Walkathon
Shortly after he won the 1960 presidential election, President John F. Kennedy penned an article for December 26, 1960, Sports Illustrated entitled, “The Soft American”. The final paragraph of the article read:
“All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our community. We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.”
In 1962, inspired by a 1908 Theodore Roosevelt executive order that every Marine captain and lieutenant should be able to hike 50 miles in 20 hours, Kennedy asked his Marine Commandant, David Shoup, to find out how well his present-day officers could handle the 50-mile test.
“An Associated Press article was published nationwide on February 5, 1963 that shared the story of the Roosevelt test and Shoup’s order to test 20 of his Marines. It received intense national attention. President Kennedy never directly challenged America to take the 50-mile challenge, and no walks were sponsored by the Fitness Council, but the article inspired many across the country, who were eager to test themselves too. Naïve, untrained, citizens, immediately decided to hit the road without much planning to undertake the challenge in the middle of the cold winter. In response, the government tried to make it clear that they were not encouraging and sponsoring 50-mile hikes conducted by the public.” https://ultrarunninghistory.com/50-mile-frenzy/
There was much talk of the 50-mile Walkathon even in Cardston. That spring, 1963, a few of my friends in Cardston decided to take on the challenge. We planned to walk from Cardston to the CHEC radio station in Lethbridge a distance of about 46 miles. A farm boy who often ran to school set the stage for the rest of us. From what I recall he ran from Cardston to Magrath and completed the whole trip to Lethbridge in just over 10 hours.
Standing: Bill Wilson, Brent Sugden, Randy Remington. Sitting: Rod Jensen, Mike Sugden, Robb Wolff. At the CKEC radio station.
My friends and I trained almost every day for a couple of weeks by jogging to the silver bridge north-east of town on the road to Lethbridge. (4km or 2 ½ miles each way)
A week or two later, on Easter Friday we set out. The wind was calm when we left and the temperature was around -2C. When we approached Magrath, the wind came up, we were tired and cold and there were snow showers in the area. We gave up and phoned from the gas station on Hwy 5, near the Magrath turnoff, for someone to come pick us up.
I remember crying the next day as I recounted our failure to my father and a farmer in the parts department of “The Massey”.
We didn’t give up.
A week or two later we set out again. This time, in the middle of the night. I remember that when we arrived at Magrath, Randy Remington had developed a painful knot in the back of his leg, but he pushed on. Along the way we sang popular rock songs of the era and refrained the CHEC Radio tag line “The CHEC Good Guys” and mocked the other Lethbridge station, CJOC, as the C-jok bad guys. CHEK was the popular rock station and CJOC was the more traditional and country station. I can’t recall how long it took but we made it. I was 14 years old.
Harvey Wolff (our return home driver), Randy Remington, Mike Sugden, Robb Wolff
Here we are in the 1090 CHEC control room with the disk jockey
I wonder what mother today would allow her 14-year-old son to leave in the middle of the night and set out, unsupervised, down an unlighted highway, on a 50-mile hike?