Bob Schul

(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 1989.)

SCHUL DAYS. It was the golden age of U.S. distance runners in world competition, except we didn’t know it at the time. You recognize golden ages only after they have ended.

This was the early 1960s, pre-Vietnam. Americans were supposed to lead the world in all fields, and our distance runners had lagged behind.

Now they had caught up. Once they knew how to reach the top of the world, we thought they would stay there. They didn’t.

The golden age for track began in 1962 with Jim Beatty breaking the indoor four-minute mile barrier for the first time. It ended in 1967 with Jim Ryun setting the last of his world records.

In that five-year period Tom O’Hara set an indoor mile record. Three high school milers broke four minutes. Ryun and Gerry Lindgren made an Olympic team as teenagers.

As quickly as this success had come, it would wane. Success would shift to the roads, where Frank Shorter won his Olympic Marathon, Alberto Salazar set a disputed world marathon record, and Bill Rodgers won repeatedly at Boston and New York City.

Mary Slaney and Joan Samuelson would make the early 1980s a golden age for U.S. women. But this country’s trackmen would never be the same after 1962-67.

None would set an outdoor world record. None one would win an Olympic or World Championships race longer than 800 meters on the track.

The golden age for U.S. trackmen peaked in October 1964 at the Tokyo Olympics. They won both the 5000 and 10,000 there, each for the first and still only time.

You know the 10,000 winner, Billy Mills. His story became a movie script, and he still appears on a hundred or more podiums a year to describe his Tokyo race in person.

You might not know the 5000 winner. A national hotel chain didn’t remember him last year. When Olympic promotion featured a display board listing “all” the American gold medalists, the name Bob Schul was missing.

That’s sadly ironic, because Schul remains the most active link to the golden age. He hasn’t made a movie or published a book, and rarely goes onstage. But he stays busy in less public ways.

He races well but not spectacularly in his 50s. He owns two running stores in the Dayton, Ohio, area.

But mostly he coaches. He continues the teachings of a coach who helped inspire the golden age.

Hungarian Mihaly Igloi defected to this country and then convinced Americans that they could run with the world’s best. Two of his early believers were runners named Beatty and Schul.

Igloi’s speed-based, track-bound, coach-controlled methods fell out of favor in the late 1960s, replaced by self-guided road training. Coincidentally or not, the golden age ended at about the same time.

Bob Schul remains a true believer in what worked for him. His runners train four days a week on the track, with the coach watching them as closely as Igloi watched Schul.

I traveled to Dayton this April and came away disappointed. Not with the event that took me there, but with not meeting Schul.

We were due to meet for the first time, but Bob couldn’t make the scheduled dinner. He relayed his apology, explaining that it was his busiest coaching season.

He’d just returned from taking Ohio’s team to the Ekiden Relays in New York City. This weekend he juggled workouts of the Bob Schul Racing Team (whose members, ranging from elite to midpack, pay him a small fee to be coached) and those of a high school team he started coaching this year.

Maybe it’s symbolic that Bob Schul remains only a name with a set of facts to me 25 years after Tokyo. He is still an invisible man to most Americans, and that’s a shame.

But if Schul feels overlooked, he doesn’t have time to dwell on it. He’s too busy preparing his runners for the golden ages that count most: their own.

UPDATE. The years since the Tokyo Games have more than doubled since this piece first appeared. Bob Schul remains the last American, man or woman, to win an Olympic race of than four laps around the track.

Schul was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1991. He published his autobiography, In the Long Run, in 2000. I finally met him in 2008, when he came to Eugene as a special guest at the Olympic Trials.

[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.]

Odis Sanders

(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 2006.)

SHARING STORIES. Young neighbors of ours don’t have time for the old folks across the street and up a long driveway. They’re too busy with children and jobs and friends their own age to think much about us.

They see us working in the yard, walking to the mailbox or driving up the street. We might get a wave, but I doubt if they know my wife Barbara’s and my names. To them we have no history, little going for us now in apparent retirement and few prospects for the years we have left.

I’m no better that way. I don’t know much more about these neighbors, or about most of the people met in passing each day. I don’t hear the stories they could tell.

Barbara wants to hear such stories. Her writing project this year involves interviewing and then profiling what she calls “remarkable ordinary people.”

These are folks that others might pass by without noticing. Yet they often have led, and still lead, lives that would amaze anyone who took time to learn about them.

Barbara asked for my help with her list. Naming only women of 50 or more years, we came up with dozens.

I don’t have such a list myself. But if I did, it would lead off with a man who keeps my car fueled.

Not one customer in a hundred at the local Chevron station would even know his first name, let alone his last. If they notice him at all, it’s only as “that skinny black guy.”

Occasionally someone might ask, “Are you the one I see running all the time?” But hardly anyone would know how good a runner he once was, and still is.

My single previously published sentence about him appears in my least-read book, the Running Encyclopedia. It reads, “A rare African American in road racing, Odis Sanders won the first three national 5K championships – in 1979, 1980 and 1981.”

Odis moved from New York City to Eugene the year of that final title. I happened to arrive here at the same time and saw him often, usually where he worked.

Before the gas station, he paid his bills by washing cars and as a YMCA locker-room attendant. These jobs haven’t brought him much more than minimum wage, and he doesn’t seem to need or want more.

The irony here is that two Odis’s current job involves cars, and I’ve never known him to drive one. He commutes by bicycle, and is a rare person who logs more miles on foot each day than in motorized vehicles. Other runners, with greater demands on their time and attention, sometimes look upon the simplicity of his life with envy.

Odis told me last summer, “I’m training for the Portland Marathon. It might be my last fling at that distance.”

I saw him more than ever on the streets, and especially on the wood-chip running trail known as Amazon. One day he was there when I drove past on the way to school, and was still there on my trip home two hours later.

Next time my gas tank needed filling, I asked how far he’d gone on that run. “Twenty-six miles,” he said. That was 26 one-mile laps, all at about six-minute pace.

The result? A 2:32:53 finish at Portland last October. Third place overall, at age 46.

Odis Sanders has the best story to tell of any gas-pumper in my town. Or does he? I haven’t asked the others, who might look like ordinary people but maybe aren’t.

Everyone has a story, waiting to be heard. Try to become a better listener.

UPDATE.  Sadly, Odis Sanders left Eugene shortly after this piece appeared. I’ve lost touch with him and his whereabouts.

[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.]

Alberto Salazar

(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 November 1987.)

SALAZAR’S SECOND LIFE. He stood behind me in the checkout line, waiting to pay for lawn-care tools. I now see Alberto Salazar more often in local stores than at races, and I like him more now than when he was the hottest runner around.

I didn’t dislike him before, just never knew him in his first life. Impressive as his running was, I found his tough-guy exterior intimidating and never tried to pierce it.

Age, marriage, fatherhood and misfortune have matured Alberto. The past four years of troubled running have also softened him in ways that now make checkout line small-talk pleasant.

I asked about his yard work. “What else do I have to do but sit around and worry about my health?” he said.

He didn’t answer bitterly but with a laugh, which is a good sign. Salazar hasn’t long been able to joke about his medical woes, which have been unending since 1983 (bronchitis, thyroid deficiency, hamstring surgery, foot injury, bad back).

Soon after we talked, he bought half-interest in a Eugene restaurant. He hasn’t decided to quit running but has started to prepare for life after racing, whenever that might start.

Salazar has put a time limit on himself: one more year of trying to beat these chronic injuries and illnesses. If he can’t do it by then, he’ll aim his legendary drive in other directions.

“I want to resolve it, one way or another,” he tells Ron Bellamy of the Eugene Register-Guard. “Psychologically the injuries are a lot of stress, and I’m not fun to live with at those times. It’s not fair to my wife and kids to put them through that. I don’t want to be like a punch-drunk old fighter who doesn’t know when to quit.”

Salazar could quit on top right now. Forget what he hasn’t done since 1983 (won a marathon, or even run one in more than three years). He’s still the American record-holder, the only U.S runner to break 2:09 twice and the last one to go under 2:10.

Alberto isn’t yet looking for a stopping place. The trait that made him great, his ability to push through the tough races, hasn’t left him. He still wants very much to see his career through to a more satisfying end than this.

If he needs a role model in this final push, he can look back at Ron Clarke. The Australian was the “Salazar” of the 1960s – a man who didn’t simply race to win on a given day but tried to run faster than anyone, anywhere ever had.

In his autobiography, The Unforgiving Minute, Clarke called success and failure “the twin impostors.” Too much success, he wrote, is not as good as it might seem because it makes a runner reluctant to change the habits that made him successful. Failure is not as bad as it may first appear if it drives the runner to correct his mistakes.

Clarke succeeded early, then failed badly and retired young. Later, after examining the reasons for his failure, he took a new course on which he became the most prolific record-setter of the past 25 years.

Alberto Salazar’s early success in the marathon was something of an impostor, as was his series of failures over the past few years. Nothing that happened to him was as good or as bad as it seemed at first.

Salazar has said that youth made him susceptible to the pressures of being the world’s top marathoner at 23. “I was never ready for it all. I had too much success, too soon. I didn’t know how to react to it all. I was just a kid.”

He has done considerable growing up in the meantime. He has learned to deal with the sometimes competing demands of running, business, media and family.

Age is still his ally. If he can recover and stay healthy, his talents have more years to ripen into even better results than he has produced so far. He’s still only 29, and distance runners often improve well into their 30s.

Carlos Lopes gives Salazar hope, for reasons beyond Lopes’s age as Olympic Marathon winner (37) and world record-breaker (38). Lopes also had two careers.

In the first he won the World Cross-Country title and an Olympic 10,000 medal in 1976. He then struggled through his own years of injuries, only to come back better than ever.

Salazar hopes he still stands between two careers. “I know I’ve had my misfortunes,” he says, “but they’ve made me better. I’ve learned from my mistakes.”

Most of all he has gained a new sense of perspective: “Running has been frustrating. But I always temper that by saying everything else is great. I always say, ‘Thank you, God, if this is the worst testing I ever go through.’ ”

UPDATE. Alberto Salazar’s PRs were permanent by the time this piece appeared. He never made another Olympic team after 1984. The U.S. marathon best, which he’d held for a dozen years, finally fell in 1994 (to Bob Kempainen).

Alberto’s final victory came that same year in most surprising fashion. He won the world’s leading ultramarathon, the 90-kilometer Comrades race in South Africa.

By then he had moved his family to Portland and left the restaurant business to work for Nike. This led eventually to coaching the Nike Oregon Project.

For all Alberto did as an athlete, he has achieved much more as a coach. The high point (so far, anyway) came when his runners Mo Farah and Galen Rupp placed 1-2 in the London Olympic 10,000.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. 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.]

Marla Runyan

(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 2002.)

MARLA’S VISION. I’m a steady but slow reader. My test of a book’s fascination quotient is how long I take to finish it.

Usually this is weeks. Seldom do I have the interest, or take the time, to turn the pages any faster.

Recently, though, I raced through two books in two days apiece. Both came from the same co-author. Sally Jenkins has mastered the triumph-over-trouble genre.

She acted as ghost-writer for It’s Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong’s best-seller. For an encore she co-wrote Marla Runyan’s No Finish Line: My Life As I See It.

Runyan is the only athlete ever to compete in both the Paralympics (1992 and 1996) and regular Olympics (2000). She also has run in the past two World Championships.

She is legally blind. But her book could just as well be called, It’s Not About the Eyes.

It isn’t mainly about the eyes, anyway. To know only about her limited sight is not really to know her at all.

The book tells of her first international victory, in the 1999 Pan-American Games 1500. In only her fourth race ever at this distance she beat Canadian Leah Pells by one-hundredth of a second.

“The press came at me like a large, anxious creature,” Runyan recalls. “Tape recorders were thrust in my face, and voices yelled questions at me simultaneously. Then one voice separated itself from the others.”

A reporter shouted, “Marla, tell us about your eyes.” This bothered her.

“I wanted to say, ‘Did you watch the race?’ At that moment the subject of my eyesight seemed the most inappropriate and irrelevant topic I could think of... Why couldn’t they let my accomplishment stand on its own?”

Runyan writes early in the book, “The truth is, running is the easiest thing I do. To run a race around a perfectly flat and smooth track, in a controlled environment, among a group of familiar people all moving at a similar pace, feels safe to me compared to the effort I have to put forth, and the menace I confront, in moving through an ordinary day in ordinary life.”

Running is where Marla Runyan has always felt most comfortable, most at home. There she “sees” with all her senses.

On the track we see only the triumphant final scenes of Marla’s drama. Before racing as she now does, she had to reshape herself from sprinter and jumper (she’d competed in the 1996 Olympic Trials as a heptathlete) into a distance runner.

This didn’t happen quickly or easily. The early efforts led to two surgeries that cost her two full years of running.

Then in Olympic year 2000 she injured a knee in May, hardly ran at all until the Trials in July, made the team anyway, and finished eighth in the 1500 at Sydney. She never lost sight of what she intended to do.

I think that without the injury she would have medaled. Her aggressive, fast-finishing style is that well suited for Olympic-level racing.

The real heroics in the book, though, are acted out away from the track: becoming a straight-A student in high school and college without seeing books and blackboards as other students do... fighting with and winning over her parents and then the license testers to let her drive a car... letting herself really fall in love for the first time at almost 30... nursing her ever-supportive mother through cancer.

Marla Runyan and I now share the same hometown. I’m friends with two of Runyan’s former coaches, Dick Brown and Mike Manley.

But I’ve seen her only in races at Hayward Field and still haven’t met her. After reading her book, I know her better in the ways she wants to be known. Not as that blind runner, but as one who sees – and seizes – life her own way.

UPDATE. Marla Runyan extended her racing range after this piece appeared. She debuted as a marathoner at New York City in 2002, and finished as first American. Then she returned to the track to qualify for her second Olympics, in the 5000.

After having her daughter Anna in 2005, she won the Twin Cities Marathon the next year. Now retired from racing, Marla teaches the visually impaired.

[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.]