From Running Times online…
Visionary Venues
Cross country venues that leave a legacy of the sport
By Roger Robinson
As featured in the JanFeb 2011 issue of Running Times Magazine
Near the top of the hill, after driving for an hour around rural Kansas, we still didn't know if we had found the right place. As the dirt road leveled off and the trees gave way on the right to a high grass bank, there, suddenly, towering above the bank, I saw him.
It was Ryun in full stride, unmistakable, 10 feet tall, a long-limbed black metal silhouette frozen in motion on the very crest of the hill. We had arrived at Rim Rock Farm.
Leaving the car, we waded through long grass, and in the green bowl below us, where the races finish, there was Billy Mills, hands flung up as he broke the Tokyo Olympic finish tape. Walking down to him, now we saw Ryun in full, striding forever along the skyline. And dominating the whole valley from a mid-hillside vantage, one hand held high with his stopwatch, perhaps forever shouting "Go!" stood the 10-foot high black steel silhouette statue of Coach Bob Timmons himself, the man who created all this for his runners -- this green idyll of pastoral landscape, this wicked nightmare of a cross country gut-buster.
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