Fort Worth’s Cowtown Marathon, as big as ever, still feels the right kind of small

There was ice the first year of The Cowtown Marathon. A winter storm blew into Fort Worth on Feb. 17, 1979, and one newspaper reported the temperature as dipping to 5 below, if you considered the windchill.

Steve Fedorko was at the starting line in the Stockyards. Maybe 400 of an expected 1,000 runners joined him, and they slogged through 26.2 miles of wintry mix, battling frostbite and slippery roads. Throughout the race, he wondered if anyone would bother coming back the next year. His mind changed when, with his extremities frozen at the finish line, he found the hospitality center, located in an old barn.

Volunteer nurses were rubbing runners’ noses, fingers and feet, warming them back to life. The Stockyards had provided the idealized image of Texas’ country western pride; this scene, to Fedorko, showcased the friendliness that he associated with the state and with Fort Worth.

Fedorko, who lives in Grand Prairie, has continued running the Cowtown every year and witnessed it grow into a nationally recognized event. This weekend, some 25,000 runners are expected to compete in a variety of distances, and Cowtown will host the USA Track and Field half marathon national championships in 2021. And the upward trajectory in size and reputation have come without sacrificing much of Cowtown’s charm.

Cowtown is one of the least expensive major marathons in the country (its maximum price of $155 for late registrants is more than $20 below the Houston and Dallas marathons) and lacks a title sponsor in an era where sponsorships adjoin race names or gobble them up completely. It contributes proceeds to charity, rather than relying on runners to shoulder the burden through fundraising efforts. And some 4,000 volunteers help out every year, many of them long-timers. These characteristics remind Fedorko of the same local, hospitable sensibilities he experienced in 1979. “That kind of thing has permeated all the races,” he said.

The first race director of Cowtown, the late Jim Gilliland, wanted it this way. Cowtown didn’t have much else going for it: It wasn’t Texas’ first marathon — that was the White Rock in Dallas. It wasn’t an easy course — the hills prevented many runners from recording their best times. And the finicky February weather kept wreaking havoc — a tornado watch was lifted just before the start of the race in 1984.

So Gilliland focused on the experiential factors he could control, organizing mariachi players and high school bands and cheerleaders to provide support along the course. The Fort Worth medical school (now HSC Fort Worth), where Fedorko was on the faculty, hosted seminars for runners (they once drew Skip Bayless for a talk, when he was a well-known Dallas sports columnist and running enthusiast and not yet a Fox Sports talking head). Gilliland told Texas Weekly in 1985, “Our approach is to make every runner who comes feel important.”

Heidi Swartz ran Cowtown for the first time in 1994, with her son. She wasn’t a dedicated runner at the time but gravitated toward Cowtown anyway, applying for a job as assistant director two years later. She became director in 2003 and is part of a five-person staff that maintains a close connection with participants by personally responding to all phone calls and requests.

One morning in early February, a blind runner stopped by Cowtown’s offices in Linwood unannounced, seeking information about the course. Swartz offered to set him up with a guide on race day. “We make a point to talk to everybody. It’s important,” she said. “We want to make sure we keep that really hometown feel. We don’t want to be a glossy race.”

Swartz has managed to keep these touches while growing Cowtown from about 10,000 runners the year she became director to around 25,000 and moving the start and finish of the course from downtown to the Will Rogers Memorial Center. The various races for Houston’s Chevron Marathon attract more than 30,000 runners; for the BMW Dallas Marathon the total is typically around 16,000.

“She’s done some stuff that other people in the industry are not doing,” says Logan Sherman, who has won the Cowtown 5K, 10K, half-marathon, marathon and ultra marathon and is a board member of the Dallas Marathon. These forward-thinking decisions include, Sherman said, turning Cowtown into a multi-day event and adding the ultramarathon distance, which brought in a new audience of trail runners.

Sherman has run dozens of marathons around the country. He said people tend to gravitate to certain races based on two factors: a fast course or a distinctive experience. Similar to the New York City Marathon, which is run through every borough, he said Cowtown has the latter. The marathon course begins in the Cultural District, winds north to the Stockyards and south through downtown. It then curves southwest toward TCU and back up through the Colonial Country Club area, giving runners views of Fort Worth’s most popular areas.

“You feel like you’re in this Cowboy West Texas feel when you’re in Fort Worth. I think they are probably one of the bigger marathons that push that in Texas,” Sherman said. “And I think that’s what draws a lot of people in.”

This year, finishers will receive a medal shaped as a cowboy hat. The medal for 2021 is shaped like a pair of cowboy boots. Swartz expects the western wear theme to entice runners to come back to complete the set. They probably will: Some 60% to 70% of annual participants are returnees, Swartz said.

In the future, Swartz would like to get a title sponsor to defray costs and help them raise more funds for the Cowtown CALF charity. But, she said, Cowtown will always be part of the title and immediately recognizable to generations of runners, some of whom may end up running it for as long as Fedorko. Unlike in 1979, he likes how people can run anywhere from 5k to 50k. “It lets everybody from all kinds of distances and conditions participate,” he said, “and walk away saying, ‘I did the Cowtown.’”

This story was originally published February 27, 2020 at 5:30 AM.