Tom Corbin, 1947–2024: A Coach’s Coach, and a Friend to All

By Gavin Kentch

Tom Corbin always called me “young man.”

“How are you, young man?” he would say, when we showed up at practice together. “How are you, young man?” he would say to Sam Flora, when Sam was well into his eighties. “How are you, young man?” he once asked Reno Deprey, in the gym for APU Masters strength session, at a moment when Reno could not have been a day under 88. Tom smirked. Reno smirked. Just two old men, opting for gainz over sarcopenia, celebrating what their bodies could still do.

This past weekend, Tom decided that his body could no longer do what he wanted it to, and that he feared what would happen to it as it continued to progress through treatment for terminal mantle cell lymphoma, with a side of cardiotoxicity and sepsis. He left a Perfectly Corbin-Esque Note To Facebook in Which… Nearly Every Word was Capitalized!!! (this is a compliment), then took his own life.

[You can read Tom’s note at the link below. I don’t know how strong a trigger warning I need for what is literally a suicide note, but keep that in mind before you decide to read it. Note is here. It is more uplifting than you may be fearing.]

No one who knew the man had anything but respect for this choice. Tom knew what his body could do, better than most of us ever will, and had asked more of it than most of us will ever ask of ours. He did not want to subject it to what came next, and to what he had seen happen to his father during the man’s own cancer treatment. Athletes know nothing if not how to take care of their bodies, and Tom made a choice to take care of his in the way that he wanted to. Withering away like his father “is what I have always feared most in life,” Tom wrote.

Tom Corbin was a born coach, and a natural storyteller. Raised by adopted parents in Gunnison and Crested Butte, he skied for the legendary Sven Wiik at hometown school Western State College in the 1960s. He trained his ass off. He was on the U.S. Ski Team for seven years, 1968 to 1975.

Tom eventually made his way north to Alaska. He had an offer to coach running and skiing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but turned it down to stay with his son in Anchorage. He won ski races and won running races and pioneered crazy mountain runs in an era when “sports nutrition” looked like putting some raisins in your pocket and maybe drinking out of a stream once every other hour. He had beautiful classic technique, which could still be made out even through the ravages of time and the scars of surgeries.

Tom didn’t want to talk about this. He wanted to talk about the people he knew, and the kids he had helped along the way. “Billy Spencer,” a man who is now 68 years old and whom I assume no one else still calls Billy, was one of his athletes. There were, literally, thousands more.

Tom knew everyone. I once attended the Alaska state xc meet with him at Bartlett High School. It was like trying to make your way to a restaurant table in Rome while hanging out with the Pope. Everyone knew Corb. Everyone had a Corb story. Everyone wanted to talk with him.

Tom was in his element. Not everyone gets to see the impact they have made on kids’ lives while they are still alive. Corb did, a thousandfold.

We typically view athletes through the lens of results, particularly their best ones. I am as guilty of that as anyone. So, to give you an incomplete measure of the man, here are some of Tom’s results: 3:36 at Crow Pass at age 41 (then a 3:37 at age 48 for good measure). A 1:57:23 at Lost Lake, aged 47. A scorching 3:11 at Equinox over two decades earlier, age 24. Ten times under an hour at Mount Marathon, including three times under 50 minutes, with a top mark of 48:50. This brief palmarès is limited to races with readily available online results, for a man born in 1947; if Tom told me that he had run a 1:13 half-marathon at age 23, or at age 43, I’d believe him. And he would have a clipping in his race scrapbook, carefully annotated, to back that up.

I did not know Tom Corbin in this era. I knew him in his era of athletic senescence, after literally dozens of surgeries and plates and artificial joints, after pain and altered movement patterns and everything that comes with that, not to mention increasingly frequent sessions of chemotherapy as the lymphoma progressed and his body started shutting down.

To say that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak is a truism, but it was also true. The man who once won races became stooped and slowed. While also coordinating email chains to find people to drive him down from the top of Potter Valley. So he could rollerski up a 1300-foot hill climb. In the rain/snow of October. Between chemo appointments. In his 70s.

Tom did not whine. He did not complain. He did attend every. single. practice.; no matter how early I would show up at some far-flung trailhead for the day’s session, Tom’s boxy Subaru Forester, license plate TCMTXC, would already be there.

Tom was surrounded by some of the fittest citizen racers in the country. We got faster. He got slower. He kept showing up. He kept doing the workout. He kept telling us that we were looking good. He kept asking us how we were doing, young man. (Women, of any age, got “kid” or “kiddo.” It was deeply respectful; Tom was a huge supporter of women in sport.)

I will go back to the gym next Monday for strength. I will have a question about the most minute detail of Alaska endurance sport from any point in the last 55 years. I will be sad that Tom Corbin is not there to answer it and to share his memories, and I will miss seeing him set up his Soviet-era portable fluid trainer, labeled, like all his things, with “CORB,” which none of us could ever master. But I will think of his love for movement, his devotion to skiing and to ski coaching, and his real, deep, lasting, palpable care for his athletes across the decades, and I will smile.

If anyone knows of a funeral fund or memorial fund that should be linked in here, please let me know: gavin (at) nordicinsights.news. Same email if you have any photos that should be added below; I would be glad to do so.

Some photos (click any image to enlarge):

More photos (click to enlarge):