Flashes of Panic

We rented Run for your Life last weekend. In case you haven’t heard of it already, this is “the Fred Lebow movie,” and if you haven’t heard of Fred Lebow, either you don’t run, or haven’t been running long enough.

Everything’s debatable, but the easiest thing to say is that for over 20 years, Fred was synonymous with the New York City Marathon, and as the race director when the marathon first leapt out of Central Park to become the sprawling five-borough monster it now is, he essentially invented the concept of the modern big-city marathon-as-event.

As a biography, the film begins and ends with the marathon, but as a life, Fred’s was remarkably focused on running. I found the movie interesting because I know so many of the people interviewed, but probably only one of them would know me in a line-up (George Hirsch, then publisher of The Runner and now publisher of La Cucina Italiana, for which CMI built a website). (I guess Allan Steinfeld, Fred’s successor and right-hand man, would recognize me, but he would have to be prompted to know my name.)

The thread of the narrative jumps around a lot in time, following its themes, but a few things jumped out at me. One was that by being the first in so many areas, the NYCM wound up incurring some serious disadvantages—they chased some “advances” which turned out to be dead ends, to mix metaphors, and got caught there while everyone else moved on. I guess leading the marathon pack can be more of a hash than a race, sometimes. (I think this sort of problem has a lot to do with why the World Marathon Majors were created—so the five can share information and avoid development dead ends.)

Another, though, was Fred’s insistence on using all available cash and more on advancement and promotion. One former treasurer told a story of describing how much money the NYRRC had lost in the previous year; Fred stood up immediately afterward and announced, “I hope we can lose even more money next year.”

Particularly if you’re familiar with the NYRR and its operations, the movie sheds a lot of light on the roots of what happens inside that 89th Street brownstone.

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