Rick Bayko: Newburyport’s Yankee Runner
by Kathleen Downey
As a youth, Rick Bayko says he was a “skinny little guy whom none of the other kids ever picked for their teams” in school sports. Today, the proprietor ofYankee Runner has 25 marathons to his sports resume, 12 of those in Boston. And he is a sought-after mentor to novice runners who stop into his Pleasant Street shop for advice, as well as for the proper footwear that will carry them along the pavement, woodland trails, and across finish lines.
A baseball tryout was the turning point that led Bayko to pursue running with the passion that keeps him running today, 46 years later. “I was a student at Newburyport High School, and I really wanted to be on the baseball team.” Bayko tells me. So he ran two miles before the tryout, thinking that he could give a better performance. He remembers, “I really wanted to impress Coach Welch with my hustle.” Bayko was ranked the second-best runner who tried out for the team. Although he might have been a great base-stealer, he lacked other desirable baseball finesse, like hitting and catching the ball. Bayko didn’t make the team, but the experience inspired him to try out for the cross-country track team in his senior year: Bayko not only found his place on the team, he found his niche in life.
Bayko’s Yankee Runner has been anchored to one of downtown Newburyport’s brick sidewalks for 30 years. The foot traffic coming through his door is from townies, those living in surrounding environs, and even those from overseas. “I have a strong local base,” Bayko says. “My repeat customers keep me going, especially during the winter months.” But his shop is also a favorite with visitors from Europe, who find that the quality running shoes he sells are much more affordable than if purchased in their home countries.
Bayko may have wished that he had a quality pair of those running shoes years ago, when as an eighth-grade student at Immaculate Conception School he could have outrun the nuns who busted him for smoking a cigarette. Retrospectively, Bayko concedes, the nuns did him a favor in excising a vice that would certainly have been detrimental to his pursuit of running. Nevertheless, Bayko recalls the incident with some mirth. “I remember walking to school on a freezing cold winter day. I would take a puff of my cigarette and then put my hand inside my pocket to keep warm. I finished the cigarette, went into school, and hung my coat on the rack in the hallway. A short while later, the entire hallway was filled with smoke. The nuns made all of us kids bring our coats to them for inspection. In my coat pocket was a smoldering cigarette butt.” The nuns took care of Bayko’s coat by dousing it in water, and they took care of Bayko by telephoning his mother, who in turn, reported Bayko’s transgression to his father. Bayko recalls performing his paper route after school that day, dreading his father’s confrontation. But after a supper of stone-cold silence and glares directed at Bayko, he escaped relatively unscathed, at least from any physical punishment. And he says that he quit smoking that day, “cold turkey.”
Looking fit today and with healthy lungs (perhaps some small thanks due to the nuns), Bayko is training to run the famed Athens Classic Marathon this October. The marathon follows the same route that Pheidippides, a Greek soldier, ran in 490BC from the town of Marathon to Athens (a distance of 42km, nonstop, as fast as he could run) to report an outnumbered Greek army’s victory over their vastly better equipped Persian foes. Said to be the first marathon in the world, the route is a holy grail for runners. This year commemorates the 2500th anniversary of that first race and its first solo marathoner. And it’s also the year that a Yankee runner from the South End of Newburyport will pound his own soles along that route, with every bit of his running soul.
Kathleen Downey is a contributing writer to Newburyport-Today if you are a “Townie” and would like to be interviewed by Kathleen, please let us know!
