Jack Foster

(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 October 1995.)

FOSTER THE MASTER. Age isn’t what it once was. In the slim biographical booklet that he wrote in 1974, Jack Foster referred to himself as an “ancient marathoner.” He was then in his early 40s and seemed old at a time, when masters were just beginning to claim special age groupings for themselves.

Forty isn’t old now, when masters life just begins at that age. But Foster never thought of himself as a young master. He was the oldest of the open runners.

The New Zealander is 63 now and long out of the racing headlines. Before updating his story, let’s review what he once did.

He ran a 2:11:19 marathon at age 41. The time stood for 16 years as a world masters record, and it remains the fastest on a loop course. (John Campbell, another New Zealander, ran 2:11:04 at point-to-point Boston in 1990.)

Foster competed against the best of the young for as long as he could. When, at about age 50, he couldn’t keep up with them anymore, he retired.

Sort of. This meant backing down on the running, but never stopping. And it meant picking up the pace of his original sport, bicycling.

He downplays his running, going so far as to say, “I feel like a fraud completing your questionnaire [for the book Road Racers and Their Training]. But I do run some, so I’ll answer it.”

Like many post-competitive runners, Foster chooses what he liked best from his past program and discards all else. His favorite session was, and still is, a run as long a 1½ hours over hilly farmlands. He now takes it two or three times a week, and nothing more.

Foster still races too. He calls it “indulging in a fun-run now and then, but at about half-throttle while finding someone to chat with.”

His “half-throttle” on half-training is a pace that few 63-year-olds can match — 37-minute 10K, for instance. A month or two of full training, and a few full-bore races could make him a record-setter again. But after all he did in his 40s, he has nothing left to prove in his 60s.

I’ve always liked Jack Foster’s comment that we pay too much attention to time, especially as age slows us down. He said, “If you don’t look at the watch, the racing feels the same way it always did.”

UPDATE. Jack died in 2004 when struck by a car while riding his bike. The day after hearing about his accident, I quoted advice from Jack in my talk at Dick Beardsley’s Marathon Camp. 

This wasn’t a memorial tribute. I’d already planned to borrow words from him, as I nearly always do in talks and books. Friends keep giving, even after they’re gone.

The last lines of his booklet read, “Perhaps what I’ve achieved as a runner may have inspired other 35-year-plus men to get up and have a go. I’d like to think so.”

I know so.

[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 Miles to Go. Other titles: Going Far, 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.]

Jim Fixx

(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 1984.)

GOOD-BYE, GOOD FRIEND. You never want to hear news like this. You never expect to hear it first as a national news bulletin.

The noon report on my car radio led off with, “The man who wrote the book on jogging has died while jogging…” Two names flashed across my mind before the reporter could give a name: George Sheehan and Kenneth Cooper.

“Fifty-two-year-old James Fixx…” Then came sketchy details about the heart attack that had killed him while he vacationed in northern Vermont.

I pulled over, too stunned to drive. In the few minutes that followed, memories of him and emotions for him rushed to mind.

I remembered first seeing his unfamiliar name on a letter in 1976. He wrote then to say he was working on a book about running, and he wondered if we could get together and talk about it when he visited California.

Soon afterward, a voice joined the name when Jim called to say he was in town – staying in a cheap motel along a fast-food strip – and could we meet? I put the name and face together with a person and a personality that day. This was the man who within two years would star on network talk shows and in “Do you know me?” ads.

At our first meeting he dressed in Levi’s cords, well-worn Asics racing flats and a T-shirt from an obscure race in New England. He looked quite fit and younger than his 44 years – not at all like the chain-smoking editor he had been nine years and 60 pounds earlier, and not like a big-time writer trying to cash in on the burgeoning running craze.

Jim was a prominent magazine editor in New York City, taking a leave of absence to work on this book. “It’s a dream come true,” he said, “a runner getting to spend a few months of total immersion in running. I was surprised when Random House gave me a big enough advance to let me take a few months off for this project.”

He said he never expected to earn anything more than that modest amount of upfront money for the yet-unnamed book. The Complete Book of Running came out a year later. It topped the best-seller lists, for books on all topics, for a full year.

That book made Jim Fixx rich and famous beyond his imaginings. It seemed to put him on easy street, in a neighborhood where he would never have to work again.

The trouble was, he wanted to keep working. He didn’t want to let fame and fortune change his life. But they did anyway.

We met at the 1978 Boston Marathon. He shook his head at all the fuss being made over him, and complained that writing this book about running had taken away his time to write and run.

His time was never again completely his own. For the next six years Jim was forced into a celebrity’s life. He took a bemused view of it in his book Jackpot, but you could read some pain into those pages.

He claimed to have slipped quietly back into obscurity after his books fell from the best-seller lists, but that wasn’t true.  Jim Fixx, a private man perfectly suited to the solitary existence of a writer/runner, remained a public figure who died a celebrity’s death.

UPDATE. Jim Fixx is remembered for many of the wrong reasons. He deserves better than being called “that guy who died while running.”

Jim sold more books than any other running writer. His Complete Book of Running didn’t cause the sport to boom but surely fed the forces already at work at the time of its release in 1977. The newly arrived flocks of runners had snapped up nearly a million copies of this book by 1984.

The sales died suddenly, along with the author. It was as if the nature and timing of his death had suddenly canceled all the good he’d done for the sport. It was as if he’d betrayed his own cause.

He had, in fact, done our sport one last favor. He’d made us face the hard truth that running isn’t a cure-all. Running can build latent strengths but also uncover inherent weaknesses. His rise from pudgy smoker to trim marathoner was as dramatic as his final fall, but he seems destined to be known only for the latter.

Jim Fixx was my friend as well as our friend. One of the hardest columns I ever wrote was this report of his passing.

[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 Miles to Go. 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.]

Buddy Edelen

(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 January 1992.)

BUDDY’S RECORD. Leonard “Buddy” Edelen is a figure from history. But few of us who run now were running when he ran his best, and little was known about him even then.

Now we can read his full story. Lawyer-writer Frank Murphy has published Edelen’s biography titled A Cold Clear Day.

Edelen didn’t have a chance to claim fame and wealth on the American roads. Little was happening there in the early 1960s.

After failing badly in the 1960 Olympic Trials 10,000, Edelen fled to Europe. He took a low-paying job teaching school and never earned more than $500 for a race. Coach Fred Wilt sent him training advice from Indiana.

Buddy became a marathoner in 1962. He went the distance four times in the last half of that year and in the final race set an American record of 2:18:57.

No one in the world had yet broken 2:15, and Edelen didn’t look like he would be the first when he lined up for England’s Polytechnic Marathon on June 15^th, 1963. He’d won his big race of the spring, breaking Abebe Bikila’s course record at Athens four weeks earlier.

“Buddy had no particular plan for this marathon,” writes Frank Murphy of the British race. “He had trained well, and that gave reason for hope, even surprise. If it came, that would be good. But if it did not, it would be no worry.”

The mix was perfect: a well-trained, relaxed runner in a great field on a fast course. The “Poly” was then one of the world’s top four marathons (along with Boston; Fukuoka, Japan, and Kosice, Czechoslovakia). The 1963 field included future sub-2:10 man Ron Hill.

Today the English course would as debatable as New York’s was when Salazar ran an uncredited “record” there in 1981. Murphy describes the point-to-point route from Windsor Castle to Chiswick as “flat to gently downhill, with no significant [up]hills to worry a runner.”

In 1963 a tailwind gave some help at the Poly. But temperatures in the 70s cancelled much of that benefit.

Edelen ran the fastest time in history, 2:14:28. Then he had to weather months of rumors that the course was short. A remeasurement finally put the shortage at 32 yards, but he’d added nearly twice that amount by taking a wrong turn.

He rolled on toward the Olympics with a 2:15:10 at Kosice that fall and a 20-minute victory at the scorchingly hot 1964 U.S. Trials. He then resumed hard work within after week of the Trials.

In that first workout Edelen felt, in Murphy’s words, “the first sign of the injury every athlete fears. It was the injury from which he would not recover.”

Sciatica hobbled him at the Tokyo Olympics, where he placed sixth. His greatest marathon may have been his last, when in 1965 he came within six seconds of his best time despite complaining to his diary that “the sciatica was sheer hell the last six miles.”

Buddy Edelen went on to teach at Adams State College and then to live in Tulsa. At 54 he won’t trust his legs to race, but they still let him run.

UPDATE. Edelen died in 1997 of cancer at age 59. He had been the first American-born man in 38 years to run world’s fastest marathon, and none has done it since. (Alberto Salazar and Khalid Khannouchi were both naturalized citizens.)

A golden age for U.S. marathon men dawned with Edelen and lasted another two decades. In 1968 Amby Burfoot became the first American in 11 years to win at Boston. In 1972 Frank Shorter won this country’s first Olympic gold medal in 64 years – and last to date.

Salazar and Bill Rodgers combined for 12 Boston and New York City victories between 1976 and 1982. The last time an American male had won either race since Greg Meyer’s Boston until Meb Keflezighi broke the 31-year drought there in 2014.

[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 Miles to Go. 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.]

Jerome Drayton

(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 1997.)

CANADA’S BEST. The fastest marathoner in Canadian history now walks with a limp. The once-gaunt look of a marathoner is gone as a result of inactivity brought on by a year-long knee injury.

The once-black hair is fading toward white, the result of his 52 years. Gone are the mustache and sunglasses that gave him a look of mystery and menace as he ran.

The Jerome Drayton of today doesn’t square with the 1970s image I had of him. I didn’t really know him as a person then, only as that image.

That’s the problem we speakers all had when Rob Reid of the Royal Victoria Marathon asked us to help honor Drayton at this year’s race. “What do we say about him?” we wondered. None of us really knew him in his glory days, and we didn’t quite know what had become of him since.

He might have become the Frank Shorter or Bill Rodgers of Canadian running. Drayton has a faster PR than Shorter’s and is within 40 seconds of Rodgers’, but he has never shared his history with admirers as they have. He truly retired from the sport when his racing ended in 1981.

Drayton seemed to prefer it that way. His running was never a popularity contest, and it wasn’t his way to joke or make small-talk. Ask him a question and he’d give an honest answer, usually brief.

We speakers in Victoria knew him mostly by what we’d seen and read: that he was a European immigrant who started racing under one name (Peter Buniak) and finished under another… that he won the Boston Marathon in 1977, then picked apart the race organization afterward… that he ran in shades before Oakley and others made it cool (and profitable for an athlete-endorser).

Drayton has held the Canadian marathon record longer than most of the runners in the Victoria audience have run, and longer than some have lived. He set his first one in 1968, his final one in 1975. That 2:10:08 has stood ever since.

He ranked number-one in the world and held a world record (for 10 miles on the track). He won the Fukuoka Marathon three times when that race was the unofficial world championship, and he ran in three Olympics – placing sixth at Montreal.

This was all pretty good but not good enough for him. He tells how “the insole of my new Tiger shoe came unglued late in my fastest race, and this kept me from breaking 2:10.” He caught cold before the 1976 Olympic race and thinks it cost him a medal.

That never-satisfied thinking made him as good as he was. So did the seriousness that caused him to say in Victoria, when asked to recall any humorous incidents from his career, “Nothing funny ever happened to me when I ran.”

Given this attitude, I wondered how he would react to the gentle roasting he would receive at the Victoria dinner that honored him. I looked over at Drayton as, one by one, the runners at the head table made jokes at his expense. His face reddened and tears ran down his cheeks, but not from anger or embarrassment.

He was laughing at all this. While little emotion came to his voice as he stood up to respond to the other speakers, he spoke volumes when he said, “I’ll never forget this night.”

Jerome Drayton doesn’t say what he doesn’t mean. He was genuinely moved at being remembered after all these years of not trying to be.

UPDATE. At this book’s publication, Jerome Drayton’s Canadian marathon record of 2:10:08 had stood for more than 40 years. No other man from his country has won a Boston Marathon since he did in 1977.

[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 Miles to Go. 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.]