Many miles behind her

• Record setter is one of state’s least-known athletes

By Ryan Watt

The Portland Tribune, Sep 10, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Caroline Walker is an Oregon sports legend, or at least she should be. She was one of the state’s first great female distance runners. And maybe its least-known.

In February 1970, as a 16-year-old junior at Grant High, Walker set a world record in the women’s marathon at the Trail’s End Marathon in Seaside.

Standing 5-foot-1 and weighing 90 pounds, she ran the 26-mile, 385-yard course in 3 hours, 2 minutes and 53 seconds. It was her first try at the distance Ñ she had never run more than 14 miles Ñ and she became the first American to hold the record.

And she never ran a marathon again.

Walker, who went on to compete internationally in cross country, feels she could have finished the Seaside race in under three hours.

“It was a very cold and windy day,” says Walker, who will return to Grant on Saturday for the school’s 20th annual Ñ and final Ñ cross-country alumni meet.

“My hands got really cold and my shoelaces had come untied. I remember stopping alongside of the road, just fussing with trying to get my shoes tied again. And then later, having to stop to go to the bathroom, and deciding to go into a restaurant, so I really wasted a lot of time É I would say five or six minutes, probably, realistically.”

The timing never seemed right for Walker to attempt another marathon. She was always busy with other events, or battling injury. In 1971, for example, she suffered a stress fracture in her foot. In ’72 and ’73, she ran for the United States in the world women’s cross-country championships and was an All-American in track.

“It never made sense to run in the marathon when I’d be running in the world championships,” she says.

She won the Oregon Road Runners Club women’s biathlon (running, swimming) six times in a row from 1972-78 and was the women’s state triathlon champion (swimming, cycling, running) in 1984, ’86 and ’87.

“She really is a forgotten hero of Oregon sports,” says Joe Fulton, a longtime friend and her coach for one year at Oregon State.

Today Walker lives in Santa Fe, N.M. When she attended Grant, the school didn’t have official girls track or cross country teams. She began running competitively as a freshman, mostly in AAU races or for the Oregon Track Club. In 1970, she placed second in the AAU national women’s 3,000 meters on the track at UCLA and was the Oregon high school mile champion.

But women’s running received little publicity in those days, and the women’s marathon wouldn’t be added to the Olympics until 1984.

Walker had no idea she had set a world record that would last for a year until someone called her with the news a few days later. She never was one to brag about it, either.

“She was always very quiet, very humble,” says Mark Cotton, former track and cross-country coach at Grant High.

To this day, Walker, 50, puts her marathon accomplishment into historical perspective.

“I’d like to give honor to those who ran hard before me,” she says, “such as the Native Americans for whom running was a part of everyday life, and who also ran for their survival from the encroaching Europeans, and the African-American slaves who broke away from their chains to literally run for freedom.”

She and Pre

In the early ’70s, Walker attended the University of Oregon, where she was one of the first runners to be coached by distance running legend Steve Prefontaine. He would watch her run once a week and then map out the next workout.

Although she never ran with Pre, she would frequently run with his dog, Lobo. Walker and Prefontaine’s girlfriend, Nancy Allman, were good friends; she remembers spending time with them, and all going out together on her 21st birthday.

She considers just meeting Prefontaine, who died in 1975 at age 24, a “gift in itself.”

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