For Generations of Runners, the Ultimate Test

January 27, 2011, 7:47 am

For Generations of Runners, the Ultimate Test

By DAVID GONZALEZ

Mary DiBiase Blaich for The New York Times Matt Centrowitz, of Power Memorial High School, won the St. John’s University high school cross country race in 1972 in Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx.

The snow blanketing the Parade Grounds at Van Cortlandt Park lends the landscape a tone of pastoral tranquillity, even if generations of schoolboy runners know better. To them, the scene is more like a battlefield temporarily stilled by nature.
The park’s cross-country course is legendary — a grueling stretch of wide flats and twisting trails that has tested up-and-coming high school and college runners for nearly a century.
“Van Cortlandt was the ultimate,” said Matt Centrowitz, an Olympian who began as a standout at his Manhattan high school in the early 1970s. “Kids would come from Massachusetts and Maryland. The point was, if you were a star in any state, you came to Vannie like a gunslinger. Guys came ready for war.”
On Friday, Mr. Centrowitz, who is now the head cross-country and track coach at American University, will become an inaugural member of the park’s new Cross Country Hall of Fame, along with the longtime sports commentator Marty Liquori and the three-time New York City Marathon winner Alberto Salazar. They will be inducted at a ceremony during the Millrose Games track meet at Madison Square Garden. Read more…