On a typical July 4th in the 1970s, a few teenagers were sitting in the sand at Mattapoisett Town Beach and squinting at one another through the sun’s rays when the subject came up.
“Are you going to run?” was the question. “Has it started?” was a typical counter. “We’d better get up there,” was the resolution.
If you can’t smell the sea air and hear the gulls laughing as the waves crash, then you can still remember what it was like to be a kid and take every second of summer as it comes.
“You literally would decide that day whether to run or not,” recalls Chris Cooper, who first asked her father Frank Cooper if she could run in 1972, the second year of the Mattapoisett Road Race. As the first finisher among three girls, a 13-year-old Chris kept going like Forest Gump, right past the finish line at the Town Beach.
“I ran straight into the water. It was so hot,” she recalls.
Living in Mattapoisett since 1964, Chris grew up watching her dad help manage what he and Bob Gardner gradually built out of a good idea.
“I ran track in high school, but nobody really trained for (the race,)” she said.
The Mattapoisett Road Race had only begun in 1971 and lacked the preparation and pageantry associated with the event 25 years later, much less what it has since become.
Nonetheless, the Coopers became a family of runners. Chris’s brother Tom finished second to Richard Reilly in the inaugural race, while brother Mike earned a third-place finish in his age category.
Life would take her away from Mattapoisett, but when she returned in the 1990s, the Mattapoisett Road Race was a different animal.
“Bob Gardner always mailed me a T-shirt,” said Chris, but she was not ready for what she saw when she visited home. “It is amazing to me what it became in the ’90s.”
In more recent years, she was happy to offer sideline support alongside her father. “We’d stand with a hose at the corner of Church Street and Mechanic. … They’d say, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’”
As of Friday, 360 women and girls outnumbered 344 male registrants, but a late surge of postregistration entries, especially among the men, was anticipated for the 50th running of Mattapoisett’s 5-miler.
Mattapoisett Road Race
By Mick Colageo