The 2nd Annual Golden Shoe Awards

Chris McCubbins (1945 – 2009) : Role Model

By Dean Tweed

When Chris McCubbins arrived in Winnipeg in the early 1970s, the Pan Am Games gold medallist and 1976 Olympian brought with him an entirely new way of training, combining marathon-distance long runs, epic interval workouts and relentless attention to every nuance of preparation. When McCubbins died of leukemia last August at the age of 63, he left behind a legacy, having rewritten the Manitoba record books and mentored three generations of the province’s top distance talents. Most of all, he had reset the competitive bar – if you wanted to win at the provincial level, you had to train as hard as the world’s best. “What set Chris apart was his mental outlook,” says friend and teammate Sheldon Reynolds. “He tackled everything he did with complete tenacity and perseverance. I remember visiting him in hospital soon after he was diagnosed with leukemia and he just had that old look in his eye. He said, ‘I’m going to beat this.'”

Born in Enid, Oklahoma, in 1945, McCubbins was not a particularly gifted grade-school runner. He tried out for his junior high track team but didn’t make the cut. By his senior year, though, he had won his conference in cross country and placed third in the state mile championship in 4:24. Running for Oklahoma State University, McCubbins won the NCAA steeplechase title, securing a spot on the U.S. team competing at the 1967 Pan Am Games in Winnipeg. His gold in the 3000m steeplechase at those Games signalled his arrival on the international stage. Grant Towns, a 2:22 marathoner who trained with McCubbins in the 70s, recalls being in the stands that day. “Chris and another American, Conrad Nightingale, had broken away from the pack in the first three laps and were trading the lead. Nightingale was a lean, fluid runner. He looked so smooth and in control that I turned to a friend beside me and said, ‘Watch this guy. Just wait until the last couple of laps. He’s going to pull away. Then the exact opposite happened – Chris took the lead and absolutely battered Nightingale over the last 800m. He ended up winning by 13 seconds.” McCubbins’s 8:38.2 gold-medal performance was the fastest time in the world that year and established him as the man to beat internationally. Then, at the height of the Vietnam War, he was drafted into the U.S. army. A commanding officer recognized McCubbins’s athletic talent and assigned him to Special Services, where he competed in the modern pentathlon, a hybrid event that combines fencing, swimming, horseback riding, marksmanship and cross-country running. McCubbins served his two-year term of duty without ever leaving U.S. soil.

In 1970, McCubbins returned to Winnipeg, the city he would call home for the next four decades, and began a systematic domination of road racing and cross country at the provincial level that lasted until the 1990s. Nationally, he was virtually untouchable for a decade, winning the Canadian steeplechase title in 1972 and the national cross-country championships in 1974, 1975 and 1977. Shortly after receiving his Canadian citizenship, McCubbins qualified for the 1976 Montreal Olympics by winning the 10,000m at the Canadian Championships in 28:16:51, a Manitoba provincial record that still stands.

A circle of University of Manitoba runners soon gathered around the quiet, authoritative newcomer, hoping to learn the secrets of his success. The group eventually became Winnipeg’s Yellow Snow Athletic Club. In an era when 200K weeks and 50K long runs were in vogue, Reynolds recalls one particularly brutal workout the group did regularly. “We’d run 24x200m with a 30-second rest. Usually in an interval workout you walk or jog lightly between reps, but Chris had us doing pushups and situps.”

It was a punishing agenda that could bring out the best in an athlete but, just as easily, lead to an injury that could wipe out an entire season. At the Montreal Olympics, McCubbins struggled home last in his 10,000m heat, hobbled by a persistent groin injury. Karl Sproll, another Yellow Snow teammate, wonders what McCubbins might have achieved at that Olympics had he been injury-free. “He’d been training at altitude in Flagstaff, Arizona, for a month. Chris knew he was in the best shape of his life and that he was one of the fittest men on the planet. He would have been in the final for sure.”

McCubbins never stopped running and remained a world-class competitor in his 40s. He was listed as the world’s fourth-ranked masters runner in 1986 and, the next year, set a North American masters record for the 15K in 45:34.

At age 45 he discovered cross-country skiing and eventually developed into one of the province’s top skiers. McCubbins took naturally to the role of mentor, both on the track and off. He studied early childhood education at the University of Manitoba, then taught elementary school in Winnipeg’s north end. He was a coaching co-ordinator for the Windsor Park Nordic Centre and recently established a program that introduces underprivileged inner-city kids to cross-country skiing.

He continued to coach University of Manitoba runners and his influence ripples through successive waves of provincial champions. Darren Klassen, the national cross-country silver medallist in 1990, and Mike Booth, a three-time winner of the Manitoba Marathon, both spoke at his memorial service. The Manitoba Cross-Country Championships have been renamed in his honour and are being run this year over a tough hilly course in Winnipeg’s Kilkona Park that McCubbins helped plan and maintain. Sproll says that, for him, McCubbins summed up the spirit of the sport. “He was the epitome of competitive distance running – extreme humility and, on the same coin, incredible dedication and capacity for sheer hard work. He transcended what we thought of as normal human performance.”