RIC SAYRE. Tributes on LetsRun Message-Board. NEELY SPENCE'S Blog. Poem: 'A Racing-Flat Filled with Blood May Be Where Dolphins Play'. Excerpt from MIKE DOWNEY'S L.A. Times' profile.

Remembering Ric--August 9, 1953 Akron, Ohio; June 21, 2011, Ashland, Oregon

April 6, 2025

Ric Sayre left us suddenly on June 21, 2011. He collapsed while talking to friends, nearby his and Phyllis’ house, after a morning run along trails and roads in hills above his long-time home-town of Ashland, Oregon. Ric was 57 and training to compete—to win, really, at least his Senior division—in the World Masters Track & Field Championships, scheduled for Sacramento, July 6 to 11, the next month. He was running with another illustrious U.S. Champion in the Marathon, Steve Spence, nine years younger than him, swapping stories when they jogged, and advising Neely Spence, then 21, before Neely’s 5000 Meters in the USATF Championships, set for Eugene, 200 miles North along I-5, on June 24. Neely’s eloquent remembrance of Ric is presented in a screen-shot below, following the series of admiring and fond statements about Ric on the LetsRun Message-Board. (Neely ran a substantial P.R. of 15:27.72, 7th in the Women’s Final, on June 24, three days after Ric passed on.)

One Racing-Flat Filled with Blood                                                                                        May Be Where Dolphins Play

One of Ric Sayre's racing-flats                                                                                                        Was always soaked with blood 
After a Marathon
In years when Ric was winning Marathons,
From the middle 1980s into the early 1990s.
Ric's right foot was a little smaller than his left 
And took more pounding from his strides 
Over 26.2 miles.

"I've never even sat in a Mercedes,"
Ric told the Los Angeles Times'
Mike Downey after winning the 1986 Marathon there. 
We laughed then about
How City of Los Angeles Marathon Director Bill Burke                                                            And Mercedes North America must have
Reacted to that quote
On the front page of Monday's Times Sports section.

The next year Ric and Sister Marion Irvine                                                                          Led an Athletes United for Peace
Group to Sandinist Nicarauga.
The tour culminated with the El Replieque
Run from Managua to Masaya in tropical June.                                                                             Ric went out hard, leading by two minutes                                                                      Halfway through the 30 kilometers,
And staggered to the Finish,
Second to a veteran of the Contra war.                                                                                "People there," Ric said later,
"Don't even have ballpoint-pens,
Much less the bandages they need."

Ric was/is one
You would want with you in a war.
He would be as good as healer
As he would as mediator
Or as soldier.
He would be stalwart--great--
In whatever role he and his fate chose.

In 2005 we laughed a lot
While riding north from Paso Robles
After the USAT&F National 10-K Championships.
Ric had another Subaru station-wagon,
Packed as if to survive the Apocalypse,
And more sacks of nuts and berries
That he shared for nourishment.
So many characters and funny moments
We could recall.
Gidamis Shahanga and his new-found masseuse,
Zak Barie taking a taxi from Pittsburgh to Wheeling
After midnight to make the race the next morning,
Police at the Biltmore in Los Angeles,
Police outside the stand-off in Oka, Quebec,
Derrick May with head on table
In the bass-and-ganja-heavy 1:00-a.m. reggae bar in Houston                                            After Derrick won the Marathon
And Ric the U.S. Championship
In Houston's 1987 Tenneco event,
We laughed too
About members of both Bush Administrations' Cabinets.

The last time we spoke, early this past June,
Ric and I agreed that fear is
Near the root of evil,
That fear is always near why people fail themselves, 
And that courage
Is fundamental to positive thoughts and acts.


"May you always be courageous!" 
"Got to have a good vibe!"
Ric's sudden passing feels as cruel
And unfair as it is out-of-the-blue.
We'd also agreed that you can't expect justice from fate. 
But, we thought, what you get,
Every moment of living,
Is what you do.

Now is the river whose flow never stops. 
Now is a time to remember
With gratitude.
Now is the time for seeing through. 
Now is time for tears of honor
And cleansing toward the model.
Now is time to pause, draw and paint.
Now is time to appreciate in stained glass
Wild dolphins' play.
Now is the snow melting into the Rogue.
Now is the lark, the jays outside windows,
The damned mosquitoes.
Now is Toothpick
And new sights for the runner every day without end. 
Now is Shakespeare under the stars.
Now is for struggles Shakespeare would embrace. 
Now and forever is Ric's kind question
From his warrior's jaw and blue-eyed gaze
As constant as grace,
"How are you doing?" across any space,
Now is Ric's quick laugh and helping hand.
Now is the salmon hurtling homeward to spawn. 
Now is Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, 
Joni Mitchell, Cesaria Evora and Steely Dan.
Now is the time to remember heroes
And heroines.
Now is the time when beliefs re-arise.
Now is the time to be arm-in-arm under sun                                                                        Or by a fire.

Saint Ric? Well, no, but close.
How close more know
Now, the one indelible legacy
Or ever-growing piece of art
(Like the "art" Steve Prefontaine said
He wished to give people through running a race) 
A life great with accomplishments
And generosity leaves.

First: June 26, 2011

Excerpt from a very good-natured and comprehensive piece by MIKE DOWNEY in the Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1986, the day after Ric won the Marathon there.

‘When he left his Ohio hometown five years ago and took off for the Oregon countryside, his hair cascaded halfway down his back. “Almost down to here,” Ric Sayre remembered, cupping his palm at the base of his spine. “You think it’s long now, you should have seen it then.”

He was a child of the Sixties, stranded in the Eighties, without a “Back to the Future”-style vehicle to transport him through time. But at least his father, an Akron cop, never peppered him with scoldings about getting a haircut. He let the boy go his own road.

This eventually directed him to the wilderness fringes of Ashland, Ore., population 15,000 or so, where no one feels compelled to look or behave a certain way. There, he and a girlfriend share a house on a six-acre plot with another couple. Sometimes they run together in the mountains. Other times they pile into his ’77 Datsun pickup with the irritable transmission and truck into town.

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He has no steady job. Thirty-two years old and still in college. A veteran vegetarian. A guy who is thinking about guitar lessons. A guy heavily into healthy food and good music and the great outdoors. An absolute Bill Walton throwback. “I guess you could say one of the things that appealed to me about Ashland was that it accepted a hippie-community life style,” he said. “I’ve always been sort of counter-culture.”

Now that Ric Sayre, the hippy-dippy distance runner, has won the San Francisco, Long Beach and Los Angeles marathons in the space of a single year--two of them in the last five weeks--he might single-handedly revive the movement. Start wearing tie-dyed T-shirts with peace symbols and handwritten slogans about LSD and LBJ. Nah. Ric Sayre is simply a very nice young man who has discovered a very nice way to avoid three-piece suits and 9-to-5 clocks. Whatever salary he makes, he earns by winning 26.2-mile runs. And by winning Sunday’s L.A. Marathon, he collected $10,000 cash, $5,000 worth of round-trip airplane tickets and a 1986 Mercedes 190E worth 25 grand.

“I’ve never even sat in a Mercedes,” he said.

[…] ‘

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