Clarence DeMar

(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 1991.)

DEMAR-VELOUS. A recently republished book tells about its author winning the Boston Marathon repeatedly. It tells of training with high mileage and about overtraining. It tells of racing after age 40 and of adjusting to aging.

It isn’t Bill Rodgers’ book, although in Masters Running and Racing he does pay homage to this other author. Rodgers wrote, “One of my favorite running books is Clarence DeMar’s autobiography, Marathon.”

Besides his historic collection of seven Boston wins, he was the last American to run in three Olympic marathons and the last between 1924 and 1972 to win a medal. He was the first great master, though that word didn’t enter running language for almost 40 years after he’d turned 40.

DeMar wrote Marathon in 1937. The book’s material has aged so well that Cedarwinds Publishing has reissued it. I just reread it and was reminded again of how little is new in this sport.

The physical rules haven’t changed since DeMar trained for his first Boston Marathon win before World War One. He got good by running lots of miles and got hurt from running too many, too fast.

“I covered nearly a hundred miles per week in practice for a couple of months with several 20-mile jaunts,” he said. “The first of many physical difficulties I have met before races annoyed me at this time. My right knee became stiff, [but] I didn’t go to see a doctor because I had a sneaking notion that he would tell me not to run until the knee got well.”

DeMar called the 1912 Olympic Marathon his most disappointing race. Considered a favorite, he finished 12^th and blamed this poor showing on overtraining.

The coach made U.S. marathoners run 20 miles a day when they should have been tapering. “We didn’t race,” DeMar recalled of that training, “but neither did we loaf. Alone, I’d have run much slower part of the time. Eventually, a week or so before the race, with the nervous strain of trying to make good every day instead of once a fortnight, I went stale.”

He found, as today’s runners are rediscovering, that a long training run every two weeks or so worked best for him. He could go very long if the pace was right.

DeMar was an early ultrarunner who sometimes entered a 44-mile race as training for Boston. At this distance, he wrote, “one can slow down 25 percent from a marathon. Instead of 10 miles per hour, 7½ is satisfactory. I found that I could run this slower pace indefinitely without the nervous strain of the marathon.”

DeMar later became one of the first “lifers” in the sport. He promised after winning at Boston in 1930, “I’ll keep running as long as my legs will carry me.” He kept running Bostons until 1954 and continued racing until shortly before his death four years later at age 70.

As Clarence DeMar came to terms with aging, he wrote, “No longer does my success depend on the amount of practice I do. Frequently a rest and just a little practice causes me to make a better showing. No longer does slow practice always produce the best race. Sometimes speed work causes me to do better.

“So the older I get, the less dogmatic and sure I become as to the best way for anyone to get into physical condition. Not only are there individual differences, but the same individual has to change his method of training over a period of years – even as old people change their glasses.”

UPDATE. In an era when the Boston Marathon was the most important race outside of the Olympics, Clarence DeMar won seven times there in three different decades between 1911 and 1930. That record will stand forever.

His 1930 Boston victory, at age 41, still makes him that race’s oldest male winner ever. He was at the time, and remains all these decades later, the greatest Boston marathoner ever.

[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, Miles to Go, 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.]

Mary Decker Slaney

(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 December 1987.)

SLANEY’S SPLASH. Alberto Salazar and Mary Decker Slaney could co-captain the All-Injured Team. Like Salazar, Slaney is as fragile as she is fast. Unlike Alberto, whose problems seem unending, Mary repeatedly overcomes hers.

Both of them live in Eugene. But while I see Salazar often, I seldom bump into Slaney.

My rare meetings with her are cordial. We once chatted through a cross-country flight, and her exaggerated prima-donna image was nowhere to be seen.

I’ve glimpsed that side of her only once, while she was injured and doing water training. I’d come to the pool to visit her coach, Dick Brown, not Mary. But she apparently saw me as a spying reporter, flashed a why-are-you-here scowl and said not so much as “hi.”

This was her private training place, and I had invaded it. I learned, while working this past year on a book with Brown, just how valuable a second home this has been for Slaney.

Dick hasn’t officially coached her since 1985. But he still oversees her frequent rehabilitations in his water-therapy tank at a Eugene medical center or at a local indoor pool.

Slaney trained that way almost daily this winter while recovering from achilles-tendon surgery. She is now “quite fit,” says Brown, and will start racing again in January.

Her history predicts another quick and complete comeback. Brown has seen this happen before. He begins this history lesson five years ago:

“Mary and I had made a deal before the 1983 indoor track season. At the first sign of any injury trouble she would end her season. She pulled out in January because of a problem in an ankle.”

Eric Bass, inventor of a training tank, read the news. He called Brown and offered to send out from Philadelphia a prototype of the Aqua Ark that Bass now markets.

“Mary didn’t need it by the time it arrived,” says Brown. “Her injury had healed, and that year she won the 1500- and 3000-meter titles at the World Championships. The tank sat unused in my shed until the next summer.

“Then at the 1984 Olympic Trials, Mary hurt an achilles tendon. She had warmed up for the 1500 semifinals, then was held with other runners in a pen for 45 minutes. Her achilles tightened up.”

Slaney qualified for the Games but hurt too much to run after the Trials. A doctor injected the tendon with saline to break the adhesions, but that procedure only increased the pain.

Brown recalls that “she was walking around like Chester in ‘Gunsmoke.’ So I pulled the tank out of the shed and put Mary in it.

“She spent the next three weeks in the water, with no land workouts at all. However, she ‘ran’ the exact workouts in the tank that we had planned for her on land – same length [in time], same effort, same periods of work and recovery for her intervals.”

One week before the Olympics were to open in Los Angeles, three days after resuming land training, Slaney set a world 2000-meter record.

“She was more fit then than I had ever seen her,” says Brown. “More fit than at the World Championships.”

Two days before her Olympic 3000, Mary finished a fast 400-meter training run and asked her coach, “What was that, about 59 seconds?” It was a 54.

“Unfortunately, she fell,” Brown starts to say how, then stops because too much has already been said about The Great Fall.

Remember, Mary Slaney did get back on her feet after that to run better than ever. Count on her coming out of the water to do it again.

UPDATE. Mary Slaney made two more Olympic teams and continued competing into her late 30s – while compiling a lifetime count of about two dozen surgeries. At this writing, she still held the American record for 3000 meters (set in 1985), and her 1500 mark had just fallen (after 32 years). She still lives in Eugene while keeping the lowest of profiles here.

Dick Brown invented the AquaJogger, a flotation belt for runners training in water. He and I teamed up on two editions of the book Fitness Running.

[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.]

Ron Daws

W(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.)

OLYMPIAN DAWS. History repeats. Suddenly it is 1984 all over again for me.

That year’s Olympics had just begun in Los Angeles when my car radio reported, “A famous running author has died while running in Vermont. Jim Fixx…”

Now the Games had just opened in Barcelona when I came home to find a note: “Call Jim Ferstle. Has sad news.”

The running writer from the Twin Cities told me, “Ron Daws died last night.” The news hit me like an aftershock.

Fixx was my friend, yes, but beyond that he was a friend to every runner who read his books. So was Daws. They’d started out much differently as runners, but their stories ended much the same way.

Jim Fixx was a late-starting runner. He’d been an overweight smoker in his mid-30s, then became a 10-mile-a-day runner who still couldn’t outrun his old habits or a terrible family history of heart disease. He was 52 when he died from blocked arteries.

Ron Daws started running as a kid and never stopped. He made the 1968 Olympic team as a marathoner, and few Americans have ever gone further on less talent.

Ron never smoked, was never heavy and had no worrisome family history. He had just turned 55 when he died from what the autopsy report said was advanced coronary disease.

Such attacks seldom if ever come without warnings, says Dr. George Sheehan. Ron had warnings scattered among some very good runs. He had to stop and walk during a five-mile race in June.

Yet he later took a 37-mile trail run while vacationing in Canada. His last weekend, he complained of slowness and stomach pain during a 14-mile run on Friday. Yet he came back on Sunday, his next-to-last day, to run trouble-free for 2½ hours.

Jim Fixx was a cerebral man whose last moments were active. Ron Daws was a restless man who died in his sleep.

Two memories of Ron stand out. The first was meeting him at the Olympic Village in Mexico City before he ran his marathon. He was studying the assembly-line shoes in a shop and pointing out why those he cobbled himself at home were superior.

The second memory was working with him as editor of his book, The Self-Made Olympian. He hated the title I gave it, disputed much of the editing and didn’t swallow his objections quietly.

In both cases I remember the somewhat wild look he got in his pale blue eyes when he mounted a crusade. Ron was seldom pleased with things as they were, whether constantly tinkering with shoes, with training systems or working on his book.

Lorraine Moller heard of Ron’s passing as she was about to run the Olympic Marathon in Barcelona. She was once married to Ron Daws, who as her coach introduced Lorraine to this event.

It would be nice to think that as she ran that marathon, she remembered the words Ron ran by – and later wrote and coached by: “You can do better than this.” At age 37 she upset all forecasts by winning the bronze medal.

UPDATE. Before his passing, Ron Daws succeeded in revising and retitling The Self-Made Olympian to his liking. He called this edition Running Your Best: The Committed Runner’s Guide to Training and Racing.

Ron’s ex-wife Lorraine Moller had a long and diverse racing career. She competed internationally for New Zealand at 800 meters when that was the longest distance open to women and later in their first Olympic Marathon, in 1984.

Lorraine was the only woman to run the first four marathons at the Games, the final time in Atlanta at age 41. She later published a book, titled On the Wings of Mercury.

[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.]

Glenn Cunningham

(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 2006.)

GLENN CUNNINGHAM, MILER. Glenn Cunningham was a hero of my dad’s generation. I grew up hearing how his legs were badly burned in a childhood fire that killed his brother.

Glenn began to run as therapy, and eventually developed into one of the world’s best milers. He held world records and was an Olympic silver medalist in 1936.

Twenty-five years later the Kansan earned his living by touring the Midwest, giving motivational talks. His average fee was just $30.

By happy coincidence my small high school in rural Iowa booked him as the speaker on the day I graduated. He rode a bus to the nearest station, then hitchhiked the final 15 miles.

I remember none of his formal speech that day, but all of what he said in an earlier talk. The school principal called me to his office, where he’d arranged for Cunningham to talk with me privately. He was using that office as his locker room and was changing into a white shirt, tie and jacket as I arrived.

Cunningham was 51 then. He had the weathered, wiry look of the miler he had been and of the rancher he was. (His ranch took in homeless or troubled kids and put them to work.)

He looked like he still could have bared his scarred legs and shown me how a mile is supposed to be run. And I’d just won a couple of state titles and was headed off to college as a runner.

He was the first famous person I’d ever met. Adlai Stevenson didn’t count. I was struck mute a few years earlier when introduced to this former Presidential candidate as he visited our farm.

This time I found my tongue. As we talked, Cunningham asked, “What kind of training do you do?”

I’d fallen under the spell of Arthur Lydiard by then, and told of emphasizing the Lydiard-like longer and slower runs. Cunningham disagreed with this approach.

“If you want to race fast,” he argued in words I would hear repeated often in years to come, “then you must train fast.” He recommended reversing my emphasis, especially in hot weather when long runs are “too draining.” He said, “I never ran more than five or six miles in my life.”

This Glenn Cunningham story has a followup. Almost 20 years later the two of us shared a stage the night before a marathon in Boonville, Arkansas, near where he now lived.

We spoke to a sparse crowd that seemed largely unaware of or unimpressed by the featured speaker’s credentials. Cunningham won them over with his message.

That night I told Cunningham, still a powerful figure in physique and personality at 70, when he said “nice to meet you” that this wasn’t our first meeting. He appreciated hearing this, but I could tell that mine had been just another face at hundreds of his talks over the years.

He didn’t remember me, and I didn’t expect that he would. But I’ll never forget him.

UPDATE.  This piece ran in conjunction with release of a Glenn Cunningham biography, titled American Miler, by Paul J. Kiell and published by Breakaway Books. Cunningham died in 1988 at age 78.

[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, Miles to Go, 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.]