Mary Decker Slaney

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 1987.)

SLANEY’S SPLASH. Alberto Salazar and Mary Decker Slaney could co-captain the All-Injured Team. Like Salazar, Slaney is as fragile as she is fast. Unlike Alberto, whose problems seem unending, Mary repeatedly overcomes hers.

Both of them live in Eugene. But while I see Salazar often, I seldom bump into Slaney.

My rare meetings with her are cordial. We once chatted through a cross-country flight, and her exaggerated prima-donna image was nowhere to be seen.

I’ve glimpsed that side of her only once, while she was injured and doing water training. I’d come to the pool to visit her coach, Dick Brown, not Mary. But she apparently saw me as a spying reporter, flashed a why-are-you-here scowl and said not so much as “hi.”

This was her private training place, and I had invaded it. I learned, while working this past year on a book with Brown, just how valuable a second home this has been for Slaney.

Dick hasn’t officially coached her since 1985. But he still oversees her frequent rehabilitations in his water-therapy tank at a Eugene medical center or at a local indoor pool.

Slaney trained that way almost daily this winter while recovering from achilles-tendon surgery. She is now “quite fit,” says Brown, and will start racing again in January.

Her history predicts another quick and complete comeback. Brown has seen this happen before. He begins this history lesson five years ago:

“Mary and I had made a deal before the 1983 indoor track season. At the first sign of any injury trouble she would end her season. She pulled out in January because of a problem in an ankle.”

Eric Bass, inventor of a training tank, read the news. He called Brown and offered to send out from Philadelphia a prototype of the Aqua Ark that Bass now markets.

“Mary didn’t need it by the time it arrived,” says Brown. “Her injury had healed, and that year she won the 1500- and 3000-meter titles at the World Championships. The tank sat unused in my shed until the next summer.

“Then at the 1984 Olympic Trials, Mary hurt an achilles tendon. She had warmed up for the 1500 semifinals, then was held with other runners in a pen for 45 minutes. Her achilles tightened up.”

Slaney qualified for the Games but hurt too much to run after the Trials. A doctor injected the tendon with saline to break the adhesions, but that procedure only increased the pain.

Brown recalls that “she was walking around like Chester in ‘Gunsmoke.’ So I pulled the tank out of the shed and put Mary in it.

“She spent the next three weeks in the water, with no land workouts at all. However, she ‘ran’ the exact workouts in the tank that we had planned for her on land – same length [in time], same effort, same periods of work and recovery for her intervals.”

One week before the Olympics were to open in Los Angeles, three days after resuming land training, Slaney set a world 2000-meter record.

“She was more fit then than I had ever seen her,” says Brown. “More fit than at the World Championships.”

Two days before her Olympic 3000, Mary finished a fast 400-meter training run and asked her coach, “What was that, about 59 seconds?” It was a 54.

“Unfortunately, she fell,” Brown starts to say how, then stops because too much has already been said about The Great Fall.

Remember, Mary Slaney did get back on her feet after that to run better than ever. Count on her coming out of the water to do it again.

UPDATE. Mary Slaney made two more Olympic teams and continued competing into her late 30s – while compiling a lifetime count of about two dozen surgeries. At this writing, she still held the American record for 3000 meters (set in 1985), and her 1500 mark had just fallen (after 32 years). She still lives in Eugene while keeping the lowest of profiles here.

Dick Brown invented the AquaJogger, a flotation belt for runners training in water. He and I teamed up on two editions of the book Fitness Running.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Ron Daws

W(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from August 1992.)

OLYMPIAN DAWS. History repeats. Suddenly it is 1984 all over again for me.

That year’s Olympics had just begun in Los Angeles when my car radio reported, “A famous running author has died while running in Vermont. Jim Fixx…”

Now the Games had just opened in Barcelona when I came home to find a note: “Call Jim Ferstle. Has sad news.”

The running writer from the Twin Cities told me, “Ron Daws died last night.” The news hit me like an aftershock.

Fixx was my friend, yes, but beyond that he was a friend to every runner who read his books. So was Daws. They’d started out much differently as runners, but their stories ended much the same way.

Jim Fixx was a late-starting runner. He’d been an overweight smoker in his mid-30s, then became a 10-mile-a-day runner who still couldn’t outrun his old habits or a terrible family history of heart disease. He was 52 when he died from blocked arteries.

Ron Daws started running as a kid and never stopped. He made the 1968 Olympic team as a marathoner, and few Americans have ever gone further on less talent.

Ron never smoked, was never heavy and had no worrisome family history. He had just turned 55 when he died from what the autopsy report said was advanced coronary disease.

Such attacks seldom if ever come without warnings, says Dr. George Sheehan. Ron had warnings scattered among some very good runs. He had to stop and walk during a five-mile race in June.

Yet he later took a 37-mile trail run while vacationing in Canada. His last weekend, he complained of slowness and stomach pain during a 14-mile run on Friday. Yet he came back on Sunday, his next-to-last day, to run trouble-free for 2½ hours.

Jim Fixx was a cerebral man whose last moments were active. Ron Daws was a restless man who died in his sleep.

Two memories of Ron stand out. The first was meeting him at the Olympic Village in Mexico City before he ran his marathon. He was studying the assembly-line shoes in a shop and pointing out why those he cobbled himself at home were superior.

The second memory was working with him as editor of his book, The Self-Made Olympian. He hated the title I gave it, disputed much of the editing and didn’t swallow his objections quietly.

In both cases I remember the somewhat wild look he got in his pale blue eyes when he mounted a crusade. Ron was seldom pleased with things as they were, whether constantly tinkering with shoes, with training systems or working on his book.

Lorraine Moller heard of Ron’s passing as she was about to run the Olympic Marathon in Barcelona. She was once married to Ron Daws, who as her coach introduced Lorraine to this event.

It would be nice to think that as she ran that marathon, she remembered the words Ron ran by – and later wrote and coached by: “You can do better than this.” At age 37 she upset all forecasts by winning the bronze medal.

UPDATE. Before his passing, Ron Daws succeeded in revising and retitling The Self-Made Olympian to his liking. He called this edition Running Your Best: The Committed Runner’s Guide to Training and Racing.

Ron’s ex-wife Lorraine Moller had a long and diverse racing career. She competed internationally for New Zealand at 800 meters when that was the longest distance open to women and later in their first Olympic Marathon, in 1984.

Lorraine was the only woman to run the first four marathons at the Games, the final time in Atlanta at age 41. She later published a book, titled On the Wings of Mercury.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Glenn Cunningham

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from April 2006.)

GLENN CUNNINGHAM, MILER. 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.”

This Glenn Cunningham story has a followup. Almost 20 years later 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. 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.

UPDATE.  This piece ran in conjunction with release of a Glenn Cunningham biography, titled American Miler, by Paul J. Kiell and published by Breakaway Books. Cunningham died in 1988 at age 78.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other 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, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Dr. David Costill

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 1987.)

POOL OF KNOWLEDGE. On its surface this is a story about swimming. But it is equally a running story because of who the swimmer is, how he took into the pool lessons learned as a runner and what advice he now hands back to our sport.

“If only I had known then what I know now,” laments many an aging athlete whose growth in expertise fails to offset the loss of skill. The naivete of youth rarely loses a race to the knowledge of middle age.

Dr. David Costill has beaten those odds. He not only knows far more about sports training at age 51 than he did at 21, but he also performs better now.

Dr. Costill first made his name as an exercise physiologist two decades ago by studying runners at the now world-famous Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. His books (the most recent being Inside Running) are must reading for anyone wanting to know how the runner’s body works.

However, his own running ended in the early 1980s when his knees rebelled. He then returned to his original sport, swimming.

“I had quit swimming after competing at Ohio University,” says Costill, “because that was what swimmers did: retire early. I wanted to stay active in some way after graduation, decided to start running and kept doing it for almost 20 years.”

Then came injuries to both knees. He began swimming only for fitness, and his first efforts were humbling.

“I still thought of myself as a pretty good swimmer,” he says. “But no one in the pool swam slower than I did, because I lacked upper-body strength.”

His skills weren’t lost, only rusty. They came back, and soon Costill was racing again – not only competing but doing better than he had in college; not only better against men his age but better against the clock.

For instance: “My best 200-yard freestyle in college was 2:07. My average time for that distance is now about 1:59.”

One reason for the improvement was mechanical. “Stroke technique has changed over the years,” he says, “and I picked up the new patterns.”

But mainly he improved his training. “I’ve been able to put to use some of the practical lessons learned from running and the laboratory. The main one is to train according to how I feel each day, judging when to push or back off.

“You have to be realistic about how much the body can adapt to and how much stimulus you need to produce the most adaptation. That differs, of course, from one person to another. But the majority of elite-level swimmers could probably get by on about one-fourth the yardage they are doing.”

Costill averages 2000 to 2500 yards a day and takes a day or two off each week. His age-group competitors train three or four times as much, and they accuse him of fibbing about his yardage when he races as well as they do.

He notes that swimmers are more easily seduced by more-is-better thinking than runners are, because overtraining in water hurts less than on land. Runners have our “pounding” injuries to protect us from overdoing.

“People who get into aerobic activity are those who are already highly motived,” says Costill. “If they have one handicap, it’s their motivation.

“First they train too much. Then they start performing poorly. When this happens, they think the only answer is to train even harder, and they perform even worse. It’s a vicious cycle that traps swimmers and runners.”

Costill knows when to work and when to rest. “A final major factor in my second life as a swimmer,” he says, “is that I’ve learned a lot over the years about how to rest up for competition. In swimming you can taper for up to three weeks by just warming up every day.”

What difference does this make? “If I try to compete now without tapering this way, then the times are almost identical to what I swam in college.”

UPDATE.  Now nearing his 80^th year, Dr. David Costill holds emeritus status on both the Ball State University faculty and at the Human Performance Laboratory. Copies of his book Inside Running (and the earlier Scientific Approach to Distance Running) can still be found.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other 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, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]