Remembering Tom Fleming, a towering figure in running world

Tributes poured in from around the region and the country for two-time New York City Marathon champion and New Jersey running legend Tom Fleming.

Past national champions and Olympians, including Rich Kenah, Henry Rono, Rod Dixon and many others described a generous, gregarious and enthusiastic man who had left them memories that his passing will never erase.

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Fleming, 65, died Wednesday of a heart attack he suffered while coaching Montclair Kimberley Academy at a track meet in Verona. He was rushed to Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, where he passed away.

“Before the meet he was in our training room here at the middle school joking and laughing with our head athletic trainer,” MKA athletic director Todd Smith said.

On Thursday, the fourth grade class he taught at MKA circled the track at Brookdale Park in Bloomfield, Tom's hometown, and released blue and green balloons in honor of their beloved teacher.

The Verona track team held a moment of silence at 3 p.m. and then walked laps at the H.B. Whitehorne Middle School, which doubles as the home track for Verona and MKA. The coaches told stories about Fleming, a member of both the Road Runners Club of America Distance Running Hall of Fame and the National Distance Running Hall of Fame.

"It's a big loss to our track and field community,'' said Verona boys coach Laura Palmerezzi. "He was always trying to get our sport recognized. There's not many people out there who feel this way about track and field so it's a huge loss to our community.''

Everything you've heard about Fleming only scratched the surface of the man.

John Pontes remembers the first time he met Tom Fleming.

The veteran Clifton track and cross-country coach was a freshman at Paterson State College and was asked to help recruit Fleming. "The coach thought I was a low-key, cerebral runner who would click with Tom,'' said Pontes. "He didn't know Tom never stopped talking.''

That didn't stop the two from becoming life-long friends.

"We never had classes together,'' said Pontes, who served as an usher at Fleming's first wedding and the best man at his second. "But we spent many, many hours together, mostly, but not only on long runs. They say to hitch your wagon to a star and follow it as far as you can and that's the way I looked at Tom.''

Fleming's appetite for long runs was insatiable as Pontes grew to learn.

The 168th Street Armory in New York " used to hold three or four evening AAU events for college and open runners during the winter,'' Pontes said. "At one of them, I ran my personal best in the 600 yards and Tom won the two mile. Those meets usually ran very late and we didn't get back to school until after midnight. But he talked me into taking a run with him as soon as we got back. It turned out to be a 15-mile loop and I don't think I was ever the same.''

After graduation, Fleming, who was a four-time small college All-American and four-time New Jersey Athletic Conference cross-country champion, taught for a year or two in Bloomfield but after his second New York City Marathon win in 1975 opened a store called Tom Fleming's Running Room, helped by New Balance at first and later by Nike.

"He sponsored and ran for a team based out of his store, and I was part of that,'' said Pontes, a solid marathoner but no match for Fleming, who at one time held five American records at distances from 15 miles to 50 kilometers. "When we were college and we had a light day of classes, he would sometimes run from his home from Bloomfield and after classes back home. That had to be 14 miles each way and to do it, you had to go over Garret Mountain.''

Numerous reports have referenced his most famous quote: "Somewhere, someone in the world is training when you are not. When you race him, he will win.''

That led to Fleming to run 130 to 140 miles during an average week of training and at times approach an almost unthinkable 200 miles a week.

Pontes remembers just how committed his friend was to training.

"Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s when the NYC Marathon was still in October I get a call from Tom three days before the race saying let's go for a little run,'' said Pontes, "It's dark out and raining and we're running 10 miles in 57 minutes three days before the marathon!"

Joel Pasternack of Clifton knew Fleming for 48 years.

“I would say we probably over the years ran over 10,000 miles together,” Pasternack said.

When Pasternack got married, Fleming was there. When Pasternack's daughter was born, Fleming was there. And the two continually hit the pavement together.

“Tom was a very warm person,” Pasternack said. “He would help anybody. We’d be at the track together and he’d see somebody not running right and he’d have suggestions. He was always there for everybody.”

But to those who think Fleming was just about running, Pontes has another story.

"We found out that if the college library thought you were taking a certain film class, they would rent movies for you and you could watch in a viewing room,'' said Pontes. "So Tom convinced the librarian we were in the class and every week they'd rent us a classic Marx Brothers movie and we'd sit there and watch it.''

After his running career wound down, Tom got into coaching. He coached the Running Room team to three straight National Club Cross-Country championships from 1990 to 1992 and worked with US Track & field for nearly a decade.

Then in the winter of 1998-99, he came to MKA and began teaching in the middle school and coaching high school cross-country and track.

Mark Boyea, the MKA athletic director at the time remembers Fleming as someone he knew right away would fit in with his much younger students.

"I've interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands of coaches during my career and he had the combination of knowledge, enormous charisma and the ability to get young people to connect with him,'' said Boyea.

But not everybody did.

When speaking with Fleming at a state indoor track meet a few years ago, he had two fine athletes in one event and they both got along pretty well. But their parents didn't and occasionally caused some distress for the normally unflappable Fleming.

"Paul," he joked, "my next job – I'm coaching in an orphanage!"

MKA mourns coach, teacher

Todd Smith, the athletic director for Montclair Kimberley Academy was at the varsity baseball game when he heard the news. He drove straight to the meet. First responders took Tom Fleming to the Mountainside Hospital so Smith made his way there to wait.

“Doctors came in and told us he did not make it," Smith said. "From what we were told he was battling for quite some time. He put up a good fight.”

Earlier in the day, Fleming was “very jovial” and there was nothing out of the ordinary. He even took a team photo with our entire squad, Smith said.

At the meet, Fleming told Injoo King, MKA assistant athletic director, he wasn’t feeling great.

“He went into the Verona Middle School bathroom," Smith said. "He came out and said he was sick. He went to sit in his car and became unresponsive.”

The loss of Fleming “stretches beyond our school and into the whole running community” because he was “in it for the love of the sport and to see kids at their absolute best,” Smith said.

That translated beyond the track as well.

Dr. David Flocco serves as head of the MKA upper school and had three of his own children in Fleming’s class.

“He was dedicated, passionate," Flocco said. "He knew every child by name but also what made them tick. He knew how to reach each kid.”

He had a way of getting through to each child.

“He was able to reach them on their level, accentuating their strengths and developing their weakness," Flocco said. "He fostered their love of learning and work ethic so that those that had him will carry that for the rest of their lives.”

Fleming remembered in Verona

After school Wednesday, Verona girls track coach Gene Leporati led more than 50 members his varsity and junior varsity teams in a lap around the track behind H.B. Whitehorne Middle School in Verona, stopping to remember Tom Fleming.

Fleming and Leporati go way back. They taught together in Bloomfield nearly 40 years ago, and Leporati would frequent Fleming’s running store in Bloomfield before they coached competing teams. They were also both on the board of the Sunset Classic, a Bloomfield road race that raises money for special needs children in the schools.

“I started running and Tom was an inspiration to me, helped me out,” Leporati said. “We used to joke around. We used to go out a few times a year.”

Leporati led the athletes around the track, pausing for a moment of silence and stories about Fleming, some of them humorous. Leporati also offered a bit of a history lesson on why the girls get to participate in some of the track and field events they do today.

Leporati and Fleming were members of the Essex County Coaches Association. About 15 years ago, the two coaches were among the members to vote to allow female athletes to participate in the triple jump and pole vault, events that were only open to their male counterparts at the time.

“That was not a long time ago,” Leporati told the girls, as they sat at the pole vault mat on the field.

Fleming stuck to his principles when he did not agree with opinions of other members of the coaches association, even walking out on a meeting once, Leporati recalled. “That’s the kind of person he was,” he said.

“We were fierce competitors,” Leporati told his team, “but we respected each other.”

He asked the student-athletes to do the same, as they walked in unison around the track. All was silent, save for a few sniffles from the group.

Leporati told the girls to “embrace each other,” and to make friends, because tragedy could strike any time.

Loss felt throughout running community

In addition to his work at MKA, Fleming was involved in the local running community.

“We knew him for a very, very long time and I grew up in Bloomfield, which he did too, so I knew him for 30-plus years,” said Paul Giuliano, manager of Fleet Feet Sports in Montclair. “He spoke at a lot of our training programs. He taught people about everything from getting ready for marathons to racing to what happens after and how to make running a life and not just picking races.”

Bloomfield High School athletic director Steve Jenkins worked closely with Fleming for over 20 years. The Bloomfield class of 1969, Fleming's graduating class and the last year the school was group champions, annually gives a scholarship to one track athlete and helped get a sign at Bloomfield's newly renovated track field.

That day is one of Jenkins' best memories of the Fleming.

"He was just beaming with the rest of the team," Jenkins said, noting that one of the lanes on the new track was named after Fleming.

George Hirsch, chairman of the board of New York Road Runners, had known Fleming for years as well.

“I’m just shocked and deeply saddened and surprised," Hirsch said. "No sense that this was coming.”

Hirsch knew Fleming during his prime as a runner.

“Tom was clearly the best runner in the New York area for a number of years," he said. "He was a local hero. If Tom showed up everyone else knew they were coming in second.”

One thing that set him apart was his dedication to the sport, Hirsch said.

“No one ever out-trained Tom Fleming," he said. "Elite runners back then ran maybe 140 miles a week. Tom Fleming ran 200. He was strong and could do that kind of a regimen that would have been too punishing for others.”

Even after Fleming’s running days came to an end, Hirsch remained friends with him.

“He switched over after his running years to mentor others, even top-level athletes," Hirsch said. "Tom possessed an extraordinary amount of knowledge about running.”

Fleming “wanted to inspire people” so that they would make running and health and fitness be a part of their lives," Hirsch said. "Moreover, he loved the sport. He liked to talk about the sport.”

They last saw each other in November at the New York City Marathon.

“We talked about the first five-borough race in 1976, what it was like back then,” he said. “We just talked about how much it has grown.”

Hirsch thought of Fleming as “authentic” saying that he was the “best of all the runners but didn’t put himself above the others.”

Staff writers Joshua Jongsma, Katie Sobko, Nicholas Katzban, Mollie Shauger and Kaitlyn Kanzler contributed to this story.