The Coaches

(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.)

2005. Dean Roe coached all three sports at my small-town Iowa school. By 1958 a football team of his had won a state title and a basketball team had reached the state tournament. He knew how to develop winners. I wanted to be one, but was too timid to succeed in football and too short for basketball.

Track was my last chance, and the best one was in the longest race we could run then – the mile. Body-size didn’t matter here, only heart-size. I could win by wanting it more than anyone else. Or so I thought.

On my first official day as a runner I tried too hard and beat no one but myself. I started at a dead sprint, which couldn’t last much more than one lap, and didn’t. The pack spit me out the back and off the track, where I now sat feeling sorry for myself after failing at another sport.

Coach Roe wasn’t a running expert, but he was an authority on the delicate psyches of adolescents. He knew when to kick a butt and when to pat a back.

He might have kicked me while I was down by quoting the slogan from his locker-room: “Quitters never win.” Instead he gave me a consoling pull to my feet and told me to try again next week and that “you’ll do okay if you pace yourself better.”

Next time I started last and didn’t do much passing, but I finished. That first year I improved enough to qualify for the state meet – and in later years to place at state, then to win there and finally to set a meet record.

My winning against other runners stopped after high school, but the improvement of times and distances lasted into the 1970s. Running didn’t stop there. It continues today, running on without needing any PR payoffs. 

Every year, every mile was and is a gift from Dean Roe. I once planned to thank him by imitating him, first by studying in college to be a coach of young runners. An early and long detour into running writing took me off the original path for more than 40 years.

Then, when given the chance to teach running classes to University of Oregon students a few years ago, I balked at first. “What if it took too much time away from the writing?” I said to my wife. Nonsense, Barbara told me. “Think of all the new story material this will give you.”

That has been the least of what these young runners have given me. If forced to choose now between the writing and the teaching, I would teach.

My best possible model for practicing this profession was my first coach. As “Coach Joe” I try to repay Coach Roe by repeating his lessons on winning running, from start to who-knows-where.

FIRST CLASS. Reading the book and seeing the movie Seabiscuit reminded me of Dean Roe. I didn’t connect my first coach with the racehorse but with his trainer, Tom Smith. He spoke one of the best lines I’ve ever heard about coaching:

“A horse doesn’t care how much you know until it knows how much you care.” Two-legged runners feel the same way.

Mr. Roe wasn’t technically savvy in running. But, oh, how he cared about his athletes. The young can sense this without being told.  I think of Tom Smith’s line, and my first coach’s application of it, while greeting a new class the first day of each term.

These students don’t know me, or I them. They see only a short guy, old enough to be their dad or grandpa, standing before them. I see faces that silently challenge me to make waking up at this early hour worth their while.

I say nothing about my credits as a writer. All I tell of my years as a runner is, “I won’t ask you to run anything here that I wouldn’t do myself, and haven’t done a thousand times. This program will work if you give it a chance.”

Some don’t. They either don’t like what they hear that day and bail out before the first run, or they let that one discourage them from trying another. I wish they had withheld judgment until they’d seen that the teacher cared and heard what he knew.

Withholding judgment goes both ways. Looking over the 30 to 40 strangers at the start, I try not to guess which ones will still be with me at the end, or how far they will have come in those 10 weeks.

Every class brings its surprises. A memorable young man stood out for his size, and a woman for her talent.

A guy named Matt wore his weight proudly enough to quote it to the pound – 247. He looked like a linebacker escaped from the football team, and I might have judged him strong-but-slow.

Wrong. Matt ran his 5K that term in 19 minutes. I’ve never seen anyone so big go so fast.

A woman named Kim told on her first-day questionnaire of having no running experience. We wondered together if she could handle this 5K training class. She broke 20 minutes in her first-ever race.

“Is that good?” she asked. It showed enough promise for Kim, a freshman, to be recruited for the University of Oregon cross-country team.

A student can do as much teaching, of the teacher, as learning. My students have taught me never to prejudge who will catch fire as a runner, or how hot and long she or he might burn.

Later. While writing this piece, I had the great fortune to see Dean Roe for the first time in more than 30 years. We greeted each other with a hug, which coach and athlete (and men in general) didn’t do long ago.

Our talk moved quickly to his past athletes. I wasn’t the only one to receive Coach Roe’s gifts.

Norm Johnston almost carried on to make the 1968 Olympic team, missing by just three places in the decathlon. Rex Harvey rose to national class as a decathlete in the 1970s.

The truest measure of a coach’s success isn’t what athletes do while they’re with him, but what they take with them when they leave his team.

By that standard Dean Roe has sent hundreds of winners into the world. I hope to send a few.

My last day of each class is always bittersweet. I’ve gotten to know these runners and won’t see them again as a group.

“I won’t forget you,” I tell them. “Contact me if you have any questions about running.”

Few ever do, and that’s a good sign. Educated and experienced runners don’t need me anymore.

Students don’t even ask much of me when we’re together. I never run with them, talking as only running-mates do.

By going off without me, they see that the class is about their running and not mine. I’m there to plan, advise and cheer, but not to be anywhere near the center of their attention.

I try to teach students not to need me for long. Most of each run, and the runs outside of class, and the future running I hope they’ll do, must come without a teacher watching.

(Photo: Coach Dean Roe led me to follow in his footsteps, 40 years later.)

[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.]

The Tributes

(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.)

2005. The list of who has most influenced my running the most runs long. It carries the names of coaches I trained with daily and some I’ve never met. I list my running heroes, teammates and competitors, parents and uncles.

But too little public credit has gone to the person who might have helped the most. That’s the one who shares the most DNA with me, my older brother Mike.

He was two years ahead of me in age, and miles further advanced as a young athlete. He played quarterback in football, point-guard in basketball, and ran hurdles and sprints in track.

Then a football knee injury struck. It crippled him athletically, then would keep him from staying active enough after that.

He would grow heavy. He would work too hard and relax too little. He would pick up a smoking habit. He would look old before his time.

My brother would become the type of person we runners too easily laugh at and look down upon. But before you judge him too quickly and harshly, get to know him a little better. You’ll see how much he could help runners without being one himself.

For all the writing that Mike did in his job with a high school athletic organization, he almost never mentioned himself (unlike his brother, who wears out the “I” on his keyboard). One of the very few pieces that told his own story was a biographical sketch requested by his employer.

He wrote this as if talking about someone else. Such as, “In grade school Mike used crayons and dice for ‘play’ track meets complete with scoring.”

From the next bedroom I would hear him announcing these nightly races: “Here comes Orange on the outside... Black is dropping back.” He recorded all the results.

Before his knee blew out in his junior year of high school, Mike was a better athlete than he ever would let on later. Afterward he hobbled along gamely on 1½ legs.

He mainly handed off the football to others. He even did this for his smaller brother in a lopsided game by calling my number twice without success, then a third time while he pushed me across the goal line.

This was Mike. He made a career of pushing others to greater glory while taking no credit himself.

An early example: He found a term paper of mine that I’d written for a high school class and sent it to Omaha’s newspaper, which I wouldn’t have thought to do myself. This became my first full-length article to see print, and created an appetite to write more.

Hard as it is to say now, my big brother also showed me how I did not want to live: physically inactive, working nights and sleeping days, working through his weekends and vacations, going wifeless and childless.

That would seem a sad life if you didn’t know the rest of his story. Mike was a rare and lucky man whose work and hobby were the same.

He found his true course early and stayed on it to the end. He pushed me in that same direction while letting me leave some of his baggage behind.

Later. The Drake Relays is Iowa’s annual Super Bowl of track and field, selling out the stadium in Des Moines each April. For the Hendersons it’s a holiday weekend as anticipated as Christmas.

The meet turned 97 years old in 2005. For more than three-quarters of those years, two generations of our family has watched and worked there. None of us served longer than Mike, and perhaps no one at all ever loved this event more or lived it more completely.

   

Few athletes and fans at the 2005 Drake Relays would have known his name. But most of the supporting cast – the officials, coaches and especially the reporters – knew all that he did for them and valued him for it.

   

By title, Mike was the Drake Relays statistician. He was much more than that: a living history book and human computer for this meet and this sport.

   

Starting in the mid-1960s, he shared the Relays’ statistical load with our late father Jim. Mike later worked with any sport that needed him: at Drake, the girls and boys high school championships, even arena football. But track and field always came first.

   

This was his family’s sport before he was born. An uncle, Charles Henderson, won a Drake Relays title for Iowa State in the early 1930s. I ran there, brother-in-law Elliott Evans won there, and our cousin Bruce Henderson coached winning teams there.

     

Mike not only loved the Drake Relays; he lived for and with this meet. From just after the state high school basketball tournaments in March through the high school track championships in late May, he camped out in Drake Field House or the stadium press box. He never sought praise for this work, and in fact acted embarrassed when told how well he did it.

     

One of his last tasks was to gather information for the Iowa Hall of Pride. His favorite part of the newly opened shrine to the sports achievements of Iowans, the track and field and cross-country wing, now bears his name. The plaque reads:

Mike Henderson (1941-2004) was Iowa track and field and cross-country’s best friend. Mike never ran in a state meet or the Drake Relays, but his many contributions made hundreds of these meets run smoothly for generations of athletes and coaches, officials and journalists. While working as information director at the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union for almost 32 years, his service spread to the Boys Athletic Association, Drake University and wherever else his talent and devotion were needed. Mike’s family and friends ask you, while visiting these exhibits, to relive the rich history of the sports that were his first love.

Mike was loved in return, more than even his family knew. Only when we sat down in Drake Stadium for the 2005 Relays did we learn that a high school hurdles race had been named for him.

We hadn’t been warned that a message from his friends in the press box would appear on the scoreboard during the qualifying rounds and final of that race. It read, “God bless you, Mike. We miss you.”

(Photo: Emily, Anne, Aunt Marion and cousin Dave Henderson gather with me as Mike appears in video at the Iowa Hall of Pride area that honors him.)

[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.]

The Brother

(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.)

2005. Some years can’t end too soon. If I could have seen in advance where 2004 would lead, I wouldn’t have wanted to go there.

A year before, the contract for my next book, Run Right Now, had just come together. Writing any book is an endurance test, and this one, at 300-plus pages, would be my biggest solo effort. From planning through publication it would take the full year.

I thought this work would be the toughest part of 2004. Instead it became a welcome everyday escape from the much tougher realities of life.

A week before last Christmas a new editor at Runner’s World, a man I’d never met and never before talked to by phone, called to say that my job of 33 years was ending. I thought this forced retirement, with publication of my last piece there in early 2004, would be the worst news that could come all year. It would become a footnote to the events that followed.

In February my wife Barbara was diagnosed with breast cancer. Subduing this invader would require a three-barreled medical assault – chemo, surgery and radiation – lasting much of the year.

In April my mother Virginia passed on. She was almost 87 and no longer her real self because of Alzheimer’s. But no matter the age or infirmity, we’re never ready for a parent to leave us.

This is not a woe-is-me tale. It’s a reminder that life itself can sometimes be an endurance test, for all of us.

We lose jobs, lose health, lose loved ones, though we hope not all of these happen in the same year. We get through these trials as best we can, hoping that the next year will be happier.

Bad years can lead to better ones. Apparent ends often mark new beginnings. This would happen for me in the first week of 2005, but not before I suffered the most shocking loss of all in the last days of 2004.

You never know which visit with a close relative will be the last. Mine with my brother Mike came at the 2004 Des Moines Marathon.

Seldom had I seen him happier and more relaxed. My last live image shows him laughing.

Two months later our brother-in-law Elliott Evans called. “I have awful news,” he said. “It’s about your brother Mike.”

Mike and I didn’t look or exercise alike, eat or sleep alike. He was two years older, but in middle age he looked a decade my senior, not because I’m youthful but because he aged faster. He outweighed me by almost 100 pounds, not because I’m thin but because his food intake far outran his activity.

Yet Mike and I were more alike than anyone would have guessed at first glance. Most of all we shared a lifelong devotion to sports – one sport for me, all of them for him.

He worked two jobs at once – one for pay as information director for an Iowa high school athletic association, the other voluntary for anyone who wanted his statistical services for sports in his home state. His greatest athletic love was the Drake Relays, which he served for 40 years.

Mike wasn’t programmed to live a long time, and didn’t. He gave himself so fully to – what was it? not a job or a career, but a calling and a passion – that his work habits might have cut his life short. While recording the triumphs of healthy youngsters, he neglected his own health.

He smoked for 30 years before a health crisis scared that habit out of him in the mid-1990s. This brother who had never shown any self-discipline in physical matters went from burning through several packs a day to never lighting up again. I was never prouder of him.

Never, that is, until the day-to-day care for our mother in her last years fell to him. No one was ever less prepared for that duty than Mike, yet he carried through to her end.

The smoking had left his lungs damaged. In the end they failed him.

Later. Now the family’s oldest, I wrote a eulogy and spoke at the funeral. There I repeated words from brother-in-law Elliott: “Mike packed 126 years of living into his 63 by sleeping so little and doing two or three things at once.”

I spoke mainly about a part of Mike that few knew. Despite never marrying or fathering children, despite working nights and sleeping days (or not at all), he was far from alone and lonely.

His service came on the worst day of an Iowa winter. An ice storm had closed many of the state’s roads. Yet 300 of his family and friends still turned out to honor him.

They came to the Drake University basketball arena, which the school freely made available. A lone chair, his chair, sat at the scorer’s table (and would remain there, empty, all season).

“Mike had a big family that he got together with regularly and happily,” I said. “Mike’s family members who are here today, please stand up so the others can see who you are. It’s okay to clap for them, because what would have an event been in his world without applause?”

Two dozen of us stood. Another dozen would have been there if weather had allowed.

“Mike, in his own sometimes odd ways, touched thousands of lives,” I added. “All of you here knew who he was and appreciated what he did for you. Thanks from all of us to all of you for coming, and thanks, Mike, for bringing us all together today.”

This brought something you don’t often see or hear at funerals: a standing ovation.

(Photo: One of the last photos of Mike with me and our sisters Anne and Emily.)

[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.]

The Farewells

(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.)

2004. Five years ago Arthur Lydiard took what he and we thought at the time was his “farewell tour” of the United States. He’d been coming here from New Zealand for almost 40 years then, and he still loved the attention that greeted him in the U.S. That acclaim kept him going.

I wrote in 1999 that “Arthur Lydiard now eases off the stage. But his system remains as sound as it was when he sprung it on the world in 1960.”

Three athletes from his neighborhood in New Zealand, a country with Oregon’s population, won medals at the 1960 Olympics. He later inspired the double-double of Finland’s Lasse Viren, 5000 and 10,000 golds at both Munich and Montreal.

Most of today’s runners hadn’t yet started when Arthur Lydiard was in his coaching prime. Many weren’t yet born.

Some critics now call Lydiard’s methods “outdated.” But there is no expiration date on expertise, no statute of limitations on what works.

Rich Englehart, a longtime Lydiard devotee, saw him in Boston five years ago. “It was an interesting evening – and a bit sad, quite honestly,” said Rich that year.

He saw his chosen coach as an unsteady old man of 82 and most of the audience in their masters years. “My pervasive feeling was that I was at a meeting of People Whose Time Has Passed.

“Right outside the auditorium one of the local clubs was running a group interval session on the track. The conference organizers went out and invited them in for free. But they all decided they’d rather stay out and do intervals than come in and listen to some old guy tell them that maybe they should be doing something else.”

Rich added, “My experience isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. But it assures me that I chose to follow the right leader – both when we were all much younger, and recently when I signed up for his online coaching advice and improved by 1:45 in the track 5000.”

That 1999 U.S. tour wasn’t Arthur Lydiard’s last. He encored this fall at age 87, bringing along the baggage of four strokes and two knee replacements.

Rich Englehart again met his mentor in Boston and then drove him to Washington, DC, with an overnight stop en route. “This was one of the greatest experiences of my life, spending two days alone with him,” says Rich.

The high point of the tour, and not just in elevation, was Arthur’s talk in Boulder before a crowd of 400, the largest of the tour. He shared the stage with Mark Wetmore, the college coach whose methods most closely follow the Lydiard system. Wetmore’s Colorado teams had won both NCAA Cross-Country titles the week before.

“I owe everything to Arthur,” said Wetmore. “I am just the delivery boy for his great message.”

Little more than a week later the greatest running coach we’ve ever known was gone. After speaking to a Texas audience, he returned to his hotel room and suffered a fatal heart attack that evening.

Lydiard left on a high note. Not in reclusive retirement in New Zealand but on the road, still spreading his timeless message to anyone who would listen. The message will outlive the man.

Later. Year after year, the University of Colorado continues to field top distance runners, and Mark Wetmore continues to credit Arthur Lydiard for pointing the way. Team alumni include Kara and Adam Goucher, Jenny Simpson, Emma Coburn and Dathan Ritzenhein.

(Photo: Arthur Lydiard’s far-reaching influence on running training survives him.)

[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.]