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.]