Eamonn Coghlan

(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 1994.)

MILESTONE MILE. It wasn’t quite now or never for Eamonn Coghlan. But it was sooner, not later. His time to become the first sub-four-minute masters miler was running out.

He had said so himself in a recent New York Times interview. “If I’m not going to do it this year,” the Irishman had told Frank Litsky, “I’m not going to do it. It gets harder as you get older.”

The four-minute barrier had turned back other great milers. Mike Boit never got in shape for a serious attempt after 40. Illness canceled Rod Dixon’s bid. Injury stopped John Walker.

Coghlan had come closer than anyone. But even he had followed nature’s timetable of losing a second or two per year since peaking at age 30.

He also had discovered the truism of masters running – that runners his age (41) get hurt quicker and heal slower. He nursed a chronic hamstring injury, which he called “literally a pain in the rear end.”    

Now his best chance had come. The injury was under control, and the conditions were right. The world’s most skilled indoor miler (he still held the open record, set 11 years ago) would run on one of the world’s fastest indoor tracks. The track in Boston is eight laps to the mile, with a springy surface and wide, banked turns.

He enlisted a world-class rabbit. Stanley Redwine, an 800-meter man, did his job perfectly by  towing Coghlan through three-quarters in just under three minutes.

This left him needing to run a quarter in 60.7 or faster. He would have to do it alone. “If I run 4:00.1 or 4:00.2,” he had said, “I’ll be a million miles away from 3:59.8 or 3:59.9.”

He was hundreds of miles from the big-time indoor circuit he used to run. This event came during a break in a high school meet. The kids cheered wildly for this man old enough to be their father finished in 3:58.15.

Quibblers might protest that this wasn’t an outdoor mile, that it was a patched-together event, that it was paced, that it wasn’t a true masters race. Don’t listen to them. Give Eamonn Coghlan full claim to one of the milestone times in running history.

UPDATE. This mile came almost exactly 40 years after the first runner, Roger Bannister, broke for minutes for the mile.

[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 Journal, 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.]

Derek Clayton

(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 1982.)

PAINS AND GAINS. Three great myths of running are, “There can be no gain without pain,” “There can be but one winner in a race,” and “There can be no running life after racing ends.” The greatest of these is the first, the one dealing with suffering.

Derek Clayton trained hard, perhaps harder than any marathoner of his time or any earlier one. Maybe that’s why he held the world record from 1967 to 1981 – as the first runner to break both 2:10 and 2:09.

The Australian absorbed a gluttonous amount of pain. When training to a peak, he ran up to 200 miles a week. He didn’t just pitter-pat through those miles either. He believed there was no sense in running much slower in practice than he would in a race. So his base pace in training was close to five minutes a mile.

A typical weekend run was a full marathon in 2:20 to 2:25. Not content with doing just that in the morning, he would return in the afternoon for another 10 miles at five minutes each.

The reward was world-record marathoning. The immediate price for this routine was chronic fatigue. Clayton once ran himself into such exhaustion that he smacked into a tree while training.

The longterm price was chronic injuries. During his career he suffered through nine surgical operations – from back to knee to achilles.

Enduring all this pain, day after week after month, simply wore down his soft tissues. Sure, he reached some of the highest peaks in the sport. But he also endured some of the deepest valleys in between.

The goal that means most to a competitor is not a record, which only means he has beaten a mechanical object. Above all he wants an Olympic gold medal.

Clayton never won a medal of any color. He was injured during the Mexico City Games, when he went into the race with the fastest time by far. He wasn’t at his best for Munich, when his time again should have made him the class of the field. He retired before Montreal.

At the time he made a blunt, bitter retirement statement. He said that now he could honestly admit that he never enjoyed a minute of his running and was relieved to be done with it.

His career ended like too many others. At the final finish line, all that pain hadn’t equaled gain. It had added up only to more and more pain – until finally it had eroded health and enthusiasm to the point that he had no reason to push on.

But Clayton’s story didn’t end there. After a few months away from running, he started missing it. He didn’t miss the pain. He certainly didn’t miss the 200-mile weeks or the marathons that had beaten him up so badly. He missed the daily routine of running itself.

He began to run again. He limited himself to a quick five miles or so each day. Years later, he still does the same.

Recently I shared a speaking stage with him in Texas. He said there, “Running has changed completely for me, from being grinding work that I barely tolerated to being one of the bright spots of my day.”

The running that Clayton does now is an answer to all three of the sport’s great myths. He runs without pain, but who is to say that he isn’t gaining? He wins no races, but who is to say he isn’t a winner? His serious racing ended in the early 1970s, but he is moving proof that running life goes on after the best races have been run – and that this new life can be just as rich as the old, in a quieter way.

UPDATE. Careers at the highest ranks of running are brief and the afterlife is long. Derek Clayton’s racing was done by age 30. Later he lived for several years in the U.S., working for Runner’s World. During that time he wrote the book Running to the Top. Copies are rare today but still available, for a premium price, from Amazon.com. Now in his 70s, Clayton is back in Australia.

[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.]

Christine Clark

(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 March 2000.)

AN AMAZING ALASKAN. Roy Reisinger, an Alaska-in-winter-exile in Arizona, was out of Internet reach the weekend of the Women’s Olympic Marathon Trials. He asked me to pass results to him as soon as the race ended.

“Just the top four would be fine,” said Roy, “plus how Chris Clark from Anchorage did.” He naturally assumed she wouldn’t be one of the four, since she was seeded 22^nd in this field and had finished more than 50 places below that in the last Trials.

It’s fun to shock someone, as I did by telling Roy that only one U.S. runner will go to Sydney. This is a 37-year-old mother of two boys and medical doctor from Alaska.

“That’s so neat!” exclaimed Roy. “If anyone should have been knocked out by the heat and humidity, it should have been Clark.” This is not only because of where she’s from but because “she works full-time as a pathologist, and running has been very much just a part-time thing for her.”

Coming from Alaska might not be the handicap it seems. Many years ago I traveled there as Roy’s guest at his running camp and came away amazed at the toughness of the Alaskan runners. Only the rugged ones settle there, and the conditions further toughen those who stay.

Notice that the last two Americans to make amazing breakthroughs in the marathon have Alaska roots. David Morris, who broke 2:10 last fall, grew up in Anchorage and went to college in Montana (not exactly a sunbelt state itself).

Christine Clark reversed Morris’s path. Raised and schooled in Montana, she settled in Anchorage.

These Alaskans aren’t just tough. They’re also smart.

Morris recognized that to run his best he had to leave the country. He migrated to Japan.

My first thought as Clark pulled away from the field in the heat of Columbia, South Carolina, Trials was that she must have left Alaska to train. Later I learned that she did, in a way.

She often dodged the winter cold by running more than half of her miles, and nearly all of her fast miles on a treadmill. That training in Anchorage gave her a safe, reliable surface and warm “weather,” and let her make the most of her minimal 70-mile weeks.

“If a gal from Alaska can do [this well] in this heat, anyone can do it,” said Clark at the post-race news conference. Fact is, no one else could do better on this day – and very few in this field could PR by any amount, let alone the seven minutes she did.

Clark and others voiced disappointment that she didn’t run just 31 seconds faster, providing Olympic tickets for two other women. But it wasn’t her job to run their races for them.

I wrote last fall about how David Morris gives hope to American men that they can shed the “national inferiority complex” in the marathon. He dropped from 2:15 marathoner to 2:09 in one race.

Clark went from 2:40 to 2:33 on a day when this shouldn’t have happened. She gives hope to everyone who’s older than the average Trials runner, has much going on in their life besides running and believes in miracles.

UPDATE. Christine Clark improved her PR by another two minutes at the Sydney Games, placing 19^th. She retired from racing soon afterward.

[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, Memory Laps, 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.]

Patti Catalano Dillon

(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 May 1988.)

THE NEW PATTI. I first saw the new Patti Catalano two summers ago at the Asbury Park 10K. We happened to sit together during the awards program at an open-air band shell overlooking the Jersey Shore.

She’d never looked better. Gone was the gauntness of the early 1980s, when she was America’s top woman road racer.

She was called to the stage to collect a prize in her age group. The announced time, a minute per mile slower than her best, reminded Patti of the runner she had been a few years earlier.

I’m so embeerrased!” she said to her friends, drawing out the last word and giving it her richest Boston accent. She had no reason to be embarrassed. She was a bigger winner now than she ever had been in her glory years.

I didn’t yet know about the fight she was waging, and winning. I’d heard rumors of her using steroids, but drugs hadn’t been her problem.

This spring she chose to make her problem public. She admitted it in two articles by Katy Williams.

Patti had slipped into bulimia – a cycle of starving, overeating and then throwing up – in 1978. She’d binged and purged “five or six times a day” during the period when she set her national road records.

She talked about her recovery in a Running Times article. Writer Williams supplied details in Boston Magazine.

“She broke the cycle without professional help, depending largely on the same inner strength that had previously taken her to the top of women’s running.”

Patti said, “My anxieties and self-determination drove me. It was the greatest race, victory – whatever – of my life. I had hit bottom, and I chose to come out of it. Nothing can compare. Nothing.”

She is now secure enough in dealing with food to co-own (with runner Liz Miller) a market and deli in Manchester, Vermont.

Patti hasn’t entirely let go of her old dreams at age 35. “I know that I want to break 2:20 in the marathon,” she said. “And I want all my records back. I want to wear size one again.”

For now, those are just dreams. “There’s no plan” to carry them out.

Another sort of plan is taking shape. That is, wrote Katy Williams, “opening a small group home in Manchester for women recovering from bulimia. The simple things – stacking wood, caring for animals, gardening – would help rebuild self-esteem. Catalano’s own road back to health began when she forced herself to do things as ordinary as getting up each day and showering.”

And running. “For me, to run again is great,” said Patti. “To compete again is better, and to have big ambitions is better too.

“I want to see what I can do with a healthy body and through clean living. I’m not talking about a rigid life style where you don’t even drink coffee. I’m talking about good, honest living, with lots of love and giving.”

She was comfortable enough with her new self to run the Boston Marathon last month, and face its demanding media and crowds, the same month the two articles had appeared. She had dropped out at Boston in 1985 while starting to mend her life.

At 2:57 this year, Patti was slower by 30 minutes than she’d run here in 1981. But in important ways Patti is doing much better ways. She isn’t embarrassed to be seen now.

“The best thing that can happen from all this is that someone with a bulimia problem will see or hear me,” she told Katy Williams. “I want to help others recover, because they’re reaching out for something the way I was.

“I am going to run well again. And I am going to be heard.”

        

UPDATE. Patti is now married to former top-class runner Dan Dillon, and lives in Connecticut. She still speaks openly about the triumphs and trials of her racing years and beyond.

Katy Williams, whose material I borrowed liberally (with permission) for this article, now goes by her more formal married name of Katherine Cassidy. She has served in the Maine state legislature and is founding director of the Bay of Fundy Marathon.

[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.]