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.]