“It’s a smart move for politicians to become endurance runners.”
So says Matt Tuerk, mayor of Allentown, Pennsylvania. He’s taken half an hour out of a busy US mid-term election campaign schedule to speak with me. He’s had journalists from the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Financial Times, and Running Sucks.
Allentown has always been a popular spot for journalists to report on the state of the country because it’s just a couple of hours’ drive from New York, and historically it’s a presidential bellwether.
Mayor Tuerk thought about running for mayor after running the streets of Allentown in 2020. He’d qualified for the ill-fated 2020 Boston Marathon, so he was running a lot. He’d read that there were 440 miles of streets in his city. He could do that in 10 weeks max.
“I thought it was a gimmick while running for mayor. I thought I’d be able to tell everybody that I’ve seen the street they live on, and I know the problems they face.”
“It turned out that it was less of a gimmick and more of an instructional activity. I was able to actually see what these various neighborhoods look like, and I was able to familiarize myself with the challenges of the city, not just from the perspective of a runner, but from the perspective of somebody who lives in those neighborhoods.”
“As my campaign started to gain a little momentum, I found myself running into people in the street. It went from familiarizing myself with the streets, and now I’m familiarizing myself with these individual people that I’m going to be asking for their votes.”