Lynn Jennings, 2009. (File photo)
Lynn Jennings began her running career in 1974 as a freshman on the Bromfield cross-country team. Not only was she the only girl on the team that year, she was the only girl in the entire league. In an interview by Craig Neff published in a 2012 blog post at thenaturalistnotebook.com, Jennings said being the only girl that first year was “intimidating and isolating.” When the team would take a bus to away meets, she would sit in the front with a book. She said when she’d get off the bus, she would hear “They’ve got a GIRL on their team!” Jennings said she would pretend not to hear.
She was not very successful that first season, but she told Neff being one of the slower runners allowed her to develop a strategy that she continued to use throughout her racing career. “I was desperate to never finish last, so I would keep my eyes up and ahead and would find some hapless boy to run down over the last part of the race so I wouldn’t finish last,” she said. She added that her first season with the team “helped me address my feelings of being ‘different,’ which I learned to embrace and to cultivate.”
Running with Otis the dog
She said she began running with her dog Otis, a springer spaniel, because she couldn’t keep up with the boys on the team that year. But that didn’t last long. The following year, still the only girl, she was running faster than all her teammates, and she brought Otis to practices to keep her company because she was so far ahead of the boys.
Coach Tom Hill recalled this week that she was the best runner on the team. “She was so good, [she and the team] really couldn’t run as a group,” he said. “There was a young man, Sean Burns, who was pretty good who used to run with her sometimes. But she pretty much trained on her own.” Jennings finished first at the first meet of the 1975 season against Groton, and although results were not obtainable for all the meets, she was the first one over the finish line at least three more times that season.
The Bromfield School cross-country team from 1976 (front row from left): T. Konop, S. Burns, K. Pennell, Lynn Jennings, C. Ferguson, M. Evans; (back row from left: A Boyce, C. Smethurst, A. Maclennan, W. Bratt, T. Clark, J. Fine, and Coach Tom Hill. (Courtesy photo)
That wasn’t all, though. She went on to win the state high school girls cross-country championship that year. By this time, she was training with the Liberty Athletic Club, and she traveled with the club to California where she finished second at the Junior Women’s National Cross-Country Championship. She repeated her win in the state finals in 1976, and again came in second at nationals in Miami. At Bromfield, she was still the only girl on the team and still regularly placed first at meets.
‘Finest female distance runner’
In 1977, when she was a senior, Jennings won both the state and national titles. The Boston Globe named her to its 1977 All-Scholastic Cross-Country Team, calling her “the finest female distance runner in the country.” That spring she began setting records in track meets across the country, both in the mile run and the 2-mile run. At the age of 17, she was still too young to qualify for the Boston Marathon in April that year, but she ran anyway. She was the third woman to cross the finish line.
In 1988, Jennings placed sixth in the 10,000-meter race at the Olympics in Seoul. She would go on to receive a bronze medal in that event four years later in Barcelona. Townsfolk were excited that Harvard was home to an Olympian, the second in its history. (Monk Terry, a former selectman, was on the U.S. Olympic rowing team in 1938.) When Jennings returned from Seoul, the Harvard Booster Club threw her a parade, and the selectmen declared Oct. 9, 1988, “Lynn Jennings Day.” At the ceremony that followed, her first coach, Tom Hill, spoke about her running the hills of Harvard with her dog Otis. He described her as an extraordinarily self-motivated young athlete who “turned herself into an outstanding runner.”
Bill McCurdy, the man for whom McCurdy Track is named and Harvard University’s track coach during Lynn’s early training years, said at the time he had nothing to do with her career except that he had almost put an end to it. One night when she was training at the university’s indoor track, which was steeply banked, he didn’t realize she was there, and turned out the lights to lock up. He said Babington lectured him about “what he was doing to the greatest athlete in the commonwealth.”
