Significant Others

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from when the book’s editing began in early 2015.)

INTRODUCTION. Going outside to run wasn’t a big social activity for high school boys in the Midwest winters of the mid-20^th century. I started running alone then by necessity, because no one else in my town would have considered it. Now, when a runner need go solo only by choice, this remains my preference.

I’m a loner runner but never lonely. From my start in the 1950s, I sought support from people near and distant, well and little known. My first coach, Dean Roe, let me make my own mistakes then picked me up when I fell. My teammates let me go my own odd ways while still welcoming me onto their team.

Back then, living on the outer fringes of the sport, I almost never saw a big-name athlete or coach. But they came to my mailbox in small-town Iowa by way of the magazines Track & Field News and Long Distance Log, and books by Franz Stampfl from Australia by way of Austria, by Arthur Newton from South African and England, and by Fred Wilt from the U.S. Midwest. People I hadn’t yet met reached across time and space to teach me how to run, and why.

These writings also told me I wasn’t alone. Other runners also were out training and racing – often alone too but never in isolation. Our publications linked us.

The runners who wrote and were written about didn’t know me then, but they became my extended family of sorts. They encouraged me, and I supported them in return. We were all in this sport together.

Later my career took me to the very center of the sport, where I ran the many of the races that verified the boom in running. While working for the main magazine that reported and spurred this growth, I talked directly with the people igniting the explosion.

Later still I backed away from running’s center, to a quieter place for doing my writing. Here in a home office (known as my “cave”) I still work alone by necessity because this is the only way I know how to write, in solitary confinement and not in a committee meeting room.

I spend much of each day alone, but I’m not reclusive. Runners wouldn’t allow it even if I leaned that way, which I don’t. My happiest days each week are those spent teaching running classes at the local university and coaching a marathon/half training team.

I talk often and at length with running friends. Some visit in person, but most cross long distances – formerly by phone calls and letters, and now through emails and Facebook. I know many others only through their published writings, and visit a growing number of old friends only in memory.

My files bulge with people stories written for my journal, newsletter and magazine column. Until now, though, I’ve had little chance to preserve these stories between book covers.

Of more than two dozen books, only one has dealt with a person (as opposed to running practices and personal experiences). The exception is Did I Win?, a biography of George Sheehan. I would call it my favorite of all I’ve written, except that it’s really George’s own book that I transcribed for him after his passing.

George liked to say when he borrowed lines from other great thinkers, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.” My take is that we run beside and behind these people. They set our pace, leading us to places we couldn’t have gone by ourselves.

People stories have always been my favorite type to read. They give life to the times and techniques. They inspire as well as inform.

These stories still do all of that for me, even after reading them for more than half a century. The gap in my book writing, now about to be closed, was not giving proper credit and enough thanks to the people who are with me on every mile run and every line typed. I call them my pacesetters in this book with that same name.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Pacesetters follows a path set by its immediate predecessor, See How We Run. The two books are alike in source and format, but different in content. Both draw on stories originally published in my newsletter Running Commentary during its 25-year lifespan, from the early 1980s to the late 2000s.

As with the first book, I select pieces here that stand up well to the passage of years. I publish them in the original wording (not an edited version that might have run later in magazines and books). Again I add an update to each piece.

While the earlier book ranged widely in subject matter, this new one narrows its focus to the people of running. Talent and fame are not required for inclusion here.

Though some runners qualify on both counts, many are little known to you but important to me for reasons other than records or winnings. The main qualification for selection is how much their stories moved me at the time and how well I recall them now.

[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 two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.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, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

These Days

(This piece is for my book titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this final one from December 2011.)

Sometime between claiming my first Social Security check at 62 and signing on with Medicare at 65, I heard an offhand comment by a fellow writer from the same age-group. Rich Benyo, my editor at Marathon & Beyond magazine, was into his own multi-volume memoirs, and he urged me to get going on mine.

“Our age is the best time to write memoirs,” Rich said. “We’re old enough to have had the experiences, but still young enough to remember what they were.”

My second big push was a cancer diagnosis. Doctors found this disease early and treated it well, but the episode still left me thinking: better get going on this book now, when the successful treatment has renewed my appreciation for the life I’ve led.

Writing on this memoir began in 2008, shortly after hearing the three chilling words: “you have cancer.” I wrote and wrote and wrote that year, and only took the story as far as 1967. This became the book titled Starting Lines, covering my growing-up years in the Midwest.

In 2009, after completing nine weeks of daily radiation, I wrote and wrote some more. This narrative of my peak years as a long-distance racer and journalist living in California ran its course in 1981. Book two is titled Going Far.

Writing the third book took most of 2010. It tells of settling down to the post-peak years in Oregon, my longest-time home state. It’s titled Home Runs.

The processing and polishing of this memoir series took three years. But in a sense I’ve been writing this story almost as long as I’ve lived it. Since 1959, I have been a journalist in the truest sense: one whose writing all starts on a daily journal page.

My first and most enduring literary hero was John Steinbeck. He taught me to read and inspired me to write. The first non-sports book I ever read for pleasure, without a teacher’s grade hanging over me, was Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The best writing instructions I’ve ever seen were in his Journal of a Novel, which solidified my habit of journal-keeping.

Much later I left fulltime magazine work and lived for three years in Monterey County, California – Steinbeck’s youthful home. I hoped that his ghost would guide me to success as an author. I wrote the books, many of them, mostly how-to texts for runners like me. Had Steinbeck lived long enough, he would have opened none of these books.

During the Monterey years I wrote a novel that never found a publisher. One rejection letter read, “This is obviously an autobiography thinly disguised as fiction. You should admit it’s your own story, rework it that way and resubmit it later.”

Good advice, but I took my sweet time following it. I needed another 30 years of writing and reflecting before these memoirs could take their current shape.

Fittingly John Steinbeck influenced the format of the three books. In one of his minor novels, Cannery Row’s sequel called Sweet Thursday, he wrote lines that stayed with me: “Looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas when it happened it was one day hooked on the tail of another. There were prodigies and portents, but you never notice such things until afterward.”

I’ve known days like this, and I revisit dozens of them here. Each chapter of each memoir opens with a journal-like entry from one of my big days, then I append an instant epilogue that tells where the events led. New-era-openers abound in every life. I’ve been lucky enough to keep a written record of mine.

UPDATE FROM 2015

By this writing, the newsletter Running Commentary had ended, as had my fresh contributions to magazines. I’d just finished the memoir series described here.

This week’s piece concludes the serializing of See How We Run. The follow-up book will be the same in source and format, different in content.

It will draw again on stories originally published in the newsletter. But Pacesetters will focus on the people of running, whose information and inspiration led me places I couldn’t have gone alone.

[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 two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.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, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Running Beyond the Boom

(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 June 2007; continued from last week’s blog.)

Hindsight is always clearer than foresight. Which is to say, it’s easier to report a trend than to predict one.

In preceding chapters you’ve read one reporter’s views on how much running grew in the 1970s, and why. Here are my confessions of how badly I underestimated running’s growth and change, along with forecasts on where we might go next.

Take the Boston Marathon as one example of surprising change. I first ran there in 1967 and thought the field might be the biggest I’d ever see. Seven hundred of us started. By 1977, despite qualifying times designed to limit entries, the number there is 10 times larger.

The time standards would go even higher as Boston struggled to control its size. Meanwhile other races would welcome all the runners they can get – at first, anyway. Fred Lebow’s New York City Marathon would overtake Boston in size in 1977.

New York would soon match Boston in prestige, but as a different style of race. There would never be another Boston.

In 1967, I thought that ancient marathoner Johnny Kelley might be the oldest runner I’d ever meet. He was 59. Kelley still ran Boston in 1977, and others his age were there with him.

This wasn’t a young-man’s game anymore. The median age was climbing, along with the quality of some runners. Jack Foster was their hero, an Olympian after turning 40 and the world record-holder for masters marathoners.

Someday someone this old would win a major marathon outright. Maybe he – or she – hadn’t yet started running today, as Foster hadn’t at 35.

Two women ran the 1967 Boston, one with a race number that her gender wasn’t yet welcome to wear. While I applauded what Kathrine Switzer did, I thought then she might have innocently set back women’s running by embarrassing certain officials.

Just the opposite happened. That monumental run-in inspired other women to run marathons. So many now did that the biggest prize of all, an Olympic Marathon of their own, would inevitably be theirs before long.

I thought in 1967 that American marathoners couldn’t compete with the best of the rest of the world. U.S. men had won at Boston just once since World War II. Fortunes then changed. Between 1972 and 1977, three of the winning men were Americans, along five of the six women’s winners.

Plus, of course, this country sent Frank Shorter to his golden run at the 1972 Olympics. With Shorter still in his prime, Bill Rodgers yet to peak, Americans would keep winning – at least until East Africans turned to the marathon en masse. They hadn’t yet done much of that after Ethiopians won three straight Olympic titles in the 1960s.

I once thought that long-distance running would always be officially amateur as the stodgy AAU blocked any cash flow? By 1977 the best runners were slipped more cash than ever before, and therefore had more time to train.

Bill Rodgers said then, “I’ll never be beaten by someone who works 40 hours a week.” Rodgers ran for the quasi-professional Greater Boston Track Club, and other top runners grouped up at well-supported Athletics West.

Races such as Peachtree in Atlanta and Bloomsday in Spokane added elite fields that didn’t come for free. Soon the AAU would be forced to surrender its governing powers to a progressive group; then the cash would flow and the good times would roll.

The fast runners would get faster, but by definition the elite would always be few in number. Running would grow from midpack on back, and the future health of the sport would largely be governed by the size of the pack.

That said, everyone should always welcome the older, bigger, slower and less serious runners. They create more visibility for the sport, bring more dollars into it and give running a firmer foundation than ever before. The wider the base of the our pyramid, the higher its peak will push.

UPDATE FROM 2015

If you ask me now where running as a whole is headed, my most honest answer is that I don’t know but can only guess. As you’ve seen, my crystal ball has always been cloudy.

But if you ask where my running is headed, the answer is easy: straight ahead for as long as possible, no matter how many of today’s runners continue – or don’t.

I’m not unique. The same forces that first attracted me to running still keep me going.

Many of you also will decide that you never want to stop. This will assure a good long run into the future that will count the most. Your own.

[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 two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.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, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Routes of a Revolution

(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 June 2007; continued from last week's blog.)

Two major and separate streams – running for fitness and training to race – came together to produce Running 1977. Two of the founding fathers, who both get credit for this revolution and earned it, were Kenneth Cooper and Arthur Lydiard. Fittingly they had dipped their feet into both streams (as had Bill Bowerman; see previous chapter).

Dr. Cooper was a college miler, then he ran the Boston Marathon while in medical school. As an Air Force physician he began researching fitness, which led him to praise endurance activities such as running, which led to his best-selling book Aerobics, released in 1968.

This book inspired hordes of new runners, because running was simple and time-efficient. Many of them reached Cooper’s prescribed amount – two to three miles, three to five days a week – and looked to go longer and faster.

Lydiard was the New Zealander who exported fitness running (“jogging,” as it was called then) to the U.S. by way of Bowerman. Lydiard was better known, though, as a coach of Olympic medalists: three runners with three golds and a bronze among them, all coming from his Auckland neighborhood.

This coach turned away from the standard training of his day – almost all of it fast and on the track. His runners trained long miles on the roads and trails. Their success bred imitation, and soon runners everywhere were training longer and slower.

The two separate streams joined in the 1970s to flood the roads with runners. Aerobics graduates took the next logical step up, to low-key road races. Lydiard devotees found they liked training on the roads and began to race there, a welcome step down from the intensity of track.

Others are credited with igniting this boom, but are at least equally products and beneficiaries of it. Breaking the gender barrier at the 1967 Boston Marathon lit a promotional fire under Kathrine Switzer, and she has done more than anyone to create new racing opportunities for women. But a critical mass of women had to jump into the fitness-running stream before they could think of entering a race.

Frank Shorter inspired multitudes of Americans to try the marathon when he won this event at the Munich Olympics. Bill Rodgers later did the same with his wins at Boston and New York City. But if not for a mass leap into the Lydiard-instigated stream of road training, Shorter and Rodgers might not have stepped into road racing.

Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running, sensational as its sales were, didn’t cause the running boom but rode its crest and spurred it to new heights. Fixx himself was a boomer, having come to the sport via the Kenneth Cooper route – to lose weight and control the heart disease that afflicted his family. Fixx shared 1977 the best-seller lists – for all topics, not just running – with George Sheehan and the team of Bob Glover and Jack Shepherd. The wrote good books, but also had great timing.

The same could be said for the many other businesses, events and organizations that now served this burgeoning community. Their further success depended on how many of 1977’s runners keep running, and for how long – in years, not miles.

UPDATE FROM 2015

Jim Fixx died in 1984 and Arthur Lydiard in 2004. Their legacies live on. Dr. Kenneth Cooper, Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers and Kathrine Switzer continue as active participants in and promoters of running.

(Concluding next week.)

[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 two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.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, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]