The Thoughts

(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.)

2011. Even in today’s seemingly marathon-crazed climate, it can be hard to find someone in everyday life who speaks marathoner language. A friend asks, “How long is your marathon this time?” A spouse wonders, “Why would you want to put yourself through this more than once?” A co-worker wants to know afterward, “Did you win?” Attempts at explanation are lost on them.

This helps explain why runners seek each other out to train together. They hunger for someone who understands and appreciates what they do, and can and will talk about it for hours at a time. Which also helps explain the popularity of marathon training groups. Runners might come together at first for the program and its coach, but they stay together because the miles add up faster with congenial companions than they do alone.

I guide such a training group. Our finish rate is near-perfect, and not because our program is better than any of a dozen others available online. Mine covers the basics of distance, speed and recovery in the usual ways. It works well because the runners follow through with it. They show up each week because a no-show would disappoint their friends. One runner told me, “I would have been asleep had it not been for the date we have every Sunday.”

Some runners arrive as ready-made mini-teams. We’ve had combinations of husband-wife, mother-daughter, father-daughter, sister-sister and brother-sister, as well as inseparable friends (neither of whom would show up without the other). I never assign pace groups, yet they form naturally. Hardly anyone runs alone here unless by choice.

That’s my choice: not to run with this team or any of its individuals. This isn’t because I’m now such a match for these marathoners, when my “long” run is their short, and my “fast” their slow. I run alone because we aren’t alike in another way. I spend much of each day talking with runners, either in person and electronically. Running is my quiet time – a time away from all voices, live and recorded.

Please don’t misread me here. I love runners, and especially marathoners. I love seeing them at Dick Beardsley’s and Jeff Galloway’s camps each summer, and at several marathon finish lines each year. I love watching the fastest ones win (and don’t envy them too much for their endurance, stamina and youth).

I love the slowest for whatever they can do. I love coaching and advising any runner who asks for help. I love reading about runners, sending email back and forth with them, celebrating their successes and commiserating over their setbacks. I love talking with them while standing or sitting still, while choosing not to run with them.

Whenever any runner, known to me or not, passes in the opposite direction, I offer a cheery “good morning,” a wave, a nod, sometimes even a hand slap. When the greeting is returned, the day brightens a bit (or darkens a little when the passing runner refuses even to make eye contact).

But if another runner falls into step with me and wants to stay there, I reach into a bag of old tricks to keep us from staying together. I say, “This is where I turn back,” even when not intending to reverse course just then. Or I say, “Don’t let me slow you down,” while slowing further down myself. Or I simply slow to a walk, a normal break for me but one that few other runners will allow themselves.

The reasons why I’m a loner runner range from historical (reaching back to a time when runners were few and very far between, and if you didn’t run alone you didn’t run much), to practical (never needing to plan a meeting time or place, or to run at someone else’s pace), to professional (already spending a good part of each day discussing the sport without doing more of that while running). But the best reason is personal.

George Sheehan, running’s greatest writer, said he ran for three reasons: “contemplation, conversation and competition.” I’m down to the first of those three. Competition is past, and conversation happens elsewhere. Now I run mostly for the contemplation. The run provides the best block of time each day for quiet, uninterrupted thought. Like Dr. Sheehan, I “write” then, collecting lines to type later.

Later. I quickly add that my most memorable run of 2010 was an exception to all of the above. Most of my runs are good but almost immediately forgettable. Not this one, which was a year in the making.

In 2009 a Dick Beardsley camper named Steve from Illinois asked, “Can I run with you some morning?” I successfully ducked him that week and figured he would forget this request by the next camp. He remembered the rain-check and on his bio page completed the statement, “My camp experience will be successful if…” with, “I go for a morning run with Joe.”

Another camper, Larry, wrote that his experience would be better if “Joe will go for a run with me.” I sensed a movement taking shape. So instead of resisting, I announced at my talk to the campers, “Anyone who run with me tomorrow morning is welcome… as long as you’re willing to do it on my terms.” Which were: “You agree to go my distance, which is short for you marathoners, at my pace, which is the slowest will ever go. You’ll take walk breaks, maybe for the first time. And you’ll ignore distance and go by time.”

I thought, and maybe hoped, these warnings would dissuade everyone except Steve and Larry. Maybe they too now realized how pedestrian my running was and would skip out too. But at the appointed hour that Friday morning I was surprised and not unpleased to find a dozen campers joining me. None complained (at least to me) that this run-walk, where we all stayed together for an hour, was too short or slow. If nothing else, it assured they would start the next day’s half-marathon race well rested.

I enjoyed our conversation enough to try it again. In about a year. After spending a few hundred more runs in contemplation, which is not a team sport.

(Photo: Dick Beardsley got me out of my loner ways and into talking during runs at his training camp.)

[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, Personal Records, Run Gently Run Long, Running A to Z, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, The Running Revolution and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

The Tough-Enough

(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.)

2011. This was a tough crowd. I mean tough in the best sense of the word – of working hard and achieving much. These runners were already highly motivated and focused when they arrived at Dick Beardsley’s latest Marathon Training Camp in Minnesota, and they left even more so.

I’m not tough. A pair of sports psychologists, Bruce Ogilvie and Thomas Tutko, once certified me as an “extremely tender-minded athlete.” This is the reason why I missed being all that I could be as a runner.

But my reluctance to push too far, too fast, too often also could be the reason why I’m still running. What Ogilvie and Tutko’s tests label as “tender-mindedness,” I prefer to think of as pacing that has let me last for all this time.

At this Beardsley camp I didn’t urge the runners to hit the highest training mileage they could handle, but instead suggested the least they could get by with or would accept. This might not have been what they wanted to hear. But it’s what I needed to say on this occasion.

Two years earlier I had talked with another of the camp speakers, Rich Benyo. He was at work then on his memoirs and urged me to get busy on mine.

“We’re at the perfect age to write this type of book,” he said. “Old enough to have had lots of experiences, and still young enough to remember what they were.”

Now I’d finished these reflections. What had begun as a single volume had grown into three. Looking back over this series, I see how much of it deals with training. I’m a training geek who has left no run unrecorded since 1959. This leaves a paper trail of what has worked best.

The very best practices are those that last the longest. My most enduring practice, a common thread reaching back almost to my start and still in play today, is runs of a half-hour to an hour.

That wasn’t all I did, or do now, or suggest that you try. You can’t race well without sometimes training long or fast, or both, and you can’t fully appreciate what’s easy if you never run hard. But while some hard training is essential, the easy runs make the hard work work.

What I talked about at the Beardsley camp, and repeat on this page, is what to do between the big efforts – on the days when that earn you no bragging rights, which is to say most days. Running is a rare sport where you can do your best only sparingly, and you need plenty of recovery time before trying that hard again.

My choice for the in-between runs always was, and still is, 30 to 60 minutes. Why this range? Because it’s easy but not too easy. A half-hour is just enough to make getting up and out the door seem worthwhile, and an hour is where running begins to feel like work that I wouldn’t want to go to every day.

How often to run this easily? I yield to Jeff Galloway, whose camp I also attend each summer, for an answer here. His name is so closely tied to walk breaks that they’re often called “Gallowalks.” He’s also well known for asking runners to train full marathon distance or beyond before race day.

Jeff didn’t introduce me to run/walk, though he helped me refine my own practice. I’ve resisted his call to longer long runs, preferring to reserve my marathons for days when a medal and T-shirt come at the finish line. He influenced me the most on what to do between the long runs – on the easy days.

My earliest written advice on marathon training fell into line with other published advice (what little there was) on the 1970s. That was to increase average weekly mileage to more than 60.

This fit with a theory then in vogue, called “collapse point.” It held that runners would hit the wall at triple their average daily distance. Sixty miles divided by seven equals 8.6, times three is 25.8, which theoretically would delay a collapse until the last half-mile. Seventy miles would avoid it.

Jeff, who as a 1972 Olympian didn’t lack toughness, had a different idea for runners he was beginning to coach: remove the emphasis from weekly mileage and focus on the long run, while recovering well in between.

Quit counting weekly miles, he said. It’s the most misleading figure in this sport – encouraging too much running on days that should be easy, discouraging rest days that leave a big zero in the week and tiring us too much for the long run that counts the most.

I agreed absolutely with Jeff, because this was how I already trained myself – and soon recommended in my writings, and much later assigned as a coach.

Later. My training was never all easy. In my best racing years I slipped in one or two hard days a week.

This wasn’t the toughest that training could be, but it was tough enough to take this “tender-minded” runner a fair ways. Tough enough in high school to net a handful of state track titles. Tough enough later to yield more than a dozen marathons that would have qualified for Boston under its toughest current standard.

And it’s tough enough for me now, when the goal isn’t to race but to keep a run easy enough today to repeat it tomorrow, and the next day, and so on and on.

(Photo: Jeff Galloway gave the toughest of runners good reasons to take walks.)

[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, Personal Records, Run Gently Run Long, Running A to Z, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, The Running Revolution and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

The Survivors

(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.)

2010. What do you run? That’s one of the simplest and best questions one runner can ask another. It demands an honest answer – not what you once did or dream of doing some faraway day, but what you really ran today and plan to run tomorrow.

Ask me this question, and there’s not much to tell. Yes, of course I still run, but not nearly far enough impress any marathoner. I write now about a run of mine taken in summer 2010 only because it was so far from my norm.

Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of the time I run alone. Most runs end before the sun peeks above the hills on our eastern horizon. Few runs repeat the same lap more than a handful of times.

This one run broke all those habits. It circled a high school track for dozens of laps. The black surface intensified the heat of the midday sun. I joined a crowd of hundreds, mostly walkers, many of whom drifted into the runners-only inside lane.

I left my loner comfort zone for the best of reasons. This was our town’s annual Relay for Life, which supports cancer causes, remembers the casualties, honors the survivors, praises the caregivers. I ran for all those reasons, plus to give thanks that I could still do this.

The first 24 years of these local Relays had passed me by nearly unnoticed, though relatives and friends had fought through or lost to cancer. Then I was diagnosed myself with prostate cancer. It was treated early and apparently successfully, and left me with new appreciation for how quickly good health can turn bad – and often can return to good again through the miracles of modern medicine.

In my first post-treatment summer I ran 45 laps of the Relay, one for each day I’d spent in radiation. I ran from predawn to sunrise – to symbolize passing from the darkness of diagnosis into the light of recovery, but more prosaically to minimize heat and crowding on the track.

When planning my return to the Relay, I realized that the first run had been too easy. Dealing with cancer is never ever easy, so I would raise the toughness level by starting at noon when the day was hottest and the numbers were highest.

During opening ceremonies I stood with Jerry Stromme, a graduate of my marathon training team. What he was doing was much bigger and more selfless than what I had in mind. He never had cancer himself but came here to support those who do or did have the disease that the Relay combats.

Jerry expressed surprise at seeing my here. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you running,” he said. I joked that “it’s my kind of event. You can start anytime you want and stop whenever you like.”

But this wasn’t true for either of us. We both had our plans. His was to total 250 laps, or 100 kilometers. Mine was far less noteworthy – to run for two hours, one for each year that had come between the dark days of exam and treatment rooms and this bright summer afternoon.

My plan took its last and best twist as I was about to leave home for the track. I cut note cards into thin strips and wrote the name of someone to remember, honor or thank on each lap.

I wore shorts with pockets. As each lap began, I pulled a name card at random from the left pocket, ran around the track holding that person in my hand, then deposited the mini-card in the right pocket and drew another name for the next lap.

Later. While undergoing treatment, I had promised to become an activist in matters of prostate-cancer awareness “after taking care of personal business.” Each Fathers’ Day I help with a wonderfully named event, the Prost8K. All proceeds go toward funding a free cancer-screening event a few weeks later.

About 1000 men are tested each summer, and 100 of them have results suspicious enough to warrant further checking. Some cancers are caught when the odds of successful treatment are greatest.

I’ve seen detection work two ways. One of my grandfathers didn’t have any chance to survive once his prostate cancer revealed itself. One of his sons, my uncle, was tested early, treated and remained healthy 20 years later, in his 90s.

A urologist found my cancer early, and two years after treatment I was doing fine. I wanted the same for as many other men as possible.

I also want runners to know too that our activity doesn’t grant us immunity. Marathon legend Bill Rodgers and Olympic marathon qualifier Benji Durden know that as well as I do.

Each of the men named above was among my honorees at Relay for Life. My two hours ran out before the cards did, and I had to carry several at once on the final lap – which wasn’t truly the last. The best two laps came later, at sundown.

The first was for survivors, walked (slowly, to savor the moment) with hundreds of fellow purple-shirted cancer veterans. Looking at many of them, I saw myself as lucky to have had one of the more treatable forms. I saw too that we were all the lucky ones to have outlived our disease so far.

Immediately after this victory lap came another, where we joined our caregivers. I walked with granddaughters Paige and Shaye, ages seven and five, who had given their care without knowing it.

None of us patients had to came this far back on our own. This had been a “we” effort, not an “I.”

Notice that there’s no mention here of how far I ran in two hours or at what pace. I’m not telling because those results wouldn’t impress you and because this wasn’t a race. There are other ways besides the numbers on a GPS or stopwatch to define running well.

Walking away from the track at dusk, with a granddaughter at each hand, we saw my friend Jerry Stromme still running. He had been on the track for eight hours already and would run well into the night before finishing his 100K-for-a-cause.

His answer to the what-did-you-run question would impress any marathoner. I was more impressed by where he did it, and why.

(Photo: Joining the “brotherhood” at the Prost8K, where cancer survivors proudly wear blue.)

[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, Personal Records, Run Gently Run Long, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, The Running Revolution and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]