Derek Clayton

(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 April 1982.)

PAINS AND GAINS. Three great myths of running are, “There can be no gain without pain,” “There can be but one winner in a race,” and “There can be no running life after racing ends.” The greatest of these is the first, the one dealing with suffering.

Derek Clayton trained hard, perhaps harder than any marathoner of his time or any earlier one. Maybe that’s why he held the world record from 1967 to 1981 – as the first runner to break both 2:10 and 2:09.

The Australian absorbed a gluttonous amount of pain. When training to a peak, he ran up to 200 miles a week. He didn’t just pitter-pat through those miles either. He believed there was no sense in running much slower in practice than he would in a race. So his base pace in training was close to five minutes a mile.

A typical weekend run was a full marathon in 2:20 to 2:25. Not content with doing just that in the morning, he would return in the afternoon for another 10 miles at five minutes each.

The reward was world-record marathoning. The immediate price for this routine was chronic fatigue. Clayton once ran himself into such exhaustion that he smacked into a tree while training.

The longterm price was chronic injuries. During his career he suffered through nine surgical operations – from back to knee to achilles.

Enduring all this pain, day after week after month, simply wore down his soft tissues. Sure, he reached some of the highest peaks in the sport. But he also endured some of the deepest valleys in between.

The goal that means most to a competitor is not a record, which only means he has beaten a mechanical object. Above all he wants an Olympic gold medal.

Clayton never won a medal of any color. He was injured during the Mexico City Games, when he went into the race with the fastest time by far. He wasn’t at his best for Munich, when his time again should have made him the class of the field. He retired before Montreal.

At the time he made a blunt, bitter retirement statement. He said that now he could honestly admit that he never enjoyed a minute of his running and was relieved to be done with it.

His career ended like too many others. At the final finish line, all that pain hadn’t equaled gain. It had added up only to more and more pain – until finally it had eroded health and enthusiasm to the point that he had no reason to push on.

But Clayton’s story didn’t end there. After a few months away from running, he started missing it. He didn’t miss the pain. He certainly didn’t miss the 200-mile weeks or the marathons that had beaten him up so badly. He missed the daily routine of running itself.

He began to run again. He limited himself to a quick five miles or so each day. Years later, he still does the same.

Recently I shared a speaking stage with him in Texas. He said there, “Running has changed completely for me, from being grinding work that I barely tolerated to being one of the bright spots of my day.”

The running that Clayton does now is an answer to all three of the sport’s great myths. He runs without pain, but who is to say that he isn’t gaining? He wins no races, but who is to say he isn’t a winner? His serious racing ended in the early 1970s, but he is moving proof that running life goes on after the best races have been run – and that this new life can be just as rich as the old, in a quieter way.

UPDATE. Careers at the highest ranks of running are brief and the afterlife is long. Derek Clayton’s racing was done by age 30. Later he lived for several years in the U.S., working for Runner’s World. During that time he wrote the book Running to the Top. Copies are rare today but still available, for a premium price, from Amazon.com. Now in his 70s, Clayton is back in Australia.

[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 Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, 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.]

Christine Clark

(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 March 2000.)

AN AMAZING ALASKAN. Roy Reisinger, an Alaska-in-winter-exile in Arizona, was out of Internet reach the weekend of the Women’s Olympic Marathon Trials. He asked me to pass results to him as soon as the race ended.

“Just the top four would be fine,” said Roy, “plus how Chris Clark from Anchorage did.” He naturally assumed she wouldn’t be one of the four, since she was seeded 22^nd in this field and had finished more than 50 places below that in the last Trials.

It’s fun to shock someone, as I did by telling Roy that only one U.S. runner will go to Sydney. This is a 37-year-old mother of two boys and medical doctor from Alaska.

“That’s so neat!” exclaimed Roy. “If anyone should have been knocked out by the heat and humidity, it should have been Clark.” This is not only because of where she’s from but because “she works full-time as a pathologist, and running has been very much just a part-time thing for her.”

Coming from Alaska might not be the handicap it seems. Many years ago I traveled there as Roy’s guest at his running camp and came away amazed at the toughness of the Alaskan runners. Only the rugged ones settle there, and the conditions further toughen those who stay.

Notice that the last two Americans to make amazing breakthroughs in the marathon have Alaska roots. David Morris, who broke 2:10 last fall, grew up in Anchorage and went to college in Montana (not exactly a sunbelt state itself).

Christine Clark reversed Morris’s path. Raised and schooled in Montana, she settled in Anchorage.

These Alaskans aren’t just tough. They’re also smart.

Morris recognized that to run his best he had to leave the country. He migrated to Japan.

My first thought as Clark pulled away from the field in the heat of Columbia, South Carolina, Trials was that she must have left Alaska to train. Later I learned that she did, in a way.

She often dodged the winter cold by running more than half of her miles, and nearly all of her fast miles on a treadmill. That training in Anchorage gave her a safe, reliable surface and warm “weather,” and let her make the most of her minimal 70-mile weeks.

“If a gal from Alaska can do [this well] in this heat, anyone can do it,” said Clark at the post-race news conference. Fact is, no one else could do better on this day – and very few in this field could PR by any amount, let alone the seven minutes she did.

Clark and others voiced disappointment that she didn’t run just 31 seconds faster, providing Olympic tickets for two other women. But it wasn’t her job to run their races for them.

I wrote last fall about how David Morris gives hope to American men that they can shed the “national inferiority complex” in the marathon. He dropped from 2:15 marathoner to 2:09 in one race.

Clark went from 2:40 to 2:33 on a day when this shouldn’t have happened. She gives hope to everyone who’s older than the average Trials runner, has much going on in their life besides running and believes in miracles.

UPDATE. Christine Clark improved her PR by another two minutes at the Sydney Games, placing 19^th. She retired from racing soon afterward.

[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 Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, 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.]

Patti Catalano Dillon

(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 1988.)

THE NEW PATTI. I first saw the new Patti Catalano two summers ago at the Asbury Park 10K. We happened to sit together during the awards program at an open-air band shell overlooking the Jersey Shore.

She’d never looked better. Gone was the gauntness of the early 1980s, when she was America’s top woman road racer.

She was called to the stage to collect a prize in her age group. The announced time, a minute per mile slower than her best, reminded Patti of the runner she had been a few years earlier.

I’m so embeerrased!” she said to her friends, drawing out the last word and giving it her richest Boston accent. She had no reason to be embarrassed. She was a bigger winner now than she ever had been in her glory years.

I didn’t yet know about the fight she was waging, and winning. I’d heard rumors of her using steroids, but drugs hadn’t been her problem.

This spring she chose to make her problem public. She admitted it in two articles by Katy Williams.

Patti had slipped into bulimia – a cycle of starving, overeating and then throwing up – in 1978. She’d binged and purged “five or six times a day” during the period when she set her national road records.

She talked about her recovery in a Running Times article. Writer Williams supplied details in Boston Magazine.

“She broke the cycle without professional help, depending largely on the same inner strength that had previously taken her to the top of women’s running.”

Patti said, “My anxieties and self-determination drove me. It was the greatest race, victory – whatever – of my life. I had hit bottom, and I chose to come out of it. Nothing can compare. Nothing.”

She is now secure enough in dealing with food to co-own (with runner Liz Miller) a market and deli in Manchester, Vermont.

Patti hasn’t entirely let go of her old dreams at age 35. “I know that I want to break 2:20 in the marathon,” she said. “And I want all my records back. I want to wear size one again.”

For now, those are just dreams. “There’s no plan” to carry them out.

Another sort of plan is taking shape. That is, wrote Katy Williams, “opening a small group home in Manchester for women recovering from bulimia. The simple things – stacking wood, caring for animals, gardening – would help rebuild self-esteem. Catalano’s own road back to health began when she forced herself to do things as ordinary as getting up each day and showering.”

And running. “For me, to run again is great,” said Patti. “To compete again is better, and to have big ambitions is better too.

“I want to see what I can do with a healthy body and through clean living. I’m not talking about a rigid life style where you don’t even drink coffee. I’m talking about good, honest living, with lots of love and giving.”

She was comfortable enough with her new self to run the Boston Marathon last month, and face its demanding media and crowds, the same month the two articles had appeared. She had dropped out at Boston in 1985 while starting to mend her life.

At 2:57 this year, Patti was slower by 30 minutes than she’d run here in 1981. But in important ways Patti is doing much better ways. She isn’t embarrassed to be seen now.

“The best thing that can happen from all this is that someone with a bulimia problem will see or hear me,” she told Katy Williams. “I want to help others recover, because they’re reaching out for something the way I was.

“I am going to run well again. And I am going to be heard.”

        

UPDATE. Patti is now married to former top-class runner Dan Dillon, and lives in Connecticut. She still speaks openly about the triumphs and trials of her racing years and beyond.

Katy Williams, whose material I borrowed liberally (with permission) for this article, now goes by her more formal married name of Katherine Cassidy. She has served in the Maine state legislature and is founding director of the Bay of Fundy 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 Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, 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.]

Amby Burfoot

(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 June 1998.)

BEYOND WINNING. As a 21-year-old in 1968, Amby Burfoot won the Boston Marathon to worldwide acclaim. He would forever wear the words “former Boston winner” before his name.

He now goes back to run Boston every five years to refresh his aging memories. This was one of those years, the 30^th anniversary, and Amby didn’t think well of his prospects.

His goal was modest. It wasn’t to win in his age group, the 50-54s.

“I just want to come within an hour of my 1968 time” of 2:22, he told me in early March when he ran the Napa Valley Marathon in a little under four hours. He was hurting before that race, and hurt more afterward.

Less than two weeks before Boston, Amby said, “I’m a mess. My old achilles problem has flared up again, and now I’ve pulled a butt muscle.”

Amby had written an article on R/W (the run/walk system) this spring for RW (that’s Runner’s World, where he is editor). “I might have to use the walk-walk to finish at Boston,” he said.

I sent him a note of encouragement. It didn’t remind him that all pains magnify before a big race, then magically ease on race day. He knew this, and that his pains weren’t imaginary.

I told him about a recent experience of mine. After running 16 miles at Napa, a chronic ache in the right ankle-heel acted up again. One day in mid-March I bailed out after just 10 limping minutes.

This problem led to changes in my R/W (run/walk, not magazine) pattern. I began taking the breaks daily, and upped their length from the old standard of a single minute to as much as five minutes in every 10.

The changes soon eased my pain. (Running nothing might have eased it more and quicker.) Even then I hobbled so badly the day before the Around the Bay 30K in Ontario that running there seemed unlikely.

A routine miracle saved me. With an assist from Advil I ran the whole 18.7 miles with no ankle or heel distress.

“Miracles can happen,” I told Amby. “The race atmosphere has amazing curative powers.”

Amby’s Boston time didn’t make news this year. It didn’t even appear in the online version of Runner’s World.

I found his result in Boston’s database. He ran 3:35, missing his goal of 1968-time-plus-one-hour but beating his injuries by doing as well as he did. My email to him read: “Miracles do happen.”

His reply told of winning in another way. He hadn’t said anything earlier about his second goal.

Though his walk-break story in the magazine was well received… and though he’d mentioned using the “walk-walk” system… and though I’d told him how more and longer breaks had helped me, he wanted none of this at Boston. He intended to run the marathon.

“I resolved not to walk a step this time, and didn’t,” he said. “A little hard but not the worst I’ve run, and I’m well pleased.”

Winning can be as simple, and as difficult, as fighting off the forces that conspire to keep us from starting or finishing.

UPDATE. I was Amby Burfoot’s nominal boss when he first wrote for Runner’s World in the mid-1970s. And he was mine when I last wrote there in 2004.

By happy coincidence Amby and I were both vacationing with our wives in the same Mexican locale when this piece came up for editing. He has retired as Runner’s World editor but still contributes to the magazine. He now runs Boston almost annually.

[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.]

Doris Brown Heritage

(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 July 1990.)

FIRST LADY OF RUNNING. Doris Heritage lives out the adage that what you once did counts less than what you keep doing. Heritage once won a wider variety of races than any woman of her era. She still serves running in more ways than almost anyone of either gender.

Thirty years ago Doris was a distance runner caught in a sport that wouldn’t yet let women run far enough. “Things were much different then,” she says with considerable understatement.

“One reason I became a runner was that there weren’t really any organized sports for women in the late 1950s. It’s easier to run by yourself than play soccer by yourself.”

When she began racing, the distances didn’t suit her. “In the Olympics, 200 meters was the longest race, and I was training five or 10 miles.”

As Doris Brown she qualified for the longest Olympic races then available: 800 meters in 1968 (she placed fifth at Mexico City) and the first 1500 for women in 1972 (an injury kept her from competing at Munich). Her best track racing would have come between 3000 and 10,000 meters, but women wouldn’t run this far at world meets until the 1980s.

Cross-country, even at distances much shorter than the current 6K, suited Doris best. Between 1967 and ’71 she won five straight World Championships – a feat unmatched by any woman or man.

Doris, now 47, still runs. “I still enjoy it,” she says, “and always want to run for the same reasons I started.”

One of those reasons is the chance to race. “Things happen to you in a race that never happen anyplace else. When you put yourself on the line and expose yourself to the unknown, you learn things about yourself that are very exciting. There’s no better way to learn them than by racing.”

Injuries and other commitments now limit her to sporadic racing. But the talent is still there.

Doris holds the world masters mile record of 4:54.69, set in 1983. Two years ago she won her age group at the National Masters cross-country meet.

Yet her own running now stands low on her priority ladder. She said near the end of her international racing career, “I definitely feel that those of us who’ve had the opportunities and experiences should pass this on, not only through coaching but by working within the governing structure.

“We shouldn’t just stand around and gripe. We should get in there and contribute from what we’ve learned. Though it might be easier to remove myself from the sport, I really feel that if there’s something I can do I should do it.”

Doris went to work coaching the women’s track and cross-country teams at Seattle Pacific University, and remains there while also teaching beginning-running classes. She worked within the structure of the sport’s national governing bodies. She became the first woman member of the IAAF cross-country and road running committee.

She campaigned for longer women’s races internationally. As an assistant Olympic coach in 1984 she took charge of the first U.S. women’s marathon team.

She says that her mission as a coach and official is “to give women more choices than I had at the start. I want them to have the opportunity to pursue goals that were not available to me at first.”

For all that Doris Heritage did as a runner and keeps doing for running, she recently was voted into the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame. She’s the first woman distance runner chosen, and the best possible first choice.

UPDATE. Doris continued running until having hip-replacement surgery in her 60s. She coached runners at her alma mater, Seattle Pacific, for four decades.  

[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.]