He sat out his freshman campaign, and in the 1931-32 season entered his first inter-collegiate competitions.
At the Big Six Meet that year in Lincoln, Neb., he set new conference records in the half mile (1:53.3), and the mile (4:14.3).
The following week, at the National Collegiate Meet in Chicago, he smashed the NCAA record in the mile, zipping to a time of 4:11.1.
No man had ever run the mile faster at an outdoor meet in the United States. Glenn Cunningham had arrived on the national scene, and it would be almost a decade before he would relinquish his place as the top middle-distance runner in the country.
1932 saw Cunningham win the NCAA 1,500 meter championship and earn a berth on the U.S. Olympic team. He placed fourth in the 1,500 meter race at Los Angeles, missing out on the medal podium by only a few meters.
In 1933, Cunningham graduated from Kansas with the highest academic marks in his class. That year, he won the AAU 800 meters in a time of 1:51.8; the AAU 1,500 meters with a time of 3:52.3; and the won the NCAA mile once more, with a time of 4:09.8.
He was rewarded with the 1933 Sullivan Memorial Award as the outstanding amateur athlete in America.
In the summer of 1933, he was captain of the American track team touring Europe. After running 20 events that summer, Cunningham was given the moniker of “The Kansas Ironman.”
1934 was the dawn of a new rivalry between Glenn Cunningham and Princeton’s Bill Bronthron.
Cunningham unveiled a brand new strategy: running the second half of the race faster than the first half.
On June 16, 1934, at the first Princeton Invitational Games, the favored Bronthron, Cunningham and Gene Venzki ran an epic one-mile encounter at Madison Square Gardens.
With over 25,000 watching, and thousands others turned away, Cunningham blitzed the competition by running lap times of 61.8, 64.0, 61.8, and 59.1 seconds, shattering the world record with a total time of 4.06.7, edging closer to the mythical four-minute mile.
Later that summer, Bronthon got a measure of revenge, adjusting to the stratagem and beating Cunningham in consecutive 1,500 meter races, the second in a world record time of his own, 3:48.8, while Glenn also beat the world mark with his 3:48.9 (a personal best).
Cunningham owned the major races in 1935, winning the AAU 1,500 meters championship in a time of 3:52.1; and taking the Wanamaker Mile in 4:11.0, with Venzke in second place and Bonthron in third.
After running relatively slow times at the 1936 U. S. Olympic trials, saving himself for the Olympic Games, Cunningham ran the best 1,500 meter time of his life...and once again lost a race while beating a world record.
He fell to Jack Lovelock of New Zealand in a new world record time of 3:47.8. Cunningham finished at 3:48.4 and said of Lovelock, “He must be the greatest runner ever,” according to Cordner Nelson and Roberto Quercetani in the book The Milers.
Cunningham finished his career with two NCAA titles, eight AAU championships, and a satchel of world records, one of which—his world one mile record of 4:06.8 in 1934—stood for three years.
He won 21 of 31 won indoor races at Madison Square Garden, despite enduring a tedious regimen of stretching and warm-ups that was far longer than any other runner’s, due to the lingering circulation problems in his legs, effects from the schoolhouse fire in 1916.
According to Nelson and Quercetani, Cunningham admired endurance, perhaps hearkening back to those bleak days of his childhood, spent dragging his almost-lifeless legs behind him as he navigated the picket fence in the back yard.
“If you stay in the running,” they quote him as saying, “if you have endurance, you are bound to win over those who haven’t.”
If all of that weren’t enough, Cunningham’s post-racing career might mark his most remarkable accomplishments.
Despite living his adult life through the worst economic depression in American history, Cunningham shrewdly invested his winnings as a prize runner, and parlayed them into not one, but two sprawling ranches.
One of them, now known as the Cunningham Chase County Ranch in south central Kansas (near Burns), he acquired in 1939, and was given to his first wife, Margaret S. Cunningham, as a part of their divorce settlement.
His daughter, Dr. Sandra Cunningham, retains 320 acres of the property to this day, and raises Egyptian Arabian thoroughbred horses there. Her father had rescued animals and used the 822 acre plot to rehab them and provide them with a quality of life second-to-none.
He earned a doctorate in physical education, and served as the physical education director at Cornell College from 1940-'44, before serving two years in the U. S. Navy.
He married his second wife, the former Ruth Sheffield, in the summer of 1947. They settled into the ranch that he had purchased in 1938 and retained for himself, an 840 acre tract of land near Cedar Point, Kansas.
The family—which eventually included two daughters by Margaret and the 10 children borne to Glenn by his second wife, Ruth—lived in the 12-room ranch house.
However, Glenn and Ruth eventually ran a home for troubled youth, though neither of them had any formal training in the field.
They had as many as 84 people—mostly children—living together at any given time.
The Cunninghams eventually helped upwards of 9,000 troubled and underprivileged youths at the Glenn Cunningham Youth Ranch. Their method was simple, according to Frank B. Bowles in the Biographical Dictionary of American Sports:
“With virtually no outside help, the couple handled the youngsters with old-fashioned patience and tolerance.”
Perhaps Cunningham is best summed up in the words of his favorite scripture, one which soothed him as he survived his harrowing brush with death, and one which he instilled in the many youths that he raised.
It is Isaiah chapter 40, verse 31:
“But those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Indeed, Glenn V. Cunningham mounted up on wings like angels—or perhaps we should say the legs of a cheetah—and ran without getting weary. He was not as effortless, graceful, or smooth as other runners; he was just more determined.
He ran all the way into the hearts of a nation, and his story of courage and inspiration should be passed on for generations.
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