World-class runner, fierce competitor, defender of good sportsmanship, coach of champions, mentor to many — Clifford Clark’s long career in running has given him a rich roster of titles and roles. But if you ask him, the real joy and value of the sport is the extra miles it’s given back to him and, in turn, those he’s encouraged to lace up.
At a conservative estimate, the millions of miles he’s run — and helped others to traverse — could probably circle the globe at least a dozen times. You might say it’s been his life’s work. At 80 years old, Clark has finally stopped making tracks himself, save for weekly visits to his personal trainer. But as far as the kids and adults he’s coached and his steady positive presence in the lives of many of them, he’s stayed the course. For the love of the sport, of course, but also for the gifts it has given him.
“I have trophies on the wall. Some coaches live vicariously through the kids, and I enjoyed everything that [my runners] did tremendously, but I didn’t need another trophy,” Clark says. “I didn’t need another medal. I didn’t need another award or anything for running. What I was trying to do, and really what I wanted to do, was give back to a sport that was great to me.”
Sport of Champions
If Clark’s name is familiar to you, well, it probably should be. His family has owned and operated the Shelter Island South Ferry since 1832, when Samuel G., Clark’s great-great-grandfather, rowed people across from the south side of the island to Noyack and back daily. Since then, Clark has always shepherded the operation, which runs seven days a week year-round including holidays, weather be darned.
You also might know his name as a founder of one of the East End’s most renowned and beautiful road races, the Shelter Island 10K, a six-mile course he mapped out for tempo runs on his treks home for vacation and visits during his senior year at Harding University in Searcy, Ark., years before it was an official annual event.
“This course was one that I kind of chose because it had everything — it had hills and it had levels and flats and uphill and downhill. And so I ran what’s called tempo runs, where you’d go out and run the first mile at a warmup pace, then the four miles in the middle at some relationship to your race pace, and then the last mile would be back down.”
The kid with the long Shelter Island history wound up in Arkansas in the early 1960s because he had an uncle who taught at Harding and his stories of the small Christian college enthralled the young man — even better, he thought the school was a place he could play basketball. At 6’3”, he showed up with a keen eye focused on getting on the team but missed the cut by one: the 16th pick of a 15-person line-up. As it happened, though, Harding’s cross-country coach had been watching Clark in practices, running far ahead of his teammates, and seized the opportunity to send a couple of runners to ask him to join.
“There’s crossovers in life,” Clark says with a gentle smile, “and sometimes we have to look back on our disappointments and see the blessing.”
In 1961, back when he was in his junior year of high school on Shelter Island, Clark’s basketball coach George Zabel had also required the team to run cross-country –– at that point, the first and only year the school had a running team. He won some local races, but other than that requirement from Coach Zabel, it had never been part of his life. With no other activity on the docket outside of his Harding classes, he agreed, and his path was forever changed.
Clark became a be-sneakered force to be reckoned with. His wife, Tish, has kept careful records and scrapbooks of all her husband’s races, from the time they met at Harding. In college and later, as a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force based in California, he became a talented runner and fierce competitor whose drive and hard work made him a notable elite runner.
It took Clark to the Olympic trials in 1972 with race number 301 in Eugene, Ore., running alongside racers like medalists and record-breakers Steve Prefontaine and George Young. During his time in the armed services, Clark ran on the United States track team in races all over the world — logging miles in Italy, Turkey, France, Morocco, Thailand and Algeria, loading up on medals and smashing records, adding clipping after clipping to Tish’s scrapbook. In 1975, he was inducted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
But for all the accolades and wins, there was something else Clark knew he needed and wanted to do for the sport that gave him so much and opened so many doors. He wanted to coach.
A Coach’s Calling
Clark’s first foray into coaching began where he began, on Shelter Island the summer between his college graduation and entering the Air Force. He graduated from Harding in 1967 and following that, at 22, put together a cross-country team with a few local kids.
“Just a rag-tag bunch of guys who didn’t do any other sports, hardly,” he says. One of them was a kid who sat on the sidelines, making fun of the other nascent athletes, until Clark challenged him to beat one of the younger runners. Of course, he didn’t, but that early urge to coach was lit in Clark.
“I went over to his house and I said, ‘Look, I saw something in you and you can do this. But you’re smoking, you’re drinking, and you act like a jerk — but if you want to get out there and have fun with the sport, this might be for you,’” Clark recalls, “and he came out for the team.”
The kid did well, even won some races. It was a moment that didn’t just spark something in the teenage islander: it ignited in Clark a lifelong calling. When he left for the Air Force in California, he found a team in the town where he was stationed that seemed like it needed a hand; he co-coached the once ne’er-do-well Merced High School cross-country team and turned them into an undefeated band of district champs.
In 1976, Clark’s dad needed help with the family business, so he and Tish moved back to be part of South Ferry — and, in turn, to re-start the cross-country team that had gone dormant after he left. Just like the first time on the island, and with the kids he coached at Merced in California, he had to start from scratch and be creative in his work with the school, at one point combining the team with Greenport and Southold to fill the roster with enough runners.
One such product of that time is Tobias “Toby” Green, Shelter Island’s current cross-country coach. Green’s dad, Jason, worked as a captain on the ferry and ran in a recreational running group with Clark. He was worried about his son, a smart kid but one who seemed disinterested in school. He felt concerned Toby would wind up on a bad path.
Photos by Doug Young
“When I was in fifth or sixth grade, the school took a bunch of kids to a meet in Montauk with all the local schools — about 400 kids, I think, running one big race, and I won that. I didn’t think anything of it,” says the younger Green. He ran another race in East Hampton, a miler, and won that one, too. Clark got wind and, after a conversation with Toby’s dad, asked Green to run the Shelter Island 10K course with him one summer day.
“Of course, that was not what I wanted to do; I wanted to go to the beach with my friends,” laughs Green. “I didn’t really understand the sport at that point in time and it just didn’t seem like something any of my friends would do.” Still, he became one of the school’s most storied runners, along with state champions Janelle Kraus-Nadeau (coached by Clark) and Cal Lewis (coached by Green).
“The skill set that you bring to the sport of running is the fact that it’s 85% mental. It’s one of those things that has affected every scenario in life that I have gone through, learning to overcome obstacles, learning to deal with exhaustion and pain and everything that goes along with it. It gives you a more balanced way of approaching life,” Green says.
And it all began with that run with Coach Clark.
“I could never thank Clifford enough for the introduction to running and just all the lessons that stick with me to this day,” Green says. “I even use them when I’m coaching.”
Today, Green’s two sons — who started in a similar vein to their dad, not particularly interested in the sport and, maybe, struggling a little with growing up — are now in training as professional runners with Olympic hopes.
It’s something that gives Clark, as he sits in his office overlooking the ferry boats in front of him, a wall of framed newspaper stories of all the runners he’s coached lining the wall behind him, a deep sense of satisfaction. The result of the routes he’s planned and trod, and the roots he planted, connecting generations of runners — and, perhaps, well-adjusted adults — from start to finish.
“It’s all just giveback,” Clark says. “It’s just the sport’s been so good to me, and it’s surprised me how many things happened from it that I never would have dreamt.”
