transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:06] Why do people run marathons? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, David Musgrove and Karl Morris, author of Dirtbag Dreams, A History of Mountain, Ultra and Trail Running, look back at the lengthy history of the sport of running long distances and consider how the Victorians inspired the modern passion for the marathon.
Speaker 2:
[00:27] My guest today is Dr. Karl Morris from the University of Lancashire. He is the author of a fascinating book called Dirtbag Dreams, A History of Mountain, Ultra and Trail Running. And today we are going to talk about the history of running as a pastime and a sport. And we are going to laser in on the curious 19th century passion for pedestrianism. So Karl, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Speaker 3:
[00:52] Hi, Dave. I'm great. Thanks. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:
[00:54] Absolute pleasure. Have you been for a run today?
Speaker 3:
[00:56] Not yet. I'm going after this. It's nice and sunny and it's going to be my reward after we've done this together.
Speaker 2:
[01:02] Excellent. Okay. So pedestrianism, what was it? When were people doing it?
Speaker 3:
[01:06] So pedestrianism was a late 18th century, 19th century form of running. It was a type of athletics that was one of the first mass participation and mass spectating sports to emerge in Europe and in North America. And it was running, walking, often very, very long distances with crowds and we can talk more about how it emerged. I think it's very interesting in how it developed over that time. But it was a type of running that is given as athletics that we're very familiar with today.
Speaker 2:
[01:38] And you said it was one of the first things. Is this the first real time that we see people running with purpose, i.e. with running being the end goal?
Speaker 3:
[01:47] As a type of recreation or spectating sport, right? So people have obviously run throughout history for all kinds of reasons, often for military purposes, for communication, for transport. But the idea of running for pleasure and for others to spectate and to take part in it as a type of sport, as a modern sport, was a 19th century innovation, really. I mean, up until the end of the 18th century, sport, what we think of as sport, was really an aristocratic pursuit or something that people might do in villages and towns as part of village fests and festivals. But there wasn't really what we think of as modern, professional, spectating sport until the 19th century. Pedestrianism running was one of the first of those sports to develop at that time.
Speaker 2:
[02:33] Great. You mentioned that it might be interesting to consider how it did emerge. Tell us about the genesis of the idea of pedestrianism.
Speaker 3:
[02:43] I'm from Yorkshire and I'm very proud to say that the first pedestrian was also from Yorkshire. This is Foster Powell in the 19th century. If people are aware of the North of England and Yorkshire and the city Leeds and the town of Horsforth, that's where Foster Powell was from. Now, he moved to London in the late 1700s to work as a law clerk, and London at this time was an emerging metropolis, obviously, a trading metropolis with a big legal professional class, and Foster Powell was part of that. He was a keen walker and was inspired to race against two colleagues out to Windsor and back, which would have been a 50-mile circuit and his colleagues dropped out, but he successfully did this. He ran 50 miles and achieved great acclaim, really, towards the end of the 1700s for this. And he then began performing these feats of pedestrianism, as it was called, these long-distance feats of running and walking over the next few decades. And he became very, very famous, most so for something known as the Six-Day Race, as it became known. He ran from London to York and then back again to London in six days. Now, in Britain at the time in the late 1700s, a very deeply Christian country, and on the seventh day, it was a day of rest, and he needed to finish that route, that out and back to York, within six days. And he became very famous. He was covered widely by the newspaper press at the time, and others began to try and replicate his feats, because there was a recognition that through gambling, by placing money on your potential success, it was possible to generate an income. So it began to attract all kinds of fortune seekers, and people from a range of backgrounds, who were looking to make money through their athletic prowess. And it generated widespread interest with people lining the streets to watch these people engage in these acts of pedestrianism at the end of the 18th century, going into the 1900s, into the Victorian era. And that was the beginning.
Speaker 2:
[04:40] So just for our non-UK listeners, London to York, what's that, about 200 miles, probably?
Speaker 3:
[04:46] Yes, you're looking at 400 miles there and back. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[04:50] So that's a sizable endeavor, isn't it?
Speaker 3:
[04:53] It is, yeah. Yeah. Fueled by toast and beer and tea for most of the time.
Speaker 2:
[05:00] So Foster Powell, he's an interesting figure then, isn't he? So can we make a case to say that he is like the first celebrity runner?
Speaker 3:
[05:06] Yes, he's been described as the father of pedestrianism. And pedestrianism was the earliest version of athletics really. He was successful enough that he went to not compete but perform. I think you need to think of it as a performance. He wasn't racing against others. He performed his athletic prowess in Switzerland and in France, across the UK. He died poor. He didn't make significant money from this, but he was certainly a celebrity athlete and the very first celebrity athlete, I think, in that kind of space.
Speaker 2:
[05:39] OK, so he got very famous and people became interested in the idea of pedestrianism. As you said, it started to explode. When is the heyday of this sport in the 19th century, would you say?
Speaker 3:
[05:49] I think there are two periods and it's useful to explore both of those. I think the first high point was with something known as the Barclay match. Now, Captain Robert Barclay was a Scottish aristocrat who had served in the military, very much an elite. He had begun performing pedestrianism towards the end of the 18th century following people like Foster Powell. In 1808, he announced that he was going to attempt to walk slash run 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours, which is not very fast actually, but it's over a very extended period of time. It's continuing to move all the time really. He was immediately challenged by someone who was described as a peddler, as an itinerant working class man, George Foster, who proposed to also complete this 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours, and there was this head-to-head rivalry between the two. Now, it was Robert Barclay who completed this first, but they both attempted this and generated huge amounts of interest. We're talking tens of thousands of people would come out to spectate and watch them compete what was known as the Barclay match. Huge amounts of money were put down on this. We have all kinds of sideshows and publicans organizing, spectating sort of celebratory events alongside these athletic events. It was a real phenomena and many others tried to replicate this. And we have a ten-year period from around 1808 to 1818, where there are people across the UK and then a little bit later in the United States, attempting to finish the Barclay match. We have women who eventually complete this as well. And this becomes a real high point for pedestrianism, just because of the degree really of the public interest in what is happening. There isn't much in the way of spectating sport at this point in the early 19th century. We have boxing, Pudgelism, wrestling to some extent, but pedestrianism is the first mass spectating sport.
Speaker 2:
[07:48] Just before we do that, before we move to the second Hayden, I just wonder, the people engaging in the Barclay match, the competitors, if we want to call them that, why were they doing it? What was their motivation?
Speaker 3:
[07:59] It ranges. I think for someone like Robert Barclay himself, it wasn't so much a financial interest as one of prestige. He was already wealthy and he was doing it as a personal challenge to demonstrate his physical and mental abilities to his peers. For many others, though, we do find that Victorian pedestrianism is very successful at drawing people in from far more working class manual backgrounds. That's because it isn't a sport that is formally organized at the time. There are no barriers to entry. Anyone can attempt to do this. We do find that diversity of backgrounds. It is working class men in the UK at the time. Then as the 19th century moves forward, we do find women beginning to participate as well. Although, women, they do often find hostility to their acts from the press and from the public. Often, people try to interfere in their attempts at it as well. There are no governing bodies at this time. There is no formal organization. These attempts are often happening on public land, in parks, and in open spaces near cities and towns. Anyone can have a go and many people do, some successfully, some less so.
Speaker 2:
[09:10] You said that this was a British thing to start with, but then it spread across the Atlantic. Is that right? Should we in Britain hold the honour of being the people who started pedestrianism, or is that overly nationalistic?
Speaker 3:
[09:22] No, that is the case. It was a British phenomena to begin with, and it began to be exported to Europe to some extent, but especially across the Atlantic, to the United States from around the 1830s. Although the Americans do become dominant in the sport, and we can maybe talk about that shortly, but they do pick it up with gusto. There is a lovely rivalry, which we all enjoy, of course, between Britain and the United States.
Speaker 2:
[09:44] Yeah, absolutely. The special relationship of running. Okay, let's move on to the second heyday then. When's the other moment of peak interest in pedestrianism?
Speaker 3:
[09:53] Well, this is where the Americans do come into the story, really. So they had begun participating in pedestrianism and performing it in the US from around the 1830s, I think. We then have Edward Payson Weston, who becomes perhaps, I think, the most famous pedestrianism of the whole era. Now, he is an American. He's from Providence in the United States, and he has this very colorful background as a traveling performer and musician. And in 1860, he takes out a bet with a friend that President Lincoln will lose the presidential election in 1860. Of course, Edward Payson Weston is wrong, and Lincoln does win the presidential election. So because he failed the bet, he is required to walk down to Washington for the inauguration of President Lincoln. It takes him 10 days, and it's sort of a walk jog, and he's actually slightly late, and he misses the inauguration. But a lovely story. Lincoln has heard about Edward Payson Weston, and they shake hands that evening at one of the balls. But the reason this gets bigger than that is that it becomes quite a phenomena, and people hear about his walk down from Boston to Washington. They come out to meet him. It's covered by the newspapers in the United States at the time, and it becomes this real celebratory feat of athletics that really captures the imagination of people. And Edward Payson Weston, following that, becomes the celebrity athlete across the United States. And he begins to perform and set records in many of the standard distances as they're emerging, such as the 100-mile race, the 24-hour running effort, running as far as he can for 24 hours, and the six-day race. He takes on various challenges, such as to run from Maine to Chicago for huge sums of money. And he generates immense interest in pedestrianism across the United States. And people set up pedestrian teams and roller rinks for performing pedestrian feats indoors. And that is the beginning of this huge surge in pedestrian practice across the US. And this leads into the 1870s and to this rivalry that starts to emerge between the United States and the UK. Because many British sporting commentators have a chip in their shoulder about the seeming success of American athletes. Because it's not just Edward Pace and Weston, it's people like Daniel O'Leary and there are others who are very, very successful. And we have British sporting commentators saying, we don't believe these Americans. They can't be trusted. These Americans, they're not trustworthy at all. And we know if there's ever a head-to-head competition between a British athlete and an American, we know the Brit will be successful. So both Edward Payson Weston and Daniel O'Leary in the 1870s, they travel across to the UK to put this to the test. And the two of them separately, but around at the same time, are traveling around Britain and competing against the very best pedestrian athletes in Britain. And as a Brit, I have to say sadly, they are mostly very successful. And we have this American triumph of this very long distance format. And this leads to the formalization of this with something known as the Astley Belt. So Lord Astley was a British aristocrat who really followed this sport and was enamored with it. And he thought, we need to settle this debate once and for all. Who's better, the Americans or the Brits? So he devises this competition, which is going to take place over an 18-month period towards the end of the 1870s, known as the Astley Belt. It's called the Astley Belt because the prize will be a gold and silver buckle belt. And there are five competitions, and they vary from taking place in London to New York at Madison Square Gardens. And we have this back and forth of American and British athletes and others. It draws in Canadians and Europeans competing at this series of five events with the final championship event taking place in New York. And it's very dramatic and very interesting. And the outcome of this race series is uncertain right through to the end. And it is a British athlete, Todd Littlewood, who actually triumphs at the final event.
Speaker 2:
[14:03] Ah, so finally Britain gets the upper hand.
Speaker 3:
[14:06] They do, yes.
Speaker 2:
[14:07] Just before we move on, just to mark your cars listeners, if you were thinking you might have heard something about this before, I did a podcast series called The Tiger Tame who went to see, which referenced a chap called Bob Carlisle, who very curiously pushed a wheelbarrow from Land's End to John O'Groats and back. And he was kind of trying to level his way into this challenge. And he tries to sort of challenge Weston. I think Weston broadly ignored him. But that was like a bit of a sideline. So if you want to know a slightly different bit of the story, then have a listen to that series in our archive. Back to the meat of the story. Am I right in thinking there was potentially a little bit of sort of stimulant usage going on among pedestrians at the time?
Speaker 3:
[14:51] There were all kinds of experiments. That's right. I mean, the use of alcohol, but all kinds of not illegal, but sort of medications and drugs were used, or there were suspected uses of them. It's very difficult to actually establish. But part of the reason for the demise of pedestrianism is it was becoming perceived as untrustworthy, that there was foul play sometimes, and cheating, and those accusations were leading to the undermining of it as a gambling sport. Who wants to bet money on something when you feel the odds might be fixed in some way?
Speaker 2:
[15:24] So that does open up the question of amateurism versus professionalism, and how that played into this picture. Because in the broader story of 19th century Victorian sports, there's an ongoing conversation, I think, between amateurism and professionalism. So how does that impact on pedestrianism?
Speaker 3:
[15:41] So amateurism was essentially a professional sport because the very successful pedestrians did become professional athletes, and they were generating often very large amounts of money, you know, a large income. There was some concern with this amongst the public schools in Britain at the time, and there were public school teachers. So we're talking about private schools here. These were elite institutions for the sort of aristocratic and elite class in Britain. And there was this growing belief from around the 1860s that sport was being corrupted by gambling, by many of the activities associated with it, including low level crime and prostitution and drunkenness and all of the kinds of activities at some of these spectating events. So we begin to find these elite British sportsmen arguing that we need to have a new code of practice where sport is separated from all of these unsavory activities because sport should be about moral character. It's about performing and competing for the love of it and to demonstrate that sort of superior set of moral qualities. So that is growing from around the 1860s in response to pedestrianism, I think. And then in the 1880s, we have the establishment in both the United States and in the United Kingdom of these formal athletics governing bodies, the AAU and the AAA. And these formal governing bodies begin to dominate athletics, particularly in the shorter distance events up to around the marathon distance, which becomes very highly celebrated with the first Olympic Games in the 1890s. And these governing bodies, very importantly, they have very fixed rules on participation. And anybody who has ever participated for money, even a small amount of prize money, never mind a significant income, anyone who has ever participated for money is blacklisted and prevented from competing in any of their events. Now, their events become the dominant form of athletics, and it begins to gradually smother and then almost eliminate entirely professional athletics as we start to move into the 20th century. It rapidly reshapes what athletics looks like. This is where we start to see the shift from what we called pedestrianism, that older Victorian professional sport, through to something that we're much more familiar about today in terms of athletics, which for most of the 20th century, of course, was amateur. That's only really within the last few decades that has changed.
Speaker 2:
[18:12] Am I right in thinking that those governing bodies also started the exclusion of women from a lot of these running sports?
Speaker 3:
[18:19] They did. They didn't allow women to participate at all right from the outset. Their argument was that women were physically incapable and that there was a health risk to women for competing in running events, but also a moralistic concern that it would impact feminine beauty and that the activities themselves were unfeminine and not suitable for women. And it's worth saying that throughout the pedestrian period, while women had been able to perform pedestrian events, they were not able to do so very easily, but these governing bodies prevented it almost entirely for the most part.
Speaker 2:
[18:53] Before we move on into the 20th century completely, we talked about pedestrianism and you've mentioned there's walking and there's running, and they're going a very long way. It sounds like they're not necessarily going super fast a lot of the time. So are they running or is this just like fast walking? It's not just fast walking, it's very dismissive. Is it fast walking?
Speaker 3:
[19:13] Yeah, it's interesting. Pedestrianism spanned a range of distances from sprinting and middle distance through to what we might think of as marathon endurance distance. The most celebrated distance, however, was what we now call ultra running, so sort of six-day racing, for example. It's impossible to run for six days. It's very, very difficult to keep up that pace. Even the very best runners are incapable often of doing that. So it often is a variety, a mixture of walking, fast walking and running. What's so interesting is that there was a debate at the time about which was most effective. If you were going for 24 hours, maybe you could run and that is the most effective speed. When it comes to six days, there were some pedestrians who argued that a fast walk, a fast but steady walk, was actually more effective than bursts of running with slightly more resting in between that running. So it was a mixture and there wasn't consensus about which was most effective at the time. There really was an attempt to explore and to play around with those techniques and to develop something that was actually effective because these were competitive athletes and they wanted to do as well as they could.
Speaker 2:
[20:22] Yeah. I feel obliged to drop in a humble brag here that I have entered a few 100-mile races and I have never run all of them. I have completed them, but there's a lot of walking involved for me. Have you ever done that sort of distance?
Speaker 3:
[20:35] I have, yeah. That's the distance I prefer to compete in. You're right. I could usually run up to about 70 miles, but after about 70 miles, yeah, you're down to a fast and then a slow walk towards the end. That's right. It's hard.
Speaker 2:
[20:51] So we're recording this conversation a few weeks before the biggest mass participation running events, the London Marathon, end of April, which I think gets over a million people sort of try and enter it these days. So a huge thing. Where did this idea of road marathons come from? What's the heyday of that particular aspect of running?
Speaker 3:
[21:11] Yeah. So, I mean, this is part of that story I've just been talking about. And it really does date back to the first Olympic Games in 1896. The marathon hadn't been a standardised distance up until that point. This wasn't really in the vocabulary of pedestrians during the 19th century. They didn't talk about the marathon. The 1896 Olympics hosted the first marathon, and they were looking back, obviously, to that very famous story. You know, a marathon in ancient Greece in the first Greek Olympic events. And the marathon was such a celebrated event at that first Olympic Games that it caused what we can think of as the first athletics boom of the 20th century. We start to see the city marathon become a thing. The very first city marathon takes place later that year. In 1896, it takes place in Paris, and we begin to see sort of urban participants, again, from a range of class backgrounds, not just a sort of middle class sport by any means, begin to participate in marathon events and half marathon events and a range of other distances which start to be held in cities following that first Olympic Games. We see this real surge in running interest at the beginning of the 20th century. It looks very different to now. It is entirely men because women are banned from participating. They're all quite serious athletes really, kind of like club athletes that you might think of now, sort of competitive club athletes. Their times are pretty good. They're highly competitive. They're putting in a lot of training. So the numbers are hugely lower than they are today, but it tends to be much more competitive. And for those first few decades of the 20th century, we see this kind of steady and very pronounced growth across North America and the UK in cities for the most part. And this is where many of the classic marathons that we think of today, like the London Marathon. There is a precursor to that, known as the Polytechnic Marathon, which took place in London at the time. But races like the Boston Marathon, the New York Marathon, the Chicago Marathon, some of those famous marathon distance races. This is when they all emerge at the very end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century. And they're all being set up to reflect this sudden interest in that marathon distance.
Speaker 2:
[23:27] I'm going to go back to women again, because at some point, women have to push their way back into it. They have to fight for the right to be able to enter these races.
Speaker 3:
[23:34] So women were excluded from these events for most of the 20th century. And it wasn't really until the 1960s that women and those who supported them, male allies, really began quite forcefully pushing for female inclusion in marathon running and other athletic events of that sort of nature. And in 1967, the most famous example of this was Catherine Switzer. She was a female runner and she had long planned to try and compete in the Boston Marathon, which typically excluded women from participation, certainly officially. The very interesting part of the story is that she noted that there was no question about gender on the application form. And she entered under the name K. Switzer, so a sort of gender neutral designation. So she gained an entry to the Boston Marathon in 1967. She began running this race. People noticed there's a woman running. And one of the organizers very famously began to try and stop her. He was trying to block her and rip off her racing bib. Her coach and her boyfriend were running with her and they were trying to help her and hold off this race organizer. And she managed to get through and she finished this race and she was the first woman to officially complete the Boston Marathon. And this opened up a discussion which had been going on for a long time, of course, about female participation and the fact that women were, of course, more than capable of participating in these events. And all of the justification for this had been ill founded. And we get this buildup then over the next few years into the 1970s of growing pressure for women to be able to compete. At first, women are allowed to start running in these Marathon events unofficially. And then there is a gradual relaxation through until the middle of the 1970s where races and then governing bodies themselves completely remove all of those barriers to female competition. And I think it's in 1976, do we have the first Olympic trials, I think, for women? And I think the first Women's Olympic Marathon doesn't take place until the 1980s. So we're talking quite late in the day, really, I think.
Speaker 2:
[25:48] And just broadening this out a bit, so you mentioned that one of the arguments against women being involved in running was basically it was bad for women to do it. Whenever I tell people I go running, they say, oh, your knees, you'll regret that in later life. I wonder, is there a trend, there's always been a trend for people to say that running's not actually good for you from the 19th century onwards, or have people always thought that actually sort of this level of exercise is something that people should engage with?
Speaker 3:
[26:14] No, not all. This is one of the most interesting things, looking at the history of it. You find these echoes all the time, the same kinds of discourses keep cropping up again and again. Actually, the hysteria around the impact of this type of activity on the body is something that has been around since the 19th century, and it just takes new forms with people suggesting that you're doing damage to yourself, to your lungs, to your knees, to your body, to your mind. That it might be a type of addiction or whatever it might be. But yeah, the strain on the body. In the 19th century, there was a worry that it was a strain on the heart, and that there was a risk you would just suddenly drop down and die from exerting yourself in this way. But that's a long running theme, I think.
Speaker 2:
[26:56] Let's move over to trail and ultra running, which is the thing you really tackle in your excellent book, Dirtbag Dreams. Nowadays, there are people doing enormously long distances, crazy challenges, and running very long ways. And that seems to be a fairly clear echo of the very long efforts that people were making in the 19th century. Do you see a long, like a clear linear track from those 19th century pedestrians to what people are doing in trail and ultra running today? And perhaps for listeners who aren't in this area, maybe you could just describe what we mean by trail and ultra, and also mountain running.
Speaker 3:
[27:32] Sure. So trail and ultra running are two disciplines of running, which have grown considerably over the last two to three decades. Trail running is running off road. It could be through forests, fields, mountains. Mountain running is running up and down or around mountains, anywhere with serious significant elevation gain. And ultra running is usually thought of as anything beyond the standard marathon distance. And that is a fairly modern term that began to emerge in the 1960s. Although of course, as we've seen, people were running those distances for a very long time. Now there is a lineage that connects pedestrianism to modern day ultra and trail running. They are a continuation of the same type of sport, really, I think. The difference is that during pedestrian times, people were running for the most part either on an indoor track or on an outdoor track or open space. They weren't running in rural or nature spaces, right? The modern sport of ultra running and trail running, which really began to take off in the 1960s, particularly in the United States, although there is a similar story taking place in the UK at that time as well and elsewhere. That modern sport very much was gravitating towards the mountains, towards national parks, towards places of beauty, and we begin to see in the 1970s and 1980s, these sports growing, but still being quite niche, I think. It's in recent years, last two decades really, that these sports have grown quite considerably, and partly that is around just the widespread public interest in the outdoors. There is much more of a concern with health, with our connection to nature, and a lot of this, I think, is a pushback against, of course, the digital world and the fact that we're spent a lot of times in front of computers and on phones. Ultra running and trail running have become sort of mass participation sports in a way that they haven't been until very recently.
Speaker 2:
[29:28] Right. To wrap up, and I'm going to spring this on to you, so you may not have a good answer, but for any of our listeners who are about to embark on the London Marathon or any other long distance run, is there anything they can take from these 19th century pedestrians? Can people channel Robert Barclay or Foster Powell or Edward Payson Weston? Is there any inspiration you can offer from the 19th century pedestrians?
Speaker 3:
[29:53] Well, I think over the arc of the full history of athletics, from pedestrianism through to the present day, I think the one thing that stands out as being most important is a person's and individual's motivation for whatever it is they might be doing, whether it's a marathon or an ultra-distance race or whatever it is. I think you need a very specific and a very good reason for what you're doing. I think if you were competing in something like the London Marathon, it's keeping that at the forefront of your mind. It might be a personal athletic best, a time. It might be the fact that you're doing this for family, for fundraising, whatever it might be. But there is a cliche in running, particularly in ultra running, that a large part of the difficulty of it is some mental difficulty. That focus, that presence of mind, that ability to channel yourself towards that goal, is the consistent feature, I think, of athletic success over the course of that history. That's different for different people, and it's about working out what that is. It sounds straightforward, but I've, in my own races, sometimes lost sight of why am I in this 100-mile race? Why am I here in the middle of the night experiencing absolute misery? It's only really when I remember what it is I'm really trying to focus on that it becomes maybe a little bit easier and more successful at what I'm trying to do. So yes, finding your why, I think, is the most important thing.
Speaker 2:
[31:16] Brilliant, brilliant. Find your why, indeed. Well, Carl, thank you very much. That's been a fascinating conversation. And your book, Dirtbag Dreams, A History of Mountain Ultra and Trail Running, is out now and contains a lot more information about the history of this sport and some great stories as well. So, Carl, thank you very much for your time.
Speaker 3:
[31:34] Thank you.
Speaker 1:
[31:37] That was Carl Morris speaking to David Musgrove. Carl is Lecturer in Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Lancashire. And his book, Dirtbag Dreams, A History of Mountain Ultra and Trail Running, is out now.