May - June 2005 Event Calendar - Michigan Runner

Gary Morgan gets ready to start the Kilimanjaro
Marathon with Mount Kilimanjaro as the backdrop.
younger. If I’m going to do it, do it!’” remembered
Morgan. “I’ve thought about growing
up, but I’m in no hurry.”
A month later, he and about 35 Loper
Tour members were bound for Amsterdam,
and then on to Tanzania.
“It’s a beautiful place,” said Morgan, not
knowing where to start in describing highlights.
The colorful garb of the local women,
boundless hospitality of the natives ... He
took in all the sights to fry an eye, fill the
memory card and expose film of both his digital
and standard cameras.
Loper Tours are known for their packed
schedule of highlights, series of banquets,
great places to stay and day trips. The first
day in-country, in the city of Arusha, Morgan
encountered his first strange beings: local
Hash House Harriers.
“I’d never done that before, so that was
fun,” said Morgan of hashing. One of the
Harriers owned a local pub, so a fair amount
of beer was quaffed later at his joint.
(Morgan, not one to let the moss grow,
recounted his trip during a hectic weekend in
early April. He had taken a half-day off from
his job as a GM plant electrician to drive to
Chicago for the Shamrock Shuffle expo.
There, as Michigan’s incoming Road Runners
Clubs of America representative, he wanted
to pick brains of others on how to make the
RRCA more relevant to state runners. Then
he was going to drive home for a Saturday
flight to New York for a Long Island 20K
Sunday. Whew!)
In Africa, tour participants had a gettogether
banquet the first night, then flew by
prop plane the next morning to the Serengeti,
landing on a grass runway after flying over
the Great Rift.
“And away we went on safari,” said
M o rgan. Drought had the animals on the
m a rch: hippos, zebras, wildebeests. The second
day, another safari. This time, elephants
and lions, one of them taking down
a zebra, followed by an incongruity you
w o n ’t find in Kansas, sunset at poolside.
The next day, another
safari and nature hike. Yo u
get the picture .
They arrived in Tanzania
Feb. 18. The marathon, halfmarathon
and 5K were Feb.
27, starting and finishing in
the city of Moshi, near the
base of Kilimanjaro.
Participants started on a
dirt track inside a stadium,
went over gently-rolling terrain
for 10 miles, then did a
relentless 1,200-foot climb
over 10 miles as the heat
soared to near 100° F.
Morgan finished in 3:39,
leading the marathoners in
the Loper group. “I was very
happy with that,” he said. “I
hadn’t run a marathon in a
long time and I hadn’t done a
lot of training. It told me I
was in 3:10 shape. It was a
very tough course.”
As if a tough marathon in high heat wasn’t
enough, Morgan and 22 others in the tour then
did the optional six-day trek up Kilimanjaro ,
with porters doing the heavy hauling.
The last day of climbing began at 11 p.m.
and finished with sunrise over the crater rim
and glacier at 7 a.m. The climb was timed
both for the sunrise and because the scree
above tree line freezes into an easier-to-navigate
surface at night.
“It took a lot out of me, but it was worth
it,” said Morgan.
What took five days to go up, took only
a day to come down.
Then it was back to the real world, of
Michigan winter and roadkill in place of a
lion kill. Loper tried to talk Morgan into the
Great Wall of China tour in May, but he says
that will have to wait a year. He has plans he
can’t cancel later this year, and it’s time to get
serious about training.
Morgan will be the celebrity announcer
at the Fifth Third Bank Solstice Run in
Northville June 25, and hopes to walk at
both the U.S. championships and the world
masters’ games in Edmonton.
“Little by little, things are coming back,”
he said. Proof was the 19-minute 5K he ran
at the March 26 Hansons race in Utica.
Overlooked because of his success in
race-walking — Morgan was top U.S. finisher
at 37th overall in the 20K race-walk at the
Seoul Games in ’88 — is his talent as a runner.
He has posted running PRs of 2:35 at the
marathon, 33:30 for 10K and 54:10 for 10
miles, to go with walking PRs of 19:55 for
5K, 41:38 for 10K, 1:26:56 for 20K, and
4:13 for 50K.
Meanwhile, his memories of Africa will
tide him over until he can get to China. “It
was an awesome trip,” said Morgan, talking
by cell phone while closing in on
Chicago. “It was definitely worth the cost. I
saw stuff you only see in National
Geographic or on TV.” M R
Parks’ Impact
Outdistances
Career
By Doug Kurtis
It has been four years since Bob Parks re t i re d
as Eastern Michigan University's track and
c ross country coach. Although he now splits
time between here and Florida, his influence
and impact on Michigan athletes, coaches and
p rograms continues.
Eight of Parks’ athletes have been
Olympians. Hasely Crawford won a gold medal
for Trinidad and Tobago in 1976 in the 100
meters, and Earl Jones a bronze for the U.S. in
1984 in the 800.
Parks’ teams won 44 Mid-American
C o n f e rence titles and nine NAIA or NCAA
Divsion II championships. He was named MAC
coach of the year 29 times and was NCAA
coach of the year in 1990. His daughter, Sue, is
a successful coach at Ball State.
L e t ’s go back to play it forw a rd. Parks was
a middle-distance track star in the 1950s at
Howell High School and Eastern Michigan. His
first coach, Loren Willis, wasn’t a track expert
but a good motivator. At EMU, Parks ran for
G e o rge Marshall, a man he considered a father
f i g u re .
Parks started his coaching career at the
high school level, working at Ferndale and
R e d o rd Thurston before becoming an assistant
to the legendary George Dales at We s t e rn
Michigan University.
Parks, who took over at Eastern in 1967,
found successful coaches to be well-org a n i z e d ,
e a g e r, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, hard w o r k-
ing and smart. From them he learned you have
to cover all the bases and leave nothing to
c h a n c e .
One of Parks’ former assistants is Kelly
Lycan, now head coach at We s t e rn Michigan.
“I wondered if Bob would ever re t i re ,”
Lycan said. “I thought they would just bury
him in the long-jump pit at whatever meet he
died.
“He loved the chase and the challenge of a
new season, the chance to beat back all his pretenders
to the throne. He was fond of saying
the only reason he kept going was to (bleep) off
( f o rmer WMU coach) Jack Shaw.
“They were rivals, but two peas in a pod,”
Lycan continued. “At coaches’ meetings the fur
would fly between them. Since Bob’s depart u re ,
the meetings haven’t been the same. Bob didn’t
like to lose, and he didn’t very often.”
Parks’ dual-meet re c o rd was 162-14-1.
The rivalry with Shaw didn’t stop Parks
f rom sending newsletters to We s t e rn Michigan
track alums trying to help them get their program
back. Parks is also writing a book about
his experiences at Eastern, and he sends out a
newsletter so his alums will be organized to
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