Miles of Memories

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from March 2004. It was submitted to Runner’s World but went unpublished there.)

Running starts with a mile. In the metrically challenged U.S., anyway, the mile is the key word in a runner’s vocabulary and the basic unit of running mathematics.

The first question you hear when telling someone that you run is likely to be, “What’s your best mile time?” (Coming a close second is, “Have you run a marathon?”)

We Americans run our races in meters and kilometers. But we insist on taking mile splits and quoting mile paces. We train by mileage, not kilometer-age.

Students in my college running classes start by learning the meaning of the mile. They run a timed mile the first week, not as a race but to draw their fitness baseline. Then they learn to apply the pace-per-mile standard to runs of multiple miles.

Running started for me with a single mile. That one now holds my oldest memories, which I fondly relive in this Year of the Mile.

In 2004 we honor Roger Bannister for the gift he gave the sport 50 years ago. I salute him for what he gave me in May 1954 by inspiring my first timed mile.

After hearing from my track-fan father about Bannister breaking the four-minute barrier, I set out to run half his speed, which put my target at eight minutes. That wasn’t slow for a 10-year-old with no training as a runner.

Our little Iowa town didn’t have a proper track. Our home block measured (by counting steps) about a quarter-mile, with an uphill on one side and a downhill on another. This became my “track.”

Four pals paced me, running a lap apiece. Without asking permission, I’d taken my dad’s precious stopwatch for the timing.

The first result: a 7:23 mile. The later result: extreme soreness from the waist down, including sharp pains in the lower legs that I’d later learn to call shin splints.

This painful “race” shelved my mile ambitions for several years but didn’t cure my fascination with the event. I came of age as a miler in the Golden Age of Miling.

Don Bowden ran the first sub-four by an American in my first year as a high school miler. Herb Elliott completed his unbeaten career in the mile in my last year of high school.

Jim Beatty ran the first sub-four indoors during my first year of college. Jim Ryun broke the high school four-minute barrier the year I broke 4:20.

Four minutes or faster wasn’t in these legs and lungs. But improvement had come steadily and added up nicely in the 10 years between the first mile time and the final PR as a 20-year-old.

PRs eventually become permanent, but times keep changing. What goes down comes back up if we run long enough.

Fifty years after that first timed mile, I’m completing an almost-perfect circle. My time has gradually gone back to where it had started. What better way to celebrate the half-century, then, than by running another timed mile the first week in May?

Jeff Galloway gave me this idea. At 18 Jeff ran his first marathon, a 2:56 in his hometown of Atlanta. Forty years later he tried to match his original time in the Thanksgiving Day race.

The 2:56 escaped him last fall, but this was no failure. Not many runners can say they’re still active 40 years after their debut at any distance.

I’ll celebrate at a much shorter distance than my friend Jeff did. My dream run would be a return to Coin, Iowa, there to circle the same block as in 1954.

But this can’t happen at anniversary time. I’ll run instead in my current hometown of Eugene, Oregon – not at famously fast Hayward Field but four laps on a gravel road, with 90-degree turns and some ups and downs.

I won’t train for mile speed this time because there was none of that training the first time. I won’t take a formal warmup for the same reason.

The target won’t be the original mile time of 7:23, which seems faster to me now than in any year since 1954. The numbers on a watch don’t count for much anymore.

The numbers that matter are those on the calendar. In this anniversary mile the reward will be to glimpse again the little kid who first ran around the block 50 years ago. 

UPDATE FROM 2015

I did return to my old hometown in the first week of May 2004, but not for the reason described above. It was for my mother’s funeral. A run around the block, with the Methodist Church marking its start/finish line, wouldn’t have been right that day. So I just stood outside the church and let memory do the running.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Winners Never Quit

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from January 2004. It was submitted to Runner’s World but never published there.)

A big lesson to learn early about running is how to win at it. Without this lesson the others never get learned. People who think of themselves as “losers” don’t last long as runners.

I was lucky to last beyond the second minute of my first race day. Everything I do now in this sport is a thank-you to my first high school coach, Dean Roe, who spoke just the right words at the critical moment.

Running my first mile race, I thought the only way to win was to stick with the leaders. Their pace chewed me up and spit me off the track after little more than a lap.

My coach rushed up to ask what was wrong, and I told him with my pained look that distance running wasn’t for me. He patted me on the back and said, “You owe me one.”

He didn’t rub my nose in locker-room slogan of that era – “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.” He just made me promise to run another mile and not to quit it this time.

The way to finish, the coach said, was to run my own pace instead of someone else’s. I got through the second race, reaching the first level of winning by finishing.

The aim then became to run the distance faster. I couldn’t control who else was in a race and how they ran it, but I could find ways to improve my time. Improving is a higher level of winning.

Ironically, while not trying focusing on finishing first I moved steadily in that direction. While watching the watch, the better placings took care of themselves. I became a state-meet qualifier as a freshman, then in succeeding years a placer, winner and record-setter there.

Time-improvement ended in my 20s, but the winning never has. That’s because I refused to let the old times, the permanent PRs, haunt me.

Instead I adopted a line spoken by the grandest old man of our sport, Johnny Kelley, who in the 1930s and 1940s was a two-time Boston Marathon winner and three-time Olympian. “I don’t judge my success by what I once did,” he said much later, “but by what I keep doing.”

Kelley continued to run into his 90s. He achieved the highest level of winning, which is continuing long after the fastest times are run and the biggest prizes are won. That kind of winning is the best because it lasts the longest.

“Winners never quit” is true in ways that locker-room sloganeers never imagined. Runners who feel like they’re still winning don’t ever want to stop.

I spent my first years of running learning and practicing to win this way. I spend the later years teaching and preaching the idea that winning has little to do with position in the pack. Some of the biggest winners finish nearer to the back than the front.

This message has never been more important to hear. Today’s runners find ourselves caught between two extreme views of winning. Each is equally misleading.

Flooding our eyes and ears are the words and images from the sports media that tell us, “There’s only one winner, and second place is the first loser.”

We see silver medalists sobbing in despair. If all but one of us is doomed to lose, why bother trying against such impossible odds?

The opposite view, the one we hear at mass-running events, is that “everyone’s a winner.” If this were true, all we’d have to do to win would be to show up. If winning were guaranteed to all of us, all the time, where’s the feeling of triumph?

The truth is, winning is never automatic. Everyone CAN win but not without making the effort, and risking defeat, to earn a victory.

We all lose sometimes, and this is good and necessary. Getting past the occasional losses sweetens the victories.

Most of the runners I now see each day are new to the sport. I try to play same role with them that my first coach, Dean Roe, did with me: not letting them drop out in defeat when they’re just getting started.

You never know who might catch fire as a runner and burn for a long time. If I did, anyone can.

UPDATE FROM 2015

Johnny Kelley died, at age 97, later in the year this column was first published. I remember best, and try to live, that adage of his about lasting success. He succeeded by running for almost 50 more years after his last Boston victory.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

No Mile Wasted

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 2003.)

Ask me about my normal daily run, and the answer won’t impress you. Tell me you run longer and faster, and I’ll agree; most runners do.

But try to tell me that my runs lack “quality” or, worse, are “junk miles,” and you’ll get an argument. Here it comes.

For as long as I’ve been running easily and writing its praises, I’ve heard how these runs waste time and effort. That was the knock on my first book, Long Slow Distance, published in 1969.

Eventually I retired the term LSD. It was misleading because it invited runners to stack up the highest possible mileage at the slowest possible pace.

Too much distance can do as much damage as too much speed. I substituted the less catchy but more accurate words such as “gentle” and “relaxed” running.

My shift to a slower gear wasn’t meant to improve my racing but to escape the ravages of excessive speed training. The five other runners featured in that book did the same. To our surprise, all of us improved our race times anyway.

Our improvement didn’t come from any inherent magic in slower running but because this was easier running. It let us freshen up between hard efforts instead of staying forever tired.

I was slow to see that the slower running was less a training system than a recovery system. I raced better by staying healthier and happier, not by training harder.

One way to judge a running program’s success is by the racing results it confers. When runners aim for the biggest racing payoffs, no training is too hard and no sacrifice too great. But another way to judge a program’s value is to ask yourself: would I still run this way even if there were no racing payoff?

The runners from the LSD book didn’t keep racing better indefinitely; no one does. But we kept running, and keep doing it, in the same relaxed way as before.

We can view our runs as either vocational or recreational, as a job or a hobby, as work or play. “Serious” training falls on the left side of those word-pairings. My running leans to the right.

I’ve spent a running/writing lifetime trying not to use certain words, because how we describe an activity shapes our view of it. One such word is “work.” Another is its cousin, “workout.”

Working implies doing something because you must, while not welcoming the job. It suggests putting up with a distasteful task to earn an eventual reward.

But what if that payday never came, or if it was smaller than expected? Would you feel that all your time and effort had gone to waste?

Running isn’t my second job. No one pays me or forces me to practice this hobby. It’s my choice, and I choose to find my rewards in as many days’ runs as possible.

To me, “junk miles” are those run reluctantly today, only as an investment in a better tomorrow. This feels like counting the hours until quitting time, the days until the weekend, the weeks until vacation, the years until retirement. Always working toward a distant finish line may mean missing the fun in being here now.

Running can give its rewards instantly and regularly. Ask me about my runs, and I’ll tell you they’re nothing special – except in the quiet ways that all runs are special. Any mile anyone wants to run, and feels happy for having taken, is never wasted.

UPDATE FROM 2015

This would become my last column for Runner’s World, though I didn’t know it at the time of its writing in late 2003. It appeared without comment from the editors that I was leaving after 33 years in various roles with the magazine. I see now that the column itself stands as a pretty good signoff.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Feeling Your Pain

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from November 2003.)

Pain is on my mind today for two reasons. First, I’m dealing with a pain in the butt that comes to visit every couple of years.

It’s not a person but an injury, a muscle tear where the glutei attach to the upper hip. It isn’t a running injury, though it stopped my runs for a few days.

The other reason I’m thinking about pain is that a student-reporter from the University of Missouri asked about it. “I’m writing a story about the pain runners go through both in really hard workouts and in races,” said James Carlson. “I’m trying to delve into why runners ignore the body’s most basic cautionary response, pain, and the ways they go about doing it.”

He wanted to know my thoughts on the “pain barrier.” What allows some runners to punch through it better than others?

I began by telling him about the butt injury, defining it as a “bad pain.” Not bad as in severe, but bad in contrast to the good pain of running. The bad one keeps you from pushing for the good one.

Good pain is what we experience normally in some runs. It’s the discomfort of fatigue or mild soreness that follows a race or hard training session.

These feelings are temporary and not entirely unpleasant. This type of pain reminds us that we’ve done as well as we could, and that we’re allowed to feel a little bit heroic.

The pain barrier exists, but I see it less as a wall to be crashed than as a line to be pushed. It tells us how hard we can safely run, how far we can safely bend without breaking. Break through that barrier too far or too often, and bad pains are sure to follow.

I don’t think runners truly break through the pain barrier – not for long, anyway. We simply learn to work with it.

The first way of working with pain is recognizing what the auto racers call a “red-line pace.” In our hard training and racing, this line separates good pains from bad pains, discomfort from destruction. Ambitious and successful runners learn to nudge that line without going over.

The second way of dealing with the pain barrier is to move it. It’s not like a steeplechase hurdle, in the same place for all runners, all the time.

Training pushes the red-line to a higher level. What might be a destructive effort early in training becomes mere discomfort later on, and what once was uncomfortable becomes easy.

I see all types of runners, from the fastest to the slowest. I don’t see the top ones, as a group, enduring a great deal more pain than the back-of-the-packers. What the front-runners have are the talent and training to run as fast as they can at twice the pace of the little-talented and lightly trained.

Kenny Moore was between his two Olympics and only beginning to earn his living as a writer when he penned a 1970 article about runners and pain. It still makes more sense than anything else I’ve read on the subject.

“Good distance runners are reputed to possess either great resistance or little sensitivity to pain,” Moore wrote. “I have heard coaches state flatly that if an athlete doesn’t have a high ‘pain threshold,’ he may as well forget about running well. Yet I doubt whether runners as a group are any more brave when it comes to sitting in dentist chairs or receiving tetanus boosters than the general populace.”

Moore told of participating in a study to measure the effects of altitude training. This involved running to exhaustion and then giving blood samples.

He noted, “It seemed strange to our doctors that while we showed no reluctance to run ourselves into unconsciousness at the end of a hard workout (quite easy to do at 7500 feet), the mention of another session with the needles set us all to whining like tormented alley cats. The explanation, of course, is that we were used to our kind of pain.

“Over the years we had developed a familiarity with our bodies that let us know how much of the discomfort of extreme fatigue we could stand. Part of a runner’s training consists of pushing back the limits of his mind. But the needle pain was relatively new and exposed our ‘innate toughness’ for what it was – a learned specialty.”

UPDATE FROM 2015

Kenny Moore, now into his 70s, has since become well acquainted with bad pains. His result from a chronic medical condition that affects his motor skills (and has ended his running), while leaving his marvelous writing skills intact. He still contributes occasionally to Sports Illustrated and Runner’s World.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]