Keeping Score: Apple pie a la race
Good morning!
It took some doing in this age of COVID-19, but Northfield-Mount Hermon School was able to stage the 130th running of the Bemis-Forslund Pie Race. The tradition began six years before John McDermott won the inaugural Boston Marathon, in 1891 when founder Dwight Moody made six-mile runs part of the school experience, together with climbing mountains and washing dishes.
Eventually the race became voluntary, the course was shortened to 4.53 miles, and the school gave an apple pie to anyone who finished in under 33 minutes. The only year it was canceled was in 1936 when scarlet fever made a run through the northeast, according to NMH archivist Peter Weis.
By then it was named the Bemis Pie Race after alumnus Henry Bemis, who paid for the winners’ medals and rounded up the apples and baking supplies. After the school went coed in 1972, it was re-named the Bemis-Forslund Pie Race in honor of Gladys Forslund, the popular wife of longtime athletic director Axel Forslund.
The race has been covered by Sports Illustrated, the Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe and other periodicals. In 1963, it became the first race ever run by a skinny junior from Middletown, N.Y., who was tired of getting beat up playing football. He started in the back of the pack and finished seventh, behind only the cross country team and one other runner. Frank Shorter had found his calling, and a decade later would win the Olympic marathon in Munich.
Another notable winner is course record holder Mohamed Hussein of Somaliland, who’s back teaching at NMH after an outstanding running career at Amherst College.
Everybody who’s affiliated with NMH qualifies to enter the race, which was shortened to 3.1 miles last year. “This year’s race was held on campus over the course of several days in the first week of November,” said NMH’s communications officer Nicole Letourneau. “Racers signed up for a time slot and ran with a mask and start times were staggered. All runners submitted their own times.”
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