Heinrich – 1

Heinrich won his debut marathon, in San Francisco, in October 1979 in 2:29:16. He improved to 2:22:34 a few months later at the West Valley Marathon in Burlingame, Calif. Two days after turning 40, Heinrich won the masters division at the 1980 Boston Marathon in 2:25:25. As in his first marathon, where he took the lead only in the last mile, “at Boston I was passing everyone at the end,” Heinrich says, “and I thought, ‘If this race had been longer I could have caught everyone instead of being 55th or whatever.” (He was 51st.) “That’s when I decided I needed to do something really long, like 100 kilometers. I looked at the pace [for the American record] and I thought, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ ”