John McDermott (runner)

John J. ("J.J.", "little Mac") McDermott (born October 16, 1874) was an Irish-American athlete, born in Manhattan, New York City to James McDermott and Lizzie Grady. He won the first marathon run in the United States in 1896, as well as the inaugural Boston Marathon, then known as the B.A.A. Road Race, in 1897. He was a lithographer by trade.

McDermott lost his mother at the age of eleven. He was unusually frail and light as a youth. At the start of the first Boston Marathon he weighed in at 124 pounds (56 kg.) on a 5 foot 6 inch (168 cm.) frame, slight even by marathoner standards.

He reportedly died either from consumption (tuberculosis) or from an inherited pulmonary disease sometime before 1906. One source states that he had tuberculosis when he won the Boston Marathon in 1897. His sister Julia died of tuberculosis in 1905.

Little is known of McDemott's life outside of his running accomplishments.

The first marathon race to be held in the United States took place on September 19, 1896, five months after the first Olympic Marathon, as part of the fall meeting of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club of New York City. While regular track and field events were taking place at the Columbia Oval (located in an area that was then part of Williamsbridge but is now called Norwood, in the Bronx borough), twenty-eight athletes, almost all from the New York City area, had earlier traveled by train to Stamford, Connecticut for the marathon race. The course began at the Stamford Armory, and proceeded through Riverside, Cos Cob, Greenwich, Port Chester, Rye, Harrison, Mamaroneck, Larchmont, New Rochelle, East Chester, Woodlawn, and William’s Bridge, finishing with two laps on the Columbia Oval. While the course was presented as 25 miles long, a distance similar to that of the Olympic Marathon, recently statistician Hugh Farley has undertaken a best-guess reconstruction of the route which measures only 23.6 miles (38 kilometers).

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