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.]