Emil Zatopek

(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 2000, ends the Pacesetters book. A set of chapters from another book will begin next week and continue through 2017.)

HERO OF THE HALF-CENTURY. No one now running can remember the turn of the last century. Many of us, though, are old enough and long enough connected to the sport to have memories reaching back a half-century. I’m happy to make that claim.

The first foreign name to pierce my consciousness in family talk about track was Emil Zatopek. He had won the 10,000 at the first post-World War II Olympics, then broke records repeatedly the next few years. He peaked at the 1952 Games when he won the 5000, 10,000 and marathon – a triple never accomplished before and not since.

To me Zatopek is the finest runner of the past 50 years. I remember him that way for how he once raced, but more so for how he continued to live and give.

I never expected to meet the great man from a then-remote land. But by chance we came together briefly while waiting to board separate flights out of Munich after the 1972 Olympics.

He blew kisses to friends outside the boarding area and spoke his last words of thanks to them in German. Working up courage, I approached him.

“Uh, excuse me, are you Emil Zatopek?” I asked, already knowing he was but not knowing if he understood English.

“Why yes, Zatopek,” he answered without missing a beat. “And what is your name, please?” It meant nothing to him, but he still took time to talk for 20 minutes.

Word quickly spread through the Runner’s World tour group that we were in the presence of track royalty. Passengers dropped out of line to shake his hand and ask for his autograph.

Now 50 years old, he had come to Munich as a guest of the Olympic Committee to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of his triple. “It is odd,” he said, “to have all this... how you say it?... acclaim. In my country I am just a common man... a nobody.”

Zatopek didn’t talk politics, but he was officially a “nobody” in Czechoslovakia. When a revolt against the Soviets broke out in 1968, he took the wrong side in the struggle and lost his rank as an army colonel.

The national hero was reduced to working as a garbage collector and then as a street-sweeper, jobs normally reserved in his country for the mentally limited. When Czechs in his hometown learned of this, they rushed out to help him carry the cans and push the broom.

He said, “I am now a simple worker. I drill for mineral water.”

Zatopek excused himself and walked toward the plane that would take him to Prague, back to his simple life as a “nobody” whose name will forever live in Olympic history. I’ve never seen him again but have followed him from afar through news stories.

One of his finest moves was a quiet one. Ron Clarke, a frequent setter of world records but never an Olympic medalist, came to visit the man who had won so many.

As they parted, Zatopek handed the Australian a small package and told him to open it later. Clarke’s worries that he was smuggling something out of the country vanished when he found a gold medal with a note saying, “You earned this.”

UPDATE. Emil Zatopek died in November 2000 at 78. He had outlasted the vindictive government in his country (now the Czech Republic).

The new rulers realized what a treasure he was, and allowed him to accept acclaim freely. By all accounts he handled it well.

[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.]

Ed Whitlock

(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 2003.)

SIMPLY SUPERB. September 28^th, 2003, was one of the greatest days ever for marathoners. The 2:05 barrier fell twice in the same race, to Kenyans Paul Tergat (2:04:55) and Sammy Korir (2:04:56). Andres Espinoza of Mexico ran the first sub-2:10 for masters, by a lot, with 2:08:46.

Yet none of those runners provided my greatest thrill that Sunday. I cheered louder for someone else who went where no marathoner has gone before: Ed Whitlock.

The Canadian first caught my attention three years ago, not so much for how fast he races but for how simply he trains. He’s low-key and low-tech in an increasingly – and he might say needlessly – complex sport.

When I first wrote about Ed, he had become the oldest marathoner to break three hours – with 2:52:50 at age 69. The wait for him to run sub-three at 70-plus wouldn’t be long, or so it seemed then.

His first try, soon after turning 70, fell a tantalizing 25 seconds short. That could have been his last try.

Injuries come easily and heal slowly at this age, even for superstars – or maybe especially for these runners who race the hardest. Ed had a knee problem that caused his 71^st and 72^nd birthdays to pass without another marathon.

“Time is not on my side,” he said recently. “But I am beginning to have hopes again.”

Finally he could train again. “I started last winter with 10-minute runs, each week adding four or five minutes for each day’s run and gradually building up,” he said.

By summer Ed was back to normal running, which is to say normally simple. A 2001 story by Michael McGowan introduced me to those practices.

McGowan wrote in Saturday Night, a Canadian magazine. “Ed Whitlock doesn’t eat a special diet, take vitamin pills, monitor his weight, do push-ups, sit-ups or visualization exercises, wear a Walkman, stretch, carry a water bottle or do much of anything besides run. His training regime is staggeringly simple. Running at a [nine-minute-mile] pace he considers a glorified shuffle, Whitlock’s only goal is ‘to go out there and put in the time’.”

Ed ran two hours most days, all of it around a three-laps-per-mile cemetery. He avoided the streets where “cars tend to aim at you, whereas in the cemetery they’re a more docile lot.”

He added that on the streets “I always start speeding up,” while in the graveyard his “only objective is that I have to go out for two hours, so I might as well take it easy.” He sped up where it counted – in the races he ran 25 to 30 times a year.

Ed’s runs reached two hours again this July. “Since then I also got in some longer ones – a few at three hours, pretty well all LSD and all on my small cemetery loop,” he told me.

He reported racing 19 times since March, at distances of 1500 meters to a half-marathon. These again made him “race tough” in ways that standard speed training might not.

“My Crim race at 1:02:25 [6:15 pace for 10 miles] in late August gave me cause for optimism,” he said before running the Toronto Waterfront Marathon on September 28^th. “I would have wished for another month of preparation, but hopefully everything will go well.”

It did. He ran 2:59:08 at an age closer to his 73^rd birthday than his 72^nd.

As soon as this news reached me, I told him by email how thrilling it was. He responded immediately, saying he felt “great relief at doing it, finally. That time was never in the bag until I crossed the finish line. I think this fall was my last realistic shot at it.”

UPDATE. Now that I’m past the age Ed Whitlock was when ran this sub-three, his continuing results amaze me all the more. At 73, he ran an even faster marathon than the one reported here – 2:54:48, which is still a world record for that age group.

Eight years later, he set an over-80 mark of 3:15:54. And later still, he ran a record 3:56:33 at 85. In all that time his training has remained a model of simplicity.

[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.]

Priscilla Welch

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 2006.)

TEAM WELCH. If Priscilla Welch hadn’t been such a fine runner, I never would have met her husband Dave. And without Dave, Priscilla never would have become the runner she was. They were a team that way.

This summer my wife Barbara and I shared a breakfast with the Welches. I'd known Priscilla and Dave a long time, almost since they’d moved to this country from England.

Priscilla was about to turn 40 that year, 1984. She’d only run for about five years but had improved enough to place in the top half-dozen at the Los Angeles Olympics. In 1987 she won the women’s race outright at the New York City Marathon and set a world masters record that still stands, almost 20 years later.

Dave was responsible for that success. He first encouraged “Cilla,” as he called her, to stop smoking and start running. They both served in the British military at the time.

After Priscilla finished her first marathon in about 3½ hours, she set what seemed at the time like an outlandish goal: to improve by an hour. That would have been within five minutes of the world record back then.

Dave didn’t say, don’t be silly. He said, “I’ll do what I can to help get you there.” With his coaching, she peaked at 2:26:52.

Her professional career was easing down in the early 1990s when we worked on a book together. Along with Bill Rodgers, the result was Masters Running & Racing.

That project was rather ironic because Priscilla said, “I don't think of myself as a ‘masters’ racer. I try to do my best against all the ladies in the field, regardless of age.”

She also talked about life of the top-level racing circuit as “a pleasant interlude” between what the couple had done before and whatever would come next. One of the “nexts” wasn’t pleasant.

Priscilla developed breast cancer and endured the full arsenal of treatments. This abruptly ended her career as a competitor.

Dave became the more serious athlete of the two. He was a primarily a runner until a hip replacement put a stop to that. Then he continued as a cross-country ski and bicycle racer.

The couple, now U.S. citizens, coached at a high school in Colorado for a few years. Then they moved to Bend, Oregon, and I now could see them more often.

Our latest meeting was this summer. Priscilla was in Eugene as a special guest at a Relay for Life cancer fund-raiser, and Dave came along.

I didn’t hear Priscilla's talk. It came after my bedtime – and hers too, she said the next morning.

At breakfast Dave – a healthy-looking, ruddy-faced, boisterous, jolly, opinionated man in his mid-60s – talked about his bicycling season, his recent results and near-future plans. “Our highlight,” he said, “will be bicycling through Switzerland in September. We are going there with a tour group.”

As we said good-bye to the Welches that Saturday morning in July, Priscilla’s last words were, “You must come and see us in Bend.” 

Now, suddenly, there is no “us.” These inseparable teammates have been separated in the only way possible.

In September, Priscilla sent an email from Europe” “Dave died just outside Geneva whilst having breakfast. He was conversing with the others in his cycle tour about having a very easy ride that day, so that he would be healthy for the flight home.

“Seconds later he held his head and was gone. What a way to go. That's my Dave.”

UPDATE. Priscilla Welch remains healthy at age 72. Her 2:26:52 marathon remained the world masters record until 2008.

[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.]

Kathrine Switzer

(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 1998.)

AVON CALLING. The director of an Avon women’s race called to ask if I would speak at the event in Portland, Oregon. I agreed but with an unspoken question: Why?

The mostly-female audience at my talk might also have wondered: Why a male speaker? This time I answered without being asked.

I said it was because my memory was longer than almost everyone here this day. I remembered when women didn’t – and weren’t even allowed to – run the 10K distance of this weekend’s race or anything longer.

Then I recalled running the 1967 Boston Marathon with Kathrine Switzer. We’ve become friends since, and Kathrine was now in this room. But at the time I’d never heard of her  (or she of me) and didn’t know until afterward that she had run.

That Boston was my first marathon, but it would change only my life. Kathrine’s wearing of an official number, her run-in with Jock Semple and the resulting media flurry would change the running world.

The incident activated Kathrine’s political and promotional instincts. She worked toward acceptance of women at Boston, which came in 1972, and approval of a national championship marathon for women, in 1974. Later she organized the first Avon running circuit, a big reason why the women’s marathon won a place into the 1983 World Championships and then the 1984 Olympic Games.

Kathrine revived the Avon circuit this year. I said in Portland, “She’s the reason you’re all here today, both because of what she does now and did a long time ago.”

The first Avon series showed the world how well women could run if given the chance. The second series celebrates how far women have come.

I added at the talk, “Another reason for my being here is that I’m a father. My two daughters now have full opportunity to run, and both have taken it. My mother and sisters never had the chance at the same age.”

I’ve supported women runners since the 1960s without really thinking of it as a women’s-rights issue. It was a growth-of-running issue. Running couldn’t grow up to full potential as long as the national and international rules arbitrarily and unfairly excluded half the population.

Kathrine Switzer wasn’t the first woman to run a marathon in the United States, but she was among the first half-dozen. She remembers knowing the name of every female marathoner in the world. They seldom topped one percent of any field when she ran.

Today women are marching toward majority status. Twice this year in North America they’ve accounted for more than half the field at marathons – with 53 percent at the Okanagan International in British Columbia, then 55 percent (or some 10,000 women) at Rock ‘n’ Roll.

The good health of running today is largely the women’s doing. The healthiest trend is the feminizing of the sport, and Kathrine Switzer and Avon can take some credit for nursing this growth.

UPDATE. Kathrine Switzer is gone from Avon, and Avon from running. Since leaving that company, she has written the memoir Marathon Woman.

Kathrine never stopped running but took a long hiatus from the marathon. She’s back up to that distance and in 2017 plans to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of her auspicious debut.

[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.]