Two Ends

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 1983.)

A CONCEIT among runners is that someone has to be a runner to understand us and our sport. Rob Strasser understood, though his running was limited to sporadic and brief attempts at girth control. He had the look and manner of a defensive tackle who in retirement had gained some weight but not lost his competitive fight.

Rob fought Nike’s early battles with Tiger as an outside attorney. He then joined the new company shortly before we met in 1980.

Nike thought then that it had been wronged by the Runner’s World shoe ratings, and Rob came to California to investigate. He called me to his hotel in Palo Alto. There I found an open door, a tabletop littered with cash and an empty room.

Rob returned to find the money untouched. Later in the meeting he offered me a job at the new magazine that Nike was funding.

Maybe the loose cash had been a test of my honesty. More likely it symbolized Nike’s attitude back then toward its new riches.

The money was meant to be spent, and Rob was charged with spreading it around. His staff dealt it out freely to clubs, athletes, coaches and events. He joked that Nike’s business plan at the time was “ready, fire, aim.”

One of his fire-first, aim-later projects was Running magazine. Nike reacted to perceived insults from Runner’s World by starting a competing publication. It produced some of the sport’s finest writing.

Running magazine was an artistic success but a financial sinkhole. Nike poured millions of dollars into it before bailing out in early 1983.

Rob called with news of the closing. He reached me at a Portland hospital, where my baby daughter Leslie had undergone heart surgery.

“We want to make sure you’re taken care of,” he said. “Do you want another job with the company?”

I turned down that offer but told him, “There is one way you can help. You can underwrite my newsletter for a while to make sure it keeps going.”

Running Commentary was a year old then and still not paying for itself. “Consider it done,” he told me.

By 1983 my non-contact (by letter, phone or in person) with Runner’s World publisher and my ex-boss Bob Anderson had stretched almost three years. Neither of us had made any move to restore diplomatic relations.

Bob acted first, at the 1983 Boston Marathon. With me there were my wife Janet and our daughter Leslie, still recovering from her heart surgery two months earlier. In her first trip away from the Pacific time zone, Leslie fought off sleep the first night until one o’clock.

The next morning a phone call woke the parents but not the little girl. (We didn’t yet know she was deaf.)

“This is Bob… Bob Anderson. Can we get together for breakfast?”

 Bob’s style was to cut right to the point.  Before we ordered food, he said, “I talked this week to Rob Strasser at Nike. He has agreed that his company will advertise in Runner’s World again.

“Also he told me about your daughter also said you need a job. I told him I was willing to set aside our differences if you were.”  I was, and did.

WHEN YOU hit a bad patch in a long run, the temptation is to cut your losses by dropping out. This isn’t taking the easy way out. Stopping short hurts more and haunts longer than slogging on to the finish line would have.

In my worst failure, which would haunt me longest, I didn’t quit voluntarily. I was pulled off the course – of a marriage.

My wife Janet’s frustration and depression had built to this breaking point. My job change had moved her away from her native California two years earlier, and away from her family that still lived there, the same year that her mother had died.

Our second child, Eric, was hearing-impaired and not yet speaking sentences at age six. Our baby, Leslie, had been born with Down syndrome and a faulty heart. She had survived surgery, barely, in early 1983.

I had lost a job. Now I either worked at home or traveled far and often to bring home paychecks for speaking.

Janet had to find reasons that justified what she was about to do. “You fly off to be famous,” she charged, “leaving me stuck here with the kids.”

I’d just come back from the latest trip, a long weekend in Kansas City. Fame wasn’t the reason for going; financial need was.

But attention – even brief moments of adulation – came with these appearances. I didn’t dislike or discourage it.

Even at home I often wasn’t really there, but instead was holed up in my bedroom office and lost in writing thoughts. I didn’t shoulder my share of the family load, but left too much of the child- and house-care to Janet.

Her growing discontent moved to action in the 13^th year of our marriage and on the 13^th of November 1983. Her flood of tears and forcefully voiced grievances ended with, “Either you leave or I will.” I left, never to live again in this family’s home.

Photo: Rob Strasser at Nike took care of me best in the year when I needed his help the most.

[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.]