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.]