The Return

(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. Once upon a time I ran marathons regularly, twice most years, sometimes more often. Then suddenly I stopped trying them at all.

While I never used the R-word (retired), this looked more likely with each passing year. Those had stretched to nearly six when 2006 began.

It’s no coincidence that I found other roles to fill a void left by not going this distance myself. In those marathon-less years I did more talking to, coaching of and writing for marathoners than ever before.

I attended Jeff Galloway’s and Dick Beardsley’s camps with marathoners, formed a marathon team to train runners and signed on as a columnist for Marathon & Beyond. The less distance I ran, the more support I was free to give.

Yet I never stopped wanting be an active marathoner at least one more time. I didn’t want my latest marathon, at Napa Valley 2000 where little went as it could and should have, to remain forever my last. I needed to run at least one more, no matter how long it took me to get to it and through it.

My next starting line was a long time coming, six years. And finishing it took almost the longest time to date.

APRIL FOOL’S DAY. We runners think in numbers, talk in numbers, define ourselves and each other by numbers. The numbers I put up at the Yakima River Canyon Marathon weren’t notable, yet they didn’t go unnoticed.

There’s nowhere to hide as a marathoner anymore. You could look up my time, anyone’s time, on the web, so I’ll save you the trouble. It was 5:01 at Yakima, a minute shy of my slowest ever.

A friend asked at the finish line, “Does it embarrass you not to break five hours?” It wasn’t a harsh question. He knew I’d once run more than two hours faster, he knew that I’m a little more visible than most five-hour marathoners, and he was concerned about my feelings at that moment.

No, I told him, this time carries no shame. If slowing down bothered me, I would have stopped running marathons after the first few. Or I would have chosen one now where no one knew me, then run in disguise under an assumed name.

A time goal wasn’t what brought me to this marathon. The final time was the least of what I took away from it.

Running a race is not all about, or always about, a finish time. Other numbers meant far more to me at Yakima, and are why I chose this marathon on this date.

We runners like giving special meaning to otherwise random numbers. Three of mine marked times measured not in hours but in years.

The first of those, naturally, was six years since my last marathon, Napa Valley 2000. The other numbers were 48 and 62.

Forty-eight years had rushed past since my first race, on another April Fool’s Day in 1958. This was my first chance to celebrate the anniversary with a marathon.

It had to go better than that first race – of just one mile – when I’d started too fast and not finished. I didn’t view this anniversary as a bad omen, but instead took comfort from sticking around long enough to wear the race number that Yakima reserved for me: 48.

A final number carried meaning only to me: my 62 years of age. Compared to the 50 States marathoners staging their quarterly reunion at Yakima, plus the 100 Marathon Club members and Marathon Maniacs who ran here, my lifetime marathon count was puny. It averaged less than one per running year.

But I’d already run them in my 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. I joked during a brief talk at the pasta dinner, “After doing this first one in my 60s, I can re-retire until age 70.”

MORNING AFTER. Checking into my Yakima hotel, I’d been handed an oversized greeting card. It read, “Since we can’t be here in body, we’re here in spirit.” It was signed by runners from my marathon team.

A column I’d posted on my website at a dark hour of marathon morning was addressed to coaches. It ended, “Teach by example. Ask your runners to do no training or racing that you wouldn’t do (and haven’t done, or are doing) yourself.”

I did that training and race, and now was back in Eugene, watching and handing drinks to and cheering for the latest team as it reached 15 miles in training. I now understood these runners – and all marathoners – a little better, and respected them even more.

After walking stiffly to their starting line, I told them, “I can teach you to walk this way the day after your marathon.”

Later. I didn’t wait until my 70^th birthday to try another marathon, but only two years after Yakima. At Napa Valley 2008, I celebrated my 50^th running anniversary with another finish. This marathon took even longer, at 5:11, than the one before.

I expected this PW to last only until my next marathon. That one turned out to be a long time coming, now into my 70s. And it would take longer than I’d ever before imagined it could.

(Photo: If a five-hour marathon at Yakima disappointed me, you couldn’t tell it from this photo at the finish.)

[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 Pacesetter

(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. Many of my best friends in this sport are older than I am. Hal Higdon was the first of these, George Sheehan was the closest, and Paul Reese was the longest-lasting. 

I look up to them as pacesetters through life, in running and other arenas. None of us can grow younger, but we all can find leaders who show how to age actively and slow gracefully.

No one I’ve known has packed more activity into his upper years than Paul Reese. He ran across the United States at age 73, finished crossing the remaining states at 80 and published three books about these experiences (and left another book unpublished).

No one I know has approached his own finish line with more grace than Paul. Evidence of that will come later in this story, but first I need to tell how he lived and how I joined his ever-widening circle of “best friends.”

Paul was a Marine by choice, a schoolteacher in his second profession and a communicator by nature. He phoned often and wrote long and well – in books, articles, journals, and especially in letters and email.

I’m not overstating to say that Paul became my second second father. He took over that role in 1993 from George Sheehan, who’d first played that role after my own dad’s too-early passing.

Paul and I met at the 1967 Santa Barbara Marathon. On our first day of racing together I finished a little ways ahead of Paul. This began years of good-hearted competition between us.

He would beat me at marathons and beyond (especially beyond, where he shone and I stunk). I’d usually outrun him at shorter distances, where my background in speed trumped his endurance.

He would start every race fast. I would begin timidly, often catching and passing him near the finish. He took to accusing me of “stalking.”

The last time we ran a race together was 1992 at the Avenue of the Giants Marathon. Paul was 75 years old by then. I was, in his term, “a marathon of years younger” – his junior by 26, that is.

As usual I started slower. He gauged his lead each time we met on the double-out-and-back course.

As usual I passed Paul near the end. His reaction, muttered with grimness on his face but goodness in his heart: “Damn you, you sneaky runt!”

We finished about a minute apart in our final race together. This symbolized the closeness we felt from the first day we met through the final days of his life.

My first column in Marathon & Beyond spoke of Paul Reese. “The grandest old man of the roads,” I called him. He was 87 then.

Paul responded to the column as I would have expected: “Cutest old man, most handsome old man, most dashing old man – all these, while appropriate and applicable, are quite a few notches below ‘grandest’.”

This would be my last personal note from Paul. I’m glad he saw that tribute, because he was grand and because he wouldn’t see another column in M&B. He told in that same letter about facing surgery for a defective heart valve.

“I’m attempting to hold out until January [2005],” he said of that operation. “I want to emerge from the surgery and recovery, and to get back to healthy living – Krispy Kreme donuts, In/Out hamburgers, pizza and all such! “

Paul’s condition couldn’t wait until the new year. His surgery was moved to October 2004.

“The good news is that I’m still here to tell about it,” he wrote the next week in a group letter to friends. Complications followed. He wrote again to us friends in late October, with a good-bye of sorts.

“One thing you learn as you sift through life is that the most precious gift of all is love, and I’m blessed to have a generous share of that. Of course, it could be argued that I am such a splendid person, what other choice is there but to love me!”

Paul died soon afterward. He was the third older running hero I lost that year, after Jack Foster and Johnny Kelley. This is the chance you take, and one well worth taking, when you look up to your elders.

Later. Paul had ended his first book, Ten Million Steps, with this line: “One of the secrets of aging gracefully is always to have something to look forward to.”

His runs across the remaining states followed, then two more books – Go East, Old Man, and The Old Man and the Road. He left behind a fourth, the unpublished America on Foot.

Paul also left another long trip unfinished. In 2003 he’d crossed Montana (with wife Elaine, as always, driving their motorhome) on what was intended to be a multi-stage passage from the Canadian to the Mexican border. This wasn’t a bad way to go – still looking toward doing more.

This career Marine would scoff at me describing him with lines from a protest singer. But these words by Bob Dylan say who Paul was:

“May your hands always be busy,

may your feet always be swift.

May you have a firm foundation,

when the winds of changes shift.

May your heart always be joyful,

may your song always be sung.

May you stay forever young.”

Stay busy, keep moving, stand firm, stay positive, die young as late as possible. That’s how Paul Reese lived, and why he became a pacesetter of mine.

(Photo: Paul Reese would set the example for prostate cancer treatment and active recovery.)

[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 Word-wizard

(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. Dr. George Sheehan reached his final finish line in late 1993. Soon afterward a favorite race of his was renamed and moved to his old training course.

    

The next summer I walked to the start of the George Sheehan Classic in Red Bank, New Jersey. A young runner ahead of me turned to another and said, “This is a cool race. But who is this Sheehan guy, anyway?”

   

He said “She-han,” not the proper “She-un.” At that time and place this was like asking who that Kennedy was with his name on a New York City airport.

Every runner should have known George Sheehan by then. Or so his friends and fans liked to think, though he himself knew better.

   

Others built up his bigger-than-life legend, and he sometimes felt the need to knock it down to size. The two of us once walked away from the adulation that always greeted him at the Boston Marathon. He shook his head in amazement, then added, “Two blocks from here I’m just another skinny old Irishman.”

    

For all the fame heaped on him in his later years, he didn’t take all of this too seriously. Being famous was a phase that started in his late 50s, when the practices of his lifetime were pretty well set and wouldn’t change much the rest of his days.

   

As long as I knew him, which was 25 years, he wore the same blue(jeans)-on-blue(shirt and sweater) uniform while greeting crowds of runners. He drove the same little well-used cars, VWs and Hondas, that doubled as his mobile locker-room.

    

He spoke and wrote his last words in 1993. Which means that many of today’s runners can be excused for asking: “Who’s this George Sheehan?”

Many Marathon & Beyond readers came into the sport after George left. They never had the pleasure of hearing, reading or knowing him in life.

     

George Sheehan once stood taller than anyone in this sport. (Put John “Penguin” Bingham on Jeff Galloway’s shoulders, and you get an idea of George Sheehan’s stature at his peak.) No one to come along since has given better speeches to runners or written finer literature on running.

     

George was an accidental author. He wasn’t trained as a writer and had practiced medicine for half his life before publishing his first article at age 50. His medical career was winding down when he wrote his first book seven years later.

    

By then he’d settled into his distinctive style of writing: personal, philosophical and padded with quotes from great thinkers from outside of sports. The Sheehan Style would come to be widely mimicked (and occasionally satirized) but never matched.

     

His first book, Dr. Sheehan on Running, sold well among his Runner’s World readers, but the wider world wasn’t yet ready to buy running books. That would happen soon afterward.

    

During one amazing month of 1978, three different books for runners ranked among the top 10 in national sales – for all topics. Each book took a different look at the sport.

Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running profiled people who ran and what it meant to them. Bob Glover and Jack Shepherd’s Runner’s Handbook advised how to run. George Sheehan’s Running & Being examined why he, and we, ran.

     

George’s book, along with his previous and later ones, gave voice to what other runners thought but couldn’t express. They embraced him for this for the rest of his life, and beyond. They loved him all the more as he wrote as openly about his final life test as he had about other subjects.

     

In 1986 George was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer that had spread into his bones. His doctors told him to hope for another year but to plan for less. He lived seven more years – good years, mostly.

Later. Who was Dr. George Sheehan? The best way to introduce yourself to him now, or to renew acquaintances, is to read one of his books.

I worked with him on all but one of those books. He never once, in almost two decades of writing them, named one as his favorite.

    

“These books are my babies,” he said. “I could no more single out one than say which of my own children I like best.” His kids outnumbered his books, 12 to seven.

    

Once you’ve read any of them, you’ll want to read more. Once you read him, you’ll know him and won’t forget him.

(Photo: Good as he was as a writer, George Sheehan was even better as a speaker.)

[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.]