Dick Brown

(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 1992.)

CBS PROGRAMS. Coaches don’t have to shout to make themselves heard. I know no better example of this, and no more successful coach, than Dick Brown. We sat together at the opening track meet of this season, where he was as nearly invisible as a man six-feet-four could make himself.

We sat almost alone in the bleachers at the end of the track farthest from the finish line. Other coaches prowled the rail, exhorting their athletes to greater efforts.

Dick never once left his seat, never once shouted. He didn’t chase after his runners.

They came to him for encouragement and instruction. He didn’t lecture them when they came, but coached mainly by listening and responding to his quiet questions.

He coached Mary Decker (Slaney) through her most successful years, when she won two gold medals at the 1983 World Championships. She’d stayed injury-free for almost three years with Brown but hadn’t gone much longer than three months without getting hurt since changing coaches after the 1984 Olympics.

Meanwhile Dick’s success has continued in a variety of ways – none of which he could have imagined while attending the U.S. Naval Academy. His sport of choice was basketball (which his daughter and son also played in college).

Dick gradually shifted his coaching attention to endurance athletes. He coached with the Athletics West club for many years, then left in the mid-1980s to complete his doctorate in exercise science and to start two fitness-related companies.

He invented the AquaJogger water-exercise belt, then sold the rights to another company. He also created the Individual Trainer, a hand-held computer that his company markets. The Trainer evaluates the relative merits of 120 activities and provides personalized training programs.

Dick carries much of this data in his head, which may explain why he works so well with such a wide variety of athletes. Other coaches might claim more Olympians in one sport or one event. But none can match Brown’s record as a generalist.

He has sent athletes to the summer Olympics (middle-distance runners and a race-walker), winter Games (a cross-county skier) and Paralympics (a swimmer). He has even coached a world champion in jet-ski racing.

Athletes move differently in each sport, and some move better than others within a sport. But one body reacts to training pretty much the same as any other.

Dick Brown’s genius lies in reading those reactions. He admitted to me, as we worked together recently on the book Fitness Running, that his most difficult task as a coach of Olympians is persuading them to train easier.

“Challenge is necessary for improvement,” said Dick. “The idea is to add challenges that the body can handle.” He called his approach “CBS: challenging but safe.”

Dick the scientist uses the stress-management theories of Dr. Hans Selye to strike a balance between enough training and too much. Brown the inventor devised a point scale for weighing training loads and made these points the brains of his hand-held computer, the Individual Trainer. Brown the coach monitors his runners’ body signs for early warnings of trouble.

“When I came to Athletes West in 1978,” Dick recalled, “it gave me the perfect opportunity to look at all these athletes and check what they were doing in workouts. That was when I got serious about refining the point system that would eventually underlie the Individual Trainer.”

He calculated the point levels of the club’s marathoners the year they all PRed and ranked among the country’s best. They wondered, as runners are tempted to do, “If we ran so well on that much training, couldn’t we do better with more?”

They upped their points by 15 percent while preparing for the next marathon. “None of them made it to the race because of one physical problem or another,” Dick recalled. “They had all gone past their threshold, to where training was hurting instead of helping them.”

Dick Brown’s golden rule, as used with Olympic athletes and underlying the training programs in the book Fitness Running: “When in doubt, be conservative.” Tune in to a CBS program: challenging but safe.

UPDATE. Ten years raced past between my collaborations with Dick Brown on books titled Fitness Running. The revised edition, from 2002, was different from the original because of all that had happened for Dick in the intervening decade.

During those years he coached Suzy Favor Hamilton and Vicki Huber onto the 1996 U.S. Olympic team. He led Marla Runyan into middle-distance running, which would lead her to the 2000 Olympic 1500-meter final under another coach, then into the 2001 World Championships 5000 and finally into marathoning.

Dick is more than a coach of world-beaters. The methods he prescribes for these athletes scale down well for use by runners on all levels.

He is more than a coach. He’s a scientist with an intimate understanding of what makes all exercising human beings work – and how they can work better. He combines scientific knowledge that few coaches can match with practical know-how that few physiologists can claim.

Age and illness have taken Dick Brown out of day-to-day coaching. In 2015 he issued a third edition of Fitness Running (without my help this time). His Individual Trainer device has evolved into an app for smartphones and tablets, called “MiFitLife.”

[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.]

Bill Bowerman

(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 1987.)

BOWERMAN’S LEGACY. We live in the same town, Eugene, Oregon, but rarely see each other. We met by chance this time in a doctor's waiting room.

I was there to talk about the athletic uses of the office’s therapy pool. Bill Bowerman was there as a patient to train in the pool. Several years ago glue fumes from his shoe experiments left the retired University of Oregon coach, now 76, with nerve damage and forced him to give up running. The pool training was part of his therapy.

When his name was called, he responded, “It’s time to walk on water.” He said this wryly, to mock the saintly status he never sought but still holds in our hometown and in our sport.

The least you can say about Bill Bowerman is that he’s one of America's all-time great track coaches, if not the greatest. He coached four national championship teams and flocks of sub-four-minute milers at Oregon, and once served as U.S. Olympic coach.

His influence reaches far beyond coaching elite athletes, touching runners at every level. He laid the early groundwork for the running boom by importing the jogging message of New Zealander Arthur Lydiard to this country in the 1960s and co-authoring the first best-selling book on the subject. He then designed shoes that would keep the masses of new runners safe and comfortable.

However, his most lasting gift to health, fitness and performance is the hard/easy system of training. You can’t improve as a runner without some hard effort, Bowerman has said for 30 years, but running hard every day will destroy you.

Every current program that works mixes hard and easy days. Bowerman gets due credit from others for this concept, but he asks for little himself. He has talked and written sparingly about the roots of this system.

His rare statements on the subject are treasures. He issued one recently for his friend Dick Brown’s book-in-progress. It tells of a pupil who has become as well known as the teacher – the runner/writer Kenny Moore.

As a sophomore at Oregon “Moore was a problem,” writes Bowerman. “He’d hooked up with the seductive idea that the more he ran the better he’d be. On Sundays when I asked him to cover 20 miles, he’d do 30. And on easy days when I thought three miles and a swim was enough, he’d sneak in 12.”

Moore’s two-mile time had slowed from a best of 9:12 to 9:48. He was often ill or injured.

Bowerman told him that the overtraining had to stop. “From then on I would watch him perform his easy-day run. It was to be three miles on the grass, seven minutes a mile.

“I told him I had spies who would report any midnight runs, and such reports were cause for suspension from the team. He told me I was a tyrant.

“He remembers, 25 years later, that we had this talk while he was hanging from his neck by my affectionate grip. But remember, this is a man who went on to earn his living by his imagination.”

After three weeks of taking the rest he needed, Moore ran the two-mile a full minute faster than he'd done while overworking. He PRed by 24 seconds.

“I sat down next to him at his locker afterward and told him I had to be honest,” Bowerman writes. “I never thought he could run that fast. He told me he still thought I was a tyrant, ‘and thank God for that!’ ”

Moore became a believer that day but still had occasional lapses of faith. One came a year later, Bowerman recalls.

“In 1965 he won both the steeplechase and three-mile in our conference meet. That was a lot of stress.

“The next day I told him to cut his long run to 10 miles. Naturally he set out to do 20.

“At 10¼ miles he suffered a stress fracture in his foot. When he finally figured out what it was, he looked at me like I had broken the bone myself with a sledgehammer. I hated to lose him for the NCAA meet, but I have to admit I was proud of myself for calling it so accurately.”

Bowerman knows runners. He knows our greatest strength – our will to endure – can also be our biggest weakness. We run into more trouble from going too far, too fast, too often than from not doing enough.

Bill Bowerman knows the difference between enough and too much. We need more “tyrants” like him to protect us from ourselves.

UPDATE. The Dick Brown book with Bill Bowerman’s chapter was never published. However, Kenny Moore published Bowerman and the Men of Oregon a few years after his mentor’s passing at age 88. It took this big book, and an author of Moore's talent, to do this life justice.

Bowerman's tinkering with shoes led him to join with an ex-athlete of his named Phil Knight to start a company that imported Tiger shoes from Japan. They later split from the Japanese to produce their own brand, known as Nike.

Bowerman remained that company’s spiritual father. On hearing of his death, Knight said, “Bill was for so many of us a hero, leader and most of all a teacher. My sadness at his passing is beyond words.”

Nike made Bowerman extremely wealthy. He shared that wealth in many ways, most of them unpublicized. For every athletic building he funded on his University of Oregon campus and every high school track he helped create, he contributed more to university academic programs and community arts activities.

Bill Bowerman will keep on giving. His financial gifts will make his city and state better places to live and learn. His gifts to the sport are priceless, even if the runners who receive them never know their source.

[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.]

John Bingham

(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 September 1998.)

MEET THE PENGUIN. The Runner’s World writing staff is not a big, happy family. We aren’t unhappy either, but aren’t a family at all. Some of us hardly know each other.

The wonders of the computer age let most of us writers live anywhere, and we’re everywhere: Hal Higdon in Indiana, Don Kardong in Washington, Liz Applegate in California, Marc Bloom in New Jersey.

The closest we come to a staff meeting is leading the RW Pacing Groups at one or two marathons a year. I’ve visited the home office in Pennsylvania only twice, and never in the past 10 years. I meet the other writers one or two at a time at races, if at all.

I’d never run across our newest columnist until this summer. I knew John Bingham only as the “The Penguin,” the persona he has adopted in his column.

In two years of appearances in the magazine he has gathered a huge following. He’s now making his second cross-country tour to meet and entertain his fans. 

Last summer he traveled for two months by motorcycle. This year he’s driving a car and staying out longer, 12 weeks in all.

One stop – between San Francisco and Salt Lake City – was Jeff Galloway’s camp at Lake Tahoe. I happened to be there too.

I knew nothing more about him than his name and nickname, and how he spends his summers. I’d seen only one picture of him, a group shot that revealed little. I expected from The Penguin a brash young pup in his 30s, somewhat outsized in height and bulk.

Up walked an almost-50-year-old with a graying mustache and round glasses that give him a look of surprise. He introduced himself by his given name, not the acquired nickname.

John Bingham is unimposing physically, at 5-8 and 140 pounds. He once was 100 pounds heavier, this during his career as a professional musician and then a Ph.D. student.

His running started at age 43. He now has dropped to part-time teaching of music at Middle Tennessee State University and risen to a starring role in the Second Running Boom. Besides his Runner’s World column, speaking tour and heavily visited website, he has a book in the works with Simon & Schuster.

When John steps in front of an audience, the quiet-spoken college prof disappears, and he becomes The Penguin. He doesn’t lecture or converse on stage. He performs.

Running writing, and by extension speaking, can use more humor. The Penguin supplies it, especially when he performs live.

His is one of the most hilarious acts I’ve ever seen on the running circuit. This is standup comedy worthy of the Improv. His listeners don’t giggle or titter politely, but double over with laughter that brings happy tears to their eyes.

The Penguin is no buffoon, though. Behind his humor lies an invitation to everyone, of any size and speed, to fit as comfortably into this sport as he did at his start.

He says that much more unites the fast and the slow, the skinny and the heavy, than separates us. We can be one big, happy family when we get to know each other.

UPDATE. In 1999, John Bingham published The Courage to Start. It quickly became one of the best-selling books in the sport.

He has graduated from Runner’s World to become an business unto himself: writing, speaking, announcing at races. You can visit him at his website, johnbingham.com.

[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.]

Rich Benyo

(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 November 2001.)

CONCEPTION TO COMPLETION. Writing a book is a little like creating a baby. It starts with conception, then comes gestation and finally birth. One big difference, though, is that a book can be a solo effort while a child is always a collaboration.

Through two dozen books I’d worked mostly alone. In the few cases where my name had made the cover of team projects – with Bill Rodgers and Priscilla Welch, with Dick Brown, with Joe Ellis – I had taken lower billing as an editor or ghost-writer. Only now was I an equal partner in a book’s creation.

Conception came in the bar at the Hotel Grand Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia. Rich Benyo and I were in town as speakers at the Royal Victoria Marathon. As we sat talking, the conversation meandered toward a big book – too big for either of us to take on alone: an encyclopedia of running history.

Rich and I had a long history as teammates. He had come to work at Runner’s World in 1977, just as I was about to leave as editor. He’d run races in high school and college, but that had been many years and dozens of pounds earlier. He could have carried that weight in his old job as a car-racing writer, but not when the subject was running and nearly all of this readers ran.

Rich quickly uncovered the athlete under all that flesh, ran the Boston Marathon not long afterward, then wrote a book about that journey (titled Return to Running). More books followed, along with ever-longer runs.

His stay in the Runner’s World editor’s chair lasted exactly as long as mine had – seven years. Then he free-lanced for awhile and directed the Napa Valley Marathon.

When Rich founded Marathon & Beyond magazine in the mid-1990s, he asked me to join him as an M&B writer. I couldn’t at the time but asked him to keep the offer open if we could make it work later.

Now, in the Victoria bar, Rich pulled out the 3x5 notecards that he always carried. Never so well prepared, I borrowed a pen from him and made notes on bar napkins about this possible book of ours.

We quickly recognized that all of running, sprints through ultras, would devour thousands of pages and more years than we had available. Even confining our book to the conventional road races, 5K through marathon, this would be a massive project in the research and then the writing.

Human Kinetics, which had published books by each of us before, bought the plan that we conceived together in Victoria. Gestation took the better part of a year before Rich and I finally held this hefty baby that neither of us could have created alone.

UPDATE. Our “child” didn’t thrive. Its sales numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands that the publisher required to show a profit. Rich Benyo and I proved what we’d long suspected – that not many runners care about running history beyond their own.

Yet this collaboration had longer-lasting benefits. “If we could work together this much for this long on a project and still be talking to each other today,” Rich likes to say, “we have staying power as a team.”

When Runner’s World cut me loose in 2003, Rich took me on immediately as a columnist for Marathon & Beyond, where I stayed until leaving (voluntarily) in 2011. He still asks me to speak each year at his Napa Valley 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.]