Don Kardong

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 2007.)

DON OF A NEW AGE. We can’t see a Golden Age while it is happening. We can’t spot the greatness of an era until we’ve seen how far it stands above the years that followed.

Given a generation’s perspective, we now see the 1970s as the Golden Age of U.S. men’s marathoning at the Olympics. We can say the same for U.S. running writing, and in two cases the names of runner and writer overlap.

Look at all the Seventies yielded, and no later decade has: in Olympic running, Frank Shorter’s gold and silver medals at Munich and Montreal, plus the fourth places of Kenny Moore and Don Kardong. In best-selling writing (for all topics, the running books of Jim Fixx, George Sheehan and the Bob Glover-Jack Shepherd team.

These authors earned their success. They wrote well and delivered the right message at the right time, as running and running bookselling boomed together.

But I’d argue that Fixx, Sheehan and Glover-Shepherd weren’t the best writers the Seventies spawned. For quality and durability of their work, I’d go with Moore and Kardong.

They have more in common than their near-misses at the Olympics. Moore and then Kardong, a few years later, were Pacific Northwest-born, ran for Pac-8 (now Pac-12) colleges and were world-class in track before turning to the marathon, and peaked in the 2:11s.

And both broke into running writing in a magazine that I edited at the time. Moore first appeared there in 1970, and Kardong five years later.

How Don tells stories distinguishes him from his fellow fourth-placer. One isn’t better than the other; they’re just different.

When I first talked to Kenny Moore about rerunning his article, he was studying for a graduate degree in creative writing. He was in training for the career to come.

When I asked Don Kardong to write his first article, about his 1975 trip across the newly opened borders of China, he was working as an elementary schoolteacher. A career as a writer? You can’t be serious.

His apparent lack of seriousness, or at least inability to take himself and the sport too seriously, would distinguish his writing and endear him to readers. With Moore, you expected to be impressed by his thoughts and observations. With Kardong, you expected to be amused by his experiences and misadventures.

This isn’t to say that Don writes the way a slapstick comic performs. He’s no buffoon. His relaxed style features a gentle jibe here (often aimed at himself) and a clever turn of phrase there.

The writing appears to entertain Don as much as it does his readers. It seems to be his break from the serious contributions he makes to the sport and to his community.

He helped professionalize running as a co-founder of the Association of Road Racing Athletes (now known by the initials PRRO). He served as long-distance chairman of USA Track & Field and as president of the Road Runners Club of America.

Don’s writing pace has slowed of late, and not just because of competing obligations. Curiously, Runner’s World stopped assigning articles to this longtime favorite of its readers.

Now, finally, Don is back writing for a national audience. His column has appeared in each issue of Marathon & Beyond since early 2007.

Readers can again smile and laugh along with this runner-writer from the Golden Age. His work still glitters a generation later.

UPDATE. At home in Spokane, Washington, Don Kardong launched and now serves as fulltime race director of the Bloomsday 12K race. His writings are again absent from national running publications.

[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, 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.]

Kim Jones

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from October 1996.)

KEEPING UP WITH JONES. Kim Jones is 38 years old and the mother of two. Both daughters were born before she won her first national marathon title, in 1986. As we talked recently, she wanted to talk as much about her younger daughter as about her own running.

“Jamie ran track as a freshman this year,” said Kim. “She ran the 800 in 2:17 and made the final at the state meet. Then she got to go with me to the Track Trials in Atlanta.”

“Yes, I saw you run there,” I told her. “What inspired that?” She was typecast as a marathoner, having run in three World Championships as well as placing second at New York City twice and Boston once.

But she’d also dropped out of the last two Olympic Marathon Trials with injury and illness. Her asthma that attacks unpredictably in long races has become increasingly worrisome.

“After my disappointment in Columbia,” said Kim of the 1996 Marathon Trial, “I wanted to try something entirely different.” She dropped from the marathon on the roads in February to 5000 meters on the track in June.

“I chose this race instead of the 10,000 because I was afraid that my asthma would kick in during the 10,” she said. “The breathing problems don’t usually start for 15 minutes or so, and I could get through the 5000 in that time.”

Kim wasn’t a speedless roadie. She had been nationally ranked in the 800 in high school, but the track 5000 was a new distance to her this spring.

“I was partly doing this for the road runners,” she told me. This was her answer to track people who think that marathoners never had any turnover or had it pounded out of them by the roads.

Her daughter Jamie’s new career on the track influenced Kim’s return as well. This was a sport they could still share.

“She came within one second of what I ran in the 800 at the same age,” said the proud mom. The daughter felt great pride this summer too as she watched Kim place seventh in the Trials 5000. Few other high school athletes have ever seen a parent come this close to  making an Olympic team.

UPDATE. Later Kim Jones relocated from Washington state to Colorado and married Jon Sinclair. Her autobiography, Dandelion Growing Wild, reveals details about her difficult early life that few runners would be willing to share.

[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, 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.]

Jeff Johnson

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from May 1997.)

LIFE AFTER NIKE. They met as students at Stanford University in the 1960s. Both sold Tiger running shoes, first from their car trunks and later from small offices.

I bought my first Tigers from one of them, Jeff Johnson, and met the other, then known by his nickname of Buck, a few years later when he came to the Runner’s World office to introduce his new brand of shoes. He later dropped the old nickname (but lived up to it by making big bucks) and is now known as Phil Knight.

Jeff is responsible for naming the company. The word came to him in a dream: Nike. The business thrived, of course. Knight is now the most powerful business leader in sports, and Jeff Johnson is long departed from Nike.       

Jeff took very early retirement in 1983, when in his early 40s. He didn’t have to wonder what he’d do with the rest of his life. He would do more of what he already did for fun: shoot photos for magazines, fish at his lakeside home in New Hampshire and coach runners.

“I entered coaching in 1969, by accident actually,” he recalls. “I was coerced into taking over a Boston women’s club, the Liberty AC. I couldn’t say no to a bunch of talented, dedicated young women.”

Jeff later coached at two high schools in New Hampshire. Former athletes of his occasionally call to tell him “the good directions their lives have taken and how they credit track and cross-country with giving them the tools for success.

“More than once I had graduating seniors tell me that they learned more in cross-country than they learned in school. Not true literally, of course, but what they meant was that they learned things in running that school didn’t teach them.”

Jeff has now taken a leap to coaching out-of-college athletes. This has led him back to where he started as an athlete, to the Stanford area where he founded The Farm Team. Meanwhile his old classmate, Phil Knight, oversees an empire. Who’s to judge which of them is better off?

UPDATE. I knew Jeff Johnson, as a fellow runner, for almost a decade before there was a company called Nike. The Farm Team that he founded moved north and morphed into the Oregon Track Club Elite. Jeff is back in New Hampshire, enjoying his long retirement.

[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, 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.]

Lynn Jennings

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 1991.)

LYNN’S WINS. Lynn Jennings makes my short list of most-admired athletes. She’s a runner for all seasons: world champion in cross-country, Olympian in outdoor track, American record-holder indoors, and owner of world and U.S. road marks.

Jennings’ versatility and year-round consistency is unmatched. But a runner needs more than talent to become a favorite. Lynn has more.

She gives you a firm handshake, looks you in the eyes, calls you by name and says what she thinks. She also takes commitments seriously.

Jennings committed herself last year to run the National Women’s 8K Championship in Alhambra, California, but couldn’t go because of an ankle sprain. She promised then to be there in 1991, and was.

Before racing, she gave a clinic for the area’s high school runners. She admitted her early failures: running herself into knee surgery in high school and retiring three times while still young.

In her mid-20s Jennings decided, “I was born to be a runner. When I told that to my parents, they supported my decision but weren’t thrilled. I could see Dad thinking he had just spent $40,000 on my Princeton education so I could run around in sneakers the rest of my life.”

Lynn also wasn’t shy about telling her strengths. “I’m one of the wiser runners out there on the circuit,” she said. “I never ignore what my body tells me, and I never get overuse injuries.”

Yet she confessed to pushing nearer the edge this year than ever before. The Alhambra 8K would be her third road race in less than three weeks, a far busier schedule than Jennings prefers.

But she made no excuses about feeling tired or this being her down-season. She wasn’t coy about her intentions.

Lynn said, “I want to break 25:02. That’s the existing world record. I’ve been thinking about that for a couple of months.

“I’m not thinking I might be able to do it. I’m thinking I will do it.”

Alhambra’s $100,000 incentive to break the record was more than a publicity gimmick. Races often get ink and airplay with such bonus offers while taking little risk of paying off.

Not Alhambra. Organizers there had to buy an insurance policy costing about one-fifth that amount. And Jennings stood a good chance of earning the bonus because she already held the 8K mark.

But records can’t be scheduled, even by the most determined runners and generous sponsors. They can’t order perfect conditions.

The weather this last Saturday in October turned un-Californian. After five years of drought, heavy rains suddenly blew through Alhambra.

The rain could have improved Jennings’ chances if it had simply cooled the temperature and cleared out the smog. But the storm also brought wind, a headwind for the hard part of the out-and-back course.

Lynn might have given up her record attempt before it started. Instead, she raced to the halfway mark 19 seconds faster than record pace before turning into the wind.

It slowed her to 25:23. Not a record but an admirable try.

UPDATE. Lynn Jennings did her finest running after this story appeared. In 1992 she her third World Cross-Country title in as many years, then claimed a bronze medal in the Barcelona Olympic 10,000. She competed in her third Olympics in 1996, won her last U.S. title in 1998 and ran her fastest marathon, 2:38 at Boston, the following year.

Lynn now lives in Portland, Oregon. In early 1994 she nearly died there after suffering pulmonary embolisms while on a run. These blood clots shut down her right lung and compromised the left.

She wrote in a blog post, “I was told in no uncertain terms that the size, strength and power of my lungs and heart are what saved me since my heart was under severe strain and pressure. A less able heart would have led to a different outcome.”

“Being a runner saved my life. The redundancy in my left lung, my strong and powerful heart, and my honed tenacity and iron will are what got me home that morning.”

[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, 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.]