So why was the most important and perfectly balanced relay race allowed to go extinct more than a half century ago? I have no clue. But the 1 and 7-8 Mile Relay is so clearly superior to all other relays of today that it is truly baffling that it was deep-sixed from the track and field universe and buried so far down that none of the old-timers I have talked to have even heard of it, and likely you will find few guys living who ever ran in it. A very sad end to a race that in its heyday (1930s and 1940s and maybe a bit into the 1950s) was one of the most anticipated events of the big meets.
The famed 1 and 7-8s was gone long before I hit the track almost fifty years ago, so when I first saw it mentioned as a top event in an article about the 1941 inaugural running of the meet that would later become known as the Eddy Games, my reaction was I think pretty natural, "Say what? 1 and 7-8 Miles for a relay? What happened, was one of the half-milers allowed to be lazy and only run three-quarters way around the track? Clearly not. The meet had a 2 Mile relay, so why did it need a weird 1 7-8 Mile event, anyway?"
The winning time for the 1 and 7-8 Mile Relay at that 1941 Schenectady Sports Carnival (Eddy #1) meet was 7:57.8, more than 38 seconds faster than the 2 Mile Relay's winner of 8:36. That margin finally gave me a clue as to what this odd duck race was all about, since it was a time that a distance guy might be posting for a quarter way around the track. My hunch was confirmed when I later read some of the many articles in the Schenectady Gazette (the hallowed repository of early times track info) about the then upcoming race. One of the articles used a shorter version of the 1 and 7-8 Mile Relay's name, the Medley Relay.
So
the long-gone 1 and 7-8 Mile Relay was the grandfather of all the medley
relays we have today, most closely perhaps the DMR distance medley
relay in its couple of formats (but usually 1200-400-800-1600) but also
the sprint medley relays (around here at least a 400-200-200-800). But
it was superior to all medley races of today. It was not an untruly named
event (sorry, but DMR's 400m is not a "distance" race unless you're a
weight-event athlete, and the 800m is not a "sprint" unless you have
some illegal substance powering you). The 1 and 7-8 Mile was a medley,
and the best of all medleys. And the DMR includes a distance that is
never run otherwise ("Hey Mom and Dad, I just ran a 3:10 lead-off leg
for DMR in the 1200m." "Son, we have no idea what that means, and you
tell your coach to take you out of there and put you on a proper and decent leg in
the future.").
So what races were part of the 1 and 7-8 relay? The founding fathers of track and field long ago in their great wisdom had a truly wonderful idea. They created a race that would challenge teams to put up their best guys at the four main track distances, the 220yd, 440yd, 880yd, and Mile (You barely start breathing at 100yd, and the 2 Mile would turn the relay into a marathon). The four distances highlighted a sprinter, the shorter mid-distance guy, the longer mid-distance half-miler, and then finally the full mile distance. The event was started on the standard line on the other side of the track used for the 220yd, and presumably was run in order from short to long. Rather than testing which team has the four best sprinters, or quartet of 400m, 800m or 1600m runners, the 1 and 7/8 Mile Relay showed which team was the most balanced and could develop a strong top runner at each distance.
Yes, obviously nobody would bring back the 1 7-8 Mile Relay today, partly because meters have replaced yards and also because the race has that funky name. You couldn't call its equivalent the Medley Relay like in old times because nowadays there's too many other medley relays of different configurations around. But the equivalent of the race today would be the 3000m Medley Relay, which has a nice ring to it. There is no such race anywhere in the USA currently, but down in Florida on February 9th (that's Outdoor season in FL), the Lipham Relays had a 3200m DMR that seven teams vied in for both the boys and girls. The event includes two 400 legs, an 800, and a 1600, so everything except the 200 sprint. The winning time for Berkeley Prep was nearly two minutes slower than a Kearney, NJ team ran back in 1941 at the Schenectady Sports Carnival, so even allowing for a 192.5m shorter distance, you can tell that the old Jersey Giants and the closely pursuing Boys team from NYC could really fly on the cinders.
The time for the 1 and 7-8 Mile Relay to rise from the dead gravel and live again on the Mondo as the 3K Medley Relay has come. It just needs a wise visionary like Coach Bill Eddy, Sr. to step forward today. All volunteers who have that kind of backbone are invited to apply.
Speaking of Nott Terrace coach Bill Eddy, Sr. and also that team from Kearney NJ at the 1941 Schenectady Sports Carnival, I kind of shortchanged the meet by describing it as just a de-facto substitute for the NY States Championship back in the 1940s through the 1970s before an official state championship was established. It was indeed a States meet, but it was also far more than that. Eddy pulled together the top teams from the east, and the 1941 meet had all but one of the indoor individual and relay event national champions from that year at the meet on May 31, and it also hosted the state champions from almost all the states up and down the coast. Besides Kearney and a host of NJ schools including Lincoln, Perth Amboy, and West (Newark) high schools, the out-of-state teams came from Rindge Tech (MA), McKinley (DC), Portsmouth (NH), and Overbrook and Northeast Catholic (PA), all powerhouses at the time and all coming to what would essentially be Nationals.
As the meet's preview article in the Gazette stated, "When so many national, state, regional, and sectional champions come together, as they will today, many things happen." Eventually, however, the Schenectady meet became so popular and crowded that NY teams started to gripe a bit, and the meet was later limited to NY teams so it could serve as kind of the NY State championship.
Other tidbits from the articles of 1941 include the fact that 5000 seats were added to the regular seating in the bleachers at the Mont Pleasant HS stadium for that first meet in Schenectady, so the attendance had to have been huge. And one of the highlights of the day at the high school was not just the track and field events, but a riding exhibition of those old "big wheel, little wheel" bicycles from the 1800s that included what was reputedly the oldest bike in existence. Two markers of a changing time was that the long jump was known as the "running broad jump" and the high jump was cited as the "running high jump," reflecting how back then they still needed to mark that these were not the "standing" versions of the events that had been the early types back in the days of the late 1800s when meets were held in less roomy armories and arenas. The one running event that was the same in 1941 as in 2016 was the boys' Mile. In 1941 the winning time on the cinders was 4:33.6 by Vernon Hartley of Bill Eddy's Nott Terrace team, and this year another local guy Maazin Ahmed of Schenectady HS won in a time of 4:19.04. So except for the difference of about 14 1/2 seconds, some things are pretty much the same.
The movement for bringing back
the 1 and 7-8 (or 3K for today's hipsters) relay will clearly be the top item
at the next NYSPHSAA track and field meeting.