This past December I ran with my Boulder Road Runners Men 60+ team at the USA Track & Field National Club Cross Country Championships in Spokane, WA. Immediately after the race and before the sweat had dried from my brow I headed to my next destination, Portland, OR.
My visit there included a personal tour of the sprawling Nike World Headquarters in nearby Beaverton, OR, which was certainly a trip highlight. I also had the opportunity to visit the Nike Company Store, which offers goods for employees and their guests, after the tour. When first checking in at the store I happened to look up at the large poster-size Nike legacy ads on the wall behind the guest registration desk.
One of the posters featured a bearded male model clad in a Nike t-shirt and running shorts sitting with one leg hanging out of the open sliding door of a railroad boxcar. There are two presumably itinerant men (back in the day they were referred to as “hobos”) sitting in the moving boxcar behind him. Just below the photo used to promote Nike’s Terra Trainer shoe is a simple title in uppercase bold italics: “Traveling Light.” The poster of the running shoe ad probably caught my eye because the young model in the ad looked familiar…and for good reason: it was Boulder, Colorado’s own Benji Durden, former world class marathoner and member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Marathon team.
Following my return home, I contacted Benji for background on this iconic Nike ad. This is what he had to say.
“It was 1983 and I had been a Nike sponsored runner since 1976, but had never had an ad that focused on me. Then Nike started an ad campaign for the Terra Trainer that featured three runners in different, but related ads: Joan Benoit Samuelson (gold medalist, 1984 World Olympics inaugural Women’s Marathon), Marianne Dickerson (silver medalist, 1983 World Championships Women’s Marathon), and myself. I flew to Chicago one morning to do the photo shoot for the ad by myself. They sewed my running shorts in such a way to make them hang just right. Then they kept rearranging and rearranging my hair as I sat on a sawhorse in a photo studio. This was before Photoshop existed, so everything they did used actual film as well as Polaroid camera film as quick proofs.“
He continued, “My final ad used four separate pictures. I never saw the other guys behind me in the photo. Two guys portraying the hobos (one a former hobo who became an actor) in the boxcar, the moving sky, the moving ground and me were all blended together. About 600 pictures were taken of me over the six-hour duration of the shoot. But it finally all came together and I was in Esquire magazine! I still have a copy of that issue with Donald Sutherland on the cover. The interesting follow-up is that all three of us were injured after the ad ran and we called it our curse. Only Joan fully recovered from her injury.”
Bruce Kirschner has been a runner for over 46 years and an active race director and volunteer in the Colorado running community for nearly 40 years. He was a member of the Boulder Road Runners Men 60-69 team that won the 2017 USA Track & Field Masters Grand Prix national championship race series.