The Welches

(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. If Priscilla Welch hadn’t been such a fine runner, I never would have met her husband Dave. And without Dave, Priscilla never would have become the runner she was. They were a team that way.

This summer my wife Barbara and I shared a breakfast with the Welches. I’d known Priscilla and Dave a long time, almost since they’d moved to this country from England.

Priscilla was about to turn 40 that year, 1984. She’d only run for about five years but had improved enough to place in the top half-dozen at the Los Angeles Olympics. In 1987 she won the women’s race outright at the New York City Marathon and set a world masters record that still stands, almost 20 years later.

Dave was responsible for that success. He first encouraged “Cilla,” as he called her, to stop smoking and start running. They both served in the British military at the time.

After Priscilla finished her first marathon in about 3½ hours, she set what seemed at the time like an outlandish goal: "to improve by an hour." That would have been within five minutes of the world record back then.

Dave didn’t say, don’t be silly. He said, “I’ll do what I can to help get you there.” With his coaching, she peaked at 2:26:52.

Her professional career was easing down in the early 1990s when we worked on a book together. Along with Bill Rodgers, the result was Masters Running & Racing.

That project was rather ironic because Priscilla said, “I don’t think of myself as a ‘masters’ racer. I try to do my best against all the ladies in the field, regardless of age.”

She also talked about life of the top-level racing circuit as “a pleasant interlude” between what the couple had done before and whatever would come next. One of the “nexts” wasn’t pleasant.

Priscilla developed breast cancer and endured the full arsenal of treatments. This abruptly ended her career as a competitor.

Dave became the more serious athlete of the two. He was a primarily a runner until a hip replacement put a stop to that. Then he continued as a cross-country ski and bicycle racer.

The couple, now U.S. citizens, coached at a high school in Colorado for a few years. Then they moved to Bend, Oregon, and I now could see them more often.

Our latest meeting was this summer. Priscilla was in Eugene as a special guest at a Relay for Life cancer fund-raiser, and Dave came along.

I didn’t hear Priscilla’s talk. It came after my bedtime – and hers too, she said the next morning.

At breakfast Dave – a healthy-looking, ruddy-faced, boisterous, jolly, opinionated man in his mid-60s – talked about his bicycling season, his recent results and near-future plans. “Our highlight,” he said, “will be bicycling through Switzerland in September. We are going there with a tour group.”

As we said good-bye to the Welches that Saturday morning in July, Priscilla’s last words were, “You must come and see us in Bend.” 

Now, suddenly, there is no “us.” These inseparable teammates have been separated in the only way possible.

In September, Priscilla sent an email from Europe: “Dave died just outside Geneva whilst having breakfast. He was conversing with the others in his cycle tour about having a very easy ride that day, so that he would be healthy for the flight home.

“Seconds later he held his head and was gone. What a way to go. That’s my Dave.”

Later. Priscilla Welch's 2:26:52 marathon remained the world masters record until 2008.

(Photo: Priscilla Welch, a Brit by birth and an American resident by choice.)

[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 Speaker

(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. Glenn Cunningham was a hero of my dad’s generation. I grew up hearing how his legs were badly burned in a childhood fire that killed his brother.

Glenn began to run as therapy, and eventually developed into one of the world’s best milers. He held world records and was an Olympic silver medalist in 1936.

Twenty-five years later the Kansan earned his living by touring the Midwest, giving motivational talks. His average fee was just $30.

By happy coincidence my small high school in rural Iowa booked him as the speaker on the day I graduated. He rode a bus to the nearest station, then hitchhiked the final 15 miles.

I remember none of his formal speech that day, but all of what he said in an earlier talk. The school principal called me to his office, where he’d arranged for Cunningham to talk with me privately. He was using that office as his locker room and was changing into a white shirt, tie and jacket as I arrived.

Cunningham was 51 then. He had the weathered, wiry look of the miler he had been and of the rancher he was. (His ranch took in homeless or troubled kids and put them to work.)

He looked like he still could have bared his scarred legs and shown me how a mile is supposed to be run. And I’d just won a couple of state titles and was headed off to college as a runner.

He was the first famous person I’d ever met. Adlai Stevenson didn’t count. I was struck mute a few years earlier when introduced to this former Presidential candidate as he visited our farm.

This time I found my tongue. As we talked, Cunningham asked, “What kind of training do you do?”

I’d fallen under the spell of Arthur Lydiard by then, and told of emphasizing the Lydiard-like longer and slower runs. Cunningham disagreed with this approach.

“If you want to race fast,” he argued in words I would hear repeated often in years to come, “then you must train fast.” He recommended reversing my emphasis, especially in hot weather when long runs are “too draining.” He said, “I never ran more than five or six miles in my life.”

I didn’t put his training advice into practice, then or later. I did follow in his footsteps as a speaker.

Later. Almost 20 years further along, the two of us shared a stage the night before a marathon in Boonville, Arkansas, near where he now lived.

We spoke to a sparse crowd that seemed largely unaware of or unimpressed by the featured speaker’s credentials. Glenn Cunningham won them over with his message.

That night I told Cunningham, still a powerful figure in physique and personality at 70, when he said “nice to meet you” that this wasn’t our first meeting. He appreciated hearing this, but I could tell that mine had been just another face at hundreds of his talks over the years.

He didn’t remember me, and I didn’t expect that he would. But I’ll never forget him.

(Photo: Glenn Cunningham in the 1930s.)

[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 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.]