Johnny Miles: Nova Scotia's Marathon King

Ronald R. Wallingford is a professor in the School of Human Movement at
Laurentian University.

As a 12-year-old, Johnny Miles worked a 48-hour week in the Nova Scotia
coal mines. Eight years later, he won the Boston Marathon. Minutes
before the race, this unknown Canadian, clad in 98-cent running shoes,
squatted on the sidewalk to consume, with tea, his prerace meal of cold
steak and bread. This young man from Sydney Mines astounded the
finish-line officials by outrunning the Finnish Olympic Champion, Albin
Stenroos, and three-time Boston winner Clarence DeMar. Wil Cloney,
Boston’s race director for 36 years, in his warm introduction to this
book, claims Miles’s victory was the most spectacular of any in Boston
history.

Back home, the ecstatic public smothered Miles with adulation. The next
year, with incredible pressure and an unexpected hot day, he dropped out
of the Boston race.

Named to the 1928 Canadian Olympic Team, Miles moved to Hamilton,
Ontario, in July of 1927 to take advantage of the distance-running
milieu. Wearing the Hamilton colors, he returned to Boston in 1929 and
repeated his earlier victory. In 1930 he won a bronze medal in the first
British Empire Games.

Miles rose from a laborer with the International Harvester company in
Hamilton to its assistant plant manager in Chicago, giving Canada a true
Horatio Alger hero.

Williston’s book gives credence to Miles’s achievement by
describing his formative years: the child miner, the possession of a
copy of Alfred Shrubb’s inspirational training manual, a strongly
supportive family, and a community excited about its holiday road races.

Young readers may question Miles’s claim that abstinence from alcohol
was necessary for his athletic success, but they will never cease
admiring this Canadian pioneer who prepared himself thoroughly and
successfully to tackle the best in the world.

Williston does trip up on his accuracy in discussing Miles’s time in
Boston in 1929, saying “a Canadian would not top that time until
1974.” Several Canadians ran considerably faster before 1974.