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.]