He didn’t know it at the time – maybe because, well, there were some 37,000 others competing – but Flagstaff’s Larry Phoenix and iconic Olympic running legend Joan Benoit Samuelson shared an exclusive and prestigious title after both finished Sunday’s Tokyo Marathon.
Both now can call themselves members of the 11,000-runner-strong (2,862 from the U.S.) Abbott Marathon Majors Six Star club, meaning that they have successfully completed all six races: Boston, New York, Chicago, London, Berlin and Tokyo.
It took the 59-year-old Phoenix, whose day job is as the Flagstaff Regional Supervisor for the Arizona Game and Fish Department, nine years to complete his quest – but much of the delay came from the difficulty of gaining entrance to the European races via lottery and a pesky thing called Covid-19, which shut down Tokyo’s race for two years.
But once Phoenix was able to lace up and race, there was little doubt he would succeed, given his renowned drive and grit.
Here’s a guy who, during his 800-mile running of the Arizona Trail, got so dehydrated in 105-degree heat that he was hospitalized and, once the IV fluids kicked in, went right back out on the trail. A guy who completed the grueling Cocodona 250 with the strategy that he wanted to run, not walk or slog, the race. A guy who, when he failed to get into the London Marathon for a few years, decided – why not? – to do a thru-run on California’s challenging John Muir Trail in 2019.
Compared to those exploits, marathons might seem tame to him. But Phoenix begs to differ. Each Abbott race was memorable and difficult, he said, and he feels a justifiable sense of accomplishment in completing the sextuplet.
Reached by phone in Kyoto, where he is vacationing after the race, Phoenix said the Tokyo race on a flat course went well, and it culminated his quest.
“It was a long-term goal,” he said. “When I first started running marathons, I didn’t know about the six marathon majors, but in 2014 when I qualified for Boston, I started learning about the majors. That’s how I picked those other marathons moving forward. I was applying for London all of those years, and just couldn’t get in. So, I started applying for the other world marathons at the same time. Fortunately, I got into Berlin in 2022, and it started after that – London ’23 and Tokyo ’24.”
For the record, Phoenix completed Boston in 2015, New York in 2016, Chicago in 2017, Berlin in 2022, London in 2023 and Tokyo last week.
His favorite of the six?
“They all are super cool and unique, but of the six Boston was my first and my favorite,” Phoenix said. “It was back in 2015, the year it rained the entire time. It was way too cold and windy and affected a lot of the other runners. But being from Flagstaff, it wasn’t as bad for me as everyone else.
“I really liked Berlin. The race itself is flat, but the roads are just so wide; there’s so much space to run. This year, Tokyo was a good run. The Japanese people are just super nice – so much different than the rest of the world.”
The toughest of the six?
“New York and London, by far, were the hardest,” Phoenix said. “London was hard for me because it was last year when it snowed so much (in Flagstaff in winter) and my result showed because of a lack of training. New York? Nick Arciniaga (former pro runner now at Run Flagstaff), ever since I’ve running, has been secretly mentoring me – giving me pointers. And he told me, when you train for New York, it’s almost all uphill and when you train, don’t train for 26.2; you’ve got to train for 28 miles because of the uphill.”
In a way, Phoenix said, having that break after Chicago in 2017 and Berlin in 2022 may have been a good respite for him. It gave him a chance to expand his running horizons – literally – into the ultra realm.
“I was kind of marathoned-out at that point, anyway,” he said. “I shifted and started running longer distances, like Stagecoach (The Flagstaff to Grand Canyon Stagecoach Line 100 Miler in 2018; he finished 18th overall), hiking John Muir Trail 2019 and running the Arizona Trail in ’20 and ’21.”
Many of Phoenix’s best running stories come from his ultras, not the road marathons.
“The reason the AZ Trail went over two (calendar) years is because, 350 miles in, I developed a shin split I’d never ever had before,” he said. “I got on the phone to Nick from the trail and said, ‘Hey, here’s the story,’ and he said, ‘You can either endure it or …’ I decided to bail at 350 miles and waited six months and was ready in October.
“But that October of 2020 was super warm. The second day out, through the Superstition Wilderness, it was a 32-miler and 105 degrees, which landed me in the Payson hospital with dehydration. After three liters of their magical IV fluids, I never felt better in my life. The folks with me thought I was nuts, of course. I took a day off, then moved out of the heat and started our trek again. I didn’t finish in March because I didn’t have time to do it in one big block, because of work, but did it in segments.”
Stay tuned for Phoenix’s next quest – sure to be memorable.
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