By Gerry Gilmour
New Century Press
Mark Knutson has Fargo-Moorhead on the run.
The architect of the wildly popular annual Fargo Marathon held each spring this fall brings us the FM Mini Marathon.
The Oct. 8 event will attract thousands of distance runners for 5-kilometer, 10-kilometer and half-marathon races in conjunction with Fargo’s Octoberfest.
Knutson, founder of GoFar Events and an owner of the Fargo Running Company, says he never envisioned the simple sport of running taking off quite as it has in Fargo-Moorhead.
“The unique thing about Fargo as a running community, is that we’re saddled with the weather,” Knutson says.
Yet thanks to the area’s bountiful offering of health clubs, treadmills are widely available.
Fargo-Moorhead has always had a solid core of runners, going back to running guru Jim Fixx and his tome on running and the advent of the early distance running boom of the early 1980s Those runners, most of them fairly fast by today’s standards, could be counted on to toe the line at a handful of local and regional charity events.
But a big race back them was a big deal if more than 100 showed up.
No one, at the time, envisioned an event here in River City that could attract thousands, or the kinds of numbers that big-city runs, such as the Twin Cities Marathon in Minneapolis-St. Paul each fall, were capable of attracting.
Look at the statistics: 30 years ago, about 35,000 Americans annually would run a marathon. Today, more than half a million marathons are completed in the United States every year.
For a guy who wasn’t exactly born to run, Knutson today finds himself making a living promoting the sport.
Ironically, he says, it’s our busy lifestyles that put more of us out on pounding the pavement. People today don’t have the time to participate in team sports, and find a morning, noon or evening run gives them a quick workout that doesn’t require the dedication of belonging, to, say, a softball team.
“I wasn’t a runner,” he says. “I was a basketball player from Hillsboro (N.D.) who went out for track so I could get out of class once in a while.”
Once he took up running as an adult, like so many, he was hooked. He ran his first marathon in 1997.
Knutson had his first taste organizing an event with the 2002 Scheels All Sports Run for the Children Half Marathon. More than 300 entered. “It was considered a huge race,” Knutson says. “No one knew there were so many people eager to run in Fargo.”
He made a leap of faith when he organized the first Fargo Marathon.
Key to that springboard event was getting the cities of Fargo and Moorhead on board as well as their respective parks departments, to allow runners to see much of the city as well as its riverside parks as part of the course.
“From my perspective, any time we can promote an event that brings people to our community, you want to look at that positively,” says Fargo parks director Roger Gress. Dave Leker of his staff works with the marathon to ensure that bike paths are ready, often following a spring flood.
The first Fargo Marathon was in the spring of 2005.
Well. It was supposed to be spring.
“I remember waking up at 4 a.m. and seeing this layer of snow on the grass,” Knutson recalls. “I felt like crawling back into bed and just hiding there.”
Instead, he went out to the Red River Bridge and found 2,500 hearty souls lined up and ready to challenge wind chills in the inaugural half- and full marathon event.
The rest, as they say, is history.
By 2010 the Fargo Marathon reached 20,000 participants. The event became so large that last year it was split over several days to include more races and runners. The spring event, which has been set for set for May 17-19 of 2012, attracts runners from throughout the United States and Canada.
The fall Mini Marathon tends to be more regional, and is capped at 3,500 participants (2,000 for the half-marathon and 750 each for the shorter distances). The 5-kilometer is open to walkers as well as runners. The three runs that compose the event all start and finish at the Fargo Civic Center and take participants on a journey of fall colors along the Red River.
(Gilmour is Regional Manager for New Century Press).