The Unretired

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2006. Speed is fleeting. Enjoy it while you have it, because it won’t last long. 

For most runners, racing speed peaks in our first 10 years or so, then slowly erodes. Then our PRs become memories instead of goals.

Paces that we once held for a marathon become those of a half, then a 10K, a 5K, a single mile. If we keep running races, they become slower than our easy training runs used to be. If that prospect depresses you, consider the alternative: full retirement.

I can’t speak for you, but I’d much rather be a slow runner than no runner. I had my allotted decade of improvement and a little more. 

My PRs first started falling at age 14, and the last big one fell at 25. Which means I’ve gone without any new ones for a growing majority of my running life.

If you run long enough, this will happen to you. Then you’ll look back at all your fastest times, and look ahead to... what? 

That’s what you’re about to hear: that there’s life after the last PR, and that it’s a good and active and satisfying life. You won’t just hear from me but from someone who had much more speed to lose.

You can pick no better model for slowing gracefully than Bill Rodgers. I’ve watched it, and have taken inspiration from it.

Few Americans have ever raced better and faster than Bill: a total of eight victories within five years at the Boston and New York City Marathons, first American to break 2:10 (which he did twice, with 26 more sub-2:15s). Those are his memories now.

The first time I ran the same race with Bill, I “beat” him, but so did everyone else who finished the 1977 Boston Marathon. He dropped out.

He said that day, “The marathon can always humble you.” But it also can make you proud of whatever you’re able to do under current conditions.

The second time I chased Bill at Boston, in 1979, he won the race, lowered his own American record and – not that he noticed – beat me by more than an hour. I paid no more attention to him that day than he did to me. We had our own races to run, and we both came away with our own special blends of pride and humility.

Bill’s time that day, six years after his first marathon, would forever remain his fastest. He would announce his retirement from racing that distance in 1993. Only later would I see that Boston 1979 would be my last marathon to run as a race.

Then what? Did we stop running? Of course not, but only eased our distance and pace. 

Stop running races? Not that either, but only changing what we raced and how.

Few sports define retirement as running does, where few athletes ever retire totally or permanently. Bill Rodgers hasn’t, nor have I, nor should you.

If you have the itch to race, scratch it. It matters not if you race fast or slow; race long, short or in between; race from the front, in the middle or at the back – only that you give your all to the race. Keep racing until you don’t need it anymore.

Later. Bill Rodgers can't leave the races behind, no matter how wide the gap between who he once was and is now. I saw how wide when we met again in Cedar Rapids on July 4^th weekend of 2005.

Bill hadn’t recovered completely from breaking a leg two years earlier. “I have thin bones,” he told me when we met to give our speeches. “My mom has osteoporosis, and I might have inherited the condition from her.”

He suggested on race eve, “Why don’t we run together tomorrow?” I laughed at the silliness of this idea. 

“No, no,” he protested. “I can’t go fast anymore. Most of my running these days is at about nine-minute pace.”

   

I thought he exaggerated. Maybe he did slow down that much to poke along with people like me on his recovery days, but his competitive fires surely would flame up in the weekend’s race.

   

To my surprise, and some sadness, I saw Bill early and often during this 8K. This isn’t right, I thought at first sighting, less than a mile into the race. He ran with the inefficiency of someone backing off too much from his normal pace.

Bill favored his bad leg. He tried and only partly succeeded in finding soft running in the grass strips beside the road.

At about three miles I had to pass him. Instead of giving him an encouraging word and a condescending pat on the back, I veered to the opposite side of the road and sneaked past, saying nothing.

He soon passed me back without noticing. We went back and forth this way through the final mile before he eased ahead at the end. 

Bill could have excused himself from running that Fifth Season 8K. He could have played a purely ceremonial role by firing the starting gun and then stepping aside.

But he didn’t. His ego isn’t so large that he can’t let a thousand runners pretend to beat him. None of us, of course, ever will.

(Photo: Bill Rodgers has slipped back into the pack, but  he’s second to no one as an ambassador of the sport.)

[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, Running With Class, 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.]