The Coaches

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2005. Dean Roe coached all three sports at my small-town Iowa school. By 1958 a football team of his had won a state title and a basketball team had reached the state tournament. He knew how to develop winners. I wanted to be one, but was too timid to succeed in football and too short for basketball.

Track was my last chance, and the best one was in the longest race we could run then – the mile. Body-size didn’t matter here, only heart-size. I could win by wanting it more than anyone else. Or so I thought.

On my first official day as a runner I tried too hard and beat no one but myself. I started at a dead sprint, which couldn’t last much more than one lap, and didn’t. The pack spit me out the back and off the track, where I now sat feeling sorry for myself after failing at another sport.

Coach Roe wasn’t a running expert, but he was an authority on the delicate psyches of adolescents. He knew when to kick a butt and when to pat a back.

He might have kicked me while I was down by quoting the slogan from his locker-room: “Quitters never win.” Instead he gave me a consoling pull to my feet and told me to try again next week and that “you’ll do okay if you pace yourself better.”

Next time I started last and didn’t do much passing, but I finished. That first year I improved enough to qualify for the state meet – and in later years to place at state, then to win there and finally to set a meet record.

My winning against other runners stopped after high school, but the improvement of times and distances lasted into the 1970s. Running didn’t stop there. It continues today, running on without needing any PR payoffs. 

Every year, every mile was and is a gift from Dean Roe. I once planned to thank him by imitating him, first by studying in college to be a coach of young runners. An early and long detour into running writing took me off the original path for more than 40 years.

Then, when given the chance to teach running classes to University of Oregon students a few years ago, I balked at first. “What if it took too much time away from the writing?” I said to my wife. Nonsense, Barbara told me. “Think of all the new story material this will give you.”

That has been the least of what these young runners have given me. If forced to choose now between the writing and the teaching, I would teach.

My best possible model for practicing this profession was my first coach. As “Coach Joe” I try to repay Coach Roe by repeating his lessons on winning running, from start to who-knows-where.

FIRST CLASS. Reading the book and seeing the movie Seabiscuit reminded me of Dean Roe. I didn’t connect my first coach with the racehorse but with his trainer, Tom Smith. He spoke one of the best lines I’ve ever heard about coaching:

“A horse doesn’t care how much you know until it knows how much you care.” Two-legged runners feel the same way.

Mr. Roe wasn’t technically savvy in running. But, oh, how he cared about his athletes. The young can sense this without being told.  I think of Tom Smith’s line, and my first coach’s application of it, while greeting a new class the first day of each term.

These students don’t know me, or I them. They see only a short guy, old enough to be their dad or grandpa, standing before them. I see faces that silently challenge me to make waking up at this early hour worth their while.

I say nothing about my credits as a writer. All I tell of my years as a runner is, “I won’t ask you to run anything here that I wouldn’t do myself, and haven’t done a thousand times. This program will work if you give it a chance.”

Some don’t. They either don’t like what they hear that day and bail out before the first run, or they let that one discourage them from trying another. I wish they had withheld judgment until they’d seen that the teacher cared and heard what he knew.

Withholding judgment goes both ways. Looking over the 30 to 40 strangers at the start, I try not to guess which ones will still be with me at the end, or how far they will have come in those 10 weeks.

Every class brings its surprises. A memorable young man stood out for his size, and a woman for her talent.

A guy named Matt wore his weight proudly enough to quote it to the pound – 247. He looked like a linebacker escaped from the football team, and I might have judged him strong-but-slow.

Wrong. Matt ran his 5K that term in 19 minutes. I’ve never seen anyone so big go so fast.

A woman named Kim told on her first-day questionnaire of having no running experience. We wondered together if she could handle this 5K training class. She broke 20 minutes in her first-ever race.

“Is that good?” she asked. It showed enough promise for Kim, a freshman, to be recruited for the University of Oregon cross-country team.

A student can do as much teaching, of the teacher, as learning. My students have taught me never to prejudge who will catch fire as a runner, or how hot and long she or he might burn.

Later. While writing this piece, I had the great fortune to see 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 a few.

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 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, talking as only running-mates 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.

(Photo: Coach Dean Roe led me to follow in his footsteps, 40 years later.)

[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, 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.]