Frank Shorter

(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 1988.)

AMONG FRIENDS. Frank Shorter first sat down to dinner with me in 1971. He had become a marathoner that day at the national championship race in Eugene.

Shorter didn’t eat anything. He couldn’t. His first marathon had so upset him that he paled at the sight of food.

He showed me that night what I was just starting to realize at the time. I was a hero-worshipper who hadn’t yet seen many heroes up close. I held them in awe and imagined they were made of different stuff than I was.

Seeing him fighting nausea demonstrated that faster and slower runners are mainly divided by speed. Otherwise we’re more alike than different.

The stars get sick too. They get hurt. They get tired and bored and worried. They need help from their friends.

Seventeen years passed between my first and second meals with Frank Shorter. The recent one reminded me again that, appearances aside, he is still one of us.

We were in West Virginia for the 15-mile Charleston Distance Run. We went to a country club for a buffet dinner.

Shorter exchanged small-talk with the sponsors and officials during the cocktail hour. But when it came time to eat, they left to find their friends. The most famous guest took his meal seated alone.

He is, in a way, a victim of his fame. As Olympic Marathon champion, NBC-TV track analyst and spiritual leader of the U.S. running boom, he’s held in greater awe than ever.

His manner makes him appear unapproachable. His prep school and Ivy League training combine with his natural reserve to give the impression that he is cool and aloof.

Shorter is treated as royalty, to be admired only from a distance. Runners are still shy about walking up to him and talking about what they have in common.

He knows this. He now tries to put people at ease, and as he does, the friendly side of him shines through the regal bearing.

He approached me in Charleston to start a conversation. This had never happened before.

He complimented me on something or other, and asked about my son who was on the trip. He spoke of plans to visit his early home in Ward Hollow, West Virginia, where his father worked as a coalmine doctor.

We talked about my recent article on the 1972 Olympic team. Most of his teammates from that year are still active in the sport.

“We had something then that’s missing now,” said Shorter. “We trained together. We helped each other. We were friends.”

Shorter had intentionally tied for first place with Jack Bacheler in track races as far back as 1970, when they started training together in Florida. Shorter and Kenny Moore had shared first place in the 1972 Olympic Marathon Trails.

Shorter, Bacheler and Jeff Galloway had trained as a team at altitude for the Munich Games. Shorter had agreed to share the pace in some of Steve Prefontaine’s record attempts.

“You don’t see that anymore,” Frank said. “Maybe the Mormons in Utah [Olympians Ed Eyestone, Henry Marsh and Doug Padilla] do it to a degree. But otherwise it’s basically every man for himself.”

Before leaving for Charleston, I’d read a newspaper article about Shorter. It had good quotes from him, but they didn’t relate to anything I planned to write at the time.

After Charleston his comments related perfectly to our talk there, so I rescued them from the recycle basket. Bill Higgins of the Cape Cod Times asked Shorter to assess his role in leading running to where it is now.

“I understand my part in all of it,” he said, “and I respect that I have an image. But what’s important to me is that I don’t try to be someone I’m not.” He is not untouchable.

“I want those around me who matter – my family and a few close friends – to appreciate me for who I am. The recognition is nice, but that’s not why I do what I do.” He does it for most of the reasons we all do.

UPDATE. Shorter got his wish that top American runners train together again, as he had in the 1970s. The best of them now team up at centers such as Portland, Eugene, Boston, Mammoth Lakes, Flagstaff and Rochester, Michigan.

[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.]