Ted Corbitt Award

The Ted Corbitt Ultrarunner of the Year Award

Recognizing outstanding athletic achievement in ultra distance running by a male athlete.

Read about Ted Corbitt.

The Ted Corbitt Award, which honors the Male Ultrarunner of the Year, is presented at the USATF Annual Meeting Awards Breakfast in December of each year. To select the recipient of this award, the MUT Running Council compiles the performance highlights of men ultrarunners each year. The performance period for the award is November 1 – October 31 of each year. The voting process is completed by the end of November so that the Ted Corbitt Award can be formally presented to the winning athlete at the USATF Awards Breakfast.

The recipient of the Ted Corbitt Ultrarunner of the Year Award must be a USATF member for the year. To be nominated for the award the athlete MUST have a current USATF membership card.

Qualifications are strictly athletic achievements and should include:

Placing in USATF national championships

Record or outstanding performance in other ultra distance races, (road, trail, track) or sanctioned international events

Overall ultrarunning performance record for the year

About Ted Corbitt
By Dan Brannen, December 2002

Ted Corbitt is regarded as the "Father of American Ultrarunning." A 1952 U.S. Olympian at the Marathon distance, Corbitt moved up to ultradistances shortly thereafter. He traveled many times to the London-to-Brighton 54-mile race in England, where he finished as high as second place in what was at the time the de facto world championship of the fledgling international sport of ultrarunning. Corbitt set American Records at 50 miles, 100 miles, and 24 hours, some of which stood for decades. One of his most noteworthy marks is a 5:35:03 for 50 miles (1970), which is still the U.S. 50-and-over record. He inspired a generation of American ultrarunners to take these events seriously on a national scale.

Corbitt was a founding father of the Road Runners Club of America, where he instituted road race course certification in the U.S. He was instrumental in getting the Amateur Athletics Union, the U.S. governing body of Track & Field, to provide official recognition of and standards for long distance running, including ultras. Corbitt remained active in the sport, and set a series of American age-group ultra records at the age of 81. For his incomparable running achievements, Corbitt was the inducted into the USATF Masters Hall of Fame and is one of four ultrarunners in the hall.

For more information about Ted Corbitt, see

http://www.ultramarathonworld.com/../uw_archive/n21ja01d.html

http://www.ultrarunning.com/archives/corbitt.htm

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Last updated: 09/14/05
Web Author: Lorraine Gersitz