This is part of a series of interviews that Cortland track and field/cross country runner Shannon Imbornoni '21 conducted in 2020 with former Cortland track and field and/or cross country individual national champions.
Interview Menu
Robert Fitts ’67
Robert “Bob” Fitts is a three-time NCAA individual champion, three-time All-SUNYAC and six-time NCAA All-American runner (four College Division and two University Division). He led the Red Dragons to two undefeated seasons in ’65 and ’66 and is the greatest male distance runner in SUNY Cortland history. Fitts won the NCAA College Division cross country Championship as a senior in 1966 and was invited to run in the NCAA University Division cross country Championships in 1965 and 1966, where he placed 9 nationally. In indoor track and field, Fitts won the state two-mile run as a junior and senior and as a junior, captured the outdoor NCAA College Division six-mile run championship. He also won the outdoor NCAA College Division three-mile championship as a senior and placed 5 in the same event at the NCAA University Division Championship that same year. He was inducted into the SUNYAC Cross Country Hall of Fame in 1964. In 1996, Fitts was inducted into the SUNY Cortland C-Club Hall of Fame. Additionally, Fitts won the Cortland cross country Red Letter Award in 1966. He also won the Cortland track and field Red Letter Award for indoor and outdoor for the 1966 to 1967 season. After graduation, Fitts went on and won four U.S.A. national championships and competed on several U.S. national teams in the early 1970's. The Mamaroneck native currently lives in Wisconsin with his wife where he is a retired Marquette University faculty member and a world-renowned research physiologist who recently served as principle investigator for a NASA project involving the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Some of the questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why did you choose Cortland?
This is kind of an embarrassing answer, but I was in the army before I came to Cortland. Out of high school, I did not feel I was ready for college and I wasn’t a real serious student. My brother suggested I should go into the army and get it over with since he had been drafted into the Korean War. It was great advice because I spent three years in the army and I was in Germany right up until the middle of August [before going to school] – I applied to numerous universities from Germany and I didn’t get into any of them. So, my mother called Cortland and said ‘how could you reject my son when you haven’t even interviewed him?’ To that they said they had a couple of openings in chemistry, so he can come up and interview. When I got home [from Germany], I went to Cortland and it turned out that the College Board test that they give, I only did well in chemistry. When they accepted me, they accepted me in the program, “passport to college’, which meant I was on academic probation and wasn’t able to run my freshman year. I could only workout as a freshman, so I started running as a sophomore. I only went to Cortland because they were the only school to accept me.
What do you remember about your national title season(s)?
I won three titles while at Cortland; one in cross country and two in track. The cross country one, I want to talk about that one because we had another runner on the team that was a sub-four minute miler. He was good at cross country, but the best in the mile. We had another guy that was never beaten by anyone except the four-minute miler and myself. We ran at duel meets, so if your team went one two three, you won. We went one two three at every meet and went unbeaten. Actually, those two fellas are still my friends today. What I remember the most is the camaraderie of the team. Also, we had a new coach who went on to be a very famous exercise physiologist, Dave Costill, who spent two years at Cortland for my sophomore and junior year. He did not know anything about running, but he was a world-class swimmer. He knew about training for an endurance sport, but he had to learn how to translate it to cross country. He was a great teacher, researcher and coach, in the point of view of team unity. I also remember the national championship race because I won the race by less than two seconds. The guy I beat, I also beat in my other two national championships by less than two seconds. So I beat him three times, each by less than two seconds. He went on to win the Boston Marathon in 1968. It was an interesting rivalry that we developed. It’s the people that you meet and the camaraderie you develop that is most memorable and most important.
What was winning your first title like?
My first title was on the track in the six-mile race. It was a very close race and I beat the guy by less than two seconds and he beat the next guy by less than a second. It was a very tight and competitive race. I also remember it being really hot that day, so the times were a little slower. I remember my cross country race the most though. It was held on a golf course in the suburbs of Chicago. Back then, there weren’t three divisions; they had the University Division and the College Division. So a lot of schools that are DI and DII now were in this College race. Side note, as the winner of the College race, I was able to race in the University race, but the College race was actually more competitive and crowded then the University race. So my goal for the race [College Division] was to get out fast and not let anyone get in front of me. I had run the week before in the New York state meet at Alfred College. They had the race on the road and I may have run my best cross country race ever. I ran the first mile under 4:30 and there was no one around after that. That race set me up for the College nationals and then the week later, the University nationals. It’s hard to run three big races in a row and I would have had to be in the best shape to win as the guy that won was an international runner and the guy who came in second was an Olympian.
What is your favorite memory of Cortland?
Outside of running, I switched my major to physical education. I was still interested in chemistry so I minored in it, but I thought at the time I might want to teach physical education. Turns out, when I started student teaching, I realized I didn’t want to teach kids. I was placed in seventh grade and it was like ‘really?’ I immediately started applying to graduate school because I knew that teaching kids was not for me. I wanted to teach at the University level and do research. What convinced me of that was, I took this course from Dave Costill [my coach] in exercise physiology and he was a terrific teacher and really got me interested in it. I went and got a masters’ in physiology at the University of Buffalo and a Ph.D, in physiology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I then did a postdoctoral and I ended up at Marquette University where I taught and did research for the last 40 years. So, the greatest memory of Cortland was taking classes with Costill, which triggered my career. Actually, over the years we did a lot of work together. He and I collaborated on research for NASA. I spent about 30 years working with NASA, mostly on [muscle] wasting in space and trying to get countermeasures to prevent it. He was my college and co-investigator on those projects, so we stayed together all those years.
What have you taken from being a part of the team?
Like I’ve said, the camaraderie, the support of others and putting others first. Here’s an example. This sub-four minute miler was a very good cross country runner, but sometimes he would get discouraged. He was very good at cross country, but not as good as he was in the mile. My junior year, I was beating him almost every single race and my coach suggested to run together and perk him up to keep him interested in cross country because he really liked track and field. So I did. We would run along and finish together instead of me beating him. It didn’t matter either because we were always one two three anyway. So, learning how to bring others along and help others is an important lesson. Cross country teaches you to put out an effort and to do your very best. Sometimes you’re not feeling good and you have have to push yourself to go the extra mile. I think that drive to succeed carries over into life. I frequently tell my students, that half of your road to success is your effort. You want to do something in life that you like. I’ve never though of it as going to work and that’s why I kept doing it for so long. The only reason I retired from teaching was because I did not want to have to prepare for every single day anymore.
What are you doing now?
I’ve taught at Marquette University for 40 years and I have four kids and nine grandkids. A lot of what my wife and I do now is support the family. I have two kids that live right outside of Chicago and they have both have two kids, so four grandkids live relatively close. We go down and visit them and help them out a lot. Grandkids are a big part of it. Right as I was retiring, I went to this seminar on retirement and they said there are three phases to retirement: the go-go phase, the slow-go phase and the no-go phase. They said you want to put most of your money in the first two because in the no-go phase, they are just going to take your money. So we’ve been living by that principle and my wife and I have been taking two to three big trips a year. A couple of years ago, we did a tour of Italy. Thankfully, we’ve done a lot of traveling before COVID hit. We’ve been up through the Canadian Rockies, Alaska and Glacier Bay. This past summer, we went to Croatia and then we had our 50-wedding anniversary this past January, so we took the entire family to Costa Rica to celebrate. I’m not entirely retired though. I have an NIH [National Institute of Health] grant; I’ve moved away from NASA because we pretty much solved the issue; we reduced muscle wasting from about 50 percent down to 10 percent. There are still issues that NASA has, but they aren’t related to muscle loss. Now I’m working on two projects. One is developing better exercise training techniques to protect muscle loss in older adults. We just finished a five-year project and I’m about to start another one. I also have another grant where I am working on heart disease and trying to find better techniques to prevent it through exercise. I work three days a week, so that takes up a lot of my time. I don’t consider it work because I love it. I share my research time with my family, which is the most important thing to me.
Do you have any advice for Cortland XC/TF athletes now?
Have fun. The main thing you want to do is have fun and develop friendships. Pick a sport that you like and enjoy it because it’s a really special time in your life to have this camaraderie with your peers. Don’t get too intense about it— of course train, but don’t get obsessed. Work hard and enjoy it.
