Running in Circles

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

October 2002 (retitled slightly in the magazine). The best runner in my family asks me without words but with his glances, Why are you so slow? We’re an odd couple. He’s tall, I’m small. He’s thin, I’m less so. He’s young, I’m not. He’s a sprinter, I’m a distance runner.

Our bond is our shared status as retired racers. Before joining my family, he had a brief professional career – on the greyhound track.

His name, Buzz, fits. He can buzz along at 40 miles an hour when his genetic memory moves him.

Buzz wasn’t just born to run; it’s his whole reason for being. His breed has been refined down to a single specialty – to run extremely fast for the pleasure and profit of dog-racing fans.

When instinct kicks in now, he bolts into high gear and dashes invisible laps for a minute or two before dropping back to my pace.

Since Buzz joined my runs, I too have run more laps – slower and bigger ones than he might otherwise do, but laps just the same.

For decades I plotted courses that never duplicated themselves. Some were out-and-backs, but a route looks different when you reverse directions. Usually I’d run a single big loop with new scenery every step of the way.

Buzz has reduced my range. Running safely with him means using fewer and shorter routes, with multiple laps per day or multiple returns there per week.

Neither of us minds repeating ourselves. This is what runners do.

Ours is a life of constant reruns. We’re always circling back to where we’d we started, then starting all over again. Even if we don’t run extra laps that day, we surely will come back for more of the same another day soon.

Anyone who thinks this sounds boring doesn’t have a runner’s mindset or hasn’t chosen the courses well. To a runner in just the right place, each repetition there has a comfortable sameness to it. And each run there also is a little different from any other.

If anyone should feel bored by his everyday runs, it’s Ed Whitlock. History’s fastest over-70 marathoner runs two or more hours a day at a “glorified shuffle,” nearly all of it around a third-of-a-mile cemetery near his Ontario home.

Some readers question this unvarying routine. Ed himself says that he feels safe in his on his everyday route because “I know every pothole on my lap. It wouldn’t be like that on a single-loop course.” Other benefits: “No traffic, no dogs and no other macho runners to keep up with.”

I have no single Whitlock-like home course. But my regular choices in Eugene have come down to a handful, meaning that Buzz and I run each of them at least once a week.

Our favorite: a former garbage dump converted into a riverside park. I first ran there more than 30 years ago when a marathon passed through this park that later became home to Pre’s Trail.

I’ve lived nearby since 1981 and probably have averaged one run a week there. That’s more than 1000 repetitions, and I have yet to tire of this course.

Where did you run today? Now there’s a question you don’t often hear.

We think and talk about the whats and hows (especially the how-fars and how-fasts) of running. But the wheres seldom come up, beyond where the next race might be.

Yet the home courses are where you spend dozens to hundreds of hours a year. You must choose them well.

Plot routes that start and finish in the same spot, that you can reach quickly and easily from home or office, and that are runnable in all weather and light conditions. These might not be the fastest, easiest or prettiest routes. But you run them because they’re convenient, familiar and safe.

Someone who doesn’t know these courses as you do might think they would get old after the 99^th repetition. Not so.

A course never quite looks the same way twice. The combinations of weather, season, light, feelings and thoughts that you find there are ever-changing.

2018 Update. Buzz ran his last laps seven years ago. I continue using his favorite off-road courses.

[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, Next Steps, Pacesetters, Running with Class, 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.]

Pure Sport

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

October 2001. You don’t run cross-country for flat, fast courses accurate to the inch. You don’t run cross-country to have every step watched, as in a track stadium, or to mix with the masses, as on the roads. You don’t run cross-country for the glory, since in U.S. schools it shares a season with King Football.

You run cross-country for the purest of reasons. You run to test yourself against other runners on whatever surface and terrain nature provides – on a course where no car can go and where your family and fans can catch glimpses of you only by running from point to point. You run with teammates in a race where everyone’s result helps or hurts the team score.

Cross-country tests your love of running and racing for their own sake, not for PRs you might set or attention you might grab. Once you’ve fallen for the fall sport, you never stop loving it.

Almost two-thirds of my autumns have passed since I last ran a full cross-country season. My final race for Drake University was the worst, as in the snowbound NCAA meet I trailed nearly all of the finishers.

The pain of that race, of failing the team and of ending a college career this way, soon eased. The fond memories of those seasons remain, and I eagerly refresh them each fall at my favorite running event of the year. It isn’t a big-city marathon or a championship track meet in my hometown, but the Oregon State High School Cross-Country Championships.

Marc Bloom wrote in his magazine, The Harrier, after last year’s overcharged Olympics, “At least we’ve got the warm and cuddly cross-country season to make us feel better.” He loves the running that high schoolers do in this season, since he coaches as well as writes about them.

Marc’s first love is mine as well. The best day of the year to be a running fan in my home state is the first Saturday in November. All sizes of high schools run their state meet on the same course, in multiple races lasting as long in total as my slowest marathon.

This is a gathering of kids who often are ignored or misunderstood in the own schools during King Football season, and where the runners outnumber the fans at most of their meets. Now they come together with runners like themselves to be appreciated for all they do.

Oregon’s state-meet crowd is large by cross-country standards. That’s because each runner brings along an average of two family members and friends. They care about that runner’s race almost as much as the runner does, and dash about the course to grab glimpses of their special athlete.

This is a feel-good meet to watch, if not to run. These runners all seem to start at a dead sprint. Standing close enough to the course to see them sweat and hear them pant, I feel some of what they feel.

I watched a favored girl fall back through the field and wind up in an ambulance. In a boys’ race one of the early leaders was reduced to walking the last lap on the track and dropped to last.

Only two of runners this day were acquaintances of mine. I’d known their parents since their own teenage years. The daughter had been injured all season and finished in midpack. The son was expected to win, but his kick failed him and he placed a dejected third.

Without knowing the other kids by name and face, I knew them by what they were feeling. I hurt for those who felt they’d never recover from this from this failure.

And I celebrated with the winning individuals and teams who felt they’d conquered the world. Feelings run to extremes at this age.

If you ever ran cross-country and want to renew those memories, or if you want to see what you missed by not being a young runner on a team, go to a high school cross-country race this fall. These kids will leave you feeling good about the sport’s future as well as their own. They’ll show you that competitive running in its purest form is still in great shape.

2018 Update. More than four-fifths of my autumns have now passed without a cross-country race. But two of my grandchildren are now doing them for me.

They were years from being born when this column first appeared. Now Paige is running high school cross-country, and Noah is doing the same on his middle-school team. Their races remind me anew of this pure sport’s attractions.  

[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, Next Steps, Pacesetters, Running with Class, 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.]

Distant Looks at Olympics

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

October 2000 (retitled in the magazine). How much do you care about the Olympics? How much should you care?

The Olympics are entertaining if you watch them as that – an entertainment spectacle. But if you yell at the television for not showing enough distance running and for overexposing Americans at the expense of the world’s majority, or if your running suffers as you use that time to glean every last crumb of news from cable and computercasts, you probably care too much.

My caring peaked a long time ago, at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. This was partly the result of my job, my first Olympics with Runner’s World, and partly a function of age. The runners that year were my age-mates and many of them, from Doris Brown to Francie Larrieu and Jeff Galloway to Mike Manley, were – and still are – friends.

My caring about the Olympics didn’t end at Munich. But it took a healthier turn, thanks in large part to the example of my hero from those Games.

It wasn’t Frank Shorter, the first American to stand atop the marathon victory platform in 64 years. It wasn’t Lasse Viren, who jumped up from a fall to set a world record in the 10,000 and later won the 5000.

My hero from Munich was a gentle man named Tom Johnson, who attended the Games only as a tourist with the Runner’s World group that I helped lead. Before that trip, Tom had never been flown. He’d never ventured far his home in Washington, DC, where he worked as an editorial artist for the Post.

When Tom boarded the plane, he was dressed for running. He carried a small backpack holding everything he’d need for the next two weeks.

The tour group saw little of him after we arrived in the tiny village, 100 kilometers from the Olympic city, that served as our headquarters for these three weeks. His second home became the trails through the “Sound of Music”-like hills and along the trout-rich local river. Here he ran-walked for hours on trails.

Buses took the tour group by autobahn to Munich each day. Tom skipped most of these rides.

German TV, with commentary he didn’t understand, would show him all of the Olympics that he wanted to see. When asked how he could be this close to the Games and not watch them in person, he either didn’t have the words or the need to explain. He just smiled and shrugged.

I watched too closely and cared too much at Munich. The athletic and real-world events there exhausted me emotionally before the Olympics ended.

The last three days of running went into history without my help. By then I’d sold my tickets and quit taking the daily bus rides from the village to the city. I’d arrived at a place where Tom Johnson had been from the start.

On the day Frank Shorter ran for his gold medal on the streets of Munich, I ran along a river so clear that the trout looked like they swam under glass. Families walked the trail, stepping aside and mouthing German greetings as we met. I spent most of the run smiling.

On our last day in Germany some tour members told of being tired of the travel and crowds, and haunted by memories of the non-athletic events of Munich. I asked Tom how he’d liked his trip.

He called it “the greatest experience of my life.” He himself, and not the Olympic Games, had made it that way.

My Olympic-watching didn’t end at Munich. I went to Montreal and have watched all subsequent Games (except Moscow, blacked out in the U.S.) on television. Free of illusions about what the Olympics are, I can enjoy the spectacle from a safe emotional distance.

Having come to this place, I can tell you to watch the current incarnation of the Olympic Games if they interest you. Just don’t let good news take you too high or the bad sink you too low.

If you feel that happening, turn off the TV and computer, close the newspaper and go for a run. That’s more important to you than any of the running happening in Sydney.

2018 Update. After this column first appeared, I heard from a niece of Tom Johnson. Kathy Clarke wrote, “Your article perfectly describes my Uncle Tom, who died in 1993.

“He frequently visited us when I was a child. He always ran the 15 or so miles from Washington, DC, to our house in Rockville, Maryland. Then he gathered up his six nieces and nephews and took us running in the neighborhood with him.

“I am so glad that you saw him as your hero, because he was mine too. That was the impact he had on people.”

[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, Next Steps, Pacesetters, Running with Class, 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.]

Don't Ask Me

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

October 1998. My favorite part of going on the road to talk is listening. That is, hearing the questions that runners ask of me at the end of my speeches.

I don’t have all the answers, or even a majority of them, but the pondering the unanswerable is still a worthwhile exercise. While flying recently to a race, I filled the time by listing sentences, each ending with a question mark.

Why, if people who run beyond 26.2 miles are called “ultramarathoners,” aren’t those who run less called “submarathoners”? Why, if we have triathletes and duathletes, aren’t running specialists called “monoathletes”?

Why are older runners called “masters” in this country, a term that denotes skill and not age, instead of the international “veterans”? Why does the public persist in calling runners the despised J-word, which is like referring to skiers as “sliders” or golfers as “swingers”?

Why haven’t we coined a better name than “half-marathon,” the only one known as a portion of another distance and by implication inferior to it? Why can’t we replace the half-marathon with a 20K, and maybe call it a “double-10” or “ultra-10”?

Why do we race by kilometers but still take splits and average our pace by miles, which sound slower and come up less often than the K’s? Why do we train by miles when kilometers would add up faster and sound like greater totals?

Why can’t we find a classier term for walking breaks than “run/walk” — such as “interval racing” or “Gallowalks”? Why, if walking breaks are so beneficial, do runners still run in circles while waiting for stoplights to change?

Why do so few races fall into the great gap between the half-marathon and marathon, when these in-between races are great training for either event? Why does cross-country remain a sport for school kids, when adult legs need the break from the roads more than young legs do?

Why do watches give times in hundredth-seconds when official times always round up to the nearest full second in off-track races? Why, if watches split times into hundredths, do runners talk of their own times by rounding them down to the full minute?

Why is your favorite shoe the one that just disappeared from the marketplace because it wasn’t popular enough? Why do so many of today’s finest running shoes come with the fat, round laces that don’t stay tied?

Why don’t more running shorts come with bigger pockets for carrying gel and bar snacks? Why do overdressed runners not remember that they’ll warm up during the run and then end up with extras clothes draped around their waist?

Why do runners who profess a belief in “listen to your body” take pain-killers to quiet the body’s messages? Why does the body lie about how good or bad it feels right before the run, or especially the race, begins?

Why, if male athletes are “jocks,” aren’t women athletes named for an item of apparel? Why, if women are equal to men in the races, the men’s results are almost always listed first in news reports?

Why, if “to finish is to win,” do finishers risk bodily harm to themselves and others to move up from 1002^nd to 1001^st place? Why, if “everyone’s a winner,” do races still keep score and give prizes to a few of the winners?

2018 Update. Twenty years later, half-marathons have proliferated. So why is the plural of that distance commonly called as “halfs” instead of the grammatically proper “halves”?

[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, Next Steps, 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.]