The Speaker

(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.)

2006. Glenn Cunningham was a hero of my dad’s generation. I grew up hearing how his legs were badly burned in a childhood fire that killed his brother.

Glenn began to run as therapy, and eventually developed into one of the world’s best milers. He held world records and was an Olympic silver medalist in 1936.

Twenty-five years later the Kansan earned his living by touring the Midwest, giving motivational talks. His average fee was just $30.

By happy coincidence my small high school in rural Iowa booked him as the speaker on the day I graduated. He rode a bus to the nearest station, then hitchhiked the final 15 miles.

I remember none of his formal speech that day, but all of what he said in an earlier talk. The school principal called me to his office, where he’d arranged for Cunningham to talk with me privately. He was using that office as his locker room and was changing into a white shirt, tie and jacket as I arrived.

Cunningham was 51 then. He had the weathered, wiry look of the miler he had been and of the rancher he was. (His ranch took in homeless or troubled kids and put them to work.)

He looked like he still could have bared his scarred legs and shown me how a mile is supposed to be run. And I’d just won a couple of state titles and was headed off to college as a runner.

He was the first famous person I’d ever met. Adlai Stevenson didn’t count. I was struck mute a few years earlier when introduced to this former Presidential candidate as he visited our farm.

This time I found my tongue. As we talked, Cunningham asked, “What kind of training do you do?”

I’d fallen under the spell of Arthur Lydiard by then, and told of emphasizing the Lydiard-like longer and slower runs. Cunningham disagreed with this approach.

“If you want to race fast,” he argued in words I would hear repeated often in years to come, “then you must train fast.” He recommended reversing my emphasis, especially in hot weather when long runs are “too draining.” He said, “I never ran more than five or six miles in my life.”

I didn’t put his training advice into practice, then or later. I did follow in his footsteps as a speaker.

Later. Almost 20 years further along, the two of us shared a stage the night before a marathon in Boonville, Arkansas, near where he now lived.

We spoke to a sparse crowd that seemed largely unaware of or unimpressed by the featured speaker’s credentials. Glenn Cunningham won them over with his message.

That night I told Cunningham, still a powerful figure in physique and personality at 70, when he said “nice to meet you” that this wasn’t our first meeting. He appreciated hearing this, but I could tell that mine had been just another face at hundreds of his talks over the years.

He didn’t remember me, and I didn’t expect that he would. But I’ll never forget him.

(Photo: Glenn Cunningham in the 1930s.)

[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 Unretired

(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.)

2006. Speed is fleeting. Enjoy it while you have it, because it won’t last long. 

For most runners, racing speed peaks in our first 10 years or so, then slowly erodes. Then our PRs become memories instead of goals.

Paces that we once held for a marathon become those of a half, then a 10K, a 5K, a single mile. If we keep running races, they become slower than our easy training runs used to be. If that prospect depresses you, consider the alternative: full retirement.

I can’t speak for you, but I’d much rather be a slow runner than no runner. I had my allotted decade of improvement and a little more. 

My PRs first started falling at age 14, and the last big one fell at 25. Which means I’ve gone without any new ones for a growing majority of my running life.

If you run long enough, this will happen to you. Then you’ll look back at all your fastest times, and look ahead to... what? 

That’s what you’re about to hear: that there’s life after the last PR, and that it’s a good and active and satisfying life. You won’t just hear from me but from someone who had much more speed to lose.

You can pick no better model for slowing gracefully than Bill Rodgers. I’ve watched it, and have taken inspiration from it.

Few Americans have ever raced better and faster than Bill: a total of eight victories within five years at the Boston and New York City Marathons, first American to break 2:10 (which he did twice, with 26 more sub-2:15s). Those are his memories now.

The first time I ran the same race with Bill, I “beat” him, but so did everyone else who finished the 1977 Boston Marathon. He dropped out.

He said that day, “The marathon can always humble you.” But it also can make you proud of whatever you’re able to do under current conditions.

The second time I chased Bill at Boston, in 1979, he won the race, lowered his own American record and – not that he noticed – beat me by more than an hour. I paid no more attention to him that day than he did to me. We had our own races to run, and we both came away with our own special blends of pride and humility.

Bill’s time that day, six years after his first marathon, would forever remain his fastest. He would announce his retirement from racing that distance in 1993. Only later would I see that Boston 1979 would be my last marathon to run as a race.

Then what? Did we stop running? Of course not, but only eased our distance and pace. 

Stop running races? Not that either, but only changing what we raced and how.

Few sports define retirement as running does, where few athletes ever retire totally or permanently. Bill Rodgers hasn’t, nor have I, nor should you.

If you have the itch to race, scratch it. It matters not if you race fast or slow; race long, short or in between; race from the front, in the middle or at the back – only that you give your all to the race. Keep racing until you don’t need it anymore.

Later. Bill Rodgers can't leave the races behind, no matter how wide the gap between who he once was and is now. I saw how wide when we met again in Cedar Rapids on July 4^th weekend of 2005.

Bill hadn’t recovered completely from breaking a leg two years earlier. “I have thin bones,” he told me when we met to give our speeches. “My mom has osteoporosis, and I might have inherited the condition from her.”

He suggested on race eve, “Why don’t we run together tomorrow?” I laughed at the silliness of this idea. 

“No, no,” he protested. “I can’t go fast anymore. Most of my running these days is at about nine-minute pace.”

   

I thought he exaggerated. Maybe he did slow down that much to poke along with people like me on his recovery days, but his competitive fires surely would flame up in the weekend’s race.

   

To my surprise, and some sadness, I saw Bill early and often during this 8K. This isn’t right, I thought at first sighting, less than a mile into the race. He ran with the inefficiency of someone backing off too much from his normal pace.

Bill favored his bad leg. He tried and only partly succeeded in finding soft running in the grass strips beside the road.

At about three miles I had to pass him. Instead of giving him an encouraging word and a condescending pat on the back, I veered to the opposite side of the road and sneaked past, saying nothing.

He soon passed me back without noticing. We went back and forth this way through the final mile before he eased ahead at the end. 

Bill could have excused himself from running that Fifth Season 8K. He could have played a purely ceremonial role by firing the starting gun and then stepping aside.

But he didn’t. His ego isn’t so large that he can’t let a thousand runners pretend to beat him. None of us, of course, ever will.

(Photo: Bill Rodgers has slipped back into the pack, but  he’s second to no one as an ambassador of the sport.)

[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 Slowfolks

(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.)

2006. Running grew as it became more democratic. More runners were bigger, more were older, far more were female. The average race pace slowed as the field grew the most from midpack on back.

Just as road races opened up to every type of runner, the Internet and its websites democratized writing. Anyone can write anything in today’s chat rooms and blogs, and on Facebook and Twitter.

The writer in me appreciates and encourages these efforts. But as a reader I’m more selective than ever before.

I used to read almost every line written about running. No longer, and not just because of the sheer volume makes that impossible. Some runner-writers spew unedited criticism and sarcasm, usually from behind a curtain of anonymity.

They attack other runners, often friends of mine, by name. These writers are free to say whatever they want, and I’m free not to read them. They can only upset me if I let them.

One online article grabbed my attention in 2006 and wouldn’t let go. It attacked no one personally but took on a whole class of runners who are friends of mine. This piece kept eating at me, and the only way to make it stop was to answer it.

It appeared in widely read Slate.com. Its title told most of what you need to know about writer’s theme: “Running with Slowpokes – How Sluggish Newbies Ruined the Marathon.” It was signed by Gabriel Sherman, credited there as “a staff writer for Conde Naste Portfolio.”

Sherman described himself as “an avid runner with six marathons under my New Balance trainers.” As you’d expect from his article’s attitude, he was younger (at 27) and faster (2:56 PR) than most of today’s marathoners.

The provocative title perhaps wasn’t his but an editor’s. The views that followed were surely his own.

Sherman made just finishing a marathon, at any pace, sound as easy as “joining a gym and then putzing around on the stationary bike. We feel good about creating the appearance of accomplishment, yet aren’t willing to sacrifice for true gains.”

He ended with, “It’s clear now that anyone can finish a marathon. Maybe it’s time to raise our standards and see who can run one.”

By this he apparently meant running a faster marathon. He implied that slowpokes are slow because they don’t try hard enough.

So they must try to overcome the genes that didn’t grant them a fast-runner-like body? Try to shed decades of age? Try to ignore a history of injury or illness? Try to have fewer kids and an easier job?

I’ve spent my running and writing lives fighting against the views expressed in “Slowpokes.” I side with folksinger Woody Guthrie, who wrote:

“I hate a song that makes you think you’re born to lose, no good to nobody, no good for nothin’ because you’re either too young or too old, too fat or too thin, or to ugly, or too this or that. I’m out to sing songs that’ll make you take pride in yourself.”

I hate a story that makes you think you’re too slow. I’m out to write stories that will make you take pride in yourself.

Gabriel Sherman suggested that slowness is shameful. He didn’t define “slowpokes,” so who are they?

How many of us slowpokes does Sherman knows personally and did he talk to about their histories, motives and training? Not many, I’d guess.

I know these people from coaching them, as well as now being one of them. We aren’t a nameless, faceless blob of unfit laziness. To say we aren’t trying is wrong.

For the sake of discussion here, let’s draw the “slow” line at a five-hour marathon. That’s twice as long as the average winning time for U.S. races (a little more for men, less for women, but close enough as a talking point).

I know exactly how it feels to finish just over five hours. I know too that about a quarter of the runners on my marathon teams take at least that long, and they aren’t slacking in training or putzing on race day.

Let me introduce some friends of mine whose marathons usually take five hours or more. There’s Bob Dolphin, who in his 70s ran about two dozen marathons a year and soon would reach the 400^th of his life. There’s Cathy Troisi, well into her third round of running marathons in all the states.

There’s the late Paul Reese, whose marathon PR was 2:39 but who took more than twice as long in his last one – at age 85. And there’s the late Fred Lebow, who finally ran his own New York City Marathon, while weakened by terminal illness, in the high fives.

From my training groups I could tell about Max and Gregg, Emily and Katie. They all started in the fives but graduated into the next lower hour.

Paula and Susan, mothers of 10 young children between them, ran 5½ hours together. Andy and Matt took much longer to finish, while carrying lineman-like weight. Joyce and Al ran-walked their first marathon at ages 66 and 67.

I looked these teammates in the eyes every Sunday for four months and told they should feel proud what they’d done. I dare anyone to tell them to their face that they’ve ruined the event.

Yet that’s exactly what the title of the Slate.com article told these people en masse. I would send them the opposite message: How Slowpokes Made the Marathon.

We make possible the 400-plus U.S. marathons each year. We’re the critical mass that lets the young, skinny and fast call themselves “elite.”

Walt Stack, a tough old San Franciscan who was slow before he had much company at that pace, gave the best answer to the anti-slowpokes: “Be nice to us turkeys. We’re the ones who make you look good.”

Later. Marathonguide.com shows no marathon results for Gabriel Sherman from 2007 and later. Cathy Troisi and Bob Dolphin completed dozens more marathons in those years. Better to run a slow one than none, I say.

(Photo: Cathy Troisi is among the “slowpokes” who have made the marathon deeper and richer.)

[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.]