What Next?

(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 2012.)

WHAT WILL YOU do as a runner after you’ve run almost everything? That’s a question I hope you don’t need to answer right now and won’t for quite awhile.

There’s much to do in running and a long time to do it. Whether you start at 15 or 50, you’re given a good 10 years to improve your PRs.

You can increase your distances just about infinitely. You can run from sprints to ultras… on roads flat to mountainous… on trails and cross-country courses… on tracks outdoors and in.

You can run alone, with partners, in crowds small to large and on relay teams. You can travel as far and as often to races as your budget allows.

I did most of that. I raced distances as short as 100 yards and dabbled in ultras as long as 70 miles… ran midpack at national cross-country and road championships… won races, finished last and didn’t finish at all… traveled to marathons coast to coast, and races in most states and outside U.S. borders… set PRs that now are all older than my eldest child.

So what am I doing now that I’ve run nearly everything? Still running, of course, but not as training for anything except life. The miles are fewer and easier.

Only as my last stay at a magazine was ending did I ask myself the “what next?” question. But I’d begun answering it unconsciously much earlier.

In 2001, I came to a fork in life’s path. Running had long since settled into its senior-adult role (which is to say short, slow and solo).

I thought I’d retired from marathons (though they would resurface occasionally in later years). I hadn’t truly raced a race (as opposed to running in one) in 20 years, and hadn’t tried another ultra in 30.

What next? Before I could ask that of myself, a new opportunity arose unsought.

The University of Oregon needed a teacher for its running classes in the P.E. department, and my name came up as a prospect. My wife Barbara said, “Take it. You’ll love it.”

And she was right. The one-term assignment grew to year-round teaching, every year, and later spawned coaching a training for marathons and halves.

Which again raises this column’s opening question: What will you do after you’ve done almost everything as a runner?

You couldn’t do much better than passing on what you know and love about this sport. This might become the most rewarding phase of your running life, as it has been mine.

There’s much you can do this way, short of the teaching and coaching I’ve lucked into. You can advise, assist, praise, pace, cajole, console in less formal ways.

Your own running is necessarily self-centered. You must focus on your own health and fitness, your distances and times. A support role can’t be all, or even much, about you. After taking care of our own biggest business, though, you can help others work on theirs.

These days with these runners I’m not someone who used to race fairly fast or a name from the bylines. They don’t know that or need to know more than who they see: a grizzled guy with a clipboard, a stopwatch and a proud smile. The time we spend together is about their running, not mine.

I don’t coach online but only in person. I limit the group in size (though never by ability) so I can get know every runner’s backstory and can call each one by name at least once each day.

We first come together as strangers, then become teammates, friends and finally a family of sorts. I gain more from these runners this way than I give to them in training and racing tips.

SUBSTITUTE THE WORD “write” for “run” in this chapter’s opening question and you see the related question that I’m addressing here: What will I do as a writer after I’ve written almost everything?

I’ve written for a small hometown newspaper, a college paper and a statewide daily... about news, all sports, my favorite sport and the distance-running branch of this sport... for the three other magazines before settling in at Marathon & Beyond... in booklets and books, of my own and in concert with other authors.

Other writers know their special area of running expertise better than I. But few, if any, have covered the sport in as many ways for as long.

I’ve written personal, practical, technical, historical, statistical, biographical, physiological, psychological and philosophical reports. I’ve said about all I have to say, to the point of repeating myself.

So after a seven-year run with Marathon & Beyond (and before that, 33 years with Runner’s World, and brief early stints with Track & Field News and Running magazine), this served as my farewell-to-magazine-writing column. I yielded the space to someone with a greater need to fill it, while I went further in the direction I already was headed: teaching and coaching runners who hadn’t read much of anything, and still had their best running experiences ahead of them.

Photo: Standing and supporting has replaced racing for me, including greeting Jean Cordova during the Eugene Marathon.

[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, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]