Arthur Lydiard

(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 2004.)

LYDIARD’S FAREWELLS. Five years ago Arthur Lydiard took what he and we thought at the time was his “farewell tour” of the United States. He’d been coming here from New Zealand for almost 40 years then, and he still loved the attention that greeted him in the U.S. That acclaim kept him going.

I wrote in 1999 that “Arthur Lydiard now eases off the stage. But his system remains as sound as it was when he sprung it on the world in 1960.”

Three athletes from his neighborhood in New Zealand, a country with Oregon’s population, won medals at the 1960 Olympics. He later inspired the double-double of Finland’s Lasse Viren, 5000 and 10,000 golds at both Munich and Montreal.

Most of today’s runners hadn’t yet started when Arthur Lydiard was in his coaching prime. Many weren’t yet born.

Some critics now call Lydiard’s methods “outdated.” But there is no expiration date on expertise, no statute of limitations on what works.

Rich Englehart, a longtime Lydiard devotee, saw him in Boston five years ago. “It was an interesting evening – and a bit sad, quite honestly,” said Rich that year.

He saw his chosen coach as an unsteady old man of 82 and most of the audience in their masters years. “My pervasive feeling was that I was at a meeting of People Whose Time Has Passed.

“Right outside the auditorium one of the local clubs was running a group interval session on the track. The conference organizers went out and invited them in for free. But they all decided they’d rather stay out and do intervals than come in and listen to some old guy tell them that maybe they should be doing something else.”

Rich added, “My experience isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. But it assures me that I chose to follow the right leader – both when we were all much younger, and recently when I signed up for his online coaching advice and improved by 1:45 in the track 5000.”

That 1999 U.S. tour wasn’t Arthur Lydiard’s last. He encored this fall at age 87, bringing along the baggage of four strokes and two knee replacements.

Rich Englehart again met his mentor in Boston and then drove him to Washington, DC, with an overnight stop en route. “This was one of the greatest experiences of my life, spending two days alone with him,” says Rich.

The high point of the tour, and not just in elevation, was Arthur’s talk in Boulder before a crowd of 400, the largest of the tour. He shared the stage with Mark Wetmore, the college coach whose methods most closely follow the Lydiard system. Wetmore’s Colorado teams had won both NCAA Cross-Country titles the week before.

“I owe everything to Arthur,” said Wetmore. “I am just the delivery boy for his great message.”

Little more than a week later the greatest running coach we’ve ever known was gone. After speaking to a Texas audience, he returned to his hotel room and suffered a fatal heart attack that evening.

Lydiard left on a high note. Not in reclusive retirement in New Zealand but on the road, still spreading his timeless message to anyone who would listen. The message will outlive the man.

UPDATE. Year after year, the University of Colorado continues to field top distance runners, and Mark Wetmore continues to credit Arthur Lydiard for pointing the way. Team alumni include Olympians Kara and Adam Goucher, Jenny Simpson, Emma Coburn, Shalaya Kipp and Dathan Ritzenhein.

[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.]

  

Gerry Lindgren

(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 January 1999.)

FAME RECLAIMED. Gerry Lindgren was a hero of my youth. I was young then, and he was even younger.

At 18 he wasn’t just the best ever for his age. This kid from Spokane with pixyish size and a squeaky voice looked and sounded like a high school freshman. Yet he was one of the world’s best distance runners, period.

Americans liked his prospects of winning a 10,000 medal, maybe even gold, at the 1964 Olympics. And why not? Gerry had beaten the mighty Soviet adult runners that summer, and he’d won the U.S. Trials.

He didn’t win at Tokyo, didn’t come close on Billy Mills’s golden day. We’ll never know how Gerry might have done if not racing on a sprained ankle.

We do know that he tied Mills for the world six-mile record the next year, at age 19. At Washington State, Gerry set an NCAA record for titles won.

Injuries began catching up with him in his early 20s, and he never made another Olympic team. Then adult life caught up with him.

Details are vague, and rumors are best left buried. It’s enough to say that he disappeared from home, family and business in the 1980s.

When spotted running in Honolulu, he denied being – or knowing – this person called Lindgren. He now lived by the name Young.

Supported by new friends in Hawaiian running, he eventually reclaimed his own name, and along with it some of the fame that is rightfully his. He again runs races as Gerry Lindgren and now works as a free-lance coach in the Islands.

Much as I’d admired him early, then rooted for his comeback later, I had never met Gerry. I’d seen him run only twice.

Now I was in Honolulu for a talk at NikeTown. Keala Peters of Nike arranged a dinner the night before.

“This started as an intimate gathering, but it keeps growing,” she said. “We now have 15 coming.”

She ran through the guest list. I knew about half of these people, and most of the others by name. They were a mix of top runners, coaches, writers and officials.

One name in particular grabbed my interest: Gerry Lindgren. It happened that I sat next to him at dinner.

In his 50s he retains some of the look that he had at 18. The years in hiding didn’t speed up his aging. His hair is its original color, and his lines are few. His voice is still boyish, and his sense of humor impish.

This is the guy who once told writer Mike Tymn (who sat on my other side) that he still had “a four-minute-mile mind, but nine-minute legs.” Well, not quite. He’d run his latest 10K in 36 minutes.

Gerry ordered a vegetarian meal. When the log-sized burrito arrived, he asked the waiter, “Did someone put a live chicken in here?”

As he worked through the burrito, I asked how he thought he might have done in the long-ago Olympics if not for the ankle sprain. “Some people built me up as a possible medalist. But I was just a kid who didn’t really know what he was doing.”

The years since then have taught him a lot.

UPDATE. Forty years after his Olympic season, Gerry Lindgren is finally a USATF Hall of Famer. His induction came in Portland, where he also watched the Nike Team Nationals cross-country races for high schoolers. No one that age has topped the running he did in 1964.

Later he wrote Gerry Lindgren’s Book of Running. It’s quirky, like the author who in his late 60s still lives/runs/coaches in Hawaii.

[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.]

  

Fred Lebow

(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 April 1990.)

LEBOW’S EVENTS. Fred Lebow has a way of making things come out right. Even when his early prospects appear dim, the New York City impresario directs final acts worthy of Broadway.

I first met Lebow at the 1976 Boston Marathon. My first impression was that he talked oddly.

It wasn’t his voice, an accent brought with him from Transylvania, but his words. Fred spoke as a dreamer and schemer in a sport still conditioned to think small and to undersell itself.

Running hadn’t yet boomed in 1976. Jim Fixx said that same Boston weekend of a book he was writing, “I hope it will sell 10,000 copies.” (His Complete Book of Running sold 100 times that many.)

Lebow said of the marathon he directed, “We’re taking it out of Central Park this fall and running it through all five boroughs. In a few years this race could become bigger than Boston.”

Dream on, I thought. Even if the city allows such a disruption, who could dare run on those mean streets?

Bill Rodgers dared, for one. He won the first four citywide races, and in those years New York City not only outgrew Boston but all other marathons in the world.

Next Lebow noticed that as road racing picked up size and speed in this country, track interest waned. “If people won’t go to track meets,” he said, “we’ll take the top track athletes to the people.”

He proposed a mile race along Fifth Avenue. It won’t work, I thought. Milers will feel as far out of their element here as Olympic swimmers would in the Central Park Reservoir.

The runners adapted. The Fifth Avenue Mile worked so well that it spawned a worldwide series of imitators.

Last year Lebow said, “This country deserves a summer track meet like those in Europe.” He would direct the New York Games.

I thought Fred was out of his element this time. He knew the road sport, but track was a different game that required selling tickets and not just giving away sidewalk space.

His meet filled the stadium. And now the New York Road Runners, the club he heads, has landed the 1991 World Championships Track Trails.

Fred Lebow’s knack for directing successful finishes is now meeting its most serious test. Lebow isn’t dealing with an event this time but with his own life story.

Co-workers suspected a problem this winter when Fred began talking oddly. His dreaming and scheming didn’t alert them. That’s how Fred normally talks.

But it wasn’t like him to slur words and forget names. He checked into a hospital to undergo tests.

The early and ominous suspicion was that he had a brain tumor. Doctors performed a biopsy in late February.

While the 52-year-old Lebow awaited the results, he told Dick Patrick of USA Today, “I’m prepared for anything. I’ve had a fulfilling life.”

The first diagnosis was inconclusive but still heartening. No signs of malignancy had been detected.

Fred walked out of the hospital the same night he was examined. A week later he returned for a second biopsy, which confirmed the worst fears: a cancer of the brain.

It’s not good,” Lebow said. “But we know what it is that I’m fighting.”

Treatment started immediately with radiation. “All I know is that if it is treatable and can be cured, I will be cured. I’m going to fight the hell out of it.”

The fight will be uphill. But I’ve learned not to doubt Fred Lebow’s ability to dream or scheme up a happy ending, even when his odds seem longest.

UPDATE. Fred lived four years after this diagnosis, during which he ran his own marathon for the only time. His legacy includes that race, the Fifth Avenue Mile and the annual track meet at Randall’s Island. He is memorialized in a documentary film, “Running for Your Life,” and with a statue near the New York City Marathon finish line.

Only after his passing did I learn two facts about Lebow’s age. He had long understated it and was actually almost 58, not 52, at the time of this writing. And we shared a birthday, June 3^rd.

[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.]

Francie Larrieu Smith

(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 July 1988.)

THE AGE OF LARRIEU. “Did Smith win?” asked the runner beside me as the awarding of women’s prizes counted up to number one.

Smith? I blanked on that name, not remembering any woman named Smith. “You know… Francie,” prompted the man who’d asked the question.

Francie’s married name is Smith, but I still think of her as Larrieu. I’ve known her that way all her life, it seems.

She won the Steamboat Classic four-mile race in Peoria this day. Her time was the fastest ever at this seldom-run distance, 20:10, but she was happier about what the performance signaled for her near future.

Francie told the crowd that she would try in July to make her fourth Olympic team at age 35. She ended by saying, “Let’s hear it for the old farts.”

She may become one of the oldest Olympians ever. But after watching Francie grow up, I find it hard to think of her as being “old.”

Ron Larrieu ran the 1964 Olympic 10,000. When we met a few years later, Ron said, “I have a little sister who just started running. Someday she’ll make everyone forget all about me.”

He was a prophet. Francie was known only briefly as “Ron’s sister.” If Ron is remembered at all now, it is as “Francie’s brother.”

Francie Larrieu has been the only constant amid the vast changes in U.S. women’s running over the past 20 years. As a teenager in the late 1960s she was among the first women to enter the road races I ran in northern California.

She ran on her first international team in 1969, and she’s still making teams a generation later. She made her first three Olympic teams – Munich, Montreal and Moscow – in the 1500 when that was the longest distance for women.

She missed qualifying for the first Olympic 3000 in 1984. This month she’s trying out for the first women’s 10,000.

I hadn’t seen Francie in five years or more before the Peoria race. Her forehead always was lined to a near-worried look, and the lines have deepened now. She always was dark, and the Texas sun (she lives near Dallas with husband Jimmy Smith) has tanned her permanently. She always was sharply angled, and training to a fine pre-Olympic edge has left her more so.

Her look and her four-mile time told most of what I needed to know about Francie and her chances in the Trials. We needed to talk only briefly.

When asked if her training was on course, she said, “I’ve never felt better.” That alone was an important revelation, because her injuries have come more often and lasted longer with age.

“I’m running well,” she added. “But I know better than to look too far ahead. I know what can go wrong.”

Francie was hurt in 1984 and 1986. She chose to skip the Olympic Marathon Trials this spring rather than risk further damage to a sore hip.

Between Olympics – and injuries – she has completed the transition from the 1500/3000 to the 10,000. She began taking the longer distance seriously in 1985, when she won the U.S. 10K title.

There have been detours for injury and a fling with the marathon. But she is back on the course she’d set after failing in 1984 to make her fourth team in the shorter races.

Last year Francie ran in the first World Championships 10,000 for women. Last month she led all Americans – including Mary Slaney and Joan Samuelson – at the L’eggs 10K road race.

The youngest U.S. distance runner from the 1972 Olympic team now tries to become the oldest in 1988. She goes to the Trials feared by all the young contenders and favored by all the old farts.

UPDATE. Francie Larrieu Smith did indeed make her fourth Olympic team for the Seoul 10,000. Then she added a fifth by running the marathon at the 1992 Games. At age 39 she was chosen to carry the U.S. flag at Barcelona’s opening ceremonies.

Now in her 60s, Francie coaches track and cross-country at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

[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.]

Francie Kraker Goodridge

(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 April 1993.)

ANOTHER FRANCIE. A remarkable trio of American women ran 1500 meters at the Munich Olympics. None made the final in this first race of its type, but they all rate a second look for what they’ve done since. More than 20 years later none of them is just an historic figure or footnote.

You know two of these women, Doris Brown (now Heritage) and Francie Larrieu (now Smith). Brown was nearing the end of her racing career in 1972, while Larrieu was just starting hers.

Doris had already won five World Cross-Country titles in a row. She’d qualified in the 1968 Olympics when the 800 was the longest women’s event, and in 1972 when the limit bumped up to the 1500 that was still too short for her.

At age 50 she’s now the longtime coach at Seattle Pacific University… and a longtime AAU/TAC/USATF official… and a member of the USOC… and an emissary to the IAAF. For all that she has done and still does, Doris Brown Heritage claims a spot in the Hall of Fame.

Francie Larrieu Smith will too, once she meets the requirement of being retired. She has qualified for four more Olympic teams since Munich. And, at age 40, she might not be through yet.

But what of the third member of this team? She’s as much a pioneer as the others, though not as famously so.

She’s the other Francie. Her last name was Kraker when she ran with Doris Brown in the Mexico City 800. It was Johnson when she made the Munich 1500 team.

Now it’s Goodridge. She and John Goodridge are soon to celebrate their 20^th anniversary as both married partners and fellow coaches.

The Goodridges first coached together at Michigan State, with Francie serving as John’s assistant with the women’s team. Then they briefly were rivals when Francie took over as Michigan’s coach.

Since 1984 they’ve been equals. John coaches the men at Wake Forest, and Francie has charge of the women. Both of their cross-country teams ran in the NCAA Championships last fall.

Francie’s biggest surprise, at age 46, isn’t that she’s a Division I head coach but that there aren’t more women like her. “I thought the opportunities would expand more than they have,” she says.

“Look at all that has happened in women’s sports since I started coaching [first at a high school] almost 20 years ago. The opportunities for women runners are enormously greater now, but the prospects for women coaches haven’t kept pace.”

Title IX has decreed that colleges and high school support female track and cross-country. But this legislation doesn’t say these teams must be led by women.

Very few of them hold top jobs at the biggest schools. 1988 Olympic coach Terry Crawford produced national championship teams at Texas before moving recently to Cal Poly/San Luis Obispo. Another woman, Bev Kearney, succeeded Crawford at Texas.

Women head only a handful of Division I women’s teams. “I’d love to see more,” says Francie Goodridge, “but I don’t see many more coming along.”

Legislative and economic forces work against it. NCAA rules now limit colleges to one full-time and one part-time assistant, thereby reducing the apprenticeship opportunities for coaches of both sexes.

Money concerns also have forced many colleges to combine their men’s and women’s programs under one coaching staff. The top job almost invariably goes to a man.

This bleak market makes Francie Goodridge all the more remarkable. She has survived as a head coach for more than 10 years, giving young women more help than she had at their age.

UPDATE. Francie and John Goodridge later hosted my visit to Wake Forest University. Soon afterward they moved back to her native state, where John took the Eastern Michigan University coaching job and Francie went to work in the University of Michigan’s admissions office.

All three women’s 1500-meter Olympians from 1972 enjoyed careers as college coaches. Francie Larrieu Smith was the last to start hers (at Southwestern University in Texas) and is the only one still coaching fulltime. She was voted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1998.

[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.]