Saplin Award In Bloom

Marc Bloom — who has been a leading figure in track & field, running and the health and fitness movement for more than four decades — is the 2013 recipient of The Armory Foundation's Stan Saplin Award. And more than that, he helped compose a most important chapter in Armory history.

"Marc Bloom's original article 'The Homeless Drive Teen-Age Athletes Into the Cold' on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times in January of 1988 moved me greatly to take up the challenge of returning track & field to The Armory," said Dr. Norbert Sander, Executive Director of the Armory Foundation. "It was the true catalyst to much of what has happened here in the last 20 years."

And his career is woven within The Armory. Bloom served as a consultant, researcher and writer in the establishment of the National Track & Field Hall of Fame here at The Armory and he has been published on ArmoryTrack.com.

A runner for Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn in the 1960s, Bloom has authored nine books on the sport, served as editor-in-chief of "The Runner" magazine and has been a senior contributor to Runner's World for the last 25 years. He has also been an award-winning contributor to the New York Times.

As mentioned, Bloom hasn't just covered the sport. Over the years he's been a participant, a coach, a television consultant and an event organizer. But his widest acclaim has been as a writer. He has penned collaborative autobiographies of Frank Shorter and Steve Scott, written freelance stories for several sections of the Times, including the Times Magazine, and maintained The Harrier Magazine, devoted to high school coverage, for decades.

He started The Harrier back in 1974, but gave it up in 1978 to help launch "The Runner." In 1989 he reclaimed The Harrier and began national rankings, laying much of the groundwork that exists today on the national high school cross country scene.

Bloom has earned two different Jesse Abramson Awards, three times claiming the annual national writing award from the Track & Field Writers' Association and once, in 1999, being honored by the Penn Relays for his dedication and service to that grand event.

A life-long runner who has logged in the neighborhood of 75,000 miles, Bloom remains active in the New Jersey masters running scene. Living in the Princeton, N.J., area, he currently serves as an assistant girls' cross country coach at nearby Hillsborough High.

Bloom is the seventh recipient of the Saplin Award, named after the late athletics journalist and statistician Stan Saplin who died in 2002. The previous recipients were writers Frank Litsky and Bill Miller of the New York Times; photographer Bill Moore of the New York Amsterdam News; New Jersey Track editor Ed Grant; Eastern Track founder Walt Murphy and long-time New Jersey-based journalist Elliott Denman.

The ceremony honoring Marc Bloom will take place in conjunction with the Eastern States Championships on Monday, February 25.