Bert Nelson

(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 February 1994.)

FOUNDING FATHER. News of Bert Nelson’s death took two days to travel the 500 miles up to Oregon from Mountain View, California. It arrived as a two-inch item in the morning newspaper, a small and sad way to hear about the passing of a giant in my life.

Bert cofounded Track & Field News with his brother Cordner shortly after World War II. It was the first of the modern magazines on this sport and still might be the most respected. Both brothers are members of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.

Bert edited T&FN for nearly 40 years, yielding that post only as his Parkinson’s disease would no longer let him do the job he expected of himself. He died at 72.

I remember him as 42. That was his age the summer I first walked into his office as an awestruck kid spending a summer bumming around the San Francisco-area running circuit.

T&FN had fed my dreams through high school and into college. I was now a pilgrim, going to the source. That was a cramped storefront in Los Altos, but it looked like Mecca to me. Bert Nelson dressed casually and rode an ancient bicycle to work (in an era when executives did neither), but he struck me as regal.

Bert let himself be bothered by a nobody from nowhere. I had no ambitions to make journalism-let alone running journalism-a career.

I just thought it would be neat to spend a summer at Mecca, and kept pestering Bert’s staff until odd jobs opened up for me. One of them was mowing Bert and Jeanette’s yard. I felt honored to do it.

If we’re lucky, we find one person in a lifetime who changes our life’s course. Bert Nelson was that person for me. Seeing the good life he’d made for himself convinced me to bail out of teacher-coach training and take journalism classes.

He plucked me off my first full-time job, with a newspaper, to return to T&FN. He published my first book. Of all the people I’ve met in 30-plus years of writing work, none has left a greater impression than Bert Nelson. When naming role models, I can’t think of a better one than the first one.

Bert could have succeeded in almost any field. He had the smarts and skills for teaching, along with a keen business sense. He could have edited, written for or published much more lucrative journals than T&FN.

But this was his baby, his family, his home. He was content there, and stayed there for almost 50 years.

Bert wasn’t much of a runner. He competed in high school and one year of college, then stopped. But he had the trait that we runners admire most: endurance, which can take many forms besides athletic. His good works endure even now.

UPDATE. The day that news of his death reached Eugene, I wanted to share these thoughts right away with his staff, widow, and daughter. But first I had another column to write, then a journalism class to teach, then a book chapter to polish. This took most of the day.

“With all that work finished.” I wrote in the letter, “it now occurs to me that it’s the best possible tribute to Bert. None of it – not one bit – would have been possible without his early help.

He helped put all of us running journalists where we are now. We feel sadness today. But we also feel enormously proud to be part of his living legacy.”

[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.]

Lorraine Moller

(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 2002.)

MOLLER’S MEDALS.  This is how it should be. Runners receiving awards after a race are too excited or tired to notice who hands them their prizes.

Few of the medal-winners at the Royal Victoria (British Columbia) Marathon had come to this same theatre a day earlier to hear the medal-presenter speak. Few even knew this middle-aged woman who now said nothing that would identify her as a far more accomplished runner than any of them ever would be.

Lorraine Moller would say this is exactly as it should be. Better to focus on what these runners did today than on what she ran a decade earlier.

To be called a “legend” is perilously close to being a relic, frozen in an earlier time. Moller is legendary as a runner but is no museum piece.

On this race day in Victoria she too was more concerned with present than past. She had to settle down her two-year-old daughter who cried out in protest when her mother went onstage.

Lorraine had a long and diverse racing career, competing internationally for New Zealand at 800 meters when that was the longest distance open to women and later in their first Olympic Marathon. She is the only woman to run four marathons at the Games.

She’s also the oldest women’s medalist to date, placing third in Barcelona at age 37. Yet even that finish disappointed her somewhat.

“I thought I still had a gold medal in me,” she said in her Victoria talk. She didn’t think of 41 as too old to try again. “But during the race in Atlanta [where she was 46^th] I realized that the young runners had passed me by.”

The young mothers hadn’t. Another Olympian effort was yet to come for then 45-year-old Lorraine, married to Harlan Smith and living in Boulder.

In 2000 a tough pregnancy replaced her Olympic training. As the Sydney Games opened, her “marathon” began. After two days of labor she delivered her first child, daughter Jasmine.

Besides keeping up with this two-year-old, Lorraine now coaches runners in Boulder. She plans to author a book, titled On the Wings of Mercury, “if I can find some strong glue to stick myself to a chair long enough to get it written.”

For now she speaks the material, and does that exceedingly well. She’s the most moving speaker I’ve heard since the passing of George Sheehan – not just entertaining and informative, but seriously inspiring.

Lorraine is a devotee of Joseph Campbell’s works, which deal in myths and symbols. Her special symbol is the winged god Mercury, whose likeness she wears in a medal on a neck chain.

She speaks about the Campbellian “hero’s journey,” urging everyone in her audience to take such a trip. It’s circular, with the hero expected to return home to share what he or she has learned.

Lorraine didn’t lock her Olympic medal away in a bank vault, never to be seen again by anyone outside the family. She carries it to her talks.

“I’m so proud of my gold medal,” she quipped while holding it up for her listeners to see, “that I had it bronzed.” She then invited them to pass it around and “rub it for good luck.”

Lorraine’s talk in Victoria ended with a standing ovation, a great rarity after running speeches. She earned it less for what she’d done 10 years earlier than what she said this day.

Then she returned to mothering Jasmine. That evening the little girl entertained the pasta-dinner crowd by taking repeated, barefoot sprints to the tray of dinner rolls.

Lorraine Moller is a running legend who isn’t frozen in her past. See her if you can, hear her speak, rub her medal and pat the golden head of her best prize, young Jasmine.

UPDATE. Jasmine is now a teenager. Lorraine’s book, On the Wings of Mercury, is as good as it promised to be when she was writing it in 2002. She continues to coach runners in the Boulder area, and is a prime mover in the Arthur Lydiard Foundation, which honors the legacy of the renowned New Zealand coach.

[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.]

Billy Mills

(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 September 1990.)

EYES ON THE PRIZE. For a glimpse of what it means to win an Olympic gold medal and what that prize means to its winner, dial a certain number in the Sacramento area code. Someone there will answer, “10K Gold.”

That’s the office of Billy Mills, the only American gold medalist at 10,000 meters. His business career now focuses as sharply on that one accomplishment as his running career did on accomplishing it.

“Focus” was and is a big word to Mills. He used it often in our recent phone conversation about his 1964 race.

Mills said he had no more talent than anyone else in the field. He hadn’t won any of his four previous 10,000s.

He hadn’t trained harder than anyone else in the field. Injuries had wiped out “40 percent of my workouts” in the Olympic year.

Mills’s strength was his ability to focus on a single goal. He never let distractions and disappointments blur his vision.

“Even though I was hardly running with the Games two years away,” said Mills, “I was formulating a plan. I wrote in my workout book in 1962, ‘Gold Medal, 10,000-meter run.’ I began training in January 1963 with that goal in mind.”

He told himself, “I truly am a great distance runner. God has given me the ability. The rest is up to me. Believe, believe, believe!”

His belief was tested often in 1964. During an indoor three-mile race that January, Mills was ordered to drop out after the leader lapped him. When Billy refused, an official shouted, “You’re an embarrassment.”

Next problem: “I wanted to average 100-mile weeks. This was hard to do with shin splints interfering, so I extended my ‘weeks’ to 10 days. I added up the best seven days from those 10. This way I could keep my mileage up and stay on track mentally while still getting the recovery days I needed.”

Mills placed second to Gerry Lindgren in the Trials 10,000. Billy ran 29:10 and thought he could have gone at more than a second faster for each lap. He wrote then in his logbook, “Gold medal, 10,000-meter run. Time, 28:25.”

Ron Clarke of Australia held the world 10,000 record at the time, which made him the Olympic favorite. Every day in training, Mills visualized outkicking Clarke on the last lap at the Games.

“Then I realized that Clarke might not be the only man there with a lap to go. So I added a mystery man to my mental scenario, and worked on kicking past him, whoever he might be.”

Mills wrote before the race, “My speed is there. Just stay with the leaders for 5½ miles, and then the race begins. Believe, believe, believe!”

During the race Mills almost dropped off the pace a couple of times. “But I hung in there. The reason I didn’t quit was that long-term focus on this day, this hour, these minutes and seconds.”

The last lap went almost exactly as he had rehearsed it. “I caught Clarke and the ‘mystery man,’ Mohamed Gammoudi, just as I’d practiced doing it.”

Mills had focused on winning in 28:25. He won in 28:24.4.

“From this race,” he said later, “I learned about the height of competition. It wasn’t to beat Clarke or Gammoudi, but to reach within the depths of my capabilities and compete against myself to the greatest extent possible.

“That was where my real focus lay. I focused first on Billy Mills and maximizing Billy’s own capabilities.”

UPDATE. Long after Billy Mills’s race of a lifetime, I shared a stage with him. He said then, “I have fulfilled my last track goal. I was in Tokyo, and our guide asked me if there was anywhere I wanted to visit. Naturally the first place that came to mind was National Stadium [scene of the 1964 Olympics].

“My one regret was that I never got to take a victory lap at the Games. We’d lapped some runners twice, and by the time they finished I had been hustled away for interviews.”

He finally ran that bonus lap, alone and ever so slowly, to savor these long-delayed moments. Only his wife Pat was watching, from the same seat she had occupied before.

“As I ran,” Billy recalled, “I could hear 75,000 people cheering. I saw the spot where Ron Clarke accidentally bumped me into the third lane… where I made my move… where I thought, ‘I can win!’… where I realized, ‘I won!’

“Then I finished and heard just one person clapping. It was Pat. I burst into tears and walked away so she wouldn’t see me.” She surely shared his tears, as she had shared his triumph and where it had taken them ever since.

[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.]

Sy Mah

(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 1988.)

REMEMBERING MAH. The sudden and stark way I heard the news made it all the more shocking. It came as a two-line, just-the-facts report from the back
pages of USA Today in November.

“Marathoner Sy Mah, 62, died in Toledo, Ohio, from a blood disease. The Guinness Book of World Records lists Mah as number one in marathons run with 524.”

I hadn’t even known Sy was ill. Suddenly I had to write a tribute to him.

At the risk of losing sight of the man in the numbers, the report begins with those incredible numbers. He accumulated those 524 marathons (almost 200 more than his nearest pursuer) in just 20 years – averaging one every two weeks in all those years and, more recently, racing almost weekly. But the spirit of Sy Mah goes far beyond those statistics.

I first met Sy in 1982 at the University of Toledo, where he worked as a physical educator. He’d already passed 300 marathons by then.

He neither looked nor acted the part of Supermarathoner. He weighed little more than 100 pounds, and he spoke in the quiet way of his Chinese ancestors.

We last met at Boston a year ago. Sy ran number 500 there.

He would run two dozen more between April and September. Then on Labor Day weekend he tried three marathons in three days.

Sy couldn’t finish two of those races. He was ill – more gravely ill than anyone knew then.

While racing in Mexico, he had contracted hepatitis. This illness so weakened him that lymphoma, a cancer that Sy apparently had lived with for some time without knowing it, suddenly grew worse.

After hearing of his death, I dug out my only letter from Sy. He’d answered a request for an updated marathon count with an eight-page response.

He wrote to me shortly after his 60^th birthday in 1986. He’d just run number 434, putting the Guinness record out of anyone else’s reach for a long time to come.

“I am frequently asked why I continue to run so many marathon races,” he wrote. “I have many childhood friends who are now dead. They worked hard all their lives, but they never got a chance to retire and do things they wanted to do.

“I don’t want my life to end before I do the things I enjoy. And marathon running is a great source of pleasure for me.”

He added that “I am also perhaps trying to prove something. I have been told by many people, many times, that once I reached 50 years of age I would not be able to continue running as much as I do.

“I am now 10 years past 50, and I find that my body is more physically capable than it was at age 40. I believe that Americans have been brainwashed with the idea that they must do less because increased age will result in less energy and diminished capability. I have found that this is simply not true if a person does not allow his mind to accept the traditional view of aging.”

Before entering marathon number one, Sy coached a record-setting marathoner. In 1967, 15-year-old Maureen Wilton ran 3:15:22. That made her the world’s fastest woman to date, but she retired soon afterward She’d had enough running “to last a lifetime,” Wilton said on the 20^th anniversary of that record.

“I wish I had emphasized keeping fit for life,” Sy said on that occasion. “But I was a coach like other coaches, and we wanted good performances. Now I tell everyone this [running] is good for your health, and it’s for life.”

Sy remained a teacher and helper. He eased countless people into running and helped many of them get through marathons. In his hometown he’s revered more for that work than for his race count. Toledo long ago named its marathon for him.

“I feel extremely honored,” Sy once said, “because most people have to die before they have an event named after them.”

Last summer, shortly before Sy’s illness struck, Toledo’s mayor proclaimed a “Sy Mah Week… for the commitment and dedication he portrays to physical fitness in our community.” The University of Toledo has since set up a Sy Mah Memorial Fund for improving running facilities on campus.

Runners who knew Sy can honor him another way. If you’ve entered a U.S. marathon in the past 20 years, you probably have run with him. Run your next one for him.

UPDATE. I couldn’t have imagined while writing this piece that so many marathons would become available in years to come, and that so many people would run them so often. I didn’t really think Sy Mah’s lifetime count would ever be topped.

Today that record is more than twice as high. Thousands of people have run more than 100 marathons, and many of them have joined the Fifty States and Marathon Maniacs clubs that didn’t exist in Sy’s day. Going fast means less to them than returning often.

[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.]