“Marathon Man” is a movie, a fine one too, with Dustin Hoffman as a Columbia University graduate student caught in international intrigue and Laurence Olivier as a Nazi demon adept at using dental tools as instruments of torture.
It hit theaters in October 1976, a year before a few thousand people gathered to risk different sorts of pain by running 26.2 miles through the city. It was the Mayor Daley Marathon and attracted 4,200-some participants, which seems a paltry number now, but was enough to make it then the largest marathon in the world.
Now called the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, it will attract 55,000 runners this Sunday and among them will be five men I recently talked to about why they run and what it means to them.
One of these people I have known for decades. James “Skinny” Sheahan is a native South Sider with a lengthy career as, in no particular order and far from exhaustive, the city’s director of special events, a public school teacher, chief external relations officer for the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, and co-host (with Mike Houlihan) of radio’s lively, informative “The Skinny and Houli Show.”
His marathon-running pals worked in various fields and live in different neighborhoods and suburbs, and all are a few years younger than the 80-year-old Skinny. They are George Scully, Thomas McShane, Mark Sulski and Rick Barrett.
Says Scully: “I met Skinny in 1991. I was running a local race in Oak Lawn with Rick Barrett, who I’d known since college. And I remember that Skinny and I wound up running the same pace that day, and I got to know him there and we had a lot of laughs. That’s when I stopped training by myself. I wanted to do nothing but group training with people who knew how to laugh.”
And so the fivesome formed. They like to laugh and talk, though I have to assume that about two of them who were not available to meet. One (Barrett) was at a doctor’s appointment, not an uncommon activity after a certain age, and another (Sulski) was dealing with traffic, not an uncommon activity in this busy city.
For decades the men would often gather after attending 7 a.m. mass at Old St. Pat’s downtown, “the five of us running the streets of Chicago, every neighborhood. We’ve seen everything and the churches of Chicago are magnificent.”
They would meet regularly to run here and they also have, often all together but not always, run across the world. They speak highly of marathons they’ve run in Dublin, Milwaukee, Big Sur and Boston, whose marathon, first run in 1897, is perhaps the most famous and prestigious. They have nice things to say about them all but are most complimentary about our town.
In talking to these fellas, it’s easy to get a sense of the importance of their friendship and of running in their lives. The conversation is peppered with words such as “confidence,” “commitment,” “laughter,” “health,” “anxiety,” “stress,” “mental clarity,” “camaraderie,” “endorphin rush” and on and on.
Someone did the math and tells me that these men have collectively been married for 240 years, with Sheahan topping that list at 58 years and, who says, “We are all still together with our first loves.”
“Our wives are saints,” says McShane.
“That they are, but they’re also happy to get rid of us for a while,” said Scully.
None of these guys have come close to winning a marathon, but they surely take pride in what one calls their “friendly competition.” Sheahan has run the most. “I’ve finished 50,” he says. “Three I wasn’t able to finish, winding up in a medical tent or ambulance.”
One senses a bit of melancholy when learning that this is to be their last marathon as a fivesome. “This is the last roundup because we’re all banged up,” says Sheahan. “But we’re going to do the best we can do.”
They will always have memories, such as: “The only spectators were the guys coming out of the taverns from drinking all night. There were four or five guys on the corner. Today there’s a million on the streets. In those early days, when you saw someone running on the street, people thought they had just robbed a grocery store or something.”
“It snowed three inches in ’93.”
This will be their last marathon but not their last run.
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“Oh, we’ll get together for shorter runs,” says Scully.
As always, they are pleased that they will be raising money for charities with which they have long been involved. One is Special Children’s Charities (which supports Special Olympics Chicago), which Sheahan calls “the best export to ever come out of the city of Chicago. It’s in 175 countries around the world. You could go to any of those countries, they’ve never heard of the Chicago Bears or the White Sox or Capone, but they all know what the Special Olympics is.”
The other is Opportunity Knocks, which serves young adults with developmental disabilities, and about which McShane says, “Some 16 years ago, some 30-year-olds, instead of drinking beer in a bar, said, ‘Let’s do something for the community.’ Then in the western suburbs, developmentally disabled individuals, when they got out of high school, had no place to go. So we created an organization that serves those needs.”
So, the marathon takes off Sunday morning and, if you are watching, in person or on TV, try to see beyond what appears as a faceless blob of humanity and know that the race is a gathering of human beings, individuals all, with five marathon men making one last long run.