A LOVELY feature of
published writing is that you don’t need to read and heed it right away. It’s
there, waiting, whenever you’re ready for it.
My introduction to
Dr. Ernst van Aaken came in 1960, when he penned the first article for the
first issue of a magazine called Track
Technique. I skimmed the first paragraph of “Speed or Endurance Training?”
– which seemed to have little to do with me – and rushed on to his advice for
serious athletes.
Now I’m rereading
the introduction by the medical doctor and coach whose last name rhymes with
“gone walkin’.” He wrote, “The play of children is nothing more than a
long-distance run, because in a couple of hours of play they cover many
kilometers with several hundred pauses. The play of children is a primal form
of interval training.”
In 1960, I thought
I’d outgrown my childish ways. My running was no longer playful, and I was into
serious interval work. I never walked between the fast runs.
Fifteen years later
I’d come around to van Aaken’s way of running, quoting him to support my
practices. I was working on overcoming my own lingering resistance to taking
walks during runs when a pair of events aligned perfectly during a single week
in 1975.
One was my first
meeting with Ernst van Aaken, during his West Coast lecture tour where Dr. Joan
Ullyot served as his host and translator. He delivered his talks from a
wheelchair, the result of losing both legs after being struck down by a car
while running three years earlier.
Van Aaken’s topics
ranged widely in his San Francisco lecture and our personal conversations,
lasting eight hours in all. He breezed through the subject of run-walk
intervals in five minutes, repeating what he’d been saying for years but I’d only
recently been ready to hear.
I might have missed
Dr. van Aaken’s point yet again if not for an episode that same week. A sore
calf, injured in a race earlier that month, stopped me two miles into a
Saturday group run. I waved the other runners on, then swore and kicked at the
ground for having to quit the highlight run of my week.
Walking sullenly
back toward the parking lot, I realized that the pain had eased. I ran again
until the muscle threatened to spasm, walked until it loosened, ran a little
farther than before, and ran-walked some more while letting the tender leg
dictate the mix.
This slow-interval
session ended up lasting the full two hours that I would have gone with the
group. My leg felt better at the end than it had at the start.
I’d taken 15 years
to appreciate what Ernst van Aaken had written in 1960: If you want to go long,
you need to stop once in a while. The pause refreshes.
GEORGE SHEEHAN is a
physician, and his patients think he’s one of the best. Yet “doctor” is one of the
last things I think of when I picture him.
Runner, yes. Writer,
absolutely. Practicing eccentric, to be sure.
Dressed in
long-johns and ski mask, he once ran past a family moving into his
neighborhood. They stared at him. He shouted, “Go back! Everyone in this town
is crazy!”
In a field that
trains its people in scientific reasoning and laboratory-tested fact, Dr.
Sheehan ventures guesses and trusts what he learns in his “experiment of one.” He
says, “The doctor is educated in the treatment of disease, not in health.”
George Sheehan was
meant to write, and we were fated to get together. I was the new editor of Runner’s World in 1970, and George was
fairly new to writing.
When I asked him to
write for RW, he said, “Ask for
readers’ medical questions and I’ll answer them. Print some of the better
ones.”
Letters arrived by
the dozens each week, and George answered them all personally… plus writing a
weekly column for a newspaper (the Red
Bank Register) in the New Jersey town where he practiced medicine. The best
of these found a second home in Runner’s
World, and eventually in his books.
George lived across
the country from me, and I heard from him by letter or phone almost every
workday. But only twice had we gotten together to talk in recent years. Both
times he was speaking at sports-medicine seminars.
At the first of
those talks, he said, “I’m not here as a doctor but as an athletes’
representative.” And he talked athlete-to-athlete and athlete-to-doctor, not
doctor-to-doctor.
I noticed then how
little importance he gave to appearances. He wore a faded blue shirt with a
frayed collar. A paper clip held his narrow tie in place. Later his speaking
uniform became even less formal.
He wrote, “I now
wear skin-tight Levi’s, over-the-calf hose, old running shoes and a cotton
turtleneck shirt. Anything added to this is simply for concealment.”
The second time I
heard him speak, he had lost his reading glasses ($2 Woolworth’s specials), so
he spoke without notes. The talk was to be on heart abnormalities of athletes,
but he barely brushed that subject.
Instead he spun out
the Sheehan Philosophy. The audience, numbed by a day and a half of clinical
lectures, loved what George had to say.
The statement that
stayed with me the longest: “For every runner who tours the world running
marathons, there are thousands who run to hear the leaves and listen to the
rain, and look to the day when it all is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.
For them sport is not a test but a therapy, not a trial but a reward, not a
question but an answer.”
Photo:
George Sheehan (un)dressed for the stage.
[Many books of mine, old
and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks
from Amazon.com. The 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.]
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