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| Schiro, 1984 Marathon Trials |
As the youngest entrant in the 2020 Marathon Trials, 16-year-old Tierney Wolfgram is getting lots of attention. It’s not that anyone expects her to finish in the top 3, but youth provides its own fascination, and the average age of women in the Trials is 31. In addition, Wolfgram has her eyes set on the American high-school and junior record for the marathon
In that regard, her goal is almost impossible. She’s chasing Cathy Schiro’s performance from the inaugural U.S. women’s Olympic Marathon Trials in 1984. Schiro’s mark has stood the test of time, because it’s one of the toughest marathon marks in the U.S. record books--2:34:24.
The two have followed very similar paths. Wolfgram won the 2017 Minnesota state cross-country meet as a freshman. When Schiro was a freshman in 1981, she won the New Hampshire state meet for the second time in a row. She went on to garner three more state titles for a grand total of five.
As a 15-year-old high school sophomore, Wolfgram decided to tackle the 2018 Twin Cities Marathon. She finished sixth in 2:40:03 to notch her Trials qualifier. When she turned her attention back to cross-country, things didn’t go well. She dropped out of both her state meet and Nike Cross Nationals.
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| Tierney Wolfgram |
She opted for the latter, entering the Hampton, NH, Marathon in February, 1984. There, as a 16-year-old, she clocked a 2:45:16, good enough to qualify for the first Marathon Trials. (The OTQ was 2:51:16.) She skipped the spring track season to continue her marathon training, generally logging 60 to 70 miles a week with long runs that reached 22 miles.
Wolfgram’s running was injury-plagued last year, with a metatarsal fracture in the spring and a tibia fracture in September that knocked her out of the cross-country season. By December she was healthy enough to return to serious marathon training. At that point, she moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for some altitude and better weather than in Minnesota.
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| Schiro racing as high schooler from Dover NH. Jeff Johnson photo |
By January, she was training around 80+ miles per week. On January 19, she ran 1:16:55 in the Rock n Roll Arizona Half Marathon on a course that turned out to be 285 meters short. In a February podcast with Carrie Tollefson, she said she had gotten up to 100 miles in a week and was eyeing Schiro’s record. Her mother and father have been alternating two-week stints with her in Albuquerque.
(Another young female marathoner, Alana Hadley, ran 2:41:58 as a 16-year-old in 2013. She improved to 2:38:38 the next year to qualify for the 2016 Marathon Trials in Los Angeles. There, she dropped out, and she has since stopped racing competitively.)
Schiro says she reached the May 12, 1984 Trials in Olympia, WA, “pretty unaware of professional racing, the other runners, their times, and so on. I only knew I had trained hard, that my coaches believed in me, and I loved to run the distance.” In Olympia, the Trials organizers assigned her 54-year-old Sister Marion Irvine (who had qualified with a 2:51:00) as a roommate.
Schiro, still 16, didn’t start the marathon with a strategy. She certainly wasn’t thinking about making the Olympic team. She and her coaches decided only on a pace plan: try to hold 6:00 pace as long as possible.
That put her in the middle of the pack early on. Then she began moving up. And just before 20 miles, something remarkable happened. Joan Benoit had a solid lead. Julie Brown was running a strong second. And Lisa Larsen (later Weidenbach and Rainsberger) held third. Only Larsen didn’t look so good.
And a little 5’1” sprite from Dover, New Hampshire, was closing in on her. For several moments, it actually looked as if Schiro might nab the third spot on the podium.
That didn’t happen. “I was too inexperienced at that point in my career,” Schiro (now O’Brien) remembers. “I had probably overextended too much. I didn’t know that you had to be careful about running aggressive even if you felt good.”
Schiro faded to ninth. Larsen finished fourth (as she would in the next two Trials) behind a fast-closing Julie Isphording. Even in ninth, Schiro’s time was an astonishing 2:34:24. It remains the American record for a junior runner, for a high-schooler, and for a 16-year-old Trials competitor.
Tierney Wolfgram won’t find it easy to beat Schiro’s performance, especially not on the tough Atlanta course. Still many will be cheering for her to run strong and have a long career. You can debate whether or not 16-year-olds should be focusing on the marathon. But once they’ve made that decision, it’s hard not to root for them.
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| Schiro. Jeff Johnson photo |
Postscript: Six months after her Marathon Trials appearance, Cathy Schiro enjoyed an unmatched cross-country season. In the Kinney Regionals in famed Van Cortlandt Park, she ran 16:46 on the 5K course, a record that still stands. Two weeks later, she won the Kinney Championships. In 1988 and 1992, Schiro finished third and second in the Marathon Trials, making two U.S. Olympic teams. Her best Olympic performance was 10th in the 1992 Barcelona Games. In 1991, she cracked 2:30 in the L.A. Marathon, running 2:29:38.
Currently, Schiro lives and runs (gently) in Durham, NH. Her son Patrick is a star distance performer at Dartmouth, while his younger brother, Andrew, has begun winning high school state championships on the track.