Greg Meyer (born September 18, 1955) is best known for his accomplishments in distance running. Most notably, he is the last American male to win the Boston Marathon.

He is a 1973 graduate of Grand Rapids West Catholic High School and in 1977 with a degree in education and social studies from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. In 1986 he earned a master's in Education from Boston University.

Meyer was born in Grand Rapids, MI to parents Rita and Jay. He has one older sibling, Matthew Meyer. He met and married fellow runner Paula Lettis in 1980[1] while living in Boston and together they had three children, Nicholle (1981), Jacob (1983) and Daniel (1986)[2]. He divorced in 2005 while living in Dexter, MI. He resides near Rockford, MI, north of Grand Rapids and since 2008 has served as Associate Vice President for Institutional Advancement at Aquinas College. Previous to that Greg was employed from approximately 2000 through March 2007 by the University of Michigan as director of Major Gifts for the Greater Michigan Region[3] where he helped raise over $125 million for the University.

Joan Benoit Samuelson (born May 16, 1957) is an American marathon runner, who won gold at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the year that the women's marathon was introduced. As a result she was the first ever women's Olympic marathon champion. Benoit Samuelson still holds the fastest times for an American woman at the Chicago Marathon and the Olympic Marathon. Her time at the Boston Marathon was the fastest time by an American woman at that race for 28 years.

Born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, of French and Scandinavian ancestry,^{[citation needed]} Benoit took to long-distance running to help recover from a broken leg suffered while slaloming. At Bowdoin College she excelled in athletics. In 1977, after two years at Bowdoin, she accepted a running scholarship to North Carolina State, where she began concentrating solely on her running. She earned All-America honors at NC State in both 1977 and 1978, and in 1978 helped lead the Wolfpack to the Atlantic Coast Conference cross-country championship. After returning to Bowdoin to complete her degree, she entered the 1979 Boston Marathon as a relative unknown. She won the race, wearing a Boston Red Sox cap, in 2:35:15, knocking eight minutes off the competition record. She repeated that success with a victory again in 1983, that took more than two minutes off the world's best time, set by Grete Waitz in the London Marathon just the day before, despite having had surgery on her Achilles tendons two years earlier. Her Boston course record of 2:22:43, set in 1983, was not broken for another 11 years.

Ambrose ("Amby") Joel Burfoot (born August 19, 1946) is an American marathoner, whose peak competitive years came in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was the winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon. After retiring from competition, he became a running journalist and author. Burfoot was the top editor (editor-in-chief) at Runner’s World for many years and both writes for Runner’s World and serves as editor-at-large.

Amby Burfoot grew up in Groton, Connecticut, where he started running at Fitch Senior High School. His high school coach, John J. Kelley (The "Younger") was the 1957 Boston Marathon winner and two-time U.S. Olympic marathoner (1956 and 1960 Olympics,) and his influence led Burfoot to take up the marathon while still a collegian. In his senior year at Wesleyan University, where Burfoot was the roommate and teammate of Bill Rodgers, Burfoot won the Boston Marathon, but an injury caused by running a steeplechase race in a collegiate track meet later that spring prevented him from being fully prepared for that year's Olympic Trials marathon.