Sister Marion Irvine

(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 1989.)

NUN BETTER. To this six-year-old girl, no one at the mountain resort’s swimming pool was a stranger. She talked with anyone who would talk back. When a woman with curly gray hair stood up to leave, the little girl demanded to know, “Where are you going?”

“To run,” said the woman.

“Run?” the girl said. “Young people run. Old ones jog.”

“How old do you think I am?” asked the tall, lean woman. “Sixty,” the girl guessed, almost correctly.

Marion Irvine – Sister Marion, the Catholic nun of 1984 Olympic Trials fame – will turn 60 in October. This fact distresses her, not because she’s getting older but because she was barely too young for a new age group at the recent World Veterans Championships.

Sister Marion laughs when she recalls talking with the six-year-old at Jeff Galloway’s Lake Tahoe running camp this summer: “She knew better than I what I should do.”

Marion never was a jogger. Almost at once she went from obesity and two-pack-a-day smoking to racing. That was 11 years, many successes and one big setback ago.

After discovering racing, she indulged often. “I loved three-day holiday weekends,” she says, “because I could race on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.”

Even when running alone, she raced against herself. Her training plan: “Always run as far as possible, as fast as possible.”

Marion ran 16 marathons in four years. In late 1983 she qualified for the Trials with 2:51:01. At Olympia she ran 2:52:02.

She was 54 then. No one that age has yet run faster.

But neither has Marion herself tried another marathon since 1984. Her biggest setback immediately followed her greatest success.

“I thought I was invincible after the Trials,” she says. “I started training hard again the next day and tried for a 10K PR two weeks later.”

During that race she suddenly thought, “I’m not enjoying this.” Finding no ready reason to go on, she dropped out.

Guilt quickly replaced her weariness. “I began berating myself,” she recalls. “I told myself I wasn’t a quitter.”

The way to prove it was to jump in her car and drive to another race the same day. She finished that one but two days later suffered a hamstring tear. Its after-effects lasted almost three years.

You don’t really become a runner until you’ve had a serious, career-threatening injury. It makes you appreciate what you had and examine what went wrong.

“I’ve become a runner,” says Marion. “I saw that if I intended to be competing in the 95-plus age group, I needed to be better balanced in my running.

“I made a bargain with God: just get me through this injury, and I’ll do things right next time.”

She still trains and races hard, just not as often. She races less than before, subscribes to the hard/easy system, and limits herself to one long run, one in the hills and one session of intervals a week.

Marion doesn’t races as fast as before, or as far. But she says, “I’m just so happy to be out there running without pain.”

Today’s pains most often come from non-running causes, but hurt no less for that. In one incredible streak of bad luck this winter and spring, she: (1) dislocated a thumb, (2) spent nine weeks with the flu, (3) tripped and fell on a shoulder, (4) broke a toe, and (5) bruised and cut her face in a bike wreck.

Still, she ran the World Veterans Championships in Eugene, winning five gold medals while at the high end of her age group. But she skipped the meet’s longest race.

“I can enter 10K’s, run three or four minutes slower than my PR and be satisfied,” she says. “I can’t do that in the marathon.

“I still think of myself as top class in that event, and can’t yet imagine going to a race, running 3:25 or 3:30 and having people ask what was wrong. I know I finally will have arrived as a runner when I can run a marathon just to finish and be happy with that.”

UPDATE. Now past her 86^th birthday, Sister Marion Irvine no longer runs but stays active in other ways. She still speaks at Jeff Galloway’s camp each summer, and works on social-justice causes for her religious order.

She remains the oldest runner ever to qualify for an Olympic Trials. Joan Samuelson ran faster than Marion had at age 54, but Joan didn’t reach the 2012 Trials because the standard was higher by then.

[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: 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.]

Judy Ikenberry

(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 1999.)

LIVING HISTORY. Running seminars work the same way as study in school. Learning isn’t confined to the lecture halls but continues in the hallways, at meals and on the streets outside.

I attended a race directors’ conference in Portland this fall, sitting on a couple of panels. As usually happens at events like this, I learned more than I taught – and heard the weekend’s best story outside the classroom. It had both a shocking start and a happy end.

Judy Ikenberry sat beside me for one of the panel discussions. My thought while glancing over at her: She looks too young and lively to be a monument to women’s running history.

As Judy Shapiro she began running in the late 1950s and ran as far as the officials at the time would let her. This was little more than a mile.

Later she married her coach, Dennis Ikenberry, and graduated up in distances as the slowly relaxing rules allowed. In 1974 she won the first U.S. women’s marathon title, setting a PR of 2:54 while beating better-known runners such as first official Boston champion Nina Kuscsik.

Later still, the Ikenberrys set up a race-scoring business called Race Central, based in southern California. This was Judy’s reason for being on the Portland panel, since her company scores the Portland Marathon along with dozens of other events each year.

After the talk we walked back to our separate hotels together. Judy said then what she hadn’t mentioned in her talk.

“We’re thinking of cutting back on our business. Dennis is 65 and starting to talk about retirement. I’m only 57, but I haven’t been well the past year and need to slow down.”

She looked as energetic as I’d seen her in any of our annual visits. I asked what had gone wrong. She gave a grim story the lightest possible telling.

“I’m happy just to be here,” she said. “I died in June.” There’s a line to capture attention.

Judy explained that she’d felt symptoms while riding her bicycle and knew what might be happening. “I have a terrible family history of heart disease and high cholesterol,” she said.

During examination for her condition, Judy’s heart stopped and was electrically jolted back to life. She required immediate bypass surgery, from which she recovered in time for her daughter’s wedding. “She would never have forgiven me if I hadn’t been there,” said Judy.

Tracing a line from lower stomach to upper chest, she said, “I now have a nice little scar to remind me to take better care of myself.”

She added, “I know I need to stay far away from gambling casinos. I’ve already used up all of my good luck.”

At lunch that Saturday in Portland, Judy had taken charge of getting get-well cards signed for race director Les Smith’s wife. Nadine had fallen the night before and broken an arm. No one at the conference knew better than Judy Ikenberry how good getting better could feel.

UPDATE. More than 40 U.S. women’s marathon titles have been awarded since 1974. The record is more than a half-hour faster than Judy Ikenberry set originally. But no one else can ever say she was the first to win this race.

[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: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, 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.]

Mihaly Igloi

(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 February 1998.)

IGLOI’S BOYS. If you think U.S. distance runners lag behind the best in the world now, you should have seen it in the 1950s. Horace Ashenfelter was the golden exception, winning the Melbourne Olympic steeplechase.

Otherwise the Americans ran the long races as expected, which was poorly. None of the 1500 runners reached the final, the highest 5000 or 10,000 finish was 18^th, and no marathoner placed better than 20^th.

In 1956 America’s first sub-four-minute mile was still two years away. U.S. records in the 5K and 10K were minor-league by world standards.

Eastern Europeans – Czechs, Soviets, Hungarians – were the “Africans” of their time. Mihaly Igloi-coached runners in Hungary were setting many of the records.

Igloi, who died recently at age 89, was an unlikely candidate to lead the U.S. out of the distance-running wilderness. He never was completely understood or widely imitated here, so his contribution was never fully appreciated.

He might never have come here if political and military battling hadn’t driven him out of Hungary shortly after the Melbourne Olympics. He came to America looking for personal freedom, not athletic opportunity. There was little of the latter here, where Igloi’s limited English barred him from traditional coaching jobs in high schools and colleges.

The coach first set up training camp in the San Francisco Bay Area, attracting a small band of athletes. They later moved with him to Los Angeles.

Igloi showed how quickly an inspired coach and a few runners can reverse a country’s fortunes. This had happened by the early 1960s.

The Igloi group included Max Truex, Jim Beatty and Bob Schul. Truex, a dropout in the 10,000 in the 1956 Olympics, placed sixth at Rome while hugely improving the American record. In 1962 Beatty ran the world’s first sub-four-minute mile indoors. And of course in 1964 Schul became America’s first – and still only – Olympic 5000 winner.

Igloi used an interval-based training system, in complex mixtures of distances and paces that only he (and perhaps his protégé Laszlo Tabori) understood. Nearly all the training was on the track, with the coach always watching.

This approach obviously worked well for the few runners lucky enough to join him  – and to tolerate the intensity and uncertainty of his program. Igloi’s boys set 49 world records.

But the mysterious method was almost inseparable from the man, who said little about it publicly and wrote even less. He had to be there to make it work, and it didn’t transfer well to other coaches or to athletes training on their own.

Timing also worked against Igloi. His coaching contemporary was Arthur Lydiard, whose runners won twice at the 1960 Olympics and whose ways were the opposite of Igloi’s.

The New Zealander called for lots of running away from the track – and out of the coach’s sight. This system appealed more to runners than camping at the track for hours each day.

Lydiard, who never met a microphone or reporter he didn’t like, had a gift for promotion that Igloi never tried to develop. Lydiard explained himself often and well, and his methods caught on worldwide.

        

Igloi’s didn’t. So he and his system, and his success, are little remembered now –  except by the people who ran for him.

One is Orville Atkins, a marathoner. Orville was an Igloi boy in the mid-1960s, and he later wrote, “Coach Igloi gave me his time and patience only because I asked for it. I respect him and thank him. I was lucky to work and learn under a man who was strong willed, stubborn and a genius to boot.”

UPDATE. Laszlo Tabori, third to break the 4:00 mile barrier, carried on the Igloi legacy by coaching for decades of club and college coaching in California. His best-known runner was Jacqueline Hansen, first woman to break both 2:45 and 2:40 in the marathon. She wrote fondly of her coach in the book A Long Time Coming.

[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.]

Ralph Hill

(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 July 1990.)

GOLDEN OLDIE. Across the decades flash images from the event that brought this old man here today. The videotape has rewound him back to 1932.

The scene: Los Angeles’s first Olympics. The event: 5000 meters. The stars: Lauri Lehtinen of Finland and Ralph Hill from the United States.

Two ghost-like figures in grainy black-and-white race for the gold medal. Lehtinen leads as they enter the last straightaway.

Hill looks stronger. The 24-year-old Oregonian tries to pass Lehtinen. The Finn won’t allow it and veers into lane three to prevent it.

Hill breaks stride. He tries to pass again, on the inside this time.

Lehtinen cuts him off. Hill drops back, then makes a final charge that goes unimpeded.

Too late. He loses by centimeters as both men share a time of 14:30.0, an Olympic record.

The mostly American crowd showers the winner with boos. An announcer breaks in to plead, “Remember, these people are our guests.”

Results don’t become final for two hours. Officials wait for Hill to file a protest that might have made him the gold medalist. He refuses, and later stands below Lehtinen to accept the silver.

Fast-forwarding to now, the hazy image of the young men on the screen jumps to the real-life scene of Ralph Hill turning away from the screen after watching his 58-years-younger self compete. He stands beside the same University of Oregon track where he ran as a student.

Ralph Hill has come back to his old school today to have a track meet renamed in his honor. It used to be called the “Last Chance Meet,” an ironic touch since his chances to be remembered now are so few.

History doesn’t treat silver medalists kindly, even those who lose by the time it takes to blink. How much different Hill’s life might have been if he’d cried “foul” that day in Los Angeles.

Yet he appears certain that he made the right decision 58 years ago. He betrays no bitterness over his lost gold, and he displays the silver medal as proudly as if it were one better.

Today he brought that medal with him to Eugene. At home in Klamath Falls he doesn’t lock it in a bank vault but keeps it on a coffee table for guests to see.

Now 82, Hill is retired from a lifetime of farming. His back remains straight, his gaze steady, his mind sharp.

Another ex-Oregon runner with the same last name, unrelated Jim Hill, introduces himself to Ralph. The elder Hill says, “Oh yes, you ran…” and then recites Jim’s racing highlights from the early 1980s, which only a close follower of the sport would know.

Ralph attended the 1984 Olympics, his first since running in the same Los Angeles stadium. He recalls, “My son tried to talk me out of going. He said the trip would cost too much. I told him I’d waited 52 years for this, and I wasn’t going to miss my chance.”

Hill’s own running ended early. Farm work gave him more than ample activity.

He contracted polio at age 44. The disease gnarled his hands and weakened his shoulders, but spared his legs.

“Now I get my exercise by dancing,” says Hill. The woman friend who drove him to Eugene calls this man who has outlived two wives “the most popular dance partner at the senior center.

He acts as if he would enjoy the party at Hayward Field just as much even if it weren’t in his honor. He looks the way you would want one of the oldest living U.S. Olympic medalists to look.

UPDATE. Ralph Hill died in 1994 at age 85. Unfortunately, the track meet named for him at his old school, the University of Oregon, didn’t last.

[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: 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.]