His Olympic success, along with the achievements of other American runners, is credited with igniting the running boom in the United States during the 1970s.

[8] In the October 2011 issue of Runner's World, an article by John Brant detailed the traumatic household life Frank and his siblings suffered at the hands of his extremely abusive father and the buckle end of his belt.

[9] Shorter first achieved distinction by winning the 1969 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) six mile run title during his senior year at Yale.

[10] Bacheler was regarded as America's best distance runner, having qualified for the finals of the 5,000-meter race at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

[11] The FTC's core nucleus of Shorter, Bacheler and Jeff Galloway qualified for the 1972 Olympics and their success made Gainesville the Mecca of distance running on the East Coast in the early 1970s.

[13] At the Munich Games—which coincidentally is Shorter's place of birth— he finished fifth in the 10,000-meter final, breaking the American record for the event that he had established in his qualifying heat.

This ultimate achievement was marred by an imposter, West German student Norbert Sudhaus,[14] who ran into Olympic Stadium ahead of Shorter.

[16] Cierpinski was later implicated as a part of the state-sponsored doping program by East German track and field research files uncovered by Werner Franke at the Stasi headquarters in Leipzig in the late 1990s.

The annual 10k race is a popular Memorial Day event, which culminates with a tribute to U.S. Armed Forces at Folsom Field at the University of Colorado.