Off Balance

(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 1995.)

NO MATTER your age, you never leave your parents. In fact, the older you grow, the more ruled you are by the genetics they passed along.

At 52, I could see a mirror image of my father staring back at me each morning. This face sometimes brought a sigh, other times a shiver. It reminded me that at the age I was now, he had just two years left to live.

A cerebral hemorrhage struck my dad without warning and took him quickly. Why this happened – an inherited defect or untreated high blood pressure or another undetected condition – we never knew. I did know that we didn’t share much in our style of living.

He had smoked; I never had. He’d exercised little to none after leaving the farm a decade earlier; I had never stopped running.

But Dad and I still shared genetics. If he died young, might I be programmed the same way?

This became more than a fleeting dark thought the weekend before Halloween. I was in Alhambra for the Moonlight 8K, where my main job was P.A. announcing.

At dusk I was taking a break as a local band played, with more volume than talent. A runner came over to the low platform where I stood and shouted words I couldn’t hear. After bending closer and talking briefly, I stood up.

Suddenly I lost focus. The scene around me went into a spin. The spotlighted starting area faded toward darkness. The band’s volume stilled toward silence.

My weak knees lowered me slowly toward the stage. I had just enough time to think, Is this how it ends? With a stroke? Like Dad?

Then, as quickly as this episode had struck, it passed. My equilibrium returned, my hearing sharpened, my vision cleared.

Still shaken and woozy, I muddled through the night’s announcing. I never said at the time what had just happened, though anyone who knew me would have noticed that something was wrong.

Later that night, when I gave my wife Barbara a heavily edited report (down to “dizzy spell”), I shook off her suggestion that we visit an emergency room. The doctor visits, lots of them, would come later.

FOR THE next year or so I wasn’t myself. This was evident to anyone I talked with, or who sat through one of my speeches, or who read some of my columns.

Nineteen-ninety-six, the year of Boston’s 100^th and the Atlanta Olympics, was my year of living dizzily. It wasn’t as if I appeared falling-down drunk but just a little tipsy.

While trying to appear and act normal, I was never quite right. Sights, sounds and thoughts were slightly out of focus. Running, writing and speaking (formally or socially) were never much fun, and were sometimes nauseating.

The symptoms were worst when they first struck in late 1995, then they waxed and waned after that. But they never went away until another year was ending.     

The first doctor I saw said, “You can take a drug and feel groggy all the time, or you can tough it out. The vertigo will probably go away on its own.”

I said no to drugs but soon ran out of toughness. I saw six more medical professionals that year, trying to learn what was wrong and what to do about it. They ruled out the scariest possibilities, but supplied no definite diagnosis or solution.      

Then I got lucky. In the fall I came home from yet another doctor’s visit and turned on the local television news that I’d normally not watch at that hour.

A report was ending with a young woman running across the screen. The voice-over said, “Her battle with vertigo appears to be won, thanks to the exercises her doctor prescribed.”

I called the TV station, asking for a copy of this full piece. “We can’t do that,” I was told in that era before websites made everything available, “but we can give you a contact.”

That phone number connected me with the Center for Balance Disorders in Houston. I asked for the exercises but was told, “It would be unethical for us to recommend a treatment plan without first evaluating you.”       

I would have taken the next flight to Texas. But the Balance Center there had a better idea: referral to a physician doing the same type of work in Portland, a two-hours’ drive from home.

This doctor fit me in quickly, and the first exam lasted as long as the drive from Eugene. Afterward the doctor said, “We want you to take more tests, but your symptoms strongly suggest that you have...” Then he reeled off about a dozen syllables describing an inner-ear disorder.      

“Did any of that make sense?” asked his nurse when the doctor left. Not much, I said, so she translated.

“He says you probably have BPPV. That’s benign, which means it won’t kill you; paroxysmal, meaning you sometimes have it and sometimes not; positional, with quick changes in head position causing symptoms; vertigo, or imbalance.”

In most cases, I was told, this condition could be treated without drugs or surgery. Specially prescribed diet and exercises could ease if not erase the vertigo.      

I went on the diet (cutting way down on my sugar and upping the protein gave best results). I did the exercises (sometimes).  Soon I felt more level-headed that anytime in the past year.

A truism of medicine seems to have worked again: Look long enough and an answer will usually appear.

Photo: Breakfast with Steve and Joan Ottaway in Alhambra, just hours before my vertigo first struck.

[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.]

Fred's Race

(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 1994.)

I WAS LATE to arrive at the New York City Marathon. I’d waited until the 25^th running to join this crowd.

Over the marathon’s lifespan the total entry list had passed a quarter-million. Each of these runners had stories to tell, and hundreds had already told them.

Now the race was over for me. I wondered while walking from the finish line back to the hotel: What do I say about the New York City Marathon that hasn’t already been said?

I wasn’t yet thinking about what to write but what to tell my wife by phone. My one-sentence summary to Barbara came out unrehearsed: “It was a one-in-a-lifetime experience.”

I meant that two ways. It was an awesome day, unlike any I’d ever known in running and one I’d never forget. And it was an overwhelming day that I never care to repeat.

New York City was my largest race ever, and I finished exactly in the center of its field of almost 30,000. This gave me a perfect typical-runner’s view of The Race That Fred Lebow Built.

I knew what to expect from watching and reading about this marathon for all its years. Yet I wasn’t completely prepared for being in the middle of it.

A race this size through a city this size might seem unworkable. But Allan Steinfeld and his army of workers somehow make it work. They see to every runner’s needs, which isn’t to say they can satisfy everyone’s wishes.

Everyone would like to walk to the starting line a few minutes before the gun (cannon, in this case) fires, find a spot on the front row, hit full stride right away and take a clear path to the finish. You can’t do that at New York.

In trade for running with so many people, and in front of hundreds of thousands more, you give up personal space and time. (My hotel-to-hotel round trip, for instance, took 11 hours.) This bothers you only if you let it.

I’m not normally a New York kind of runner. I favor smaller marathons in more rural settings. (My last was Big Sur and the next would be Napa Valley.)

A race this big doesn’t suit my style of running marathons. That is, to line up at the back, start slowly and work my way toward the middle while taking short walks at regular intervals. At New York this means waiting for miles before starting to move up – and even then doing it only by becoming a zigzagging broken-field runner who risks blind-side blocks.

It means risking rear-end collisions when stopping to walk. You run smoothly here only by going with the flow of the people around you. Which I didn’t.

I came away with a few bruises, and unavoidably delivered an equal number. I took 15 minutes longer than normal to finish, but it was time well spent. I had to see if all the fuss about the New York City Marathon was justified.

And it was. Running here was all that everyone had said it would be, and even more. Every marathoner should have this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

WHEN ANYONE asked the early 1990s, “How’s Fred?” I knew it could mean only one man. When someone left me a phone message on an October Sunday in 1994, saying that “Fred died today,” I knew instantly who she meant.

Fred Lebow wasn’t even his original name. He was born Fischl Lebowitz in Romania, in 1932. 

The Jewish boy scrambled to survive in Europe during World War II, then struggled in various enterprises before and after winding up in New York City. There he changed his first name to the one we would know him by, and dropped the final three letters from his surname (now correctly pronounced “LEE-bow,” though he didn’t mind being called the French-sounding “La-BOW”).

I first met him at the 1976 Boston Marathon, where we’d barely exchanged hellos when he announced, “We’re taking the marathon out of Central Park this fall and running it through all five boroughs. In a few years this race could become bigger than Boston.”

Dream on, I thought then. You can’t close down any city but Boston for a marathon. Nowhere but Boston will a race draw thousands of runners (and New York had only a few hundred at the time).

But Fred was right. Less than 10 years later Boston was suffering badly by comparison with New York City. Boston joined races all over the world in copying Fred’s model of the big-time, big-city marathon.

Meanwhile Fred became, in the words of USA Today’s Dick Patrick, “bigger than the race. He received more attention than the elite runners. His beard, cycling cap and sweatsuit were his public identity, along with his frantic windmilling arms at the marathon finish line.”

This was the public Fred. He became almost a caricature, an easily identified image of a man we didn’t really know.

His illness, which struck in 1990, introduced us to the real Fred Lebow. The Fred who, he now admitted, was six years older than he’d claimed.

This was the Fred who in 1992 ran his own citywide marathon for the first time, and it turned into a 5½-hour victory lap. The Fred who in 1993 returned with a few friends for an emotional visit to Fischl Lebowitz’s hometown in Romania.

Grete Waitz came to see Fred the day before he died. She brought him 10 roses, one for each of her New York City victories and the last for their 1992 marathon together. Though he was barely conscious, he appeared to have known it was Grete.

All runners knew him. We honor Fred for making the sport better.

Photo: Fred’s victory lap through New York City, accompanied by that event’s greatest winner Grete Waitz.

[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.]

Last Supper

(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 1993.)

WHAT IF someone threw a party in your honor and no one showed up? That was George Sheehan’s fear when local friends approached his son George III in early 1993 about organizing a dinner for The Doc (as they called him).

Young George then broached the subject with his dad. Dr. George’s first reaction: “Definitely not.”

“Fine,” said the son, “it’s your call.” The next morning “Dad came to the office with 10 pages of notes. They told where the party could be held, what the program might be and who should be invited.”

Later Dr. George started to worry that no one would come. “I gave a recent talk in Florida, and only a dozen people showed up,” he said. “What if that happens here?”

“No chance of that,” the son reminded the dad. “We’ll draw a crowd with the Sheehans alone.” Just to be safe, they extended the invitation list and published an announcement in local newspapers.

By the time I left home for New Jersey, the guest list stood at 300 and was still growing. Young George said, “We could top 400.” The crowd would grow to 500.

Paying tribute to George Sheehan took a long time. He had lived almost 75 very full years, and the program planners couldn’t leave out any of his phases. The program took three hours to cover them all.

Finally, on the far side of 10 o’clock, George himself took the stage. His voice came out quiet, slow and hoarse at first.

But as he warmed to his topic and his audience, this became the George Sheehan we’d always known: lively, eloquent, funny and heartfelt. Everyone else had taken care to avoid the subject that brought us all here.

George himself didn’t hesitate to mention what everyone knew he faced. He said, “Dying [of advanced prostate cancer] is my current experience. I’m going to face it and find out what it’s all about.”

With his finish line in sight, George felt fortunate. He’d had an early wake of sorts, when he could be there to enjoy it with 500 of his nearest and dearest. We should all be so lucky.

NO RUNNER wants to leave anything unfinished. Dropping out goes against our training and our nature.

George Sheehan worried in his last months that he would leave work undone. He wanted to finish one more book.

He called it his “death book.” Knowing that no publisher would accept that stark a title, I suggested that it be “Miles to Go.”

That line comes from a Robert Frost poem: “I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” It best describes how George lived with the prostate cancer that had spread into his bones and was inoperable when discovered in 1986.

In fact, he used Frost’s words himself when first revealing his illness. George went those miles.

He spoke for all runners when he told me in an interview several years earlier, “What we are interested in is performance. Our consuming concern is getting up in the morning and doing our best the rest of the day.”

Speaking for himself, he said, “At my age I could be retired, I could be sitting by the ocean, watching the waves roll in and out. But I feel I’ve never achieved all that I could. If you take less of a view than that, you’re finished.”

He kept performing in the face of his cancer. He demonstrated what he called “a healthy way to live.” He wrote hundreds of articles, gave dozens of speeches and ran scores of races in the next six years.

Two new Sheehan books came out right on schedule during that period, as he took the usual three years apiece to fill them. Maybe he couldn’t do his all-time best after the cancer struck. But he still tried to do the best job he could with the tools at hand.

George fought the cancer to a standstill for six years after his diagnosis. It hadn’t advanced, but neither had it retreated. The final battle began in 1992 with news of further metastases.

He continued to race until August 1992, finishing the Crim 10-mile before the disease took him off the road. He continued to speak until spring 1993, talking at the Boston Marathon before the disease took him off the stage.

George continued to write into that fall, turning his back on the ocean view until he’d gathered enough columns to fill the next book. While Random House expressed interest, it still hadn’t offered a contract by fall. George was weakening by then.

Finally, in October, an editor planned to bring an offer to George’s Jersey Shore home. This was one of his bad days physically and he felt like canceling the meeting, but he had promises to keep. He would reach this finish line no matter how hard the final miles felt.

George called me on October 20^th to say, “We made the deal.” He sounded as exhausted yet ecstatic as a marathoner at race’s end.

Now he could sit and watch the waves roll in and out. He could rest in the glorious peace that follows a big effort.

Photo: George A. Sheehan, M.D., died at home on November 1^st, 1993, four days shy of his 75^th birthday. His wife Mary Jane and their 12 children were at his bedside in a room looking out on the ocean. His final book would come out the next year under the title Going the Distance.

[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.]

Road Hazards

(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 1992.)

ONE MOMENT all can seem right with your world. The next instant it can spin out of control. Literally, in this case.

My life was going superbly as 1992 neared its end. Barbara and I had settled into a new house, one that we agreed we never wanted to leave. We had a flight to Honolulu scheduled the next morning, a respite from Oregon’s darkest and rainiest month.

My son Eric, now 15, had joined his 10-year-old sister Leslie at the Oregon School for the Deaf in Salem. The school nurse called that afternoon to say, “Eric has the flu. We can’t keep him in the infirmary overnight, and he can’t go back to the dorm, so you’ll need to take him home.”

I made the hour’s drive north on Interstate 5, then reversed course with Eric dozing semi-reclined in the passenger seat. I planned to drop him at his mother’s house.

The trip seemed no less routine than dozens of others I’d made on this highway. Then came a sudden “Whomp!” A speeder had rear-ended our little Honda, which now fish-tailed out of control and onto the muddy right shoulder, where it rolled.

Our car came to rest upside down, leaving me hanging suspended by the seatbelt. I looked over to see Eric dangling the same way.

He spoke first: “I’m okay. Are you okay?” I was. We released each other’s belts and lowered ourselves to the ceiling.

Eric kicked open his door but mine wouldn’t budge, so I crawled through his side. Only on the outside did we realize how lucky we were, and how shaken.

We stood in a puddle, wondering what to do next. Eric finally announced, “We survived,” then threw up.

A State Highway Patrolman arrived promptly, from his headquarters just across the freeway. A witness identified the culprit, who hadn’t stopped, as driving an American-made muscle car twice the size of mine and going at least 25 miles an hour faster.

The cop let me call my wife, then offered to take us to a nearby restaurant to wait for her. I took a last look at the crumpled Honda. Its final act was its best, as it protected us from serious harm.

The crash didn’t cancel the Hawaiian trip, only delayed its start by a day. I still ran the Honolulu Marathon as planned, just slower than hoped and feeling as if I’d recently played a football game without pads.

Photo: A hard-earned shirt from the Honolulu Marathon, run five days after my auto accident.

[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.]