(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 2004.)
YOUNG AT HEART. On Johnny Kelley’s last day, I was
writing about him without yet knowing the sad news. This story told about one
of his guiding philosophies, that “I don’t judge success by what I once did,
but by what I keep doing.”
By that
measure and almost any other, John Adelbert Kelley was immensely successful.
His final success was living to be the youngest 97-year-old I’ve ever known.
Walter Bortz,
MD, an expert in aging actively, said the ideal life is “to die young as late
as possible.” Kelley lived up to that model beautifully. He ran the Boston
Marathon into his 80s and serving as the race’s honorary leader as recently as
last April.
On television
this fall Kenneth Cooper, MD, drew two graphs on aging, the normal versus the
ideal. The “Aerobics” doctor said Americans normally peak early in fitness and
then follow a steady downhill slope to the ultimate finish line.
Ideally, said
Cooper, the fitness line stays high and fairly flat into the advanced years,
with a quick plunge at the end. Johnny Kelley took this high road.
A month past
his 97th birthday Kelley finally wore out. His end came just three
hours after admission to a nursing home. I like to think he decided this wasn’t
where or how he wanted to live.
Another
doctor, the late George Sheehan, would have described this as “a beautiful
death.” That’s to go late, quickly and on his own terms.
My fondest
memory of Johnny Kelley was sharing a stage with him, George Sheehan and
Kenneth Cooper in Dallas. Three of us spoke. Kelley sang, as he continued to do
at public events, his theme song, “Young at Heart.”
It begins and
ends with verses that now would make a perfect epitath:
“Fairy tales can come
true,
it can happen to you, if
you’re young at heart.
For it’s hard, you will
find,
to be narrow of mind, if
you’re young at heart.”
“And
if you should survive to a hundred and five
look at all you’ll derive
out of being alive.
And here is the best
part, you have a head start,
if you are among the very
young at heart.”
UPDATE. I’ll always thank Johnny Kelley for
leading me into the marathon. He didn’t know this at the time, but heroes
seldom recognize the reach of their influence.
The best
marathoners of the mid-1960s intimidated me with their speed. But Kelley, who
was slowing by then but still running at Boston each spring, inspired me.
He was older
(at 59) than my dad, older than I could ever imagine becoming. If someone that
old can run a marathon, I thought at the time, then why can’t I? The next
spring at Boston I ran a few minutes in the roar that greeted Kelley,
everyone’s hero there.
[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.]
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