Back to Our Future

(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.)

This spring Nike asked me to write a series of stories to support re-release of several shoe models from the late 1970s. I didn’t produce ads but told how running was back then and where it has progressed since and where it might go from here. The opening piece:

RUNNING AFTER BOWERMAN

Call it what you will – an aerobic revolution, a fitness phenomenon, a running boom (the most-used phrase), a jogging fad (the one that oldtime runners hate, for both of its words). Running’s population had exploded in 1977. More runners were running more miles, entering more races, and buying more products, publications and services. The runner, so recently a seldom-seen oddity, was now trendy.

Long-distance running was no longer a clannish sport, skulking along beneath the public’s radar between Boston Marathons and Olympic years. Now you couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into runners, sometimes almost literally as they shared the streets with cars. You couldn’t escape being told running was so fantastic, you should try it, here’s a flyer for a race you’ll be ready to run next month – and while you’re at it, buy this shoe, subscribe to this magazine, and this is how you should to train.

Running became more than simply a competitive sport, as it used to be. It was also an accepted exercise. Runners came in all sizes and shapes, all abilities and ambitions, and – maybe most notably – both sexes.

Bill Bowerman was as surprised by all of this as anyone, even though he had as much to do with it as anyone. Bowerman was so far ahead of his time that he couldn’t see what was coming. His contributions to running, as we knew it by 1977, came so early that he didn’t get full credit for laying foundations on which others have built their reputations as innovators and instigators.

This Bowerman story had little to do with his amazing run of success as University of Oregon track coach from late 1940s to the early 1970s, or with his coaching the Munich Olympic team. In fact, the revolution/boom/fad had little to do with elite sport but mostly with running for fitness and fun, far away from tracks.

In the 1960s running was almost exclusively a sport of young men, born to be lean and fast. The only reason to run was to race. Only the fastest high school racers ran in college, and most of those retired at graduation. A long distance was six miles, the longest that collegians raced. Women didn’t run at all at that level.

Bowerman coached this type of runner, taking a good young one and making him great at the University of Oregon. The coach didn’t set out to start a nationwide running revolution. His ambitions were local and personal: to coach his own runners well, to put them in better shoes, and maybe most importantly for our subject here, to reclaim his own fitness.

He experimented with training methods that would maximize improvement and minimize injury. This led to such Bowermanisms as “train don’t strain” and “better to undertrain than overtrain.” He saw that recovery between hard runs made the hard work work. This became the basis for his hard/easy system, which was helpful to young athletes but is vital for adult-onset runners who can’t train their buns off everyday without penalty.

Bowerman’s tinkering with shoes led him into the business of shoemaking, first for a Tiger (now Asics) distributorship that he bought into and then for Nike where he had a larger voice. The resulting shoes contributed indirectly but mightily to the running boom by allowing people other than the young, thin and biomechanically gifted to run more miles, safely on the streets and roads.

His final, and perhaps greatest, discovery was personal. He realized how unfit he was in his early 50s, and what he could do about it. During a trip to New Zealand he saw men his age “jogging,” as they called their slow and steady runs. He tried it, and his partners shamed him into training again after decades away.

Bowerman took the message back to his hometown of Eugene, where he offered it to his public. Hundreds turned out, because they thought if this local hero preached and practiced something it must be good. The training plan was a scale model of how he trained his athletes. This program became a book titled Jogging, written with Dr. Waldo Harris. It came out in the mid-1960s, years before bigger-sellers on the subject would appear.

In 1977 Bowerman lived in semi-retirement in the hills above Eugene. He was content to coach an occasional hand-picked athlete, tinker with shoes, act as godfather to Nike, and watch new gurus accept acclaim for discoveries he made a decade earlier.

Bill Bowerman didn’t see the running revolution coming, nor did even the most optimistic pre-boomer. We marveled at how running grew so much, so quickly, and wondered where it might take us from there.

UPDATE FROM 2015

Some stories, like some runs, veer from their planned path. The concept for Nike’s 2007 marketing campaign changed, and my stories didn’t make the final cut there. Instead they became Running Commentary “originals,” retrieved now in this and succeeding chapters.

Bill Bowerman continued as the conscience of Nike until his death in 1999. His wealth continues to enrich his university, community and state. His inventions and innovations continue to serve the sport.

(Continued 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.]