Twin Cities Marathon record-holder will look back – if asked

The Twin Cities Marathon is awash in change: new competitors, updated technology, first-time runners, and the list goes on.

One key narrative has been steadfast amid the churn for 31 years.

Phil Coppess, a then-single dad who got in his training around night shifts at an Iowa corn-processing plant and raising three preteens, came up to the Twin Cities and blew away the field in 1985, with a course record 2 hours, 10 minutes and 5 seconds over the 26.2 miles from Minneapolis to St. Paul.

Remarkably, the record hasn't changed. Endearingly, neither has Coppess.

He still is all about family (he's going to watch a niece play college softball in Ottumwa in southeastern Iowa the weekend of the marathon); all about small-town life (still in Clinton); and all about blue-collar shifts (he works at Alcoa).

How about his 1985 marathon?

"Usually only when someone like you calls for an interview is the only time I think about it," said Coppess, 62, when reached last month just after he mowed his lawn.

Coppess was back, too, but struggled in at 2:17:04, good for 12th place.

Coppess is borderline indifferent to his exploits. "It was a half of a lifetime ago," he said. Still, his story is rich: A factory worker from an Iowa town was one of the fastest marathoners in the world for a time. One motivator, he said, was to run faster than Bill Rodgers, who won four Boston and  New York City marathons (some as fast as 2:09) in the late 1970s and early '80s.

Coppess would make his own headlines in the early '80s. He won the 1981 Chicago Marathon (2:16:13), beating former Olympic gold medalist Frank Shorter, and Coppess took sixth in the 1982 London Marathon.

Then 1985 happened.

"That whole year, every distance I PRed by so much that I knew I was going to run super fast," he said, talking about a run of personal records. Before Twin Cities, Coppess ran a half-marathon (13.1 miles) in Philadelphia that beat his previous best by a minute and a half. By his calculations, he said he was set up to go three minutes faster than his marathon PR of 2:13.

"That had to be the top of my running career," said Coppess, who was 31 at the time. "The best race that I ran.

"When I set that time I thought I could run a lot faster. Twin Cities is a hard course, [and] I never could get back in the same shape that I ran there." His final marathon would be the 1988 Olympic trials, in which he finished 55th in 2:30:45.

Coppess said the Twin Cities course — the sneaky inclines and punishing march up, down and along Summit Avenue — has kept his name next to "course record" all these years. He returned a few years ago and witnessed the challenge firsthand, sitting in the press vehicle. "That course is a lot harder than people think. That's the only reason the record has lasted that long."

What will it take for a runner to beat the mark? Unfailingly humble, Coppess still chuckled at the memory of talk of besting his mark over the years — and more recently. In 2014, Kenyan Dominic Ondoro made history at Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, running 2:09:06 to break Dick Beardsley's 33-year-old course record. Ondoro went on to win the 2015 Twin Cities Marathon in 2:11:16, well off Coppess' mark, but still at the time the fastest in the Twin Cities since 1990.

"I just went up there to run fast," Coppess said of his long-ago day in the sun. "You've got to be willing to go for it. If the pace is too slow … like me, I took off at six miles and basically ran the rest of the way by myself because I wanted to run fast."

Bob Timmons • 612-673-7899