my name is john phillips and i'm your guest host for this evening i'm here with jeff benjamin he is the former president of the staten island athletic club he is the senior writer for the running network and he is the l r d chairman for the u s a t f new york to the show thank you very much i'm really thrilled to be here thanks jeff i know you've been on the show before and i recommend that everybody go and take a look at that episode but this time i really want to focus in on staten island running culture i don't think there's anybody on earth that is better equipped to talk about staten island running than you i appreciate that i've been very lucky though that a lot of people have filled me in through the years and really grates that not one but i want to talk a little about the rich history that exists the us president jimmy on who is a mets fan and i feel very bad for him at this point to me it was asking some of us some you know what is the magnitude of all this and one person told him it's like having the world series track and field on staten island not only that we're going to have just the current crop of america's greatest track and field athletes but also brings in a lot of old timers as well absolutely so like for example carl lewis the greatest of all time as an assistant coach at the university of houston he will be up because some of his athletes going to be making it and together a heck of a package heck of a presentation and we have every bus we really have gotten going to have yeah before we dive right into that i actually i we're going to stand up and running i really love this story we talked about this before but your first running five miles a day i joined him here's one about eight minutes a mile first time i remember running with him i didn't keep up with him but then you know his training went on in college when i started catching up and my family and i learned about a old race new york road runners manufacturers hanover five mile challenge in close place park back then manufacturers hanover bank would have little five baro similar to half marathon format you guys have now very cool so i entered the race and i really know what to expect is my first time ever like you know over a course so to speak not the track and people say hey what are you looking to run what you're going to run what are you looking to run and it was a guy there who said yeah we'll get a break forty minutes so i was like alright i'm going to stay with this guy goes off i remember being very right at the end of the race the guy i was with sprinted finished in front and we actually both broke thirty nine minutes and it was for the bo you know everyone knows who he is yes and from what i know from for its history that might have been a p r for him  star not not at all not at all so i think as you know he knew who we were and everything and when we would see i've been a member of the road runner since eighty two i believe eighty one eighty two so you know just a lot of fun memories and stuff we did a lot with the new york road runners club when i was president start off a lot of club one of great things fred did was get involved have community groups get involved with the new york city marathon start where there was funding for them which was really a great thing and really want a way to help out those groups it's awesome so let's thirty diving into into stand woman writes about how during the time period she was fighting for women's rights that there was this young african american runner running distance in central park all the time which was rare to see and she devoted a lot of time and attention to our whole and how he helped encourage her as to move to staten island the mid seventy's and late eighty one as i started getting into the running you know i had a club called the north shore track club and i was fortunate enough to join the high school captain became a lifelong friend of mine to y a lot of and we've been friends ever since art's philosophy was was that he didn't care whether somebody was a good runner or he wanted a good person he felt he could make a good runner out of anybody so you know and that was really the camaraderie of that club five and somebody early new york city marathon if i remember correctly the one nine hundred seventy four a seventy five race which was still in central park going to four times central park it was a hot day and a young runner in front of our head went out a little hard and he was still in his experimental phase of becoming a runner  at the highest level and around twenty miles he actually got exhausted this one hour lay down on the side of a parking lot then in the park and what came by and said hey you got to get up you got to finish this race and i got him up did beat him but the young runner was and everything was really great and art would always say you know i care was sportsmanship but he also said but you got to remember this is the early one nine hundred seventy s the north end of central park who knows what would have happened to the guy which is true just true i mean you know crazy you know running through the products you know and everything and in a way that race was kind of like the progenitor to like get everything going in the right direction we're now anybody you know could be in central park it's very safe you know so you know as well as other neighborhoods because they're running so you know running is a sport that really brings people together of all backgrounds faiths races and you know just the common goal of trying to improve oneself you know tell me a little about how are really helped popularize and grow the sport of running beyond that island like i said in his years as a boy director of the new york road runners encouraging things one of the thing to in the early eighty's or did talk with fred and now one about doing a children's thing originally was sponsored yeah very happy to hear that my story a really good story about art's character because he didn't just want to focus on adding making good runners one focus on making good people yeah prior to the race so it would be very quiet serious you know some people want to get into that mode but if the race basically i think the great thing with auto is that he would invite anybody to join him for a jog down anywhere from ten minutes to twenty five minutes and he went slow he would run like twenty four minutes for five miles per se but then the but then the warm down would be  eight to ten minutes a modest conversation goes you feel he's encouraged everybody and he always went out of his way to introduce runners younger runners to other people too i recall in one thousand nine hundred two i ran the trailer to some a ten mile race which was to be put on by the road runner and in high school he was an exceptional baseball player in his time period he was called the jewish honus wagner some people may remember what a swagger is when it was an outstanding superstar baseball player and his card in one nine hundred twelve was the most valuable baseball park in queens and the club in the early one nine hundred which the first and only inclusive club in the united states at the high level they did not care who you are they accepted you that must been i mean a pretty progressive club i brought in one thousand zero eight you have to allow every single person in this is a pretty unbelievable way to think that sport can truly kind of transcend absolutely able was made the captain of the club the jewish kid was made the captain of the irish american year was nine hundred twelve the fifteen hundred meters which is the metric mile little short of the mile became the first major break four minutes for it and over a period of i believe seventeen days broke the world record three times and in that time period like with weird system ran at harvard's outdoor track thirty thousand people jammed the stadium to see if you could break the world record again wow and in a great story the rules back then were they took three officials and put them at the mile mark with three stop yeah and ironically the boat he took over literally went from the united states to fender one a month a half after the titanic had sunk wow some people kind of nervous about going home and yeah his roommate on the fifteen hundred is the overwhelming favorite but in one of the greatest races ever run he's leading and literally what five yards to go on all jackson of great britain runs by majority leaps past the finish line to take the gold and kiviat is so close to the third place guy they can't decide who got the silver so it's the first time that sports have used the photo technology the photo finish technology what they determined got the silver while kiviat did regret for the rest of his life that race sometimes put a happy face on it in some interviews which i've read sometimes you wake up in the middle of night have nightmares now yeah he said i had it i had it a few days later he was on a three thousand meter relay team race the only contest at a time a little about what this used centerfield kiviat shortstop and he played exhibition baseball there and if you go google there are some photographs of these guys all have been laris yeah so abel is a jewish american who's the captain of the irish american right club and like how did how did he use running to advocate for different social justice issues he ran to show everyone that recalls that he was doing it was a runner you know there's a fellow named allan catchin k a t c h e n who wrote a book able caveat phenomenal phenomenal book and he writes about staten island new york city the united states the turn of the century the only one hundred track and field in this country caveat there was some races where people screamed some epithets at him now he ignored it he stayed in a zone ironically most people know about jim thorpe how long he was declared a professional integrated just a story yeah where he lost his gold medals for many years and kiviat was actually barred from the sport as well because supposedly he was accused of taking some kind of on the table money as well you wonder you know he would just do it better anybody else able later on came back into the sport actually and you know ran very well for a long time he held a lot of american records from like a thousand yards outdoors indoors all the up the cross country so his range eighteen seventy five seventy six he looked at homes on staten island and in the civil war colonel robert gould sure who's played by matthew broderick in the movie glory his family had homes on staten island the family is buried here at moravian cemetery on staten island so a lot of the sports in one thousand await they had their awards dinner at the waldorf astoria so here yeah you know we have a photo somewhere floating around of these people and yeah this was like a different kind of crew the club kind of won their first race and they are the people who really kind of got the club going into what it became today and since though in those years we've had presidents barber raise him richie right mike brennan  were asked joe joe joe joe would say the standard carry a club which was preeminent in the fifty's and early sixty's was starting to have the members started to get up there in age i guess joe was part of a youth movement at the time that wanted to do their own thing you what say you run fifteen minutes for three miles and i run eighty minutes for three miles right we show up that morning i get a three minute head start yeah ok and then your jobs try to catch me at some point there was some ringers you know and  qualify for scholarships and stuff the club has always been preeminent it's tradition and history in the baro there's another called the richmond rockets which is so well you know the sawyer act has been around longer and like you said the history and tradition with sayaka something that every president is always brand new facility there right open in what twenty fifteen twenty sixth and you have to tell us a little bit about that facility we don't want to have an organization sidetrack was formed in the late ninety's trying to push try to get a track go and i would think that everyone is  agreement that this facility is beyond the wildest dreams i talked to a lot of world class runners you know through my writing and stuff i talk about ocean breeze and we actually receive one of the great compliments we're like it's like you're running outdoors indoors yeah ventilation system in air is just outrageous mando track banked hydraulic use by the public it is a new york city parks facility which means that if you have a new york city parks membership you have access to track during certain hours so you know how to read  you know they're definitely at work right now thinking avoid what we do to market it more and include more people get the community behind it and stuff like that so like very phenomenal you know how do you think this is going to impact running in staten island you know for future generations that had this world await fifty nine and rob you before this well you know rod is what a great all around runners of all time he was a three fifty two mile three thirty three fifteen hundred thirteen fifteen four five k world record holder and a half marathon eighty nine years young is bill welsh yeah bill welsh has been running for of or despite leukemia despite the fact he just came out of a nursing home if the fighting the monia he's still up in at it just aware that he is beyond