Syracuse, N.Y. – Forty-four years ago, Walt Price had the audacious idea of organizing a 17-mile run through the city of Syracuse.
It would begin and end near his workplace, the downtown YMCA adjacent to Columbus Circle. It would include some of the students in his popular exercise class and some men who were training for a marathon. It would encompass four city parks, all of which perched atop Syracuse’s hilliest neighborhoods.
Back then, the running movement had entered a nascent stage. Jim Fixx’s 1977 book “The Complete Guide to Running,” would sell more than a million copies and spur an exercise and road running movement. Communities nationwide started planning and executing races.
And Price, who ran the YMCA’s morning fitness class, got to thinking.
Why not stage a race in Syracuse?
“On a Saturday morning, he formed this informal race where you would run out to one of the parks, run back to the start at Columbus Circle, run out to another park and then come back to the circle,” said David Rood, who participated in the 1978 run with his brother Dennis. “We did all four parks.”
“Walt organized it,” said retired judge Joe Fahey, who like the Roods was training for a marathon that year. “I don’t think there were more than 25 or 30 of us that did it.”
That informal run, dubbed the “Super Goat,” would blossom the next year into the mercifully scaled-back 10-mile Mountain Goat Run, a race that now routinely attracts 3,000 runners and has become a mainstay on the local running calendar.
And Price, who recently celebrated his 91st birthday with a stroll around the Woodland Reservoir and a game or two of pickleball, plans to walk the beginning of the 2022 Goat on Sunday morning with his daughter-in-law, Mary, by his side.
Price, inducted into the inaugural Mountain Goat hall of fame class, still describes the “Super Goat” as a collaborative effort. But Mountain Goat historians have anointed him the modern race’s founder and a pioneer of the Syracuse running movement.
“Walt Price is really the originator,” said Mountain Goat race director Rosemarie Nelson. “He will always defer and say, ‘Oh no, it was this person or this person or this person.’ But it was him.”
It started with his YMCA exercise class.
Initially, Price said, about 50 people in his class began running around the Y’s compact gym track to get into shape. Soon, relay races infused a layer of fun.
Eventually, Price sensed interest in a greater challenge from the more serious runners at the Y. Early on, he handed out ribbons for runners capable of eclipsing 20 minutes or 30 minutes of continual running. Then, he organized daily runs that started at the Y and climbed to one of the city’s parks and back.
“After a while, some people were training for a marathon, which in those days was a big deal,” Price said. “So we decided to have a race one morning. We’d been running all winter long. And so we did the four parks. And we called it the Super Goat.
“It was 17 miles. We went to Woodland, Schiller, Burnet and Thornden. We’d come back to Columbus Circle, get some water and then we’d go out to the next one.”
Neither Rood nor Fahey participated in Price’s exercise class, but both distance runners knew him, respected his dedication to fitness and showed up that April morning in 1978 to run his Super Goat.
A small group of runners tackled the route with no police presence to contain traffic. A Nanny Goat distinction went to those who finished eight miles. The Mountain Goat designation was reserved for runners who finished all 17 miles.
Fahey, now 72, remembers running along West Onondaga Street with someone from Watertown. It was early in the race and the man remarked that the course did not seem particularly difficult. Then the two turned left onto steep Dudley Street and all conversation ceased.
“I think we all knew in our heads and in our hearts that it was going to be a long distance, but I don’t think any of us realized it was going to be as exhausting as it was,” Fahey said. “Short of a marathon, it was probably one of the two most exhausting races I can think of.”
Rood, now 75, remembers seeing two actual goats at the finish line, a memory partially reinforced by newspaper photographs that day. In a photo, a goat draped in a “Super Goat” cape posed for photos with runners. The goat was borrowed, the caption explained, from the Burnet Park Zoo.
“I don’t remember that,” Fahey said, “but if you did this race, a hallucination would be understandable.”
By the following year, the course was pared to 10 miles and included the reservoir hilltops at Woodland and Thornden.
Price said organizers of the first official Mountain Goat mapped out a course that was strikingly similar to the modern Goat, though the course has undergone various route changes. These days, the race snakes past Price’s house in Strathmore, much to the delight of its founder.
Price, once an avid runner who completed the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., has never competed in the Mountain Goat. He stopped running, he said, about 10 or 15 years ago, after two artificial knees made the exercise uncomfortable.
His son, David, who is training for a marathon, will run two loops in Sunday’s Goat race. Walt Price will walk as far as his 91-year-old legs will take him. He’s been training these days by walking the steep slope to the Woodland water tower near his house.
“He’s overdue,” Fahey said, “for the recognition for the kind of contributions he made to running here in Central New York.”
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