These Days

(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 final one in the series comes from 2017.)

THESE DAYS I write as I’ve long written. The first stop for the words is a page in an ongoing journal, and more often than not they go no further.

These writings almost always end at a single page. The frequency is daily, with no days off. The setting for this writing is an office at home that doubles as a bedroom for visitors.

Nothing here has changed much since I started writing these pages in 1959… No, that’s not quite right. I should say that this practice has circled back to how it began – before wordplay became a profession and an obsession, before the reporting took me far from home in search of stories, before I wrote in the offices of several different magazines.

The earliest writings were intended for my eyes only. Each day’s report occupied its own page (which held more white space than pen scratches and carried more numbers than words as I detailed the miles and minutes of that day’s run).

I started writing in support of my running hobby, and soon these were twin hobbies of equal standing. I wrote at a desk in a bedroom (except then it was where I also slept).

The habits aren’t much different today, only the setting. Then, as a 16-year-old, it was a small town in Iowa.

Now, in my Medicare years, it’s a mid-sized city in Oregon. The office in Eugene looks out toward the north and east, and if not for the trees and hills I could see Hayward Field and Pre’s Trail beyond.

Immediately outside the window is a space where a retired travel trailer used to rest and where I once wrote. My wife jokingly called it “the world headquarters for Running Commentary” (the one-man show of a newsletter that I still published on paper at the time).

When our son moved away, my office took over his bedroom. Then during a home remodel we added the office-slash-bedroom that I now occupy.

I made just one request during the planning of this room: built-in bookshelves. The books I’ve published now fill a cubicle two feet long, and the books I’ve edited occupy another space of similar size.

By far the most prominent feature of this wall of shelves, though, is the yearly journals. Their binders number almost 60 and spread across eight of the bookshelf slots.

I’ve long said that if a fire were to break out here and I had just a few minutes to save invaluables and irreplaceables, I’d head straight for the journals. They tell the real and full story of my life… the one that keeps growing every day I sit down to write again.

This is pure writing. I don’t write it on orders from an editor or publisher. I use no notes. I feel the eyes of no reader peering over my shoulder.

All of this might come later, or once did but seldom does anymore. For the first time in more than four decades I write regularly for no magazine.

I post regularly on Facebook, Instagram and several blogs. I keep a dozen old books and a few newer ones in print.

But the vast majority of current writing is unpaid and unseen again. It’s back to being mostly a hobby, as rewarding now as it was in the beginning.

THE WRITING has truly come home again, to a house where I finally feel very much at home. I’ve been here since 1992, but took a long time and a long and winding road to find this home.

I’d looked for one again ever since leaving my early hometown of Coin, Iowa. Over the next three decades I’d lived in four states, eight cities and towns, and 20 different houses (none longer than three years) before settling at the current address.

I’m not a hermit here that I once was. Even this house used to be a place to hide out and hunker down to write between trips.

I flew out of Eugene 20 to 25 times a year, to take the stage before running audiences and pretend to be famous. So much was I away, and so busy at home, that I played no role in Eugene’s large and lively running community.

Now I’m all but retired from the road. My travels have shrunk to three or four a year, nearly all of those for family reunions – with my real family and with running friends who feel like family.

Meanwhile I get out of my writing cave a lot more often – to teach running classes at the local university, coach marathoners through a local running store, help at several local races, and stand and cheer at many more. I’m home at last and loving it.

Photo: Pointing the way to runners from the Sunday team that I now coach.

[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.]

Significant Others

(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 2016.)

GOING OUTSIDE to run wasn’t a big social activity for high school boys in the Midwest winters of the mid-20^th century. I started running alone then by necessity, because no one else in my town would have considered it. Now, when a runner need go solo only by choice, this remains my preference.

I’m a loner runner but never lonely. From my start in the 1950s, I sought support from people near and distant, well and little known.

My first coach, Dean Roe, let me make my own mistakes then picked me up when I fell. My teammates let me go my own odd ways while still welcoming me onto their team.

Back then, living on the outer fringes of the sport, I almost never saw a big-name athlete or coach. But they came to my mailbox in small-town Iowa by way of the magazines Track & Field News and Long Distance Log, and books by Franz Stampfl from Australia by way of Austria, by Arthur Newton from South Africa and England, and by Fred Wilt from the U.S. Midwest. People I hadn’t yet met reached across time and space to teach me how to run, and why.

These writings also told me I wasn’t alone. Other runners were out training and racing – often alone too but never in isolation. Our publications linked us.

The runners who wrote and were written about didn’t know me then, but they became my extended family of sorts. They encouraged me, and I supported them in return. We were all in this sport together.

Later my career took me to the very center of the sport, where I ran the many of the races that verified the boom in running. While working for the main magazine that reported and spurred this growth, I talked directly with the people igniting the explosion.

Later still I backed away from running’s center, to a quieter place for doing my writing. Here in a home office (known as my “cave”) I still work alone by necessity because this is the only way I know how to write, in solitary confinement and not in a committee meeting room.

I spend much of each day alone, but I’m not reclusive. Runners wouldn’t allow it even if I leaned that way, which I don’t. My happiest days each week are those spent teaching running classes at the local university and coaching a marathon/half training team.

I talk often and at length with running friends. Some visit in person, but most cross long distances – formerly by phone calls and letters, and now through emails and Facebook. I know many others only through their published writings, and visit a growing number of old friends only in memory.

MY FILES bulge with people stories written for my journal, newsletter and magazine column. Until now, though, I’ve had little chance to preserve these stories between book covers.

Of more than two dozen books, only one has dealt with a person (as opposed to running practices and personal experiences). The exception is Did I Win?, a biography of George Sheehan. I would call it my favorite of all I’ve written, except that it’s really George’s own book that I transcribed for him after his passing.

George liked to say when he borrowed lines from other great thinkers, “We stand on the shoulders of giants.” My take is that we run beside and behind these people. They set our pace, leading us to places we couldn’t have gone by ourselves.

People stories have always been my favorite type to read. They give life to the times and techniques. They inspire as well as inform.

These stories still do all of that for me, even after reading them for more than half a century. The gap in my book writing, now closed, was not giving proper credit and enough thanks to the people who are with me on every mile run and every line typed. I called them my pacesetters in a 2016 book with that same name.

Talent and fame were not required for inclusion here. Though some runners qualified on both counts, many are little known to you but important to me for reasons other than records or winnings. The main qualification for selection was how much their stories moved me then and how well I recall them now.

Photo: Arthur Newton reached out to me across the oceans, and the generations, to coach me with his book.

[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.]

Brief Beliefs

(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 came from 2015.)

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO doesn’t go with me on my runs. That’s when I still resist listening to anything but live sounds. But NPR’s morning news is the last voice I hear before running and the first afterward.

At those times I used to hear a segment in the ongoing series titled “This I Believe,” now discontinued. Hearing these five-minute highly personal essays, I thought: I could write a book on that subject.

Then I remembered: Already did that. It was titled Long Run Solution (first published in 1976). That book was an extended version of what I believed while writing the book in the 1970s.

Thirty years after Solution’s publication I wrote an updated and much-condensed version for Marathon & Beyond – everything I believe about running in 100 words or less. A hundred per topic, that is, while totaling a couple dozen of those.

Rereading those pieces another 10 years later made me think: What if space had been tighter or the assignment stricter? Could I state my most fondly held beliefs in 25 words or less? I’ll try here, while also limiting the number of topics to the original 25?

I write here as my journalism instructors urged: in simple declarative sentences. They also gave a warning too often ignored: avoid first-person pronouns; keep yourself and your opinions out of the story.

No I’s, me’s or my’s appear from here on, but they’re implied. These are my beliefs. Adopt them, edit them or reject them, but think about what yours are.

1. “If you run more than 15 miles a week, you’re running for reasons other than fitness.” Kenneth Cooper said that, and he’s right.

2. There’s more to running than fitness. Running only to train your heart, lungs and limbs is as incomplete as eating only to exercise your jaws.

3. Training to race, and running for relaxation and meditation, begin where the exerciser stops. The early miles are warmup steps leading to the best part.

4. Limit the running to one hour a day, on average. Beyond that time, this hobby starts to feel like a second job.

5. Limit the hard days to one a week. This is all that most of us can tolerate, or can fit into life’s schedule.

6. Life is complicated enough without adding to the complexity when you run. Take a break by keeping the training simple, low-tech and low-key.

7. Race training balances three needs: long enough for your longest race, fast enough for the shortest, easy enough to recover from the hard runs.

8. We must run less than our best most of the time. Nine miles in every 10, and most days each week, must feel easy.

9. The long run means the most, by far, in marathon training. Take it and nothing else but easy runs and rest days, and you’ll race fine.

10. You don’t need to “finish” a marathon in training. Leave the final miles unexplored until race day, when it earns you a medal and a shirt.

11. A little bit of speed training goes a long way. Too much of it leads to dead-ends of injury and disappointment.

12. Limit the interval-training sessions of a road racer to 5K fast running, total. Limit the pace to that of a 5K race.

13. The best type of speed “training” is regular racing. You can’t duplicate the race-day experience, effort or excitement as well with tempo runs or intervals.

14. Racing is an unnatural act. Do it, but treat it as a prescription item best taken in small, well-spaced doses.

15. Race day is magical. It can spur you to run as much as a minute per mile faster than you'd cover the same distance by yourself.

16. Start at a cautious pace, and let the impatient runners sail ahead. Catch them later, when it's better to be the passer than the passee.

17. Frank Shorter said, “You can't run another race until you forget how bad the last one felt.” Forgetting is the last stage of recovery.

18. A good guide for recovery is not to run another race (or even to train long or fast) until one day has passed for each mile of the race.

19. “Winning is doing the best you can with what you’re given.” George Sheehan said that. Also, “Winning is never having to say I quit.”

20. You are good. There are no “bad” runners, only slower ones. You’re always way ahead of those who dropped out or never started.

21. Everyone in a race is not automatically a winner. You risk a loss whenever you race, but the only one who can beat you is yourself.

22. No matter how fast you are, running can always humble you. No matter how slow you are, running can always make you proud.

23. You never run alone, even when you appear to be by yourself. There with you is everyone who ever advised, inspired or supported your running.

24. Running interests evolve. Runners typically begin with fitness goals, graduate to chasing racing goals, then finally advance to running as its own reward.

25. Speed eventually drops, PRs become permanent, medals tarnish. All you can really hold onto is today’s run. All that lasts in running is the lasting.

Photo: Frank Shorter believes, “You can’t run another race until you forget how bad the last one felt.”

 

[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.]

Taking Walks

(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 2014.)

AS THE YEARS have added up, my public roles in running have shrunk. At 60, I ran my last true race; at 61, I quit hitting the road once or twice a month as a speaker; at 64, I ran/walked my last marathon; at 68, I wrote my last column for a national running magazine.

I didn’t become anti-social or reclusive, exactly, and didn’t fully retire from running, writing or speaking. But I now enjoy relative anonymity after being too public a figure in this sport for too long.

I run (and increasingly, walk) alone. I write mainly for an audience of one (myself). I speak mostly to my training teams (and then only briefly).

If I’m known at all in my hometown beyond these small groups of runners, it’s for another role played in recent years. That’s as a local poster boy for a cause near to my heart (and points south): prostate cancer awareness.

At age 65, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I’ve put modesty and privacy aside and spoken out about my condition, in hopes of helping other men avoid or treat it.

Treatment sent my cancer was into deep remission, if not entirely cured. But I didn’t escape it without some cost, which I gladly paid.

Hormone suppression figured into the early treatment. It added pounds to my waistline and minutes to my miles. I’ve never lost the former or gained back the latter.

This combination gradually reduced my running range. I couldn’t run as far as I still wanted to go, so I evolved over the next few years from a runner taking a few walk breaks to a walker who ran a little.

For the first five years post-treatment, I joined a Relay for Life, the cancer fund-raiser usually held on a track. The first three were traditional run-walks.

I celebrated the fourth year differently. My first-ever hamstring tear (a “speed” injury at a time when I’d never been slower) temporarily ended all running. This happened right before the 2012 Relay, which led to another first: walking an organized event, the whole four hours.

Never had a walk lasted longer for me. I didn’t know exactly what my old walk-only high was, but only that this new one wouldn’t long remain my lifetime high.

That “PR” lasted only a year. The fifth cancer-versary (the traditional time for pronouncing a patient “cured”) brought a five-hour walk at the Relay… and a vow to extend to a marathon in the sixth year.

All previous celebrations had gone unpublicized and unaccompanied by anyone who knew what I was doing. The marathon was different.

At age 70, I entered an official one – the 2014 Yakima River Canyon Marathon in Washington, which offered a generous early start for slowpokes like me who mainly walked. And I accepted help from a few young runners on my training team.

Laurel Mathiesen, Sara Tepfer and Jesse Centeno made the 600-mile round trip on their own. Then they ran until they’d made up my two-hour head start.

From 22 miles on, we walked in together. We finished, in 6½ hours on the early-start clock, and my first written comments afterward still stand as the most accurate:

“Walking a marathon is very different from running one; much less intense, for one thing. But it isn't easy with its extra hours. Laurel, Sara and Jesse made the hard final miles go better, and they made my day four times more rewarding than it would have been as a private effort.”

THIS EXPERIENCE encouraged an encore the next year, my seventh post-diagnosis, this time at the 2015 Newport (Oregon) Marathon. Laurel Mathiesen and Rachel Walker from the team walked with me, and others waited at the finish. I thank them for this support – and their patience.

Fittingly for the personal anniversary being marked that week, this marathon took me nearly seven hours. But that clocking was incidental to another bigger, better number.

This event celebrated 10 years for my training team, whose first race also had been at Newport. I am quietly proud to have gone these miles, here and for the past decade. And I am loudly proud to have shared so much with so many teammates.

Photo: Two young runners – Laurel Mathiesen (left) and Sara Tepfer (right) – slowed down to help their 70-year-old coach finish at Yakima.

[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.]