Roxbury runners get fit, conquer hills, make friends

Ed Sandifer Bill Burley Jim Fixx

Mary Mahrer Larry Kershnar

By Scott Benjamin

ROXBURY – As the running boom was taking off, Bill Burley decided to recreate the "fun" he had in a summer race series in suburban Westport by bringing it to the rolling farmlands and winding stonewalls of rural Litchfield County.

Burley, who had taught Physical Education at the Bedford and Coleytown elementary schools in Westport, had just finished his first year as principal at the now-defunct East Street Elementary School in New Milford.

He developed eight courses, got approval from the Recreation Commission in Roxbury - where he now lived with his wife, Suzanne, who also had taught Physical Education in Westport - and started the Roxbury Road Race Series.

While running in the Westport series in the early 1970s, Burley became friends with Jim Fixx, a magazine editor from the Riverside section of Greenwich who began running in 1967 to lose weight.

Fixx told Burley that he was writing a book on the sport. In 1977, his muscular legs were featured on the cover of "The Complete Book Of Running," which sold over a million copies and sent Fixx on a world speaking tour.

Longtime Staples-Westport High School boys' track & field and cross country coach Laddie Lawrence has organized the Westport series since 1965. He said when Fixx ran there he had him "give a lecture on some topic before and after the race. People listened to him."

Also in 1977, Burley started the Roxbury Road Race Series.

"I never thought that it would go on forever," he said in a recent telephone interview.

On July 2 it will be 45 years old.

Cynthia DeGirolamo of Newtown, a former women's season champion in the Roxbury series who recently completed the Boston Marathon, said “I think the series has continued for 45 years because the people that run there recognize the special combination of friendly competition with no frills, the scenic, challenging courses and the variety of personalities of the runners."

In 1980, Larry Kershnar, a Roxbury resident who taught at New Milford High School and later Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, succeeded Burley as the race director and gradually lengthened the schedule. Since 1986 it has started in February and continued until early December.

In 2016, Hartford Courant sportswriter Lori Riley wrote about summer race series across Connecticut. The Roxbury series was the only one referenced that extended beyond those months.

Ed Sandifer of Newtown, who captured the Roxbury season championship a record 12 times and completed 37 Boston Marathons, has said that the only series on the East Coast that exceeds Roxbury in the number of weeks per year is Fresh Pond in Cambridge, MA., which has been held every Saturday since 1973.

The Roxbury races are run on Saturday mornings at 8:30 a.m. and attract a wide variety of runners.

Before the move in 1990 from the Booth Free School to the current site at the Everett B. Hurlburt Community Park, some years the series averaged just 10 runners per week.

In a 1999 Litchfield County Times profile, John Torsiello wrote that Dave Dunleavy - the first-place finisher that day and who at that time wrote the running column for The News-Times of Danbury - had said the series was a valuable part of the local running community but was too much of "a secret," indicating that more people should do the races. Actually, at about that time the participation was starting to increase, probably due, in part, to the explosion of the Internet. Between 1998 and 2001 the annual weekly participation rose from 19 to 37. It nearly reached 48 in 2016. More than 30 runners per week have turned out over the most recent years.

Plaques are awarded to the top six male and top six female finishers in the annual season standings. The runners also make donations to local organizations and sponsor a Thanksgiving Day race that provides funds for the Roxbury Scholarship Foundation. The series received a civic award in 2017 from the Bridgewater Grange Club.

Over the 45 years the series has gone from a primitive scoring system where runners were noted on a clipboard to a timing chip recorder, which was installed in September 2020.

Bob Satterlee of Woodbury, who has been running the races since 1988, added, “You cannot beat the quaintness of the environment, the beauty of the Village of Roxbury with its akin countryside. The winding scenic backroads, the whispering pines, the gently echoing streams as the water collides with its army of stones, the living endless steepness of the hills, with an occasional bear thrown in for color.”

Riley noted in her 2016 Hartford Courant feature that "many of the Roxbury distances are old-school and quirky — last Saturday, there was a 9.9-mile race, and on July 23, there is a 4.8-mile race."

Burley, who now lives in Colorado, explained, “I was never a stickler for having an eight-kilometer course or a 10-kilomerter course and then someone could set the state record for that distance. You have your 4.3-mile course and if someone runs a faster time the next time you do it, then that becomes the course record.”

Paul Butler of Southbury, who has run in the series for 20 years, remarked, "If this was the same course every week, I think we would be bored."

He added, “The Roxbury races are known for the hills. When I tell friends that you’ve got to come up to Roxbury and run, they go, ‘But I will have to run those hills.’ The hills are part of the series. It’s part of the strategy. I can catch this person if I can make it up that hill. There’s an art to running these hills.”

Burley said, “The intention was to throw in those hills and make it tough. We didn’t want to strangle anybody. We wanted to challenge the runners, have them continue to work on their shins.”

Former season champion Mike Abraham, a Roxbury, resident, wrote in a 2014 e-mail message that the series “welcomes a broad range of people to participate and in many instances has probably helped given direction and structure to an individual in need of such. I think this is an important quality of the series. “

Kateri Danay, 24, of Waterbury, who began running the races at age 12, related, “When I was in fifth grade my physical education teacher inspired me to run. My dad started searching for races for me. He found this series on the Internet. It gives me something to look forward to every week."

She won the women's season title in 2021 and has completed two marathons.

David Monti wrote in a 2009 profile of the series in Runner's World that there is “a sense of belonging" at Roxbury.

DeGirolamo commented, “After the run, many runners meet up for breakfast afterwards at the Roxbury Market. On warmer days, we meet outside The conversations are about a wide range of topics from people with different backgrounds and knowledge They are always interesting and unpredictable.”

Mary Mahrer of Manhattan - a former president of the race Executive Committee and former women's season champion, who has run in the series with her husband, Nate, since 2007 - has said that they decided when they wanted a weekend home in rural Connecticut that they would choose Roxbury because it had an extensive race series.

Mahrer said she has made some of her "closest friends" through the races.

Butler said, “I don’t know if I would be a life-long runner without Roxbury. People feel so welcome here. What I like about it is that no matter how fast or how slow you are you feel like you’re a winner. When you come across that line, people are cheering for you even if you are the last runner.”

Satterlee added, “Because of the uniqueness, the series attracts all levels of runners, from those that are sub-sixers to guy like me that are members of the “huffers and puffers”. We all compete within our own groups, yet our primary competitor is ourselves, for we strive to improve our personal bests, to return home updating our running logs, in capital letters, our victories."

Note: The series is administered by an Executive Committee consisting of Russ Pribanic, president; Janet Levy, treasurer; and Scott Cooney, vice president. The operations team includes Scott Benjamin, race director; and Chris Deming, Larry Deming and Lee Anne Zarger as assistant directors.

A social event will be held on Saturday, July 16, following the 6.4-mile race that day to mark the 45th anniversary of the first race in the series.

For more information about the races: Access www.roxburyraces.net or the Roxbury Races Facebook page.

Resources:

:https://www.amazon.com/Complet.

..https://www.nytimes.com/1984/07/22/obituaries/james-f-fixx-dies-jogging-author-on-running-was-52.html

David Monti, Runners World, April 2009.https://patch.com/connecticut/.

..https://www.courant.com/sports...

The Litchfield County Times, 1999.