Book Preview: Miles to Go

(2003) JOBS, LIKE RACES, have finish lines. These seldom come at exactly the time you expect or hope. But whatever the result, you accept it and move on because the only other option is to give up for good.

My job as a columnist for Runner’s World lasted much longer than I ever thought it would. But I knew that it would end someday.

Now, in Christmas week 2003, I’d reached my final finish line there. This may not have been a good time – could there ever have been a good one? – but I accepted it and prepared to move on to whatever came next.

David Willey, the new editor, was charged by his bosses at parent company Rodale with redesigning Runner’s World. We can argue whether the choices were the right ones or not, but they came anyway.

He called to say that my RW column had “run its course” and would breathe its last in the March 2004 issue. This wasn’t simply an out-with-all-old step. The remaining columnists – Amby Burfoot, Jeff Galloway and John Bingham – weren’t far behind me in age and were also long-timers with the magazine.

The new editor offered to let me keep writing occasionally in other parts of the magazine, such as in feature articles and in how-to columns with multiple contributors. I declined, so in that sense the decision on my leaving was mutual.

I said no to the new role because I’d been trained and spoiled by columns, which read as personal letters from writer to reader. That style isn’t a good fit outside the boundaries of the column.

My last RW column went to the editors before this parting came. I didn’t get to say good-bye to readers there but only on the magazine’s website, with these lines:

“I never took my page for granted and always felt honored to talk to so many of you this way. Thanks for lending me your eyes and thoughts, and for sometimes sharing your agreements and disagreements, through the past 250 straight months of columns.”

MY LONG STAY at Runner’s World ended with a phone call lasting just a few minutes. I might have retired then and there from published writing if editor David Willey had said no more than thanks; it’s been a good run for you.  

Instead he added words that goaded me to press on as a writer.  He suggested that my column ideas had run dry; that I was mailing in pieces that fell well short of my old standard – and the magazine’s new one.

I’ll show him what I can still do, I thought at the time. I’m not nearly ready for the retirement pasture.

I would write for another magazine, Marathon & Beyond, for the next seven years. I would write a big book and a smaller one for Barnes & Noble, write a three-book memoir series, write guidebooks on marathon training and on walking for runners, write for a weekly newsletter (whose columns would grow into two more books).

Quantity, of course, doesn’t automatically equal quality – in training or in typing. It isn’t for me to say how good this late-career writing has been. The ultimate judgment rests with readers like you, who choose to spend some time with me.

THIS LATEST book travels through my post-Runner’s World years. When the editor cut me loose in late 2003, I still had many more miles to go – on foot and as coach, as well as in print. These are stories about some of those miles.

Miles to Go was written without really trying to write a book. This isn’t to say I didn’t work at the writing. It just that this book came together while I worked on something else.

Between 2008 and 2011, I wrote the personal histories Starting Lines, Going Far and Memory Laps. This trilogy ended with a report on my “retirement” from Runner’s World.

Meanwhile my column had moved to Marathon & Beyond. Most of those pieces continued to tell, in serial form, what I kept doing after RW said I was done. When the M&B column finally ran its course in 2011, I realized that another book had taken shape incidentally.

This is it. The book rests heavily, though not exclusively, on those magazine columns. Some of the originals were dropped to keep the page count manageable, some are trimmed to avoid repetition from earlier books, some are added from other sources, and all are updated to this book’s publication date.

With the column writing ended, I’m thinking again that Miles will be my last book. But I know better now than to promise this is the end. The miles go on.

The M&B columns were published earlier in a book titled Joe’s Journal, which was organized differently from Miles to Go. This one replaces that first book, and is supplemented and updated here.