Standing, Watching

(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 2004.)

ONE DOOR CLOSING allows another to open. My sudden parting with Runner’s World, after so long there, didn’t come as a shock to me. It felt more like a lingering death in the family – sad when it finally came, to be sure, but also bringing some relief that the waiting for the inevitable was over.

My column didn’t stay homeless for long – just days. Marathon & Beyond magazine editor Rich Benyo and publisher Jan Seeley would hand me their “On the Road” column after current columnist Barry Lewis’s term expired later in 2004.

This truly felt like a homecoming since it brought me back together with Rich. We’d never strayed too far apart since our first meeting in 1977.

On mutual friend Hal Higdon’s recommendation, Rich came for a job interview at Runner’s World. I helped hire him as my future replacement editor, where he served a term exactly the same length as mine had been.

When Rich bailed out of the RW offer after seven hectic years, he became co-director of the Napa Valley Marathon. He invited me there as a speaker in the early 1990s and has kept the invitations coming ever since.

We worked longest and most closely (if 500 miles apart and by email is “close”) on the biggest book either of us has written. We wouldn’t or couldn’t have done it alone, but together we produced the Running Encyclopedia.

We knew we teamed up well. Now, finally, we would get the chance to do that again with a magazine.

I would enjoy just as much working with publisher Jan Seeley. We don’t have a Benyo-length connection, but still a long and good one.

Jan served as an editor at Human Kinetics when I first hooked up with that Champaign, Illinois, company as an author in 1995. She co-edited, with husband Joe Seeley, the RRCA magazine FootNotes during its very best years.

Jan made me feel part of the M&B family even when I wasn’t a writer there. Our best “reunion” came each summer at the Dick Beardsley Marathon Camp in Minnesota.

The move to Marathon & Beyond felt like a homecoming in another way. M&B reads like the old Runner’s World.

My daughter Sarah reminded me how far today’s RW is from the earlier model. A co-worker of hers passed along two copies from 1976, which she read and then gave to me.

Those magazines were more about running itself as I knew and loved it, and still do. The stories were longer and meatier, giving readers more credit for knowledge and experience.

Marathon & Beyond knew we had something good going then, and still honored it. I thought of M&B as the “New Yorker of running magazines,” where Rich and Jan let the writers write in their own ways and at whatever length the subject required. I hadn’t felt so much at home, so wanted and needed, in years.

THE STAGE changed, but the tunes remained the same. When my column migrated from one magazine to another in 2004, my instructions from Marathon & Beyond editor Rich Benyo were simple: “Keep doing what you did before.”

Privately I asked myself while stepping onto this new stage: Do I really belong here? Readers were justified in asking how well I could speak to their interests.

What were my credentials, not as a writer but as a runner? They ran marathons and, for some, beyond that distance. Did I?

Well, no, not lately. My life as a marathoner had sputtered to a halt four years earlier, after four dozen finishes spread over four decades.

I wasn’t ready to say that the last one had been run. But the passing years have turned a probably-soon into a maybe-someday.

My life as an ultrarunner never really got started. I dropped out more often than finished those few races, all run by 1971.

Which returned us to that question: Did I have anything left to say to runners of distances now available to me only in aging logbooks?

I finally justified my new position at Marathon & Beyond by broadening the definition of “beyond.” It didn’t have to mean only “longer than.” The word could also imply “in addition to.”

Beyond could include runs other than marathons and ultras, the shorter training and racing that isn’t devalued by the long. Beyond also could include what happens after the long races are finished, when the knowledge of and appreciation for marathoning and ultrarunning don’t end at the final finish line.

Paul Reese, the grandest old man of the roads I know, once bristled when I referred to him as an “ex-Marine.” Colonel Reese corrected me by saying firmly, “There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine.” He explained that once you’ve had that experience, and Paul had it in three wars from the 1940s to the 1960s, it never leaves you.

Likewise there are no ex-marathoners or ex-ultrarunners. Once you join this club, you never really leave. The experience stays with you, to share with the runners who follow you on these courses.

Those who stand and watch also participate. If you’ve gone to a marathon to support the runners you knew, to wait for their faces to appear in the crowd, then you’ve been involved too. Standing and watching can stir your emotions in same ways that running does, and sometimes more.

We who stand and watch also serve. We cheer the runners who do what we once did, giving them support that we once received.

We show these passers-by that what they do does not go unnoticed or unappreciated. No one knows them better than one who has passed this way before.

Photo: Marathon & Beyond ran the good race from its first issue in the mid-1990s through its final one in 2015.

[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.]

Parting Words

(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 2003.)

THE HIGHEST and lowest points of my writing life both came within six days of each other in December 2003. They might have fallen on the same day if I had picked up phone messages while traveling. The thrill of the high helped ease the pain of the low. 

I had picked the right writing hero, and visited him at exactly the right time. This is John Steinbeck. I never saw him in life (he died in 1968), but a writer's good words can reach beyond the grave. 

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was the first book I ever read without it being a class assignment or having sports as its subject. It wasn’t his fiction that moved me the most, but his collection of letters and the journals that he kept while writing the novels. 

From his informal lines I learned what writing can mean to the writer. With Steinbeck it wasn’t a job or ever a career. It was a calling, a passion, even an obsession. 

He didn't write because he could but because he must. For every public word he wrote, there were hundreds or thousands that no one ever saw. He felt about writing as I did about running, and would come to feel about running writing. 

Steinbeck was born and grew up in Salinas, California. The hometown that once vilified him for writing unflatteringly about it now promotes him as its top tourist attraction. There’s the Steinbeck House, the Steinbeck Library, the Steinbeck gravesite and now the National Steinbeck Center.

The Steinbeck Center opened about five years ago as a memorial to his life's work. My big thrill there was seeing pages he had handwritten. 

I came home from the highest point in my writing life and plunged to the lowest. This came as a call from the new boss at Runner’s World. 

He said that my column, which had appeared for 250 months in a row, had “run its course.” It didn’t fit into his plans for the “new” RW, so he was dropping it.

But this is not the end of my writing. Not even close. 

John Steinbeck continues to teach and inspire me. The final National Steinbeck Center exhibit, posted on the wall at the exit, reads, “I nearly always write, just as I nearly always breathe.” 

I can say with some certainty that as long as I’m breathing I’ll be writing about running, somewhere. Always I have the daily diary where the private words far outnumber the public. There I write as Steinbeck did, because it’s what I must do even when no one's looking.

THIS WAS my last column for Runner’s World, though I didn’t yet know that at the time of its writing in late 2003:

Ask me about my normal daily run, and the answer won’t impress you. Tell me you run longer and faster, and I’ll agree; most runners do. But try to tell me that my runs lack “quality” or, worse, are “junk miles,” and you’ll get an argument. Here it comes.

For as long as I’ve been running easily and writing its praises, I’ve heard how these runs waste time and effort. That was the knock on my first book, Long Slow Distance, published in 1969.

My shift to a slower gear wasn’t meant to improve my racing but to escape the ravages of excessive speed training. The five other runners featured in that book did the same.

I was slow to see that the slower running was less a training system than a recovery system. We raced better by staying healthier and happier, not by training harder.

One way to judge a running program’s success is by the racing results it confers. When runners aim for the biggest racing payoffs, no training is too hard and no sacrifice too great.

But another way to judge a program’s value is to ask yourself: Would I still run this way even if there were no racing payoff? The runners from the LSD book didn’t keep racing better indefinitely; no one does. But we kept running, and keep doing it, in the same relaxed way as before.

You can view your runs as either vocational or recreational, as a job or a hobby, as work or play. “Serious” training falls on the left side of those word-pairings. My running leans to the right.

I’ve spent a running/writing lifetime trying not to use certain words, because how we describe an activity shapes our view of it. One such word is “work.” Another is its cousin, “workout.”

Working implies doing something because you must, while not welcoming the job. It suggests putting up with a distasteful task to earn an eventual reward.

But what if that payday never came, or if it was smaller than expected? Would you feel that all your time and effort had gone to waste?

Running isn’t my second job. No one pays me or forces me to practice this hobby. It’s my choice, and I choose to find my rewards in as many of days’ runs as possible.

To me, “junk miles” are those run reluctantly today, only as an investment in a better tomorrow. This feels like counting the hours until quitting time, the days until the weekend, the weeks until vacation, the years until retirement. Always working toward a distant finish line may mean missing the fun in being here now.

Running can give its rewards instantly and regularly. Ask me about my runs, and I’ll tell you they’re nothing special – except in the quiet ways that all runs are special. Any run anyone wants to take, and feels happy for having taken, is never wasted.

Photo: Steinbeck House in Salinas, where my writing hero once lived.

[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.]

Marathon Max

(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 2002.)

YOU NEVER know who will catch fire as a runner, and flame the brightest and longest. This was one of my first lessons learned as a teacher of running. If first impressions had ruled, I would have judged a woman named Max wrongly on the first day of my first class.

She walked in carrying a motorcycle helmet and wearing boots, bleached hair, enough metal piercings to set off alarms, and a tough look. The roster listed her name as Angela Skorodinsky, a grad student who was 32 at the time. When the class survey form asked what she preferred to be called, she wrote “Max.” It fit – short and strong, just like her.

The class began with a timed mile. Not an all-out mile race but a simple run to draw a fitness baseline. Max lagged a half-lap behind the next-to-last finisher, running (with some walking) 11:02.

Afterward she complained about how hard it had been, how finishing so far back had embarrassed her, how she wanted to look for a different fitness class. I gave my your-best-is-good-enough pitch. Somehow the words worked, and Max kept trying.

When our first class together ended as it had begun, with a one-mile test. she asked, “What splits do I need to run to break nine minutes?”

Ten weeks earlier she would have thought a split was a stretching exercise. Two months earlier she couldn’t have imagined improving by two minutes, and now she’d made it possible.

Again she chugged along in last place, but now a close last. She paced herself perfectly, then groaned while pushing each of her final steps to shave seconds.

“Eight fifty-five,” I called to her. She thrust her fist into the air and shouted, “Yeeesss!”

Max Skorodinsky didn’t stop running after one class. She returned the next term, entering a 5K race and then a 10K.

A year after her shaky start, Max decided without any prodding from her teacher that she would run the Portland Marathon. She plotted her own training.

I only saw her a few times that summer, but she emailed regular progress reports. She listed a pair of two-hour-plus runs, both on a riverside bike path at night.

Normally I’d warn a woman against running alone then and there, but not Max. She was a rugby player who knew just where to kick and how hard.

Her midterm test of marathon training was a local half-marathon race. “Damn, that’s a long way!” she said at the end of it. “Now I have to think about going twice this far.”

I assured her she’d be okay if she did the needed training between July and October. She did, pushing the long runs on up while continuing to run them alone at night.

The 2002 Portland Marathon was the first that any of my students ran. The last of them to finish, and the happiest and proudest, was Max.

She’s short but ran tall, seemingly a foot off the ground, as she finished. Her time was 5:08.

When I greeted Max in the chute, she turned and pointed to a cloth sign on her back. I still choke up while recalling its words: “Thanks, Joe.”

Thanks go to her. She’d planned and carried out the training, she’d run the distance, and she’d taught me not to write off any runner.

A year later Max would improve her original time by 21 minutes. Her pace, 11:02, was exactly the time she had run the first day in my class – at one-twenty-sixth of the marathon distance.

(Note: This 2002 article used female pronouns for Max, who’s pictured here. He now uses the male version. This might have been his biggest win.)

[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.]

First Class

(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 2001.)

THE CO-STAR of the book and movie Seabiscuit was his trainer, Tom Smith. The racehorse didn’t talk, so Smith spoke the most memorable line: “A horse doesn’t care how much you know until it knows how much you care.”

Two-legged runners feel the same way, I reminded myself in 2001 while greeting my first class as a running teacher at the University of Oregon. These students didn’t know me, or I them.

They saw only a short guy, old enough to be their dad or grandpa, standing before them. I saw faces that silently challenged me to make waking up at this early hour worth their while.  I hoped they would give me a chance to show that I cared about them and knew the sport.

The oldest student was 30, but most were typical college age – late teens to early 20s. Though this was billed as a beginning class, many had dabbled in running and wanted to know more, and a few have done more than dabble – such as running the Bloomsday 12K.

Our first run was a test mile. “Don’t race,” I warned, “but run at a pace that you feel you could hold for two or three times this distance.”

Put two or more runners – even new ones, young and especially males – together and a race can break out. The leader started at five-minute pace and finished above six.

The first woman ran as if she’d done this before, and groaned when she heard her time shouted. After a cooldown lap, each student had to report name and time because I didn’t know the former or remember the latter.

“Courtney Smith, 6:30,” she told me. “Did you run on a high school team?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I was a cheerleader. My mother was a fast runner, but I disappointed her by not going out for track or cross-country.”

Later I learned that Courtney’s mother Judy had been a teammate of running pioneer Doris Brown Heritage. They’d run together in the 1969 World Cross-Country Championships, which Doris had won (during her five-year winning streak there). Another of Judy’s daughters, Lauren, had contended for state high school titles both on the track and in the pool.

Courtney now lingered to chat after the other students had moved on to their next class. “I talked with Mom last night and told her about our mile time-trial. She asked what time we started and said she would send good wishes then.”

I asked why the time had made her groan. “This only tied my best,” she said. “I really wanted to break 6:30.”

I joked, “Would you have felt better if I’d fudged and given you a 6:29?” She told me, “No way. I have to earn it.”

Her mother can be proud that she raised a true runner – a pair of them, in fact. Courtney would move on to run dozens of marathons. Her sister Lauren would compete in several Bostons and become an Ironwoman triathlete.

EARLY IN MY running-teaching career I had the great fortune to see my first coach, Dean Roe, for the first time in more than 30 years. We greeted each other with a hug, which coach and athlete (and men in general) didn’t do long ago.

Our talk moved quickly to his past athletes. I wasn’t the only one to receive Coach Roe’s gifts.

Norm Johnston almost carried on to make the 1968 Olympic team, missing by just three places in the decathlon. Rex Harvey rose to national class as a decathlete in the 1970s.

The truest measure of a coach’s success isn’t what athletes do while they’re with him, but what they take with them when they leave his team. By that standard Dean Roe has sent hundreds of winners into the world. I hope to send some, too.

My last day of each class is always bittersweet. I’ve gotten to know these runners and won’t see them again as a group.

“I won’t suddenly forget you,” I tell them. “Contact me if you have any questions about running.”

Few ever do, and that’s a good sign. Educated and experienced runners don’t need me anymore.

Students don’t even ask much of me when we’re together. I never run with them, leaving them to talk among themselves as only running-mates can do.

By going off without me, they see that the class is about their running and not mine. I’m there to plan, advise and cheer, but not to be anywhere near the center of their attention.

I try to teach students not to need me for long. Most of each run, and the runs outside of class, and the future running I hope they’ll do, must come without a teacher watching.

The final exam for each of my students comes after the class ends. It has one question: Will you continue running when attendance is no longer required? If the answer is yes, we’ve both succeeded.

I’m happiest when I see a former student, one who left class months or years earlier, running through town. Or, better yet, when one comes up to say hello at a race.

Or, best of all, when we meet at a marathon. That student has gone on to “graduate school” in this sport, and this was graduation day.

Photo: Two generation of Smith runners, my student Courtney and her mother, former international competitor Judy.

[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.]