This page collects members’ recollections about club history.
Memories of Ron Lefreniere, from Jack Carroll
By Jack Carroll
Published July 9, 2021
Ron Lefreniere coached FTC runners during the 70’s and 80’s. He guided many FTC runners to reach their fullest potential. He organized Wednesday track workouts, offering a variety of challenging fast paced intervals and ladder workouts.
He was a perennial fixture on the hill on Oyster Pond Road for the Falmouth Road Race cheering on the local participants.
As a runner he was fearless, running many long distance birthday challenges with Ron Pokraka. He relished in the many lively discussions on the Sunday morning long runs with Henry Smith-Rohberg and Courtney Bird and the gang on their weekly jaunt. They were usually broken up with a dip in the ocean near Trunk River.
A few years ago he completed the Falmouth Road Race with a back injury.
My most endearing memory of Ron goes back to 1982, I was fortunate to win the Cape Cod Marathon, Ron drove the lead truck encouraging me to keep up the pace particularly in the last nine miles when I was running alone.
Ron was truly “one of a kind” and his contribution to the Falmouth Track Club was sizable. He will be deeply missed! Rest in Peace my running friend!
Memories of Ron Lefreniere, from Courtney Bird
By Courtney Bird
Published July 9, 2021
Ron was a very complex and caring person, and he was a character! There are many stories that everyone who knew him could tell. Here are some of mine.
Ron was a friend of Alberto Salazar who was one of the greatest American runners of his time. One year, Ron wanted Alberto to set the world or American road record for the 10k at the Falmouth Road Race. It could have been 1979, ‘80 or ‘81. And maybe it was the year that Alberto collapsed at the finish of heat exhaustion. Anyway, Ronnie convinced John Carroll and Rich Sherman, the co-directors of the Falmouth Road Race at that time, that the Road Race should do this. Ronnie and Ron Pokraka went out and bike-measured and certified the 10k point on the Road Race course, which ended up on Falmouth Heights Road at the traffic island by Edwards Boat Yard at the intersection of Heights Road and Grand Ave. John Carroll and I painted a stripe across the road there with a big “10k”, and everything was in place to verify the 10k split time. There was an elite field for the road race that year with the likes of Craig Virgin and Bill Rodgers and many more. Alberto went out hard and took the lead.
There was a classic photo in the next day’s Boston Globe of Ronnie, somewhere just before the 3 mile mark, running full tilt with both feet off the ground, next to Alberto, handing him water. That was pure Ron! Supporting every runner to do his or her best! Sadly, Alberto didn’t break the record that day, but the memory of that day endures in the lore of the Road Race and is memorialized by that 10k stripe on Heights Road.
During the eighties, Ron conducted track workouts at the Falmouth High track for anyone who showed up. In the summers, there often were as many as 30 people there of varying abilities. His workouts were old-school, gut-wrenching and intense. But Ronnie was there encouraging everyone to push themselves to their limits. And many, many of those who participated improved their running by leaps and bounds as a result. But those workouts were more than I could endure. Ron tried to get me to come to them, and I did a few times. But a few pyramid intervals where you ran a quarter mile, half mile and full mile and then back down (half, then quarter) at top speed with a 1/4 mile jog in between was too much for me. But that didn’t mean he didn’t make me a better runner. He did because he pushed me during our shared road workouts and his competitiveness in road races.
In March 1980, we both ran the New Bedford Half Marathon, which a large contingent of FTC runners ran each year. I caught up to Ron at about the 12 mile mark just before the final long hill. As I went by him, I jauntily said “Hi, Ron, see you at the finish!”, and pushed as hard as I could up that long hill. Just as I got to the top, Ronnie roared by me, and I had no gas left in the tank to try to stay with him. He beat me by 30 seconds. And from that day forward he would never let me forget it!
Every Sunday morning in the late 70’ and during the 1980’s, a group of us would gather at Karen and Henry Smith-Rohrberg’s house on the corner of Chapoquoit Rd. and 28A in West Falmouth for a 20 mile run. That is what you did in those days. It was the centerpiece of your weekly training. While the size of the group varied, the core was Karen and Henry, Ronnie, Betty Fuller, and I. None of us were elite by any stretch of the imagination, but we took our training seriously.
And Ronnie was the one who pushed us. We generally ran those 20 milers at a comfortable 7:15 to 7:30 pace. I say comfortable, because we carried on animated conversations about everything while running at that pace. But every so often, the talking stopped, not because we ran out of something to say, but because all of a sudden the pace quickened to something like 6:00 or 6:10. And it was always Ronnie behind the surge. One way he did that was to remind me how he’d whipped my ass at New Bedford! That inevitably happened at the bottom of the 1/2 mile long hill on Quissett Ave. leading up to Woods Hole Golf course. Suddenly Ronnie and I would drop our pace to 6:10 or less as we went up the hill, and the rest of the group would follow along. And that would be followed by a few more surges during the rest of that day’s 20 miler.
Ron loved Shakespeare. So one way he would get us to pick up the pace in the midst of one of these runs was to start reciting passages from “Julius Caesar” verbatim. That usually happened on the bike path going out of Woods Hole. The level and straight bike path must have reminded him of a Roman road. He imagined himself to be a Roman Centurion. He’d straighten up his posture, throw his shoulders back as if he were on a quick march. As he recited the verses, his pace would quicken, and we all followed on! But if it were a hot summer day, when we got to Surf Drive and he’d finished his soliloquy, we’d all dive into Vineyard Sound, led by Ronnie, to cool off! And by doing things like that, he made us all better runners.
He was behind my setting a marathon PR at the 1980 CCM – a race I entered at the last minute and intended only to run 20 miles of it as a workout. In fact when the gun fired, I was in the woods relieving myself. My training partner that day and I started dead last. We were running along comfortably when, at about 5 miles in, I saw Ronnie up ahead of me. All of a sudden my mindset changed. My mind drifted back to New Bedford, and I said to myself, that’s not going to happen here. So I decided to run right behind him until the end, if I changed my mind and actually decided to complete the race, so I could blow by him at the last minute, leaving him no time to catch me. But after about 3 or 4 miles of hanging just behind him, I couldn’t stand it and went by him. We both picked up the pace as expected and soon we merged into a pack of FTC runners that included the bulk of our Sunday morning crew plus Ron Pokraka who was a consistent mid-2:50’s marathoner and Rod Walz who also regularly ran 2:50 marathons. We ran together until about 17 or 18 miles, just like a Sunday run. At that point and feeling strong, I took off, got to 20 miles at 2:10, and thought “I can break 3:00 by just running a 50 minute 10k.” I decided right then to run the whole thing. At 23 miles, I began to run low on gas, and when I stopped at a water station, Ron Pokraka ran by me. “Where’s Ronnie” I asked. “Behind you a ways back,” came the answer. So I gritted my teeth, kept pushing and finished with a 2:56:46 PR – my first time under 3 hours. Ronnie finished in about 3 hours. But the key to this story was that Ronnie’s ability to get the best out of a runner — whether by traditional means like track workouts and formal coaching or less formal ways like he did with me — was at the core of his personality.
But he didn’t do that with just me. In 1983, he pushed Karen Smith-Rohrberg in those 20 milers to train to try to break the Olympic Trials qualifying standard of 2:51:16 in the Marathon. It got so serious on those runs that either Ron or Karen’s husband, Henry, would tell me to shut up and stop talking because I was distracting Karen! But Ron’s training worked, and she almost succeeded when she PR’d with a time of 2:52:21 at the Cape Cod Marathon, the last year it was held at Otis. While she missed the qualifying time by 65 seconds, it was her marathon best by 10 minutes! And Ronnie was instrumental in that accomplishment.
But he wasn’t just the Coach, with a capital C. Ron gave of himself with everything he did. In 1982, when the race director of the CCM quit a month before the race, having done nothing to prepare, Ronnie, along with Kit Wise, the FTC President at the time, and me picked up the pieces and saved the race.
The man was a legend and one of a kind; I was honored to know him.
FTC Women, 1980’s-90’s
By Helen Kennedy
Published April 26, 2021
In the 1980’s the Falmouth Track Club had a group of women that were a force to be reckoned with in the New England running community. Under the guidance of coach Ron Lafreniere, these women trained hard for road races across the state and beyond.
The core of the group was made up of eight strong runners. Amanda Cloutier, Anne Ford, Mary Olenick, Helen Kennedy, Sande Cullinane, Eileen Troy, Karen Smith Rohrberg and Betty Fuller. Individually they won many age category road race divisions in the 80’s and 90’s but their greatest achievement was running as a team for the FTC in October 1984, in the Plymouth to Provincetown Relay Race. No Cape Cod women’s team had ever won the annual event until this group of women entered. The race at the time was a very popular event with 250 teams from all New England states.
The race was a 93-mile relay starting in Plymouth and ending in Provincetown. It was made up of eight legs ranging from seven to sixteen miles. The FTC team, co-captained by Amanda Cloutier and Anne Ford, blew the other women’s teams away and won the event in a winning time of eight hours, 58 minutes and 55 seconds. The team finished nine minutes 10 seconds ahead of the pre-race favorite and winner of the race the two previous years, the Boston-area Irish American Track Club team.
Each woman on the FTC team ran personal records for their leg of the race and the team held the lead throughout the race, but it was during the 14.5 seventh leg, run by Karen Smith Rohrberg, that the FTC women put the race away. Betty Fuller running the last leg into Provincetown crossed the finish line to take the win! Not only did this FTC women’s team win the women’s event is also was better than all coed team that had entered and it finished 51st out of 250 teams which was an amazing feat.
The FTC women were also very strong runners at the marathon distance, including the Boston Marathon in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s. Betty Fuller and Karen Smith Rohrberg ran over 20 marathons spanning over 23 years, Eileen Troy ran over 10 marathons and Helen Kennedy ran four marathons.
Karen Smith Rohrberg won the Cape Cod Marathon in 1981, 82, 83 and Anne Ford won the Cape Cod Marathon in 1986.