RACES AREN’T just won and
lost on race day. They are as surely decided in the spaces between races, by
the right and wrong moves made then.
This is never more true
than before an Olympic Trials. I happened to see the fastest marathoner out
training in my hometown of Eugene, Oregon, before the first qualifying race for
women in 1984.
The sturdy little figure
clad in a dark blue jacket and tights slipped onto the bike path two steps
ahead of me without noticing I was there. I said nothing to her, preferring to
watch rather than talk this Monday morning.
What I saw was heartening.
The runner put two minutes between us in one mile. And she didn’t hint at a
limp.
Ten days after knee
surgery, one week after returning to running, a few days after feeling hamstring
pain, Joan Benoit was back. I was happily eating my published words that she
wouldn’t be recovered in time for the Trials. She looked ready.
Joan’s race against time
didn’t begin on the morning of May 12th but the evening of April 25th.
Still drugged with pain-killers after her arthroscopic surgery, Joan asked
coach Bob Sevene, “Can I start tomorrow?”
Meaning could she begin
running. Sevene said a firm no, but they agreed that she could pedal a
redesigned exercise bicycle with her arms.
This makeshift training
continued until the following Monday. Joan ran that day: 45 minutes in the
morning, 55 more in the afternoon. She totaled 80 miles for the week but at the
price of a sore hamstring from favoring the knee. That injury was treated by
spending most of her waking hours under an electronic muscle-stimulation device
to speed the healing.
One final test before
deciding whether or not to run at Olympia: a 17-mile run on the Tuesday before
her Saturday race. She passed it.
“I’ll be running strictly
to make the team,” she said at a pre-race news conference in Olympia. “I’m
aware of my problem, but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could handle
it.”
Handling it meant going
right to the lead, dropping her final challenger in the 23rd mile.
Joan ran on alone from there, and not easily.
After averaging 5:38 miles
through 20, she slipped to 6:11s for the remaining distance. She looked a bit
wobbly at the finish, and more relieved than joyous.
“Cardiovascularly I felt
great,” she said. “But my legs just wouldn’t go, and I was lucky to hold on. I
knew with six miles left that if the pack came on me I was in trouble.”
Three months later, I
would watch the Los Angeles Olympics from home, less than a mile from where I’d
seen the rehabbing Joan Benoit in May,
as she broke free of the pack early in the first Olympic Marathon for
women. Catch me if you can, she challenged the field that included world
record-holder Grete Waitz. No one could.
YOU NEVER want to hear
news like this. You never expect to hear it first as a national news bulletin.
The noon report on my car
radio led off with: “The man who wrote the book on jogging has died while
jogging…” Two names flashed across my mind before the reporter could give a
name: George Sheehan and Kenneth Cooper.
“Fifty-two-year-old James
Fixx…” Then came sketchy details about the heart attack that had killed Jim as
he was on vacation in Vermont.
He had told me when we met
eight years earlier that he never expected to earn anything more than that
modest amount of upfront money for the yet-unnamed book. When The Complete Book of Running came out a
year later, it made Jim Fixx rich and famous beyond his imaginings. It seemed
to put him on easy street, in a neighborhood where he would never have to work
again.
The trouble was, he wanted
to keep working. He didn’t want to let fame and fortune change his life. But
they did anyway.
We talked at the 1978
Boston Marathon. He shook his head at all the fuss being made over him, and
complained that writing this book about running had taken away his time to
write and run.
His time was never again
completely his own. For the next six years Jim was forced into a celebrity’s
life.
He took a bemused view of
it in his book Jackpot, but you could
read some pain into those pages. He claimed to have slipped quietly back into
obscurity after his books fell from the best-seller lists, but that wasn’t
true.
Jim Fixx, a private man
perfectly suited to the solitary existence of a writer/runner, remained a
public figure who died a celebrity’s death. He would be remembered for many of
the wrong reasons.
Photo: Joan
Benoit will always appear first on the list of women’s marathon winners at the
Olympics.
[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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