Taking Walks

(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 2014.)

AS THE YEARS have added up, my public roles in running have shrunk. At 60, I ran my last true race; at 61, I quit hitting the road once or twice a month as a speaker; at 64, I ran/walked my last marathon; at 68, I wrote my last column for a national running magazine.

I didn’t become anti-social or reclusive, exactly, and didn’t fully retire from running, writing or speaking. But I now enjoy relative anonymity after being too public a figure in this sport for too long.

I run (and increasingly, walk) alone. I write mainly for an audience of one (myself). I speak mostly to my training teams (and then only briefly).

If I’m known at all in my hometown beyond these small groups of runners, it’s for another role played in recent years. That’s as a local poster boy for a cause near to my heart (and points south): prostate cancer awareness.

At age 65, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. I’ve put modesty and privacy aside and spoken out about my condition, in hopes of helping other men avoid or treat it.

Treatment sent my cancer was into deep remission, if not entirely cured. But I didn’t escape it without some cost, which I gladly paid.

Hormone suppression figured into the early treatment. It added pounds to my waistline and minutes to my miles. I’ve never lost the former or gained back the latter.

This combination gradually reduced my running range. I couldn’t run as far as I still wanted to go, so I evolved over the next few years from a runner taking a few walk breaks to a walker who ran a little.

For the first five years post-treatment, I joined a Relay for Life, the cancer fund-raiser usually held on a track. The first three were traditional run-walks.

I celebrated the fourth year differently. My first-ever hamstring tear (a “speed” injury at a time when I’d never been slower) temporarily ended all running. This happened right before the 2012 Relay, which led to another first: walking an organized event, the whole four hours.

Never had a walk lasted longer for me. I didn’t know exactly what my old walk-only high was, but only that this new one wouldn’t long remain my lifetime high.

That “PR” lasted only a year. The fifth cancer-versary (the traditional time for pronouncing a patient “cured”) brought a five-hour walk at the Relay… and a vow to extend to a marathon in the sixth year.

All previous celebrations had gone unpublicized and unaccompanied by anyone who knew what I was doing. The marathon was different.

At age 70, I entered an official one – the 2014 Yakima River Canyon Marathon in Washington, which offered a generous early start for slowpokes like me who mainly walked. And I accepted help from a few young runners on my training team.

Laurel Mathiesen, Sara Tepfer and Jesse Centeno made the 600-mile round trip on their own. Then they ran until they’d made up my two-hour head start.

From 22 miles on, we walked in together. We finished, in 6½ hours on the early-start clock, and my first written comments afterward still stand as the most accurate:

“Walking a marathon is very different from running one; much less intense, for one thing. But it isn't easy with its extra hours. Laurel, Sara and Jesse made the hard final miles go better, and they made my day four times more rewarding than it would have been as a private effort.”

THIS EXPERIENCE encouraged an encore the next year, my seventh post-diagnosis, this time at the 2015 Newport (Oregon) Marathon. Laurel Mathiesen and Rachel Walker from the team walked with me, and others waited at the finish. I thank them for this support – and their patience.

Fittingly for the personal anniversary being marked that week, this marathon took me nearly seven hours. But that clocking was incidental to another bigger, better number.

This event celebrated 10 years for my training team, whose first race also had been at Newport. I am quietly proud to have gone these miles, here and for the past decade. And I am loudly proud to have shared so much with so many teammates.

Photo: Two young runners – Laurel Mathiesen (left) and Sara Tepfer (right) – slowed down to help their 70-year-old coach finish at Yakima.

[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, Starting Lines, and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]