After four decades, Greater Long Island Running Club president steps down

Where is Mike Polansky?

"He's around somewhere," says a fleece-jacketed volunteer standing by the entrance to Stillwell Woods Park in Syosset where runners are beginning to fill the parking lot for Rob's Run 5k on a Sunday afternoon.

"I saw him over by registration," says the runner, wearing the bright red of the Selden Hills Warriors, a group participating in this event, the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving.

Registration is around the corner, off South Woods Road. But in the gymnasium at the Center for Developmental Disabilities, it seems that the peripatetic Polansky has already come and gone.

"He's over by the start," Mindy Davidson says, sitting behind a table where race volunteers are checking in. She should know — as a vice president and coordinator of volunteers, Mindy has long been Polansky's right-hand in the Greater Long Island Running Club.

We finally catch up with Polansky near the starting and finishing area of Stillwell Woods’ soccer fields, although we practically have to start running to do it. There he is, walking briskly, despite the noticeable limp that he's had since back surgery in 2013.

As usual, he's got his Canon camera with him, ready to snap photos of the many GLIRC members participating in this cross-country race, held in memory of a member of the running club, Rob Lauterborn, who died in 1992.

As usual, he's on the move; Polansky himself has run 50 marathons since 1978.

As usual, he's leading the way, if not as a runner (even in his younger days, Polansky was a proud "back of the pack" competitor), certainly as the person who transformed an informal group of guys running laps around the track at Plainview High School into the largest running organization on Long Island.

30 events a year

Founded in 1978 as the Plainview-Old Bethpage Road Runners Club, the size and scope of the group has exploded into the organization that goes by the acronym GLIRC and that Polansky has headed for almost 43 years.

During that time, it has also grown from a club of a couple of dozen, mostly middle-aged white runners into a geographically and ethnically diverse organization numbering 3,500 members. It stages 30 running events a year, ranging from 5k (3.1-mile) races like Rob's Run, to a national championship 50k (31 miles) in Caumsett State Historic Park Preserve. Through races that benefit charitable causes, the club was able to donate $400,000 to nonprofit organizations on Long Island in 2019, the last full year of events.

"We were very innovative," Polansky says proudly, pointing to the fact that the group held the first women-only race on Long Island. It was a prescient move that anticipated a huge surge in female participation in road running in general: About half of GLIRC's membership is now female.

"Mike was instrumental in unifying the running community on Long Island," says Davidson, a vice president of the organization.

"Without Mike, running on Long Island would never have been the same," said longtime GLIRC member and race director Bob Sherman. "Mike's the man."

And now — he's stepping down. At age 81 and after four decades at the helm of the not-for-profit organization, Polansky will retire from this volunteer job — one that he was able to devote full time to since the early 1990s, when he retired from his first career as general counsel at Grumman Corp.

The very mention of the aerospace giant sparks a sense of bittersweet nostalgia.

"I loved working with Grumman," he says wistfully. "I didn't want to retire."

Polansky had landed at the company in the late 1960s with impressive credentials. A native of Brooklyn, he attended James Madison High School (around the same time, he points out, as Bernie Sanders). He graduated from Cornell University in 1961 and Harvard Law School in 1964. His paper chase led him first to a job with the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. In 1969, he and his wife, Susan, moved out to Plainview when Mike took a job in the legal department at Grumman (Sue went on to a career as a preeminent track and field official; she has worked at national and international competitions, including the Olympics. The couple have two grown children and five grandchildren).

10k was the catalyst

In the late 1970s, Polansky, like a lot of professional white-collar males of his generation caught up in the running boom of the time, ran his first marathon in 1978 in New Jersey. He finished last — in four hours, three minutes, which, he points out, in today's less competitive running environment (where the emphasis is more on participation and fitness), would be considered a decent performance.

At first, he said, "the club was basically a group of guys running around the track. We used to have meetings in the high school." In 1979, when the first club president left after a year, Polansky took over. Soon after, the fledgling group organized its first 10k (6.2-mile) race in Plainview, an event that morphed into the Aspire 10k, still held every spring. "That was the catalyst," he said.

Alan End, who joined the group in the fall of 1980, recalls being impressed with Polansky's energy and focus on expanding the young club and its events.

"I was intrigued enough to begin to realize that there was something here that could be big, but I couldn't have imagined it as big as it would become," recalled End, who would become the longtime director for the club's popular Ocean to Sound Relay (50 miles from Jones Beach to Oyster Bay).

After Polansky retired from Grumman, he was able to focus full-time on the club. In 1998, the group moved into its current headquarters on Dupont Street in Plainview.

"It became a lot easier for us to do things at that point," he said. "We had a warehouse, an office, a staff. It changed the whole outlook in the club." Indeed, the club expanded its scope and reach — its new name, adopted that same year, reflected the club's expanding geographical boundaries. Later, GLRIC added such races as the Fred von der Heydt Memorial 6 Hour 60th Birthday Run (originally held to celebrate Polansky's 60th birthday, it now spotlights birthdays of all club members) and the Sayville Running Co. 10 Mile Run to the Blue Point Brewery. Held in the runner-unfriendly month of January, the 2022 brewery run has nonetheless sold out its 1,500 slots — in just 40 minutes allotted over two days.

While he had volunteer race directors organizing these events, Polansky was the man in charge. For a long time.

"His tenure is certainly among the longest of any club leader and his accomplishments are laudable to say the least," said former Road Runners Clubs of America president Jeff Darman, a Kennett Square, Pennsylvania-based event marketing consultant. "The personal sacrifices he has made, no doubt in terms of time and the stress these roles create, makes his tenure even more impressive."

Big shoes to fill

Although he has faced stress and conflicts, when asked if there was anything different he would have done during his tenure, Polansky doesn't hesitate: "Absolutely nothing." For that, and GLIRC's success, he gives much of the credit to the people around him — who now number seven paid staff as well as hundreds of volunteers.

"I'm leaving behind a good team," he said.

At 37, Jossi Fritz-Mauer, the new president, is 44 years younger than Polansky. The Old Bethpage resident is also a relative newcomer to Long Island — having moved here from Philadelphia with his wife in 2016 — and unlike the retiring president, he was an outstanding collegiate runner at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He met Polansky, like many runners do — he saw the GLIRC president at races snapping photos of members for the club's monthly publication, Footnotes. When Polansky wrote an editorial for the publication urging new and younger members to get more involved, Fritz-Mauer said, "I felt like he was speaking directly to me."

Fritz-Mauer joined the club's board of trustees, and earlier this year found himself being sounded out by Polansky as a potential successor. "My initial reaction was 'there is no replacing Mike Polansky,' " Fritz-Mauer said with a chuckle. "His shoes are as big as they come. This is someone who cofounded the club, has donated countless hours. I had to sit with that for a while."

But there is no sitting for long when it comes to Polansky. With his encouragement, Fritz-Mauer agreed to take the role. And so, on Jan. 1, the Greater Long Island Running Club will have its first new president since Jimmy Carter was in the White House.

Polansky says he will devote his time to a number of pursuits, including possibly, local politics (he has been active in the local Democratic Party over the years). But as he snapped pictures of runners finishing at Rob's Run, he paused to assert what his new role would be in the club. The same one he began with, many years ago.

"I'm going to be out there running a lot more of these races," he says.

So that's where you'll find Mike Polansky.