The Pacesetter

(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. Many of my best friends in this sport are older than I am. Hal Higdon was the first of these, George Sheehan was the closest, and Paul Reese was the longest-lasting. 

I look up to them as pacesetters through life, in running and other arenas. None of us can grow younger, but we all can find leaders who show how to age actively and slow gracefully.

No one I’ve known has packed more activity into his upper years than Paul Reese. He ran across the United States at age 73, finished crossing the remaining states at 80 and published three books about these experiences (and left another book unpublished).

No one I know has approached his own finish line with more grace than Paul. Evidence of that will come later in this story, but first I need to tell how he lived and how I joined his ever-widening circle of “best friends.”

Paul was a Marine by choice, a schoolteacher in his second profession and a communicator by nature. He phoned often and wrote long and well – in books, articles, journals, and especially in letters and email.

I’m not overstating to say that Paul became my second second father. He took over that role in 1993 from George Sheehan, who’d first played that role after my own dad’s too-early passing.

Paul and I met at the 1967 Santa Barbara Marathon. On our first day of racing together I finished a little ways ahead of Paul. This began years of good-hearted competition between us.

He would beat me at marathons and beyond (especially beyond, where he shone and I stunk). I’d usually outrun him at shorter distances, where my background in speed trumped his endurance.

He would start every race fast. I would begin timidly, often catching and passing him near the finish. He took to accusing me of “stalking.”

The last time we ran a race together was 1992 at the Avenue of the Giants Marathon. Paul was 75 years old by then. I was, in his term, “a marathon of years younger” – his junior by 26, that is.

As usual I started slower. He gauged his lead each time we met on the double-out-and-back course.

As usual I passed Paul near the end. His reaction, muttered with grimness on his face but goodness in his heart: “Damn you, you sneaky runt!”

We finished about a minute apart in our final race together. This symbolized the closeness we felt from the first day we met through the final days of his life.

My first column in Marathon & Beyond spoke of Paul Reese. “The grandest old man of the roads,” I called him. He was 87 then.

Paul responded to the column as I would have expected: “Cutest old man, most handsome old man, most dashing old man – all these, while appropriate and applicable, are quite a few notches below ‘grandest’.”

This would be my last personal note from Paul. I’m glad he saw that tribute, because he was grand and because he wouldn’t see another column in M&B. He told in that same letter about facing surgery for a defective heart valve.

“I’m attempting to hold out until January [2005],” he said of that operation. “I want to emerge from the surgery and recovery, and to get back to healthy living – Krispy Kreme donuts, In/Out hamburgers, pizza and all such! “

Paul’s condition couldn’t wait until the new year. His surgery was moved to October 2004.

“The good news is that I’m still here to tell about it,” he wrote the next week in a group letter to friends. Complications followed. He wrote again to us friends in late October, with a good-bye of sorts.

“One thing you learn as you sift through life is that the most precious gift of all is love, and I’m blessed to have a generous share of that. Of course, it could be argued that I am such a splendid person, what other choice is there but to love me!”

Paul died soon afterward. He was the third older running hero I lost that year, after Jack Foster and Johnny Kelley. This is the chance you take, and one well worth taking, when you look up to your elders.

Later. Paul had ended his first book, Ten Million Steps, with this line: “One of the secrets of aging gracefully is always to have something to look forward to.”

His runs across the remaining states followed, then two more books – Go East, Old Man, and The Old Man and the Road. He left behind a fourth, the unpublished America on Foot.

Paul also left another long trip unfinished. In 2003 he’d crossed Montana (with wife Elaine, as always, driving their motorhome) on what was intended to be a multi-stage passage from the Canadian to the Mexican border. This wasn’t a bad way to go – still looking toward doing more.

This career Marine would scoff at me describing him with lines from a protest singer. But these words by Bob Dylan say who Paul was:

“May your hands always be busy,

may your feet always be swift.

May you have a firm foundation,

when the winds of changes shift.

May your heart always be joyful,

may your song always be sung.

May you stay forever young.”

Stay busy, keep moving, stand firm, stay positive, die young as late as possible. That’s how Paul Reese lived, and why he became a pacesetter of mine.

(Photo: Paul Reese would set the example for prostate cancer treatment and active recovery.)

[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.]

The Word-wizard

(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. Dr. George Sheehan reached his final finish line in late 1993. Soon afterward a favorite race of his was renamed and moved to his old training course.

    

The next summer I walked to the start of the George Sheehan Classic in Red Bank, New Jersey. A young runner ahead of me turned to another and said, “This is a cool race. But who is this Sheehan guy, anyway?”

   

He said “She-han,” not the proper “She-un.” At that time and place this was like asking who that Kennedy was with his name on a New York City airport.

Every runner should have known George Sheehan by then. Or so his friends and fans liked to think, though he himself knew better.

   

Others built up his bigger-than-life legend, and he sometimes felt the need to knock it down to size. The two of us once walked away from the adulation that always greeted him at the Boston Marathon. He shook his head in amazement, then added, “Two blocks from here I’m just another skinny old Irishman.”

    

For all the fame heaped on him in his later years, he didn’t take all of this too seriously. Being famous was a phase that started in his late 50s, when the practices of his lifetime were pretty well set and wouldn’t change much the rest of his days.

   

As long as I knew him, which was 25 years, he wore the same blue(jeans)-on-blue(shirt and sweater) uniform while greeting crowds of runners. He drove the same little well-used cars, VWs and Hondas, that doubled as his mobile locker-room.

    

He spoke and wrote his last words in 1993. Which means that many of today’s runners can be excused for asking: “Who’s this George Sheehan?”

Many Marathon & Beyond readers came into the sport after George left. They never had the pleasure of hearing, reading or knowing him in life.

     

George Sheehan once stood taller than anyone in this sport. (Put John “Penguin” Bingham on Jeff Galloway’s shoulders, and you get an idea of George Sheehan’s stature at his peak.) No one to come along since has given better speeches to runners or written finer literature on running.

     

George was an accidental author. He wasn’t trained as a writer and had practiced medicine for half his life before publishing his first article at age 50. His medical career was winding down when he wrote his first book seven years later.

    

By then he’d settled into his distinctive style of writing: personal, philosophical and padded with quotes from great thinkers from outside of sports. The Sheehan Style would come to be widely mimicked (and occasionally satirized) but never matched.

     

His first book, Dr. Sheehan on Running, sold well among his Runner’s World readers, but the wider world wasn’t yet ready to buy running books. That would happen soon afterward.

    

During one amazing month of 1978, three different books for runners ranked among the top 10 in national sales – for all topics. Each book took a different look at the sport.

Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running profiled people who ran and what it meant to them. Bob Glover and Jack Shepherd’s Runner’s Handbook advised how to run. George Sheehan’s Running & Being examined why he, and we, ran.

     

George’s book, along with his previous and later ones, gave voice to what other runners thought but couldn’t express. They embraced him for this for the rest of his life, and beyond. They loved him all the more as he wrote as openly about his final life test as he had about other subjects.

     

In 1986 George was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that had spread into his bones. His doctors told him to hope for another year but to plan for less. He lived seven more years – good years, mostly.

Later. Who was Dr. George Sheehan? The best way to introduce yourself to him now, or to renew acquaintances, is to read one of his books.

I worked with him on all but one of those books. He never once, in almost two decades of writing them, named one as his favorite.

    

“These books are my babies,” he said. “I could no more single out one than say which of my own children I like best.” His kids outnumbered his books, 12 to seven.

    

Once you’ve read any of them, you’ll want to read more. Once you read him, you’ll know him and won’t forget him.

(Photo: Good as he was as a writer, George Sheehan was even better as a speaker.)

[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.]

The Man-cancer

(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. Old people, sometimes to the irritation of the young, talk often and long about their physical ailments. Runners don’t wait until they age to do that, though the years give us more to discuss.

Three men whose ages averaged 65-plus sat at a Napa Valley Marathon dinner in 2005, detailing their prostate health. The eldest, a world record-holder for his age, told of his successful surgery. The next was healthy himself but said, “I know 15 runners who are dealing with prostate cancer.”

To me, the third man in this conversation circle, the topic was disturbing. I asked questions of the others but didn’t tell them about my imminent biopsy. I hadn’t told anyone except my wife Barbara, who spent most of 2004 dealing with breast-cancer treatments.

(If you think this is a men-only story, substitute the word “breast” for “prostate,” and “mammogram” for “PSA.” Prostate cancer is for men what breast cancer is for women – a scourge from which our fitness seems to give little protection.)

I’d delayed the biopsy for the 2005 trip that brought me together with the two tablemates. A routine physical exam that week had turned up a high enough reading on the prostate-cancer screening test, the PSA, to warrant a call from the doctor.

“We need to biopsy you right away,” he had said. “With this reading, the chances of it being cancer are one in three. Can you come in tomorrow?”

I couldn’t, but promised to be checked right after the weekend trip to Napa. The wait for results was more painful than the doctor’s needles.

Eighteen years earlier, Dr. George Sheehan’s week-long wait had ended with the worst of verdicts: prostate cancer, spread beyond the reach of surgery and other treatments. The day in March 1986 when George Sheehan broke the news to me, I asked him if it was too personal and painful for him to make public.

“No,” he said, then repeated one of his favorite lines. “For a writer there are no bad experiences. There are just good stories.”

He found the good in his experiences to come, and kept no secrets. Nothing was too personal for a writer like him to make public. He would have expected no less from me.

Later. George was Irish. It’s fitting, then, that the verdict on whether or not I harbored “George’s disease” would come on St. Patrick’s Day.

A nurse called, which I took as a good sign. Wouldn’t the doctor himself be reporting a bad result?

The nurse said without any preliminary chit-chat, “You have good news. All 10 of your samples were benign.” That last word has to be one of the most beautiful in our language.

I’m pleased to follow in some of George Sheehan’s big footsteps, to carry on some of his work, sometimes even to be compared with him. But I was even more pleased, in 2005, not to follow George this way. Not yet, anyway.

(Photo: Dr. George Sheehan pictured in 1993, the year he lost his long fight against prostate cancer.)

[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.]

The Graduation

(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. I can’t think of an emptier end to marathon training than to come to the race alone. Teaming up for our first event, the Newport Marathon, meant that no one had to finish this way.

We trained as a team. Then on marathon weekend everyone saw the support team that helped the runners get there. Spouses, parents, children, grandkids, partners and friends came to Newport on the Oregon coast. Many of them met each other for the first time at our own pasta dinner.

The largest number came in support of Paula Montague. She uses the name “flyingmama” in her email address. Paula is the mother of three daughters, “and my 16-year-old sister is like a fourth.” Those four, and Paula’s own mother, were in Newport.

A few weeks after the marathon, Paula would undergo a medical procedure (she wouldn’t call it “surgery”) to correct a non-life-threatening heart irregularity. Her concerns were more immediate: knee pains that had all but stopped her since our longest training run.

As I mother-henned the team on the course, the last to pass my spot at three miles was Paula. I asked about her knees. She grimaced, shook her head and asked for the tube of Biofreeze that she’d left with me. We next met up at 11 miles. This time she smiled, shouted “I’m better now!” and stopped for a hug of mutual relief.

Our next runner ahead of Paula at that point, Michelle Martin, appeared fearless. She’d started boldly, given her condition.

On our first day together back in January, the runners filled out an information sheet. I asked if any physical condition might affect their training. Michelle had written, “Can discuss later,” then added a smiley face.

In April, Michelle announced that she was pregnant. I might have urged her to postpone the marathon for a year if she hadn’t already rejected that idea. “My doctor gave me permission to keep running,” she said, “if I keep my heart rate below 140.”

I was never clear if she mentioned “marathon” to the doctor. Michelle wore a watch that beeped when she was scheduled to walk for a minute. Only sometimes did she heed it.

Into her fourth month on race day Michelle still didn’t look like a pregnant woman – or run like one. She passed my spot at 11 miles, running a minute per mile ahead of her pace goal, seeming worry-free.

But the marathon wasn’t yet halfway finished. It was Michelle’s first, just as this would be her first child. A lot could happen in the second half, of a marathon as with a pregnancy, some of it unpleasant to anticipate or to experience.

   

A first marathon is like a first love. No matter how beautifully or badly it goes, you will never forget it. I can’t recall my breakfast menu this morning or much about the run that preceded it. But I can recount in loving detail my first marathon day. And that was at Boston, in 1967.

    

That first marathon day can change you in ways that you couldn’t have imagined before running the race. I had intended to finish the one marathon and then retire to fun-and-fitness running. But this one led to dozens more marathons plus a few ultras – and finally to coaching my first team of marathoners.

   

After their graduation exercises at the Newport Marathon, I wrote to the runners, “I’ve never been prouder of more runners on a single day. Each of you gave me chills for your own reasons as you hit your finish line at Newport – in a race that didn’t start at seven o’clock this morning but four months ago in your first training run with this Team.

“Even if you didn’t run the time you’d hoped for, remember that veteran marathoners say the same thing about their races as pilots do about their landings: any that you can walk away from is a good one. All 16 of you finished and can walk away proudly.”

   

The greatest benefit of this program wasn’t the training plan or the coaching. It was the support that these runners shared for these months of Sundays.

“You helped each other do what you might not have done alone,” I told them. “Ultimately that is what you’ll remember most about this marathon.”

Later. Our final finisher that day, Paula Montague, sobbed with the greatest joy and relief that her knees had allowed this. Her heart procedure two weeks later would bring even more success, and relief.

Michelle Martin lost her time goal to the long lines at the potties but finished the race. She would deliver a healthy daughter that fall.

Ten of our 16 runners were first-time marathoners. One of them, Laura McClain, ran like a pro. She alone on this team paced herself to negative splits.

    

“I had never been on a team of any kind, nor did I participate in sports in school,” Laura told me. “I was too shy and scared. This group was the first organized sports thing I’ve ever done, at almost 40.

“I was so extremely nervous the first couple Sundays I thought I would throw up. It wasn’t so much the running I was scared of, though I was definitely scared of not keeping up, getting lost, wearing the wrong thing, tripping or looking foolish somehow. Finishing the marathon was as big of an emotional breakthrough for me as it was physically.”

You never forget anything about a breakthrough this big. It changes how you choose your next test, face it and then graduate from it.

(Photo: Our second marathon team, for Portland 2005.)

[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.]