THE HIGHER your
climb, the harder your fall. Even if you settle back to where you’d been not
long before, the comedown is disappointing.
My summit arrived in the final months of 1978 and early 1979.
My fall 1978 royalty
check peaked out at its heftiest size ever, and I imagined that such amounts
would continue indefinitely. Then I accepted a Road Runners Club of America
double: a Hall of Fame induction and a journalism award. The descent came
steeply after that.
My spring royalty
check from Anderson World, the book-publishing branch of Runner’s World, dropped by half from the last one. Then the next
check shrunk to one-tenth of peak size.
I thought what had
happened with the runaway sales of Jim Fixx and others would keep happening
indefinitely. Fixx’s Complete Book of
Running topped the best-seller lists, for all topics, for almost a year.
At first other books
(including mine) tagged along on that wild ride. The big sellers spawned dozens
of similar books. In 1977-78 all running books sold, but soon most of them
(mine too) tanked as the market became glutted.
Then I needed to
find another way to make a living. I’d burned some bridges with Bob Anderson at
Runner’s World by joining other
authors in challenging his reported book-sales figures.
I doubted he would
add to my duties, and pay, so I looked toward Nike. It had declared itself an
enemy of RW by challenging the
legitimacy of shoe ratings and was buying a magazine of its own.
Ned Frederick and
Jack Welch had published a small one called Running
that now had visions of going large. Jack arranged a meeting, in Hawaii, to
pitch me on working for him.
My wife Janet and I
had come to the Honolulu Marathon. This trip was long planned as a celebration
of her successful cancer treatment, along with another marathon opportunity for
me. But now I was suffering through bronchitis, running little and worrying
much about my suddenly sick career.
Jack Welch didn’t
need to talk very hard to recruit me to his magazine team. He asked, “Can I
assume you are ready to go to work for us?” Yes.
“So let’s talk about
the terms,” he said. Before I could answer, he said, “This is what I’m
thinking. Whatever you were paid at RW,
we can raise it.
“There’s no need for
you to move to Oregon. You can keep writing from home, flying up to Eugene as
needed, though I suspect that once you’ve come there a few times you’ll want to
stay.” I didn’t debate any of this.
RUNNERS PEAK at different
ages and levels. So too do writers, though successes with words and phrases aren’t
as easily quantified as those with times and distances. We can’t know in
advance how high we’ll climb, but can only look back later to see when the
ascent ended.
In running I took about a
decade to learn the game well enough to play it at my highest level. Then I had
only a few more years on that high plateau before my body refused to play at
that level any longer.
Because I started young, I
peaked early. My year-round running began at age 15, my best year of racing
came at 25, my last personal record of note at 27.
During the peak years my
days centered on the training runs, my weekends on the races. I had no
competing commitments from family or job to keep me from indulging so heavily.
I raced whatever and whenever possible, with no thought to what this might mean
to my health.
Then, at age 29, I ran
myself into a date with a foot surgeon. His repair job worked well enough to
let me run again within a few weeks and to race again a few months after that.
But the heel was never
again as good as new, and it gave me an excuse never to train as much or race
as hard again. My peak clearly had passed, and the time had come to settle for
fewer miles and less speed.
Full-time running writing
followed a similar decade-long climb to a peak. It started later than my racing
but also summited early.
This career began at Track & Field News as a 23-year-old;
by 26, I had published a book; by 27, I was editing Runner’s World (and not just the magazine but its spinoff books,
booklets and newsletter, along with many and varied promotional efforts). By 34,
my book sales were lofty enough to let me leave the magazine for life as a
gentleman author.
But by then the book sales
had already peaked, then crashed downward as quickly as they’d soared. At 36, I
had to seek another job in magazines, but was no longer willing to work as hard
to climb as high as before.
I’d worked too much in the
glory days at RW. I’d given too
little thought to how this might have affected my girlfriend, who became my
wife, then the mother of our children. It was time to settle down below peak
level.
I couldn’t, and didn’t,
stop writing after peaking – any more than I could, or would, quit running
after setting my last PR. These twin passions had been too much a part of me
for too long by then to leave behind.
The running and writing
did change, though. I slowed the paces of the runs and the writings so they
could keep going. The peaks had been nice places to visit, but I couldn’t have
lived indefinitely in that rare air.
Photos: By 1979,
my Eric and Sarah held more of my attention than racing and writing did.
[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.]
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