Henry Rono

(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 1995.)

SLOW HENRY. “Slow” is in the eye of the beholder. Each of us has times to look down on from whatever peaks we have climbed. Each has a pace below which we won’t let ourselves fall – at least not in public.

And no place is more public than a track meet. There’s nowhere to hide here, as you can in a road race that disappears into the neighborhoods or countrysides.

I’m an old trackman who doesn’t run much on the track anymore. When I go to meets, it’s usually only to sit and watch.

While watching the Hayward Classic masters meet in Eugene, friends who were running asked again and again, “Why aren’t you out here?” My answer was always the same: “I’m too old and slow now.”

The “old” was a joke. Runners with enough years to be my parents competed here. The “slow” was no joke.

I’ve never been truly fast, and no one else cares that I’m now slow. But I care. Running minutes slower than my old track bests and being lapped repeatedly would have been embarrassing.

So I sat and watched. One runner in particular left me embarrassed about feeling embarrassed.

That was Henry Rono. If anyone should shy away from this track meet, it would be Rono. The last person you’d expect to last this long would be Rono.

The same drives that make runners great also prevent them from settling for less than their old level of greatness. You don’t see many ex-record-holders competing as masters, because their past comes to haunt them. To them, anything less than the fastest time anyone ever ran looks slow.

Rono has one of the sport’s greatest pasts. Between 1978 and 1981 he set world records in four events – 3000 meters, 5000, 10,000 and steeplechase.

Back then he ran some of his finest races at Hayward Field. The best I ever saw was a 1982 win over Alberto Salazar when both came within 10 seconds of the 10K world record.

This past might have haunted Rono. So too might have the sad years that followed: his problems with drinking, his habit of appearing at races (at their expense) out of shape.

He stopped showing up at all as his name lost its sales value. I hadn’t heard about him in years, and sometimes wondered how and where he’d ended up.

Suddenly here he was, unannounced in the publicity, at the starting line of a little-known meet for masters. He must have come on his own, because this event paid no fees or expenses.

I could have imagined Rono losing himself in a road-race crowd. But this was track, where he had nowhere to hide.

He might have run the mile, where the laps are fewer and the comparison with his past isn’t as direct. But he chose one of his record distances, the 5000.

Always well-rounded from the waist up, Rono was now even more so without looking obese. But from his beltline down, he still looked fit. He stride retained much of its old grace.

The old speed was long gone. In Eugene he ran almost 4½ minutes slower than his 5000 world record. He was almost double-lapped by the winner, whose PR would have left him a lap behind Rono at his best.

If this performance shamed Rono, he hid it well. What he did here shamed me for having petty concerns about looking bad.

“I’m getting slower,” a friend in his late 60s told me after he ran in this meet. “But if slowing down doesn’t bother Henry Rono, I shouldn’t let it bother me. The important thing is just to be out here.”

That’s the true spirit of masters running, even on the track where the slowdown is plainest to see. Henry Rono has that spirit. He escapes the shadow of times past and still gets out here.

UPDATE. Henry Rono tells his own story in the memoir titled Olympic Dream. You can also read more him, past and present, on the website team-rono.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.]