Twenty Years Later, Schilling’s Mile Record Still Stands

On a 90-degree afternoon in the tiny hamlet of Oroville, Calif., nine nervous, skinny young men walked to the starting line for the CIF State meet mile. There was nothing particularly special about the day, and no hint that anything out of the ordinary would happen on the high school’s dirt track.

Mark Schilling, then a senior at Garden Grove High School, remembers thinking that it seemed too hot to run.

What unfolded was a piece of State meet history. Without much thought to running a specific time, Schilling broke the meet record with a time of 4 minutes 5.4 seconds, defeating Terry Cotton of El Cajon by one-tenth of a second.

Twenty years later, that mile race remains the fastest in State meet history and is the oldest meet record still on the books. Twenty State meets have come and gone and no one has even broken 4:06. This year’s winner, Daniel Das Neves of La Mesa Helix, won the 1,600 meters--a bit shorter than a mile--in 4:09.54.

It’s one of the top times in the nation this year, but a long way off Schilling’s record.

Schilling, now 37, runs occasionally near his home in Los Osos in San Luis Obispo County and follows high school track as much as he can. He works long hours as the manager of the United Parcel Service facility in Santa Maria and has taken up golf.

Still, he has managed to attend every State meet since 1987. He relaxes in the stands and chats with old friends and coaches. Only when the 1,600-meter runners step onto the track does his pulse quicken and his mind travel back to Oroville and the 1972 State meet.

“That’s when the old competitive instincts kick in,” he said, laughing.

In the stands, talk always seems to turn to his record and why no one has been able to break it after all these years. Everyone seems to have a theory. Schilling believes he ran more difficult workouts, but balanced them with little or no running during the off-season. He also thinks running in two or more distance races in the same meet has hurt today’s runners.

In the early 1970s, the Southern Section did not allow runners to “double,” as it’s known.

As a freshman at Garden Grove, Schilling ran 50 intense miles a week. There was a heavy emphasis on repetitive runs of between 100 and 880 yards. In his first few years in high school, he hardly ran a step between cross-country and track seasons, preferring to rest between the disciplines.

“I didn’t run as many miles as everyone else did, but I said I did,” Schilling said. “I just couldn’t see running 100 miles a week the way some of the other top guys did.”

Perhaps that was the start of an individuality that marked Schilling’s career. Seldom would he follow the crowd--on the track or off.

In later years, he would be almost as well known for the long mane of hair that followed down his back as for the outstanding times he ran.

“To be perfectly honest, I was probably the laziest runner around,” Schilling said. “My senior year, I remember for a while there I was winning dual meet races in around 4:54.”

When it came down to the nitty-gritty, though, Schilling always seemed to be at or near the front of the pack. Simply winning the race meant more to him than breaking a certain time barrier.

“My thing was to just go out and try to win and see what happens,” he said. “People all talk about how runners now all know their splits. Someone would have to tell me my splits after the race was over.”

That carefree thinking only seemed to help Schilling on the road to Oroville.

He was coming off a victory in the section championships in 4:10.6, the fourth-fastest time in meet history. As a junior, he’d given a hint of what might be forthcoming, running 4:13.2 to finish fourth in the section meet.

In 1972, Schilling, Cotton and Barrie Williams of North Torrance, who had a best of 4:06.7, were the State’s top milers.

In the State meet qualifying heats Friday, Cotton had run a blistering 4:10. Schilling had finished third in the other heat in a sluggish 4:19.

But on the next afternoon, Schilling was confident, if somewhat troubled, by the high temperatures in the Sacramento Valley.

He said recently that he doesn’t remember much about the race, only that he was “pretty far back” at one point. But in a interview with The Times a few days after the race, he described it this way:

“Cotton usually runs his first lap in 59 seconds but he went through in 61 at Oroville and I was right with him. He started to pull away just before the end of the 1,320 and I stayed with him. He went through in 3:08.

“I started to take him at the head of the last straightaway but he kicked, too. I was three yards behind him and he wasn’t pulling away but neither was I. It was a standoff and I thought I’d had it.

“But I gave it everything I had and caught him 15 yards before the tape and beat him by half a stride.”

Schilling covered the final 440 in 56.7 and broke the previous meet record of 4:08.0 by Tim Danielson of Chula Vista in 1965. In 1966, Danielson joined Jim Ryun as the only high school runners to break the magical 4-minute barrier. They were later joined by Marty Liquori.

As a freshman at San Jose State, Schilling would have his day to break 4 minutes, finishing sixth in 3:58.6 at the 1973 NCAA meet at Baton Rouge, La. It was only the beginning of a standout college career at San Jose.

After graduating, Schilling settled in San Luis Obispo and continued his running with a close-knit, fun-loving club known as the Reebok Aggies. Slowly but surely, however, the press of work has limited his running, although his interest in high school track has been rekindled in recent years.

And all the while his record has remained standing.

“To tell the truth, I thought it would be broken in the first couple of years after I set it,” Schilling said. “There were so many good runners at that time. There’s no way I would have believed it would have lasted this long.”