entry fee was $1, and the entire race budget was about $1,000. The top finishers were awarded wristwatches and recycled trophies.

Read more about the first New York City Marathon in an article by New York Road Runners chairman of the board George Hirsch in today's New York Times.

The race was directed by New York Road Runners president Vince Chiappetta and Fred Lebow, an NYRR member who’d joined taken up running to improve his tennis game. Lebow got hooked on the sport and ran pretty much every NYRR race, including the 1970 Cherry Tree Marathon, held in February in the Bronx. “There were no spectators. Automobile traffic was difficult. Some kids threw stones,” Lebow recalled in his 1984 book, Inside the World of Big-Time Marathoning.

Lebow knew there had to be a better place to run a marathon, and his idea was Central Park, which Mayor John Lindsay had recently closed to cars on weekends. In July, he and Chiappetta managed to get a permit. They chose a September race date, before the crush of fall sports and cultural events.

Sunday, September 13, 1970, was warm and sunny—not ideal for running 26.2 hilly Central Park miles. The start time was set for 11:00 a.m. The starters were small in number, but some had impressive credentials: NYRR founding president and 1952 Olympian Ted Corbitt; Philadelphia Marathon champion Moses Mayfield, who’d later become the fastest African American marathoner in history; New Jersey collegiate star Tom Fleming; and Millrose AA’s Gary Muhrcke, a local standout who arrived at the starting line after being up all night as a firefighter.

Muhrcke almost didn’t show up. “I’d worked all night, we were pretty busy, and I was tired,” he recalled. “I called my wife, and I could tell that she just wanted to get out of the house with our three kids. So I said, all right, we’ll go.”

Nina Kuscsik, the lone female entrant, was also tempted to skip the race. A local legend who’d go on to win the first official women’s division of the Boston Marathon, in 1972, Kuscsik had a stomach virus, but she came to the race as a favor to Lebow and Chiappetta.

There were few spectators. One of them was George Hirsch, pictured with Muhrcke in a recent photo at the end of this article. “I decided to run the Central Park loop in the opposite direction from the runners,” Hirsch, now 86, recalled. “It was a fun way to log a long training run while cheering for my many friends in the race.

"I was among the few bona fide spectators that day," he continued. "Most of the cyclists and pedestrians weaving in and out among the runners were just folks enjoying a car-free Sunday in Central Park. They didn’t seem to realize that a race was taking place.”Muhrcke had a simple race strategy: He latched onto his Millrose teammate Pat Bastick, who he knew was fit. ““I knew he would finish,” recalled Muhrcke recalled. He shadowed Bastick for the first half, not paying much attention to their time or place. As the pair passed Tavern on the Green, Bastick pulled off the course. 

“He’s doing all the work, and suddenly I’m out there all on my own,” said Muhrcke, now 80, laughing at the memory. “So, I got a little more serious.” 

He picked up the pace, and gradually began to pass runners in front of him—Corbitt, Fleming, and finally, around mile 24 on an uphill in Harlem, Mayfield. “He was staggering,” said Muhrcke. “I was running at such a different pace from him, the cyclists pacing him didn’t even think I was in the race.”

Muhrcke went on to finish unchallenged in 2:31:39, followed by Fleming (2:35:44), Ed Ayres (2:39:19), Bastick (2:44:09), and Corbitt (2:44:15). Check out the complete results. 

Kuscsik, suffering from diarrhea, dropped out at 14 miles. “I figured I had better stop because this will not play good for women, you know—look what happens when a woman runs,” she recalled. Kuscsik won the New York City Marathon in 1972 and 1973 and the Boston Marathon in 1972 and 1974.

After the awards ceremony, the marathoners and well-wishers enjoyed sandwiches and cans of soda, after waiting patiently while someone found a can opener. “This was before flip-tops,” Muhrcke explained. The next day’s New York Times carried a short article, with no photos, on page 54.

The New York City Marathon has changed in extraordinary ways since 1970. “Back then we were looked at as freaks,” said Muhrcke, pictured below, right, with Hirsch in a recent photo in Central Park. “It was very strange to be a runner. In a race, you’d sometimes look ahead and not be able to see the person in front of you, and you’d look back and have no one behind you—that’s how few people were doing it. Today, everyone runs. We run for our health—it’s mainstream.” The 2019 TCS New York City Marathon had 53,640 finishers from 141 countries.

Muhrcke hopes to run a lap of Central Park on September 13. “Maybe I’ll go early in the morning, and just look at the course,” he said. “Back then we didn’t notice the beauty of it.” Though much has changed in running over the past 50 years, in some ways today’s runners have much in common with those of 1970—with mass-participation events on pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have been running on our own in 2020. 

This year’s Virtual TCS New York City Marathon will be a bright spot in a challenging year. Runners around the world can sign up to run anytime, anywhere from October 17 to November 1. In 2021, we hope to come together again to celebrate the 50th running of the New York City Marathon.

Illustrations by Luke McCambley