As Asics Falmouth Road Race weekend arrives, traffic along Main Street clogs tighter than a NFL fan’s descending arteries. Cars with license plates from the entire eastern seaboard come to an idle along the quaint store-lined street, with a lot of nowhere left to go in front of them.  

     Nobody seems to care. Windows are open, music pours out. Pedestrians cross easily. With the Cape in the final throes of high summer season, the mood around town retains a neighborly white clapboard feel.  

     Colors are summer splashed, smiles brightened by framing sunglasses.

     The event has come a long way since its modest 92-person beginning in 1973. Now in its 53rd year, it is easy to take the Falmouth Road Race for granted.  It is a fixture on the both Cape and international road racing calendar, the number one money generating weekend of the Falmouth summer season, the number one party, and the culmination of the U.S. summer road race season.  

But less we forget, none of this was envisioned when Brother’s Four barkeeper Tommy Leonard’s fertile imagination took flight back in 1972 after he watched Frank Shorter win his Olympic Marathon gold medal in Munich, Germany.  

 “It was late on a Saturday night,” Tommy recalled years ago. “I was sitting at the bar with my feet up on chair having a cold one. And I’m looking out over Martha’s Vineyard Sound, and the Sound was like shimmering in the silvery moonlight with Roberta Flack on in the background softly singing, First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.   

“I was with Captain Red Caviar – Cavanaugh, we called him Red Caviar – from the Cap’n Kidd, and it all just came into being. I’m a little bit of a romantic, and with this scenario I said, ‘I’d really like to do something for the Falmouth Girl’s Track Club, and I started putting all of it together. The conception was right there at the Brother’s Four.”

     A year later, 92 people came together to raise money for the Falmouth Girl’s Track Club in a seven-mile race from the Cap’n Kidd in Woods Hole to the Brother’s Four in Falmouth Heights.  Who could have guessed that it would one day be featured on CBS Sports Spectacular and ESPN, and come to be known as The Great American Road Race? Sure, Tommy’s infectious charm set the course.  He recruited America’s premier miler, Marty Liquori in 1974, then Olympic champion Frank Shorter, himself, in 1975.  Tommy even notched the first sponsor, Perrier in 1977. 

“I’m not surprised by the event’s success, though,” he once confessed.  “I remember telling Joe Concannon  (the late sportswriter for the Boston Globe) ‘We’re going to have 5000 runners here or I’ll do a swan dive off the Bourne Bridge!”

     Well, Tommy’s guess came up well short of the mark. Consequently, he never had to take that Greg Lougainis leap from the Bourne Bridge. 

These days, 12,000 lucky souls make the pilgrimage from Woods Hole to Falmouth Heights each August. 

It’s been a remarkable journey, for sure. Tommy Leonard left us at age 85 in 2019. 82 year-old Brian Salzburg is the last of the original 92 runners who finished the first Falmouth Road Race in 1973. Equal course record holder Wesley Kiptoo of Kenya out of Iowa State University returns looking for a second title—maybe a solo record. Last year’s women’s runner-up, Melknat Wudu of Ethiopia, 21, the world U20 record holder at 3000m looks to top the podium. 

The Falmouth wheelchair division celebrates its 50th running in 2025. In 1975,  Bob Hall, of Belmont, Mass. pushed a 48-pound hospital chair over the 7-mile distance. Since then, Falmouth has become one of the premier wheelchair competitions on the road tour. 

Five time men’s champion Daniel Romanchuk, 27, from Champagne, Illinois and Silver Spring, Maryland’s Tatyana McFadden, another five-time champion and 22 time Paralympic medalist, top the fields.

Falmouth fashioned just the right facets over the years and turned into a gem of rare quality, producing a series of races that each summer shimmer like the moonlit Sound that inspired Tommy Leonard those many, many years ago.  

END 

(Toni Reavis first came to the FRR in 1975, and has covered the race for Runner’s Digest Radio, the Boston Herald, and ESPN through the years. This year he will serve as the finish line announcer.)