Pacing Patiently

(This is 50^th anniversary of my first article in Runner’s World magazine. All year I post excerpts from my book, This Runner’s World.)

January 2002 (retitled in the magazine). Distance running is one sport that requires doing less than your best most of the time. That is, you hold back now so you can keep going later.

You can’t run an early mile of a long race all-out, or you won’t finish. You can’t train your hardest every day without ever easing off or resting, or you won’t last long.

Running far requires that you pace yourself. Take that word “pace,” split it in half, add a few letters, and you have “patience.” That’s what pacing is, an exercise in patience.

Walking to the Portland Marathon start one year, I happened to pass a church. Chiseled in concrete on one wall was the line, “Run with patience the race set before you.”

Someone more religious than I told me later that these words are Biblical, from Hebrews 12:1. All I knew at the time was how wisely they speak to runners, especially on marathon day.

A marathon demands patience, as gratification there is long delayed. The race doesn’t start on race morning but months earlier with the decision to enter and the commitment to train. You spend more of the training days holding back than pushing ahead.

Even on marathon day the wait for your final reward is long, with many hours of running separating the start from the finish. The early miles feel too easy, but you restrain yourself then so the late miles won’t seem unbearably hard.

Even while pacing yourself well, you almost surely will run into what the British call “bad patches.” Your patience is put to its sternest test as you wade through and wait out the inevitable trouble spots – injuries, illnesses, crises of energy and confidence – that threatened to end your big effort too soon.

The lessons of pacing yourself patiently while training for and running marathons carries over to the race of your life – the one that you hope will have no finish line except the ultimate one. Here the right pace is one you can maintain indefinitely, through the good years and the not so good.

One year in a longtime runner’s life is like a mile in a marathon. You don’t run the first mile in six minutes if you’re planning to finish with an eight-minute average. And you don’t push the pace too hard in any season or year if you still expect to be running strongly next year, or a decade or more down the road.

Either in races or in life, you can push hard for a short distance or back off for the long haul. Rare is the runner who can handle an intense pace for a long time.

I’m into my 44^th year as a runner. The length and pace of runs are nothing to shout about, but I take certain pride in the longevity because it isn’t always easy to maintain.

The past year and a half tested my patience more than any similar period had before. Without going into the gory details, I caught a long-lasting, strength-sapping illness last year.

Finally recovered from that, I fell on a sidewalk and did slow-healing damage to a hip. Running never stopped for more than a week, but the runs themselves were never shorter or slower.

Here’s where patience came into play. I couldn’t rush recovery but had hold back, do what was possible and wait for better days ahead. Pace myself, in other words.

Taking a long-term view is most important during and right after a bad-patch period. The urge is to break through the trouble – to pick up the pace and make up for lost time.

This is a time to stay within comfort-zone pace. Let progress come instead of trying futilely to hurry it.

The waiting isn’t as hard as it might sound, as long as you see hope for eventual recovery. One off day is an eye-blink in the life of a runner; it’s like a few steps in a marathon. One bad month is but a marathoner’s minute; one year, less than a mile.

Taking the long view of pace gives you patience, and with patience comes peace of mind. Fittingly that word “peace” is in Italian spelled p-a-c-e.

2018 Update. I’m into my 60^th year of running, and now much more a walker than runner. If that’s the pace I need to keep putting in the miles, it’s good enough.

[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.]

Three Cheers

(This is 50^th anniversary of my first article in Runner’s World magazine. All year I post excerpts from my book, This Runner’s World.)

January 2001 (retitled in the magazine). I have one of the world’s great jobs. On most weekdays I write about runners. On some weekends I see them at races.

My work takes me to many races each year. Once finished with the pre-race talk that brought me there, the choice is mine – run in the race or stand by and cheer for other runners. Either way is equally satisfying, involving either receiving shouts of encouragement or giving them.

While watching a race, my strategy is not to stand right at the finish line. You don’t see the truth of the race there. Instead, if you see anything through the crowd, it’s a victory prance as runners celebrate the last steps of their day’s work.

If you want to know what a race is really all about, then move a kilometer to a mile up the course. The view is closer there than at the finish line, the voices are quieter, and the views are more realistic.

First you see yourself in the other runners, and sometimes it isn’t a pretty sight. You notice how long the wait is from the time the leaders pass until people of your ability appear. Then you think, They look so much slower than I picture myself running at that pace.

Mostly, though, you see honest, concentrated, sometimes painful effort written on the faces and in the strides of the passing runners. Something in the way they look at this point makes bystanders shout verbal support to strangers.

Something in the look of these runners also makes the viewers tell well-meaning lies. I’ve approached hundreds of finish lines, and stood near hundreds more. I’ve always heard the same three lies:

1. “You’re almost there.” Distance and time are elastic. When you’re full of run, the early miles seem to pass in three minutes each, while the last mile can seem to stretch to half an hour.

Distance can sometimes be truly variable as one viewer shouts, “You have less than a mile to go,” then another one farther down the road informs you, “A little more than a mile to go.”

2. “It’s all downhill from here.” When you’re weary, the topographic map loses all meaning. Downhills can seem like flat running, and the flats can feel uphill.

True downhills are at best a mixed blessing because they up the stress load on well-pounded legs. At this point, just stepping off a curb can be as jarring as leaping off a steeplechase barrier.

3. “Looking good.” This is the crowd favorite. You might look more relaxed and less tired than most of the people around you, but that’s not the same as looking good.

Don Kardong once wrote, “Do you want to see how you’ll look 20 years from now? Glance in a mirror right after you finish a marathon.” Runners who look good late in a race probably haven’t run hard enough.

Never do I expect to hear someone shout, “You have farther to go than you want to know,” or, “Look out for the killer hill between here and the finish line.” I have, though, had a rare truth-telling spectator ask me late in a race, “Are you okay? You don’t look so good.” For him to say that, I must have appeared in need of a 911 call.

Trust a New Yorker to be honest. A sign spotted at one of that city’s marathons read, “Remember, you chose to do this.” And we even pay for the privilege of pushing ourselves this far, so no spectator needs to feel sorry for us.

When my turn to play cheerleader, I try to be both supportive and honest. My cheers stay neutral: “Way to go”... “Good job”… “Well done.” Or I just clap and then give a thumbs-up to anyone still able to make eye contact, while knowing that runners hear or notice even when they don’t acknowledge these good wishes.

It doesn’t matter what an onlooker says, if anything. Runners only want to know that someone – friend or stranger, loud or silent – cares what we’re doing.

2018 Update. I do a lot less participating now, and much more watching (as a teacher and coach of runners). The three big cheers of those standing with me haven’t changed, nor have my alternatives ones.

[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.]

The Great Beyond

(This is 50^th anniversary of my first article in Runner’s World magazine. All year I post excerpts from my book, This Runner’s World.)

January 1999. John McGee spoke while still under the influence of his longest run ever. He didn’t finish the 50-mile race that he’d conceived in Edmonton, Alberta. But he went far enough to feel elated over the day that took him well beyond what his training should have allowed.

“The ultras could be the future of running,” he said while sat watching other runners continue their five-mile loops. “They pose a new challenge for all of today’s marathoners who are looking for something new and different.”

I didn’t disagree at the time. You don’t argue with a lawyer, even a tired lawyer – which McGee is and was.

But thinking about his statement later, I’d say that ultrarunning as now conducted is less the future of the sport than its past repeating itself at new distances. Today’s ultras bear a strong resemblance to yesterday’s marathons – small, obscure and peopled by the sport’s fringe element.

Most ultras go unnoticed beyond the pages of their own magazine, Ultrarunning, just as marathons went unreported outside of Long Distance Log a generation ago. Ultrarunners are seen as eccentrics and extremists even by lesser runners, just as marathoners once were.

Some runners prefer to be abnormal. They like to go where the crowds do not, to the courses less traveled – which means both far different and much tougher than the norm.

“Normal” ends today with the marathon. The runners who flock to these events are attracted by the crowds and the excitement they generate, as well as by the chance to run a course proven to be fast.

But we have always had a certain, preferably small, group that refuses to do what everyone else does. When running was largely confined to track and cross-country for school athletes, the dissidents broke away and ran on the roads. When shorter road races grew popular, they moved to the marathon.... then to road ultras, then to off-road treks.

To find an exclusive race, a runner must now search for one that is very steep or very long – and usually both. Hundred-mile mountain races spread across the country from Vermont and Old Dominion to Leadville and Western States now satisfy the urge to be different.

Their starting size is often limited by qualifying standards and by how many runners the trails can support – which suits the entered athletes just fine. They want their club to stay exclusive.

If ultras are to grow into “the future of running,” they must take a different course than ever-longer, ever-tougher. They must go in a different direction from the avant garde of ultrarunning — to, if these two words can go together, easier ultras.

For ultras to grow, someone would need to provide more races that are more accessible steps up from the marathon, such as 50K to 50 miles. Someone would need to bring ultras down to the flatter trails and roads, which emphasize running and not mountain-climbing ability. Some would need to create a North American counterpart to the 54-mile Comrades in South Africa that everyone wanted to run.

I don’t see any of this happening. Then again, I never would have thought in the 1960s that marathons would go where they’ve gone.

2018 Update. Trail and ultra races have grown in number and size since this column appeared, but not explosively so. The degree of difficulty might always keep these events relatively exclusive compared to traditional road races. Trail/ultra runners seem to like it this way.

[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.]

Feminizing of Running

(This is 50^th anniversary of my first article in Runner’s World magazine. All year I post excerpts from my book, This Runner’s World.)

January 1998 (retitled in the magazine). Looking out on the Second Running Boom, I see the face of my daughter shining back at me. Sarah runs, and so do thousands like her.

Sarah is typical of her generation. She didn’t run much as a kid, once trying a mile and announcing, “It’s too far to run.” When asked if she competed in high school, she replied, “No, I don’t like to sweat.”

In college she saw other young women running and got the idea that sweat has its advantages. Her own running started then, and now she’s part of the largest new growth area in the sport: the young women.

They’re a welcome addition to a sport that had long been largely male, and was increasingly middle-aged and older. Where would the replacements come from, I wondered, when the oldest of us starting hitting the ultimate finish line?

Now I know. I see the new recruiting class in all my travels.

One recent Sunday I counted the runners whose courses crossed mine in run-crazed Eugene. Exactly half were women, and most were young.

By itself this count proves nothing. But together with other evidence it shows that a longtime imbalance in the sport is correcting itself. Women are taking an equal place alongside men, and the young beside the old.

This is as it should be. The sex with half the population should supply half the runners.

But women have never before known numerical equality in running because they started so far behind. Men have run long-distance races for more than a century.

Only in 1967 did Kathrine Switzer finagle the first women’s number from the Boston Marathon, and not until 1972 did officials first bless women’s road racing. Which means the women had a lot of catching up to do, and their numbers have grown faster than men’s.

Women didn’t play a big role in the first boom of the 1970s; there were too few of them then. But they have much to do with the encore.

They now make up nearly half the Road Runners Club of America membership. They supply half the field – or more – at some races, and fill a growing number of women-only events.

These women contribute heavily to organized running programs, where they’re more likely than men to team up for training. I’ve seen female majorities in the marathon groups of Jeff Galloway and Team in Training, as well as those of the Portland Marathon Clinic, L.A. Leggers and the Chicago Area Runners Association (CARA).

David Patt, who directs CARA, quoted figures for his groups. “Our marathon training program is close to 60 percent female,” said Patt. “Our beginning running program is about 80 percent female.”

He also commented on a sub-trend in women’s running: “We find that in many races the women outnumber the men in the younger age groups.”

Patt’s theory on why this is true, at least in his area: “In many instances these are young women taking their first jobs in the city. They’re committed to fitness, looking for a social connection and looking for protection in numbers.”

So they join training groups and enter races together. The young men still haven’t joined these women in great numbers.

But where the fit, active women go, the same type of men are likely to follow. Together they insure the future health of the sport.

2018 Update. Later I was to become largely a women’s coach. All my training groups, 2001 to present, have been predominantly female. At the extreme, one University of Oregon running class had one man amid 19 women. Lucky guy.

[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.]