A Burst of Stardom . . .and His Race Was Run : Short but Sparkling Career Reached Its Zenith With World Junior Cross-Country Title in 1975

He dreamed about it.

He lived his dream.

And then it was back to reality.

That’s the way Robert (Bobby) Thomas, a former distance-running standout at Glendale College, views his short but brilliant career.

Like a shooting star streaking across the night sky, Thomas went from being the 15th-ranked two-miler in the state as a Glendale High senior in 1974 to the World Junior (age 14-19) cross-country champion as a Glendale College freshman in 1975. His running career at the elite level was over by the summer of 1977, however, at the age of 20.

Thomas finished eighth in the Amateur Athletic Union cross-country championships in 1976 and lowered his personal best to 13 minutes 32 seconds in the three-mile early in the 1977 season, but the cheering had stopped.

“The 1976 AAU meet was really my last hurrah,” said Thomas, 36. “I wanted to run well there so I could earn another college scholarship, but because of injuries, I was never the same.”

Thomas, a realtor whose office is across the street from Glendale High, says that with only the slightest twinge of wistfulness.

It would be understandable if he longed for his athletic glory days or spent time wondering about what might have been. Thomas, however, figures he experienced more success in a short period of time than most runners do in a lifetime.

“I had a lot of fun and I don’t regret any of it,” Thomas said. “I had some phenomenal coaches who helped me run some times that I thought I would never be able to run. . . . I ran (9:06.3 in the two-mile) in high school. To me, that was a phenomenal time for someone of my ability.”

A humble personality, an incredible work ethic and a devout belief in the wisdom of Glendale College cross-country Coach Mark Covert propelled Thomas to a stellar freshman cross-country season in which he won the state small-schools title, set a four-mile course record at Mt. San Antonio College that still stands and won the World Junior title in Rabat, Morocco.

Covert, who finished seventh in the 1972 U.S. Olympic trials in the marathon, was in the first season of a coaching career that continues today--at Antelope Valley College--when Thomas began working out with him during the summer of 1974.

After running 110-120 miles a week, the 5-foot-8, 120-pound Thomas was in superb shape by summer’s end.

The proof came at an August training camp in Yosemite National Park where Thomas timed 2:45 over a 23-mile course that had an elevation gain of 4,600 feet. The time was 10 minutes faster than Covert had ever run, and as he put it, “Bobby was cruising. He was running all by himself.”

Thomas opened the season with a runaway victory in the Moorpark Invitational in September and he was undefeated and heavily favored to win the small-schools division race when the state championships were held in November. All that did not prepare him or Covert for his time of 19:19.8 over the hilly four-mile course at Mt. SAC, which shattered his course record of 19:36 set earlier that season.

“I remember when he came by the two-mile mark in 9:20 that he gave me this, ‘What do I do now?’ kind of look,” Covert recalls in amazement. “I just yelled, ‘Keep running hard.’ ”

Covert claims that Thomas’ time was actually 19:10, but Mt. SAC Coach Don Ruh added nine seconds to the official result because he didn’t believe someone in junior college could run that fast.

“When I heard the official time, I went up to Don and said, ‘Are you sure that time is right? Several of us timed him in 19:10,” Covert said. “He just said, ‘That’s not possible. He can’t run that fast. End of conversation.’ ”

It was only the beginning for Thomas, who would place 25th in the 1974 AAU championships, win the junior trials race and set a national junior college outdoor three-mile record of 13:36.4 two weeks before the World Junior cross-country championships.

“That race gave me a lot of confidence,” Thomas said. “I kept asking myself, ‘How many people in the world who are 18 or 19 years old can run 13:36 for three miles?’ ”

Few could, but Thomas was far from cocky as he approached the World meet.

“I knew that all anyone had to do to beat me was to hang on to me until the end of the race,” he said. “If they did, they would be able to outkick me. I never had any speed.”

Lack of speed never became an issue in Rabat. Thomas broke from the pack midway through the 4.8-mile race and finished in 20:59.4, well ahead of Jose Gonzalez of Spain (21:18) and John Treacy of Ireland (21:24). Treacy later would finish second in the marathon in the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic champion in the marathon, was a member of the U.S. men’s team that competed in Morocco, and he told Thomas that “it looked like you were running easy.”

Thomas knew better. He said one thought kept going through his mind after he took the lead and that was, “Please, God, don’t let them catch me.”

“My reaction afterward was just one of elation and astonishment that it actually happened,” Thomas said. “That I had actually accomplished what I had dreamed about the year before.”

Thomas had been thumbing through a copy of Runner’s World magazine as a Glendale High senior when he came across a photograph of American Rich Kimball winning the World Junior race in 1974.

“I remember thinking, ‘Gee. Wow. Wouldn’t it be neat to do something like that,’ ” he said. “And it was just a dream. I wasn’t, like, a great runner. . . . I was just a normal high school runner with a high capacity for endurance.”

That capacity, as Thomas describes it, might ultimately have led to his downfall after he returned from Morocco on an emotional high and raring to go when the prudent thing would have been to take a break from racing.

Two days after returning to the States, Thomas was running three races in a dual meet for Glendale and shortly thereafter an assortment of injuries ranging from heel spurs to sciatic nerve problems in his lower back started the countdown to the end of his career.

Those injuries relegated him to a sixth-place finish in the three-mile in the state junior college track championships two months after winning the World Junior title.

Covert, who no longer was coaching at Glendale at that time, is convinced that Thomas’ injuries occurred because he did not take a break from racing when he returned from Morocco, but the mild-mannered Thomas refuses to blame then-Glendale Coach John Tansley for his woes.

“They say whatever goes up has to come down,” he said. “I think it was just time for me to slow down, but I was feeling so good when I returned from Morocco that I didn’t slow down like I should have.”

Thomas’ problems continued when he transferred to UCLA in the fall of 1975 after accepting a full scholarship from the Bruins.

Although he managed to finish fifth in the Pacific 8 Conference cross-country championships, he placed a disappointing 62nd in the NCAA meet.

Injuries limited him to a handful of races during the 1976 track season and he informed then-UCLA cross-country Coach Hal Harkness in the summer he would not be returning to school that fall.

Harkness, the commissioner of athletics for the Los Angeles City Section for the past seven years, said that Thomas’ high-volume training was not conducive to running well at UCLA because the Bruins competed in three or four dual meets a month during the peak period of the track season.

“Bob was a Mark Covert disciple,” Harkness said. “That caused some problems because it meant that he spent most of his time training. In Covert’s system, he didn’t race very often, but we needed him to in ours.”

After taking time off to allow his body to heal and incorporating injury-preventive stretching exercises into his daily routine, Thomas began to train again in earnest.

Although the volume and intensity of his training was not as high as before, he improved steadily, winning the Southern Pacific Assn. AAU title and placing eighth in the AAU championships while competing for the Maccabi Track Club.

The latter race--combined with his 13:32 three-mile in the spring of 1977--earned him a partial scholarship to San Diego State, but his heel spurs flared up during his first cross-country season there and surgical procedures to remove them in the spring and summer of 1978 brought down the curtain on his running career.

“He just kind of took the end of his running career in stride,” said Thomas’ mother, Bernice, in her native Kentucky drawl. “He never got down about it. He just looked at it like this was something that he did and that now it was time to do something else.”

Thomas, the fifth of six children raised by devout Baptists, expressed similar sentiments.

“I believe that God has a purpose for everything that happens to you,” he said. “And I think it was just time for me to get on with my life.”

Getting on with his life included receiving his bachelor of arts degree in business administration from San Diego State in 1980 and joining his father, Phil, as a partner in Time Realty in Glendale later that year. He was married in 1990, and became a father four months ago.

“Selling real estate has been very fulfilling for me,” Thomas said. “When I make a sale, I get the same type of satisfaction that I got when I ran a good race. Plus, I was born and raised in Glendale, so I feel like I want to give something back to the community. I feel I can do that by encouraging companies to move their businesses to properties in Glendale.”

Nothing is more important to Thomas, however, than his wife, Lynne, and his daughter, Tracey, which is quite a change from the attitude he had half a lifetime ago.

“For a few years there, running was my life,” he said. “But there is more to life than running. . . . It was a great experience, but I would trade all my distance-running experiences for what I’m experiencing now because it’s so much more rewarding. Distance running was rewarding, but family life is another experience altogether. It’s just so much fun.”