Just Rewards

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from March 1999.)

Ask runners why they choose to enter a particular race, and the type of awards will appear far down the list of reasons. Or at least this isn’t a big concern to any but the elite who compete for monetary prizes. Most of us look first at the location and tradition of the event, size of the field and speed of the course.

But if awards don’t rank high among the reasons to run a race, they stand at or near the top among ways to remember it. While writing today, I wear a shirt from the 1995 Victoria Marathon.

Near my desk hangs a medal from the George Sheehan Classic of 1994. In a box across the room sits a collection of race prizes, including a seashell necklace from the 1992 Honolulu Marathon.

And, oh yes, upstairs in a drawer sit more T-shirts than I can count. I give old ones away when the drawer overflows, but the remaining number is still impressive.

Each shirt represents a race completed. The harder the race, the longer I keep the shirt that recalls this effort. Marathon shirts are always the last to go.

The T-shirt has come to be the most common way to reward runners in the U.S. Often it is the only way. I don’t recall exactly when this tradition started, but do know that it is unlikely ever to end.

A few runners complain that they already own too many T-shirts and don’t need to pay for another. A few races offer a reduced entry fee for runners who don’t choose to take a shirt.

But the vast majority of American races award these shirts because runners demand them. The shirt is the runner’s way of saying during later training runs or trips to the grocery story, “Look what I accomplished.” Race sponsors like the shirts too because they’re a highly visible and long-lasting form of advertising.

So the T-shirt is here to stay. But the more creative events practice variations on this theme. Some step away from the usual short-sleeved shirt by offering long sleeves or singlets, or occasionally even a sweatshirt for winter running.

Some shirts become works of art. Runner’s World conducts a yearly contest for the best T-shirt designs. Runners have been known to sew their favorite shirts together to make quilts.

Few races dare operate without shirts. However, many also give additional awards.

The Hospital Hill Run in Kansas City hands out running shorts. The Honolulu Marathon presents its shell necklaces or pottery medals. The Okanagan International race awards half a medal to its half-marathoners.

Most events give some type of medal or certificate to all finishers. A cherished medal of mine is the one from the Sheehan Classic, with a likeness of the late doctor-writer on one side and a saying of his on the other. I also have special fondness for the certificate from my first marathon, Boston 1967.

These awards come with the runners’ entry fees. Other mementos may be purchased at race expos.

These range from jackets and hats, to drinking mugs, to personal photos along the course or at the finish. They all help keep memories of the race alive. But souvenirs that can be bought never quite match the value of prizes that must be earned.

UPDATE FROM 2014

This morning I ran in a shirt from the Victoria Marathon, a recent replacement for one earned long ago and worn to tatters. Now I write in a shirt from the Eugene Marathon, which I’ve never run, to celebrate the victories of runners I have coached there.

The only medal now hanging in my office is the one mentioned in this column, from the first George Sheehan memorial race. Inscribed on one side are his words, “Winning is never having to say I quit.”

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Giving Back

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from March 1999.)

One of the great strengths of American running is also one of its subtle weaknesses. We rarely suffer a shortage of runners willing to go any distance, anywhere there is a race that weekend. We often suffer from a shortage of workers willing to help conduct the races.

In this sport we are a nation of doers, not viewers. We would rather run in a race ourselves than watch others run it, now matter how fast they are and how slow we are.

Few events here are in danger of disappearing for lack of entrants. Many must limit their fields by setting maximum numbers (New York City and Chicago Marathons) or by imposing qualifying times (Boston Marathon).

The demand for space at starting lines is high and growing higher. The demand for volunteer workers grows too, and the supply remains short.

Race directors – who usually are volunteers themselves – forever beg for help. They never seem to have quite enough of it on race day.

The volunteers give up a weekend day to stand shivering in the cold or baking in the sun, delivering the aid that runners demand. For this the workers usually receive no more than a free T-shirt.

I often go to races as a guest of the directors. This lets me follow them through their race day, which usually begins after a sleepless night for them. They and their support troops arrive before the first runner, and stay long after the last one goes home.

Watching the start area come together, seeing the course from the standpoint of the workers, then observing the finish-line cleanup is something every runner should experience at least once. It tells several truths about this sport:

– Running the race may be one of the easiest tasks that day. At least it takes much less time than the scene-setting work that makes the running possible.

– Runners are abundant, and each has only one job to perform – running his or her own race. Workers are scarce, and each often does multiple jobs.

– Runners as a group are quick to complain and slow to compliment these workers. They hear little or nothing from the 99 percent of runners who go home happy, but hear much from the one percent who are not pleased.

The least we can do as runners is to say more thank-yous. Let the volunteers, those too often invisible heroes of the sport, know that we appreciate them.

The best we can do is to give back to the sport by serving as volunteers ourselves. Set aside an occasional race to stand and deliver assistance to the runners.

Christian churches promote the concept of the tithe, or giving one-tenth of one’s earnings to the church. Runners of all religions, or none, would do well to practice a form of tithing.

For every 10 races we run, we might agree to work at one. Hand out the race packets, work at an aid station, direct the traffic, read the splits, award the winners, assist the ill and injured, distribute the food.

Doing this would help a sport that is always long on runners and short on helpers. It would also help us to be slower with complaints and quicker with compliments when next we run a race.

UPDATE FROM 2014

My running in races has fallen off from a few a year in 1999 to one every few years now. But I’ve compensated by standing and watching more often.

Usually I’m there as a coach, which doesn’t count as volunteerism because I’m paid modestly for being there. Occasionally I truly volunteer.

The most humorous role was at a recent marathon (unnamed here to protect the guilty). I drove with friends to the halfway point, where no official was turning the runners around. We set out cones, which had been dumped beside the road, and became course monitors.

At another race, I volunteered to print out individual results for runners at the finish line. Best job ever – giving them proof of what they’d just earned.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Beginning to Break

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from October 1998.)

My history in ultrarunning is as undistinguished as it is ancient. It includes – all from the early 1970s – one attempt at 100 miles (ended at 70) and two aborted 50s (stopped at 35 and 40). The longest finish was a 50K, in 1970.

My memories of ultras are as good, though, as they are old. Having dabbled in these events, I’ll always appreciate the effort involved for runners who do them often and well. And I’ll always thank an ultrarunner for teaching me to walk.

Tom Osler gave all runners permission to take walking breaks, and showed us how, in his Serious Runners Handbook. I edited this book, but even earlier had experimented with the technique of breaking a big distance into small pieces.

My convincer that run/rest routine worked was a 1971 race in Rocklin, California. The distance was 100 miles, which was farther than I’d ever run in a week, and I now had just one day to finish it.

I didn’t finish but did cover 70 miles. This not only would remain the longest run of my life but also contributed heavily to my biggest week.

This ultra was on a Saturday, and the previous Sunday I’d run a marathon. Token runs on the days in between (I never skipped a day back then) boosted the week’s total 110 miles, or 30 higher than anytime before or since.

Back to the 70-mile day: I wasn’t terribly tired – or sore – at that distance. But I’d already been on the road for 14 hours, it was two o’clock in the morning, no one else was visible, and I didn’t see much point in running more laps on the 2½-mile road course.

When I told the lap-scorer of my impending dropout, he said, “What do you mean you’re quitting? You only have 30 miles to go!”

That 30 would have nearly matched my longest previous run. But even as this abbreviated “100” was a failure in one sense, it was an eye-popper in other ways. Most obviously this was double my longest non-stop distance, plus another six miles.

This longest run ever was also my first use of intentional resting along the way. The term “walk breaks” doesn’t work here, because these were full STOPS that averaged about one minute for each mile run.

In the early 1970s, I still had the misguided idea that running every step was required. So I just milled around for a few minutes during these breaks, then started exactly at the leaving-off point.

Recovery from these 70 miles was quicker than I’d ever known it after conventional runs of less than half this distance. Lost sleep was more of a problem the next day than sore feet and legs.

The running pace had held up much better than it would have in a non-stop run. It averaged about 7:30, or less than a minute per mile slower than my marathon the week before.

This experience made me a lasting believer in breaks. It led eventually, thanks to Tom Osler’s influence, to the run/walks that I now promote and practice at small fractions of ultradistances.

I never tried to clear up the unfinished business of that 100-mile race. Marathons are my upper limit now, and I’m still putting the old lessons to work in these mini-ultras.

UPDATE FROM 2014

Advancing age and declining energy conspired over the years to decrease the length of my run segments and to increase the frequency of my walk breaks. In 2013, as I turned 70, the balance finally tipped from run/walk to walk/run.

That year I took my longest pure walk ever – five hours in a Relay for Life that celebrated five years since prostate-cancer diagnosis and treatment. In 2014, I trained for and completed my first marathon as a (mostly) walker, in 6-1/2 hours.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Lessons from Layoffs

(This piece is for my book-in-progress titled See How We Run: Best Writings from 25 Years of Running Commentary. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from July 1998.)

A long-lasting injury or illness – long as in weeks or even months, not days –  can be good for a runner. The longer the layoff, the better the lessons about what running really means to you.

This isn’t true at first, of course. Pain and suffering are never pleasant, and they don’t allow philosophical musings to break through. All you want early in the ailment is for the hurting to stop.

The worst of the pain might not come from the ailment itself, but from not running and wondering if you ever will again. During this stage you can’t stand to see or talk to or read about healthy runners. They remind you too painfully of all that you are not doing.

This stage eventually passes. The pain settles down and then eases, and your head clears. You now see what went wrong.

Your illness or injury was no accident. You got what you paid for, or more likely the bill came due for not paying out enough (training, that is) in advance of your last big effort.

Say you ran a marathon a few weeks ago. It was your first in years, and by most standards your training had fallen short of adequate.

Say your longest run before the marathon was 30 kilometers. This left you more than a mile shy of the 20 miles that most advisers on the subject call minimum pre-marathon distance. So you probably hadn’t paid enough into your training account.

You ran the marathon anyway, trusting experience and the magic of race day to carry you through. They did, but it was a long and tough day, especially the final miles.

The less the training, the more sporadic the racing, the harder the effort, the longer the recovery time. A hard-training, regular racer might be immune to most of the stresses of racing and might bounce back from a marathon in a week or two.

A lightly trained, infrequent racer hasn’t built such immunity. A marathon might require six or more truly easy weeks afterward.

So what happens if you fit the second description and try to resume normal running in fewer than the needed number of weeks? If you don’t voluntarily take the full time needed for recovery, the body demands it from you as an injury or illness. Healing that problem then occupies the weeks when you would have been getting over the marathon anyway.

As you come out of the dark spell and begin to run again, you see that the troubles have helped you. They have shown you what means the most in your running.

That is not finishing a marathon or taking the long runs leading up to one. Nor is it shorter races or the fast training that prepare you for them.

What you missed most was getting out for the little everyday runs, the fillers between the big efforts. They’re the ones not worth bragging about because their length and pace would impress no runner. Getting down to the little runs, you now see, is at least as important as getting up for the big ones.

You promise yourself not to get greedy again anytime soon. That vow will last until you forget how bad your last illness- or injury-forced “vacation” felt.

It’s best to develop a long memory, so you never forget the worst of days. This adds to your appreciation of days that are back to normal.

UPDATE FROM 2014

Though this piece speaks in second-person pronouns, “you’s” instead of “I’s,” it is personal. My training peaked at 30 kilometers before a 1998 marathon.

I resumed normal running too soon afterward. This left me too rundown to fight off the flu, my first case in years and longest-lasting to date.

That dubious “PR” fell two years later. Forgetting the lessons from the earlier layoff, I trained even less for a marathon in 2000, ran myself down more, and caught an illness that lasted longer.

This time I learned. For marathons that followed, I’ve trained better, finished slower but stronger, and recovered without harsh side-effects.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in  as many as three different formats: (1) in print from Amazon.com; (2) as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com; (3) as PDFs for e-reader devices and apps, from Lulu.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Marathon Training, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]