Joe Henderson's Writings: May 2016

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Jack Kirk

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from November 1994.)

KIRK AT WORK. They don’t make runners like him anymore. Jack Kirk is a singular figure in a sport whose participants mostly conform to the current fashions.

Befitting his 88 years, more than 70 of them spent running, Kirk is a throwback to a much earlier era when distance runners often were eccentric characters. He shuns modern running outfits in favor of long, baggy dress pants and long-sleeved shirts with collars and buttons.

The first time I met him, Kirk was already one of the oldest runners I’d yet seen. He was 56 when I followed him through the 1963 Dipsea race.

This seven-mile (more or less) trail race is one of the country’s oldest. Begun in 1905, it crosses the mountains between Mill Valley and Stinson Beach, California.

The Dipsea remains so appealing that it fills up the first day its 1500 applications come out. The race never needs to advertise.

Running Times writer Barry Spitz’s finely crafted book, Dipsea, carries the subtitle The Greatest Race. He acknowledges that the Boston Marathon is “the nation’s most influential and prestigious race, but I love the Dipsea even more. So I propose a tie: the Boston Marathon is the greatest road race, and the Dipsea is the greatest cross-country race.”

Jack Kirk stars in Spitz’s book. He has run every Dipsea since 1930, won twice in this event with handicapped starts, and had the fastest times two other years. He’s still the oldest winner, at 60 in 1967.

No has ever run the same race over a longer period of time than Kirk, not even Johnny Kelley at the Boston Marathon. Kelley is a year younger than Kirk and started his collection of Boston finishes three years after Kirk’s first Dipsea.

Kirk already was a colorful figure when we met in the 1960s. Even then he carried the nickname “Dipsea Demon,” both for the event he never missed and for the way he ran it.

He earned the title for his intensity as well as his loyalty. In his youth and well into his middle years he ran with a wild-eyed look that warned: clear the trail, or I’ll run up your back! In old age he runs with a determined shuffle that says: I’ll run this thing until I drop!

He once said, in reference to the 671 steps at the start of this trail, “Old Dipsea runners never die. They just reach the 672^nd step.”

He lives as he runs, in his own unique way. He trains entirely on a path he carved around a lake in the country near Yosemite National Park. Living alone, he goes without running water or electricity.

Barry Spitz, the longtime Dipsea race announcer, writes in his book, “After a dispute with a [utility] repairman, Kirk has been without electricity or telephone for years. He usually sleeps in one of his aging Volkswagen Bugs scattered about.”

The biggest threat to Kirk’s Dipsea streak, says Spitz, isn’t that his own body will betray him anytime soon. “We worry that some year none of his old cars will be able to make the trip to Mill Valley.”

Jack Kirk knows he has lived right when he runs longer than his automobiles.

UPDATE. Kirk ran Dipseas for another eight years after this column appeared, saying his farewell to that race at age 96. He reached his 100^th birthday shortly before taking the “672^nd step” in January 2007.

The race continues to fill for each of its June runnings. Barry Spitz’s book remains available at DipseaBook.com.

[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 Miles to Go. 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.]

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Johnny Kelley

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from October 2004.)

YOUNG AT HEART. On Johnny Kelley’s last day, I was writing about him without yet knowing the sad news. This story told about one of his guiding philosophies, that “I don’t judge success by what I once did, but by what I keep doing.”

By that measure and almost any other, John Adelbert Kelley was immensely successful. His final success was living to be the youngest 97-year-old I’ve ever known.

Walter Bortz, MD, an expert in aging actively, said the ideal life is “to die young as late as possible.” Kelley lived up to that model beautifully. He ran the Boston Marathon into his 80s and serving as the race’s honorary leader as recently as last April.

On television this fall Kenneth Cooper, MD, drew two graphs on aging, the normal versus the ideal. The “Aerobics” doctor said Americans normally peak early in fitness and then follow a steady downhill slope to the ultimate finish line.

Ideally, said Cooper, the fitness line stays high and fairly flat into the advanced years, with a quick plunge at the end. Johnny Kelley took this high road.

A month past his 97^th birthday Kelley finally wore out. His end came just three hours after admission to a nursing home. I like to think he decided this wasn’t where or how he wanted to live.

Another doctor, the late George Sheehan, would have described this as “a beautiful death.” That’s to go late, quickly and on his own terms.

My fondest memory of Johnny Kelley was sharing a stage with him, George Sheehan and Kenneth Cooper in Dallas. Three of us spoke. Kelley sang, as he continued to do at public events, his theme song, “Young at Heart.”

It begins and ends with verses that now would make a perfect epitath:

“Fairy tales can come true,

it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart.

For it’s hard, you will find,

to be narrow of mind, if you’re young at heart.”

“And if you should survive to a hundred and five

look at all you’ll derive out of being alive.

And here is the best part, you have a head start,

if you are among the very young at heart.”

UPDATE. I’ll always thank Johnny Kelley for leading me into the marathon. He didn’t know this at the time, but heroes seldom recognize the reach of their influence.

The best marathoners of the mid-1960s intimidated me with their speed. But Kelley, who was slowing by then but still running at Boston each spring, inspired me.

He was older (at 59) than my dad, older than I could ever imagine becoming. If someone that old can run a marathon, I thought at the time, then why can’t I? The next spring at Boston I ran a few minutes in the roar that greeted Kelley, everyone’s hero there.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Meb Keflezighi

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from September 2004.)

MEB’S MEDAL. That publicity-crazed idiot who invaded the men’s Olympic Marathon hurt all three medalists, not just the one he tried to tackle. The saddest part of this bizarre incident is that we’ll never know what their order of finish might have been.

The guessing game involves the gold medalist and the one who might have been. If Vanderlei de Lima’s rhythm and concentration had gone uninterrupted, could Stefano Baldini have caught him?

The man in the middle wouldn’t have won but would have medaled regardless. He doesn’t figure in most of the media frenzy about this race, which spilled over from sports reports to the front pages and the news shows.

He’s Mebrahtom Keflezighi, a name as hard to say as it is to spell. For convenience the reporters call him “Meb.”

I don’t know him and have never heard him speak on television, but he strikes me as a quiet man. From Marathon to Athens he ran quietly with the leaders or first group of chasers, never leading himself.

He performed no dramatic acts at the finish and shed no visible tears. He subtly crossed himself, then patted Baldini on the back and walked away.

Meb gave no post-race interview on NBC. Commentator Marty Liquori explained that the runner was “in drug testing” (which is routine for medalists), then spoke to the other two American men.

Meb’s running spoke as loudly, though, as Deena Kastor’s did a week earlier as the bronze medalist. He stayed with the leaders while she came from behind, but both ran about four-minute negative splits in the second half.

Both finished within a minute of the winner. Both bettered their times from the much cooler Trials.

Yet of the two Americans, Meb ran a distant second in attention received. You could say this was because Deena made her breakthrough first, and then came the de Lima affair and Meb’s own quiet finish.

I hope the relatively light praise for Meb wasn’t because Americans think of him as not quite a “real” American. True, he immigrated to this country (from Eritrea in East Africa), but this happened at age 10.

As much as any native-born Olympian, Meb is a product of the U.S. system. He went to high school in San Diego, college at UCLA and has stayed with his coach from the latter, Bob Larsen.

Like Deena Kastor, Meb trained in the Running USA program, formed after the nation’s Olympic marathoning hit bottom in 2000. Only one man and one woman qualified for the Sydney Games, and they finished far out of the medals.

When Meb did finally break his silence on marathon day, he all but shouted his reaction to the silver medal: “Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!”

Then he added, “USA distance running is back. There should be no question about that.”

No other country had both a woman and a man medal in Athens. The U.S. never before had scored such a double at an Olympics or World Championships.

UPDATE. Meb’s record for coming through at the big races grew from there: New York City winner in 2009, fourth at the 2012 Olympics and then his Boston title in 2014. After Boston I wrote that it couldn't have happened to a better guy, in a better way (leading nearly every step), at a better time (in that year of healing, by an immigrant American-by-choice).

Let me tell a story that has nothing to do with him being the first U.S. men's winner at Boston in 31 years, or him approaching his masters years. This is more local and personal.

Two years earlier Meb came to the Eugene Marathon as featured speaker. That Sunday he arranged his training run so he could cheer on the marathoners.

That night he called me to ask, "How did your runners do today?" Not many pros would do that. And after he did, none would stand taller in my eyes.

Thursday, May 5, 2016

Deena Kastor

(This piece is for my book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from August 2004.)

PEAKING PLUS PACING. My viewing of the latest Olympics peaked on the third day of the running events. Nothing that would come after that Sunday could top one woman marathoner’s race. Nothing in at least the last 20 years had topped it.

Deena Drossin Kastor did everything perfectly. Her training peaked at the right time, she paced herself the right way, and her first emotional and verbal reactions to what she had done were just right.

A friend of mine said on that Sunday night, “If she had gone out faster, think of what she might have done.” My guess is that a faster start would have handed Kastor the same fate as Paula Radcliffe. The world record-holder dictated much of the pace before dropping out, overheated and exhausted, four miles short of the finish.

Two other runners finished ahead of Kastor. None ran smarter.

The scheduling of this race (along with the men’s marathon a week later) was almost criminal. Everyone knew that Athens in August would be hot, and the late afternoon hottest of all.

So when did the marathon start? At six P.M., in the heat of the day, on a day when the official Athens temperature peaked at 103.

And why this hour? For the convenience of officials and the prime-timing of television. If the safety and performance of the athletes had been of any concern to schedulers, the race would have started at six o’clock that morning.

Kastor, more than anyone else, took what she was given and made the most of it. She simulated the expected heat by seriously overdressing in training. She planned her race as if the faster starters would come back to her.

And they did. At 5K she stood 28^th. At halfway she was 12^th.

I don’t have midway times for the other women but can’t imagine many of them running negative splits. Kastor did, by four minutes.

Her U.S. teammates, Jen Rhines and Colleen DeReuck, lagged 14 and 19 minutes behind the Trials times they’d run in near-perfect weather. Kastor bettered hers by 2:18, which showed both the wisdom of her Olympic pacing and of her training between April and August.

Now she was the first American marathoner (woman or man) to medal since 1984. In fact, she was the first with a single-digit finish since Joan Benoit Samuelson won at the Los Angeles Games.

These facts are impressive enough. But they alone don’t explain why Deena Kastor’s finish was my peak moment of these Olympics.

The stoic look of her running on the roads broke down into a tearful lap of the track as she learned from the stadium announcer that her place was third, not fourth as she’d thought. Those tears were contagious to viewers everywhere, including one watching TV in Oregon.

Her post-race comments were uncommonly gracious and articulate. These interviews too often fall somewhere between “God is great” and “God, I’m great.”

Kastor’s words echoed those of Benoit 20 years earlier. Joan had given credit to the pioneers of women’s marathoning who’d opened up this opportunity for her.

Deena said, “We might look like we’re alone out there, but we aren’t. Many people made our race possible.” Then she thanked some of them by name – her coach Joe Vigil, her husband Andrew.

Three months earlier I’d heard similar remarks from her. We sat at neighboring tables during the banquet that ended the Road Runners Club of America’s convention at Lake Tahoe.

The Kastors had driven several hours from their training base at Mammoth Lakes, California. “I really wanted to be here,” she said, “to thank the RRCA in person for supporting me when I was a struggling young runner. Your Roads Scholar grant allowed me to do the training necessary to reach the next level.”

Deena spoke first on the program. I came last, two hours later. Afterward a crowd surrounded her, wishing her well on the road to Athens.

I missed meeting her that night and telling her good luck at the Games. She wouldn’t need luck, only a plan that could and did work.

UPDATE. A week later Kastor’s U.S. teammate Meb Keflezighi did her one better by taking the men’s marathon silver medal. Like Deena, Meb trained in the Running USA program at Mammoth, formed after the nation’s Olympic marathoning hit bottom in 2000. Only one man and one woman qualified for the Sydney Games, and they finished far out of the medals.

In Athens just four years later, no other country had both a woman and a man medal. The U.S. never before had scored such a double at an Olympics or World Championships.

A decade years further on, these two still run inspiringly. Deena, now the mother of a daughter, sets masters records. Meb, at almost 39, won the 2014 Boston Marathon.