In the Begining....

December 1978

"Hi, Tom. This is Gerry Grasso calling. I
was thinking...how about we start a running club. I'll be the Andover coordinator, you be the N. Andover coordinator..."

And so it began.

I had been running since the summer of 1976 in an attempt to qualify for my 1st Boston Marathon. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was getting myself into. But I did have my first "coach", Barry O'Neil, and my long time friend, Phil Capodilupo guiding me through the training. I learned a lot starting with my first run (7 hilly miles) in July to my first race on August 15th - the Sons of Italy 10 miler. The race began at 1 PM and the thermometer on the bank on my drive to the race posted a scorching 102 degrees. I wouldn't allow my wife, Lyn, to come watch because she was pregnant with our second daughter, Crissy.

This race was one of the long time traditions in the Merrimack Valley and been run for the previous 60 years. You could rub shoulders with many of the top runners and icons of the running world back then. Jock Semple could be found at the starting line, and Clarence DeMar could be found in the list of previous winners. Water stops were few, mile markers were unheard of, and women were an anomaly. But, if you called yourself a runner from the Merrimack Valley, you toed the line with guys like Gerry Grasso, Frenchy Vermette, and the famous Tony Sapienza.

There was no such thing as runner's watches (Casio would unveil its first runner's watch two years later - the F 100 ; no lap memory on this baby), there was no Lycra or poly pro - cotton shorts were it. Gatorade wasn't invented yet, so we relied on exotic concoctions like water and flat Coke, and the new shoe idea was from this little company in Exeter, New Hampshire called Nike - the "waffle trainer". I proudly wore my red Nike's, blue cotton shorts, and borrowed singlet - Barry lent me his Sprinfield College singlet which was apparently made out of some kind of miracle absorption material as it weighed about ten pounds by the time I finished the race. But I did finish in 72 minutes and got the opportunity to experience heat exhaustion. But I now considered myself a "real" runner.

Less than 4 months later, I headed to Baltimore for my first marathon on December 7, 1976. Crissy was born just a few weeks before (November 26th), so it was a fairly emotional sendoff. The truth is that Lyn cried so much, I nearly didn't go! But, as always, Lyn supported this crazy idea of running the race so I could qualify for Boston. "Honest, Lyn, I just want to do it once."

The qualifying time was 3 hours, and I really didn't know how hard that would be. Barry said I could do it, and I believed him. After all, I did EVERYTHING he told me to do, including 3 weeks of 100+ miles and a carbohydrate depletion week (a week starting with a 3+ hour run, followed by NO carbs for 3 1/2 days, and finally nothing but carbs for the final 3 1/2 days leading up to the race...crazy!). But Barry was right. I ran a 2:52 to qualify on a course that featured a 3 mile hill at 18 miles.

That Spring, I similarly trained for the big one - Boston.

Knowing it was a special race, I made the pilgrimage to the new running store, Bill Rodgers Running Center. There was no Whirlaway, Athlete's Corner, or any other running specialty store in the Merrimack Valley. But, Bill Rodgers waited on ME - that was a real treat. My first Boston Marathon uniform was yellow and green, made by Dolphine, and sported nothing on the front or back.

At my first Boston I learned two things. First, this would not be my only Boston (sorry, Lyn), and you simply have to run with something on the singlet to get the girls in Wellesley to yell to you. My 2:54 qualified me for the return trip.

On my singlet at my 2nd Boston I decided to be clever. There were no running clubs in our area (the BAA and the N Medford clubs were too far from home), so I had iron on letters spell out my affiliation - "Unattached Strider". That got me all the attention we males seek at Wellesley and along the entire course. I re-qualified and looked forward to doing even better in 1979.

That's the year I got Gerry's call.

We met at Gerry's house, had more than a few beers, named the club the Merrimack Valley Striders, made Gerry the president, I was a VP, picked our club colors (gold and black - we were widely known as the "bumble bees" among other running clubs), identified our mission (nobody had mission statements in those days) as "a club dedicated to encouraging and enhancing running at all levels", and planned our first event - the New Year's day fun run. We figured a dozen runners would come. We bought a box of donuts and Lyn brought our coffee peculator. Thirty runners came and we knew that we would really have a club.

With membership fees rolling in (nearly 40 members!) we designed and ordered our first MVS singlets. They looked suspiciously like men's basketball jerseys (they were), and the material was made of a nylon material that had the same abrasive qualities as 30 grit sandpaper - lots of bloody nipples those days! The good news for me was that I would run my 3rd Boston as an official member of an official club!

And so our club was born. There remain only 5 members of that charter group - Lou Peters, and the Licciardello clan. The membership has now grown tremendously. We've come a long way in the past 31 years, and we'll continue to have lots of new stories to tell. Still, it's fun to take a look back every now and again.