“Long distance runners have to be very strange people. You have to really want to do it. You don’t have to win or beat someone; you just have to get through the thing. That’s the sense of victory, that’s the sense of self-worth.”
These penetrating words were once spoken by the late Ted Corbitt.
On December 2, the organization that he helped begin will continue to honor the late running great and WWII veteran by staging the annual New York Road Runners Ted Corbitt 15K in Central Park. The race will commence at 8:30 a.m. and span approximately 9.32 miles.
No one was more a more qualified authority on distance running than Corbitt, a University of Cincinnati and NYU alumnus. Given the designation “father of American long distance running,” he was the first African American to compete in an Olympic marathon when he raced in the 1952 games in Helsinki, Finland.
That was merely one of Corbitt’s many accolades and accomplishments.
Born in 1919, the Dunbarton, S.C., native, the grandson of slaves, was a co-founder and the first president of the internationally acclaimed New York Road Runners. In 1947, he joined and aided in the ascension of the New York Pioneer Club, an integrated vanguard running organization in Harlem started in 1936 by a trio of Black men: Robert Douglas, William Culbreath, and Joseph Yancey.
In 1998, Corbitt was one of five inaugural inductees of the National Distance Running Hall of Fame.
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Along with legendary distance racer Sandra Kiddy, Corbitt was one of the two initial members of the American Ultrarunning Hall of Fame enshrined in 2004. He was prominent in laying out the 26.2 mile New York City Marathon course, which was run solely in Central Park from its inception in 1970 through 1975. The NYC Marathon became its current five-borough race in 1976.
Corbitt completed an astounding 223 marathons and ultramarathons. He died in 2007 at 88.
