Parting Words

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 2003.)

THE HIGHEST and lowest points of my writing life both came within six days of each other in December 2003. They might have fallen on the same day if I had picked up phone messages while traveling. The thrill of the high helped ease the pain of the low. 

I had picked the right writing hero, and visited him at exactly the right time. This is John Steinbeck. I never saw him in life (he died in 1968), but a writer's good words can reach beyond the grave. 

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath was the first book I ever read without it being a class assignment or having sports as its subject. It wasn’t his fiction that moved me the most, but his collection of letters and the journals that he kept while writing the novels. 

From his informal lines I learned what writing can mean to the writer. With Steinbeck it wasn’t a job or ever a career. It was a calling, a passion, even an obsession. 

He didn't write because he could but because he must. For every public word he wrote, there were hundreds or thousands that no one ever saw. He felt about writing as I did about running, and would come to feel about running writing. 

Steinbeck was born and grew up in Salinas, California. The hometown that once vilified him for writing unflatteringly about it now promotes him as its top tourist attraction. There’s the Steinbeck House, the Steinbeck Library, the Steinbeck gravesite and now the National Steinbeck Center.

The Steinbeck Center opened about five years ago as a memorial to his life's work. My big thrill there was seeing pages he had handwritten. 

I came home from the highest point in my writing life and plunged to the lowest. This came as a call from the new boss at Runner’s World. 

He said that my column, which had appeared for 250 months in a row, had “run its course.” It didn’t fit into his plans for the “new” RW, so he was dropping it.

But this is not the end of my writing. Not even close. 

John Steinbeck continues to teach and inspire me. The final National Steinbeck Center exhibit, posted on the wall at the exit, reads, “I nearly always write, just as I nearly always breathe.” 

I can say with some certainty that as long as I’m breathing I’ll be writing about running, somewhere. Always I have the daily diary where the private words far outnumber the public. There I write as Steinbeck did, because it’s what I must do even when no one's looking.

THIS WAS my last column for Runner’s World, though I didn’t yet know that at the time of its writing in late 2003:

Ask me about my normal daily run, and the answer won’t impress you. Tell me you run longer and faster, and I’ll agree; most runners do. But try to tell me that my runs lack “quality” or, worse, are “junk miles,” and you’ll get an argument. Here it comes.

For as long as I’ve been running easily and writing its praises, I’ve heard how these runs waste time and effort. That was the knock on my first book, Long Slow Distance, published in 1969.

My shift to a slower gear wasn’t meant to improve my racing but to escape the ravages of excessive speed training. The five other runners featured in that book did the same.

I was slow to see that the slower running was less a training system than a recovery system. We raced better by staying healthier and happier, not by training harder.

One way to judge a running program’s success is by the racing results it confers. When runners aim for the biggest racing payoffs, no training is too hard and no sacrifice too great.

But another way to judge a program’s value is to ask yourself: Would I still run this way even if there were no racing payoff? The runners from the LSD book didn’t keep racing better indefinitely; no one does. But we kept running, and keep doing it, in the same relaxed way as before.

You can view your runs as either vocational or recreational, as a job or a hobby, as work or play. “Serious” training falls on the left side of those word-pairings. My running leans to the right.

I’ve spent a running/writing lifetime trying not to use certain words, because how we describe an activity shapes our view of it. One such word is “work.” Another is its cousin, “workout.”

Working implies doing something because you must, while not welcoming the job. It suggests putting up with a distasteful task to earn an eventual reward.

But what if that payday never came, or if it was smaller than expected? Would you feel that all your time and effort had gone to waste?

Running isn’t my second job. No one pays me or forces me to practice this hobby. It’s my choice, and I choose to find my rewards in as many of days’ runs as possible.

To me, “junk miles” are those run reluctantly today, only as an investment in a better tomorrow. This feels like counting the hours until quitting time, the days until the weekend, the weeks until vacation, the years until retirement. Always working toward a distant finish line may mean missing the fun in being here now.

Running can give its rewards instantly and regularly. Ask me about my runs, and I’ll tell you they’re nothing special – except in the quiet ways that all runs are special. Any run anyone wants to take, and feels happy for having taken, is never wasted.

Photo: Steinbeck House in Salinas, where my writing hero once lived.

[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.]