FLRC Newsletter - August 2004
	Tribute to John Whitman, Hartshorne Memorial Volunteer of the Year, 2004

John Whitman has been named 2004 winner of the Finger Lakes Runners Club's Hartshorne Memorial Volunteer award, along with Frank and Sally Rusby. I am grateful to the editors for giving me the chance to lead the club in saying thanks to John for his tremendous efforts on behalf of the running community. I am uniquely well positioned to write a tribute to John, since during the two years (1999–2001) that I was FLRC vice-president for track he was one of several people who consistently put in much more work than I did. There are several other race directors I know who could make the same confession.

Our club is, after all, a running club so it makes sense to start with a little overview of John's accomplishments on foot. Although I had run with John many times in the years around 1990, first with the Sunday morning group that left from Schoelkopf and then increasingly with High Noon as he improved, I somehow didn't really regard him as a serious runner until August of 1993. I distinctly remember running a terrific race at the Phelps Sauerkraut Festival 20K, and I heard somebody in the finish chute say, "Good race, Rick, almost caught you but you were too strong." When I turned and saw it was John, I was startled. Somehow it had escaped my notice how quickly he was improving!

Since then I have had eleven years of observing John from behind in races, at least on those rare occasions when I stay close enough to keep him in sight. He has been a stalwart on the High Noon teams in the Upstate cross-country series as a runner and as an organizational force. He has managed to run great times even while his successful career on the faculty of Cornell's Department of Linguistics compels him to maintain an exhausting world-wide travel schedule. His 2003 Boston marathon, when he ran under three hours at age 48, is one excellent recent example.

The list of jobs that John has taken on for the club (Skunk Cabbage race director, equipment manager, etc.) is very impressive, but fails to capture the essence of his larger contribution. For those of you who don't know John as well, let me present a few areas in which he has made a big difference in the lives of other runners:

• International cooperation—John speaks several languages, and uses them effectively in the running community. Anyone who has read his race reports from around the world marvels at his experiences running around temples in the Far East. En route to the starting line of the Boston marathon in 2003, John and I ducked under a large pine tree for a last pit stop. We were joined there by a group of Korean runners who, I gather, made a little joke about the tree being so tall because of all the fertilization it was getting. When John was able to respond with a snappy one liner in Korean it made their day.
• Driving—John has always done more than his share of time behind the wheel en route to and from races. Some of my finest pre- and post-race memories are set in John's old Taurus station wagon, a car whose muffler was for some time attached with a leather bootlace. Combining this attribute with his international skills, John this year hosted a Korean friend, Mr. Park, who came to the United States for a few days to run his first Boston marathon.
• Encouraging newcomers—John has always been good at gently persuading people who don't run to give it a try, and to encourage those who run a little to run a little more. Never was this more evident than in a recent Triennial Trail Relay when John brought in several graduate students from his department to form a reasonable competitive team called The Cunning Linguists.
• Wedding toasts—If the linguistics business ever dries up, John could make a living giving toasts at weddings. His comments at Chris Mansfield and Stacey Benton's wedding had the crowd howling (I was in the unfortunate position of giving the toast after John; it was rather like bringing up Barry Manilow to do a couple of numbers after a Rolling Stones concert.) At President Tily's wedding, he came through with another crowd pleaser. Ask him to your next event!
• Humor—Many of us run because we find it fun, and nobody makes it more fun than John. Whether it's done on purpose (hiding beers on the course on somebody's last day at High Noon) or not (running with a bar of soap in his shoe for several miles), John has a knack for producing something memorable during any training run or race.

I have never met anyone else with John's exceptional capacity to move easily among different groups of people. He can stop at a roadside bar on the way home from the Cazenovia race, order a Genesee draft and talk about the Bills' preseason prospects; then give an academic talk in Japanese at a conference in Boston the next day. The time and effort that John has given to the FLRC would be more than enough to earn him a Hartshorne award, but his greatest contribution is surely his unique ability to make the running community a better place. Our club is more welcoming to newcomers, richer in race opportunities for veterans and most importantly more fun—much more fun—for everybody than it would be without him.

—Rick Cleary

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