Joan Benoit Samuelson

(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 May 1984.)

BENOIT’S KNEE. Races aren’t just won and lost on race day. They are as surely decided in the spaces between races, by the right and wrong moves made then. This is never more true than before an Olympic Trials.

I happened to see the fastest U.S. marathoner out training in my hometown of Eugene, Oregon, before the first such qualifying race for women. The sturdy little figure clad in a dark blue jacket and tights slipped onto the bike path two steps ahead of me without noticing I was there. I said nothing to her, preferring to watch rather than talk this Monday morning.

What I saw was heartening. The runner put two minutes between us in one mile. And she didn’t hint at a limp.

Ten days after knee surgery, one week after returning to running, a few days after feeling hamstring pain, Joan Benoit was back. I was happily eating my published words that she wouldn’t be recovered in time for the Trials. She looked ready.

Joan’s race against time didn’t begin on the morning of May 12^th in Olympia, Washington, but the evening of April 25^th in Eugene. Still drugged with pain-killers after her arthroscopic surgery, Joan asked coach Bob Sevene, “Can I start tomorrow?” Meaning could she begin running then.

Sevene said a firm no. But they agreed that she could pedal a redesigned exercise bicycle with her arms.

This makeshift training continued until the following Monday. Joan ran that day: 45 minutes in the morning, 55 more in the afternoon. She totaled 80 miles for the week but at the price of a sore hamstring from favoring the knee. That was treated by spending most of her waking hours under an electronic muscle-stimulation device to speed the healing.

One final test remained before deciding whether or not to run at Olympia: a 17-mile run on the Tuesday before her Saturday race. She passed it.

“I’ll be running strictly to make the team,” she said at a pre-race news conference. “I’m aware of my problem, but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could handle it.”

Handling it meant going right to the lead, and dropping her final challenger in the 23^rd mile. Joan ran on alone from there, and not easily. After averaging 5:38 miles through 20, she slipped to 6:11s for the remaining distance.

She looked a bit wobbly at the finish, and more relieved than joyous. “Cardiovascularly I felt great,” she said. “But my legs just wouldn’t go, and I was lucky to hold on. I knew with six miles left that if the pack came on me I was in trouble.”

Joan dodged trouble here. Now her Olympic race could begin.

UPDATE. I watched the Los Angeles Olympics on TV at home, less than a mile from where I’d seen the rehabbing Joan Benoit that spring. Now she broke free of the pack early in the first Olympic Marathon for women. Catch me if you can, she challenged the field that included world record-holder Grete Waitz. No one could.

That fall Joan married Scott Samuelson. In 1985 she set an American record of 2:21:21 that stood for 18 years (and fell to Deena Kastor, the only other women’s Olympic Marathon medalist from this country). Then she continued to qualify for Olympic Trials until 2008, when she was 51, and narrowly missed the 2012 standard.

One of Joan’s most memorable races wasn’t a victory or a record-setter. It was the recent Boston Marathon that she ran with her daughter Abby.

Only two American women have yet run faster than Joan’s best time from 30 years ago. Both are Olympic medalists themselves, Deena Kastor in the marathon and Shalane Flanagan in the 10,000.

[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.]

Jim Beatty

(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 January 1991.)

SMALL WONDER. We remember our early heroes as they were then, not thinking who they might have become since. So when the small, smiling, graying man worked his way along the head table at a Charlotte Observer Marathon luncheon, I took him to be a race sponsor or maybe the city’s mayor. He shook hands with each guest and introduced himself.

He reached Francie Larrieu Smith. She was in her late 30s, an Olympian and not easily awed. But she turned into a star-struck as a teenager in the company of a rock idol at the mention of his name, which I hadn’t yet heard.

“I’m Ron Larrieu’s little sister,” she gushed. “He talked about you all the time, and I’ve always wanted to meet you.” Her brother had been a 1964 Olympian.

Then came my turn to meet him. “Hi, I’m Jim Beatty,” he said. This turned me into a tongue-tied, hero-worshipping kid again. He took me back 30 years to a time when I was most impressionable and he made the biggest impression on me.

Beatty, at 56, was now a Charlotte businessman and former state legislator. But to me his far greater honor was a recent induction into the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame.

As the 1950s ended, no one from this country had set a world mile record since 1934 or in the marathon since 1908. No one had medaled at the three longest Olympic distances – 5000, 10,000 and marathon – since 1932. No one had won any of those races for 50 years.

National recovery started when a coach named Mihaly Igloi defected from Hungary. He came to America after the 1956 Olympics and began free-lance coaching in California.

Jim Beatty both led and symbolized the recovery. He’d been a competent runner at the University of North Carolina, then had done what most graduates did then: retire immediately. He had gone soft by 1959, when he unretired to join Igloi.

At first Jim couldn’t even keep up with the locals in California races. But within six months he held the American mile record. He broke it three more times in the next three years.

In 1962 he became the “Bannister” of indoor track by breaking the four-minute barrier in 1962. He also ran the world’s first sub-8:30 two-mile outdoors.

Beatty fell through the crack between Olympics. He hadn’t yet come to top form for Rome 1960 and was past it by Tokyo 1964. Between those Games, though, he did much to cure American distance runners’ national inferiority complex.

They came to believe they could run with anyone, anywhere. By the mid-1960s American Jim Ryun had set a world record in the mile and Buddy Edelen in the marathon. Bob Schul had won the Olympic 5000 and Billy Mills the 10,000.

Coach Igloi provided a model for success unknown previously in this country and too seldom imitated later. He pulled together mature runners and trained them as a group with the highest goals in mind.

From this one California team, first based in Santa Clara and later Santa Monica, came much of the country’s recovery force: Beatty, gold medalist Schul, early sub-four-minute miler Laszlo Tabori (who’d come from Hungary with Igloi and later became a coach himself), Hall of Famer Max Truex, Olympian Jim Grelle and Francie Larrieu’s brother Ron.

Frank Shorter said in Charlotte, “One problem with American distance running is that we don’t have teams like Beatty’s anymore. We need to have our best runners working together.”

It worked for Beatty and the Igloi group in the early 1960s, and for Shorter with the Florida Track Club a decade later. Their way could work again, and would.

UPDATE. As a height-deprived young runner myself, I idolized the smallest runners the most. Only later did I meet them – Johnny Kelley (the younger one), Max Truex, Jim Beatty – and looked them straight in the eyes, literally. None stood taller in my mind than fellow shorty Beatty.

Mihaly Igloi supplied a template for high-performance group training. The most successful American runners since his heyday have often come such groups: Florida Track Club, Greater Boston and Athletics West in the 1970s and 1980s, to Team Running USA, Hansons Brooks and Nike’s Portland and Eugene teams in the 2000s.

[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.]

Dick Beardsley

(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 December 1989.)

BEARDSLEY'S INJURIES. Dick Beardsley had two big wishes. Both came true.

Beardsley wanted to be one of America’s best marathoners. He became the second-fastest ever.

Dick grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs but wanted to be a dairy farmer. He used his running earnings to buy his first farm, knowing that his work there might cut into his future earning power as a runner.

His two peaceful-seeming professions both proved to be risky businesses for him. When we first met in 1981, Dick limped up to introduce himself.

“A pack of farm dogs attacked me while I was running on the country roads,” he said. He later told of an old knee injury suffered in a kick from a cow.

Dick had run a marathon in the 2:09s between the cow kick and the dogs’ attack. Only two other Americans had run faster then, so this time made Dick a star.

But he didn’t act like one. He had charm, wit and innocence often missing in the stars from any field. The aw-shucks, gee-whiz farm boy in Dick put him high on every runner’s list of favorites.

We met a second time in April 1982, at Boston. He had just been part of the greatest two-man marathon finish to date.

He and Alberto Salazar had raced side by side the whole way. Dick looked fresher in the home stretch, but Salazar dug deeper to win by two seconds.

They ran 2:08:52 and 2:08:54 that day. Those were the two fastest times in U.S. history.

Before I could congratulate him, Dick gave me a big hug. It was more a glad-to-see-you than a didn’t-I-do-great hug.

His success came and went quickly. He probably never recovered from his best race, because soon afterward he developed an achilles-tendon problem.

That injury required surgery in 1983 and more cutting a year later. He missed the 1984 Olympic Trials.

Hope surfaced again in 1987 when Dick ran 2:16:10 to qualify for the next Trials. But he realized then that “I was basically running on one leg” and that coming all the way back wasn’t possible.

He kept running. He finished a 50-mile race last year but had put aside his old racing ambitions.

By then he had bigger concerns. Farming always has been a gamble, and never more so than for a young farmer starting up in the 1980s.

Dick was forced to sell his first farm. He moved his wife Mary and their adopted Central American son Andy to town, where Dick went to work selling dairy-farming supplies.

This Labor Day, at age 33, a dream of his came true a second time. He traded the relative ease and regular income of his sales job for the insecurity and seven-day work weeks of another dairy farm.

Writer Jim Ferstle saw him at the Twin Cities Marathon, where Dick helped with the radio coverage. Ferstle recalls, “He was dressed in coveralls, as if he’d just come from the farm and would be going right back.”

A few weeks later, while he worked on the farm, the pant-leg of coveralls caught in the power-takeoff shaft of his tractor. His leg was pinned to the shaft while it continued to whir, slamming him repeatedly to the ground before he somehow shut of the power.

He had parked the tractor on grass. If it had sat on a hard surface, the blows to his head probably would have been fatal.

As it was, he suffered multiple injuries. The worst was to his left knee, which took the brunt of the violent twisting. Damage to the ligaments, cartilages and tendons was massive, and the knee will be rebuilt surgically.

The rehab period will be long, and maybe never complete. It will test the sunny disposition of this most positive of runners.

UPDATE. Dick Beardsley amazed his doctors. So well did they repair his mangled leg that he ran a race six months after the accident.

But his troubles didn’t end there. This and later accidents left him addicted to pain medications and under arrest for forging prescriptions.

That episode led to his current career as a motivational speaker and author of the tell-all book Staying the Course: A Runner’s Toughest Race.

Dick returned to marathoning and eventually ran in the low 2:40s. These days he probably logs the highest mileage anyone ever has on two artificial knees.

I’ve heard him speak many times, never more memorably than at a high school assembly in Selah, Washington. The kids were skeptical at first about what a runner could tell them, but Dick won them over with his humor and honesty.

Now living in Texas with his second wife Jill, Dick runs on two replaced knees. He remains one of the few Americans ever to break 2:10 twice in the marathon.

[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.]

Bob Anderson

(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 August 1996.)

HE STARTED THIS. His is a name you don’t hear much anymore. You never see it in the magazine he founded. Yet everyone who works there now owes him a debt, as does the whole sport.

Thirty years ago as a high school boy in Kansas, Bob Anderson wanted to read more about his favorite sport, so he started a magazine, Distance Running News. It took so much of his time and attention that he dropped out of college. Later he moved to California and changed the magazine’s name to Runner’s World.

I joined him then as his first editor. We stayed together, in several capacities, for most of the next 15 years. In 1985 he sold the magazine to Rodale Press and apparently dropped out of the sport.

Since then I haven’t seen or talked with Bob Anderson, but I’ve often wondered how he is doing since leaving running publishing. As the oldest and biggest of

the sport’s magazines marks its 30^th birthday, you might also wonder about its founder. Mark Winitz answers this in The California Schedule magazine.

Now 48, Bob manufactures and markets women’s swimsuits from RW’s old hometown of Mountain View, California. He runs as he never did while owning the running magazine.

“When I was involved in the business of RW, I never had the time to train,” he tells Winitz. His usual week was a Sunday race and nothing else.

“Now I have a lot more time for my own running,” he says. “I haven’t missed a day of running in over three years.” He recently broke 36 minutes for 10K and is approaching 17 minutes for 5K.

Only when he talks about racing does Bob’s old hard edge show. The competitive juices that he once funneled into the running business now go into his races.

“I think jogging is boring,” he says. “If I were a jogger, I wouldn’t bother with the activity at all.

“To me running has always been a sport rather than just recreation. That’s why I was always willing to promote anything that got people into racing.”

Bob Anderson promoted well. His magazine gave the developing sport its first and longest-lasting national voice, for which we can thank him. He gave me a career, for which I thank him.

UPDATE. I’m now in semi-regular touch with Bob. In his mid-60s he still races, hard, and he’s back in the running business – as creator of the Double Road Race series.

He publishes a magazine that supports this “new sport” that combines two back-to-back races (usually 10K and 5K) with a “halftime” rest break between.

In 2012 Bob celebrated 50 years of running by completing 50 races, at an average pace of 7:00. A movie titled “A Long Run” documented this effort. As an encore he ran his first Boston Marathon in 2013.

The magazine that he founded turns 50 next year.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joMany 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.]