(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-20th 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.]
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