50/50 Chances

YOU NEVER know when a new year begins just where it might take you before it ends. The path through those 12 months usually has little or nothing to do with your resolutions made in early January.

Fateful forces, as yet unknown to me, were at work in early 1967. I owe the working life I’ve been lucky enough to lead to the U.S. Army. My good fortune came because someone else wasn’t so lucky.

Military service wasn’t often voluntary in 1967. Two years earlier I’d lucked into a slot with the Army Reserve and avoided being drafted.

I’d exchanged a long stretch of weekend warrioring for the freedom to live and work wherever I wanted. Another draft board was about to pick off a young editor and free up the job of my dreams.

Early that year I lived in Des Moines and worked for the city’s newspaper. This was my first fulltime job in journalism, but I was already looking for a way out of it.

I’d been accepted into a grad-school program at Drake University that would lead to a teaching credential, which would qualify me to coach. Classes were due to start in the fall.

Meanwhile the lowly staffers like me answered the phones at the Des Moines Register. We heard from coaches and parents demanding more coverage for their kids, from readers complaining about our errors, from drunks begging us to rule on their bar bets.

So when the phone rang one March night, I wondered which type of hell it would bring. It brought the opposite.

Dick Drake, the managing editor of Track & Field News, said, “My chief assistant, Craig, just got his draft call. I need someone here right away to replace him. Are you interested and available?”

Without hearing, or asking, anything about pay or working conditions, I answered, “Yes, and yes!” I was going to California dreamland.

The next morning I quit my first and last non-running job in journalism. The next week I packed up (with all I owned not even filling a Volkswagen Bug), waved good-bye to my sad-faced parents (who knew better than to believe me when I said, “I’ll only be gone for a year or two”), and drove toward a career that would never feel quite like work.

WHEN 1967 DAWNED, I already felt old as a runner. I was 23. Most of my former college teammates had retired. My last PR in the mile was two years old and looked permanent.

The sport already had taken me further than I’d ever expected to go. I’d run track meets from New York to California, from Minnesota to Texas. I’d run twice in NCAA Cross-Country Championship meets.

What was left? If I couldn’t go faster, then I could still go longer.

Old Johnny Kelley pointed me that way. The best marathoners ran at unimaginable speeds. But Kelley, who was slowing by then yet still running the Boston Marathon 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, why can’t I? This became my goal: to run a marathon, singular.

After finishing it, I could retire happy from this event – if not from all racing. And if I was to run just one marathon, it had to be Boston, the only one that mattered in the 1960s.

To run this marathon, I had to break old habits. The point of all my running to date had been to race short distances faster.

To race farther than ever before, I needed to train as never before: by slowing down on purpose. The long-run pace settled at a sedate minute or two per mile slower than it had been recently.

As 1967 began, I was well into the training for Boston. I was groping at what needed to be done, making up the schedule as I went along, but the most important ingredient – the weekly long run – had climbed to where it needed to be.

My only race plan was to finish the marathon before official timing ceased. Getting into Boston back then required no qualifying time, but official finishers needed to break 3:30.

That’s eight-minute pace, so I trained only to run those eights. My long runs peaked at 20 miles in late winter.

I intended to step on up from there, maybe reaching 22 or even 23. The magazine editor in California had other plans. Great ones, to be sure, but unlikely to allow a run on the opposite coast so soon after moving out west.

THE JOB as a writer wouldn’t end after “a year or two.” The attraction of the marathon wouldn’t fade after “just one.” Fifty years past 1967, I still enjoy a career that combines the writing and the running. To commemorate this double 50^th anniversary, I’ll post each week a favorite piece from each year until they count up to 2017.

Photo: Dick Drake (right) brought me into full-time running journalism with a job offer in 1967. He died during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Jon Hendershott (left) joined me at Track & Field News later in '67, there to remain for almost a half-century himself.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, 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.]