Two Ends

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 1983.)

A CONCEIT among runners is that someone has to be a runner to understand us and our sport. Rob Strasser understood, though his running was limited to sporadic and brief attempts at girth control. He had the look and manner of a defensive tackle who in retirement had gained some weight but not lost his competitive fight.

Rob fought Nike’s early battles with Tiger as an outside attorney. He then joined the new company shortly before we met in 1980.

Nike thought then that it had been wronged by the Runner’s World shoe ratings, and Rob came to California to investigate. He called me to his hotel in Palo Alto. There I found an open door, a tabletop littered with cash and an empty room.

Rob returned to find the money untouched. Later in the meeting he offered me a job at the new magazine that Nike was funding.

Maybe the loose cash had been a test of my honesty. More likely it symbolized Nike’s attitude back then toward its new riches.

The money was meant to be spent, and Rob was charged with spreading it around. His staff dealt it out freely to clubs, athletes, coaches and events. He joked that Nike’s business plan at the time was “ready, fire, aim.”

One of his fire-first, aim-later projects was Running magazine. Nike reacted to perceived insults from Runner’s World by starting a competing publication. It produced some of the sport’s finest writing.

Running magazine was an artistic success but a financial sinkhole. Nike poured millions of dollars into it before bailing out in early 1983.

Rob called with news of the closing. He reached me at a Portland hospital, where my baby daughter Leslie had undergone heart surgery.

“We want to make sure you’re taken care of,” he said. “Do you want another job with the company?”

I turned down that offer but told him, “There is one way you can help. You can underwrite my newsletter for a while to make sure it keeps going.”

Running Commentary was a year old then and still not paying for itself. “Consider it done,” he told me.

By 1983 my non-contact (by letter, phone or in person) with Runner’s World publisher and my ex-boss Bob Anderson had stretched almost three years. Neither of us had made any move to restore diplomatic relations.

Bob acted first, at the 1983 Boston Marathon. With me there were my wife Janet and our daughter Leslie, still recovering from her heart surgery two months earlier. In her first trip away from the Pacific time zone, Leslie fought off sleep the first night until one o’clock.

The next morning a phone call woke the parents but not the little girl. (We didn’t yet know she was deaf.)

“This is Bob… Bob Anderson. Can we get together for breakfast?”

 Bob’s style was to cut right to the point.  Before we ordered food, he said, “I talked this week to Rob Strasser at Nike. He has agreed that his company will advertise in Runner’s World again.

“Also he told me about your daughter also said you need a job. I told him I was willing to set aside our differences if you were.”  I was, and did.

WHEN YOU hit a bad patch in a long run, the temptation is to cut your losses by dropping out. This isn’t taking the easy way out. Stopping short hurts more and haunts longer than slogging on to the finish line would have.

In my worst failure, which would haunt me longest, I didn’t quit voluntarily. I was pulled off the course – of a marriage.

My wife Janet’s frustration and depression had built to this breaking point. My job change had moved her away from her native California two years earlier, and away from her family that still lived there, the same year that her mother had died.

Our second child, Eric, was hearing-impaired and not yet speaking sentences at age six. Our baby, Leslie, had been born with Down syndrome and a faulty heart. She had survived surgery, barely, in early 1983.

I had lost a job. Now I either worked at home or traveled far and often to bring home paychecks for speaking.

Janet had to find reasons that justified what she was about to do. “You fly off to be famous,” she charged, “leaving me stuck here with the kids.”

I’d just come back from the latest trip, a long weekend in Kansas City. Fame wasn’t the reason for going; financial need was.

But attention – even brief moments of adulation – came with these appearances. I didn’t dislike or discourage it.

Even at home I often wasn’t really there, but instead was holed up in my bedroom office and lost in writing thoughts. I didn’t shoulder my share of the family load, but left too much of the child- and house-care to Janet.

Her growing discontent moved to action in the 13^th year of our marriage and on the 13^th of November 1983. Her flood of tears and forcefully voiced grievances ended with, “Either you leave or I will.” I left, never to live again in this family’s home.

Photo: Rob Strasser at Nike took care of me best in the year when I needed his help the most.

[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, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Running Commentary

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 1982.)

THINK OF TRAINING up for competition but then having no place to race. Before long you’d wonder: Why train at all?

That’s how I now felt, except this was about writing rather than running. I did the “training” (the private writing) but had little chance to “race” (go public with the best of it).

This wasn’t happening at Running magazine, where my writing style and subject choices didn’t match the editorial philosophy. Running had positioned itself as the literary journal of the sport, and my plain-spoken words and phrases didn’t fit that image.

As 1982 dawned, I had nowhere else to place my writings while keeping my job as an editor at Running magazine. Running Times and The Runner were competitors, as was Runner’s World – where I’d broken diplomatic relations anyway, apparently permanently.

A writer wants to be read, even more than to be paid. No matter how humble the outlet or how small the readership, I needed someone to say, “I saw what you wrote.” The only way to do this was to build a writing home of my own.

This never would have happened without help. My first push came from Jon Anderson, a 1972 Olympian and 1973 Boston Marathon winner. He now published, with his father, a weekly lumber-industry newsletter and advised me on creating a similar publication on running.

Next came an essential assist from Tom Mills. He worked as an agent in the music business but was branching into sports when we met, during my lobbying efforts to win acceptance for a women’s marathon in the Los Angeles Olympics.

With that event now in place, Tom said, “I’d like to work with you on a writing project.” My reply: “Your timing is good. I’m thinking about starting a running newsletter.” Tom: “Let me see what I can do.”

He contacted Ed Fox, the Track & Field News publisher. Ed was willing to test-market what was now known as Running Commentary. Only 170 people liked it well enough to pay in advance for a publication that didn’t yet exist.

Ed said, “This isn’t enough to make it worth our while. But if you want to go ahead on your own, we’ll send you the checks to get you started.”

The newsletter started as a twice-monthly (and would later go monthly, then finally settle at weekly). It started at $24 a year (would peak at $30 and eventually become free). It started at eight printed pages (would drop to four, then a single web page, which I’d call a “column,” never a “blog”).

What started in January 1982 would become the outlet for my more of my writings than any other site.

Photo: The newsletter Running Commentary wasn’t much to look at but had a lot to say.

[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, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Oregon Calling

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 1981.)

RETREAT ISN’T necessarily defeat. Instead of surrender, it can be a pullback to revise strategy. My plan for life as a gentleman writer was failing, and to revive it I had to retreat from the bucolic beachhead on the California coast.

Once the book royalties dried up, we couldn’t live in dreamland anymore. We didn’t want to leave Pebble Beach but couldn’t afford to stay.

We’d outgrown our house, where Sarah and Eric couldn’t share a bedroom much longer. We couldn’t add on here and couldn’t buy up in the bullish local real-estate market.

Paul Perry offered a solution. The editor of Running magazine called to say, “Our managing editor is leaving, going back to New York City. Would you like to move north and take her place? Nike can raise your pay and cover your moving costs, plus you’ll find bargains on houses here.”

The benefits would be professional and financial, even educational. As a gatekeeper on content for the magazine I could assign and edit my own articles, reclaiming a voice in the running world. Moving to Eugene, where half the money bought twice the home, would solve the housing squeeze.

Sarah was now in second grade at a school that wasn’t great. The older population of this area balked at spending tax money on schools.

Eric, at three, had started to school himself. Our boy was slow to start talking.

A pediatrician had tried to ease our concerns by saying, “Don’t worry. He’s a boy and a second child. That combination often leads to delayed speech.”

Finally we visited a specialist at Stanford University Hospital. She told us, “Your boy has been severely hearing impaired since birth. Without hearing aids, he essentially can’t hear anything.”

The doctor outlined a remedial program: hearing aids and an early start at a special pre-school. At age three he took an hour-long bus ride to Salinas and back each day.

The kids deserved better schools, or at least closer ones, than we could find on the Monterey Peninsula. So we headed north to Eugene, where a job awaited, where better housing was affordable, where the schools were first-rate in this college town.

Relocating here was a needed move out of the dream and back to reality, out of a theme park that guests paid to see and into a real town. We would remain in Eugene long after Running magazine’s short life ended. Eugene, where I came in retreat, would become my longest-time home.

Photo: Pre’s Trail, hallowed ground for runners of all abilities in Eugene.

[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, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]

Nike's Magazine

(To mark twin 50^th anniversaries in 2017, as a fulltime running journalist and as a marathoner, I am posting a piece for each of those years. This one comes from 1980.)

EVER FEEL that you’ve made a big mistake by changing jobs? And that it’s too late to turn back?

That’s how I felt while visiting the Running magazine office for the first time. There, during the Olympic Trials-to-nowhere, I met the full staff and felt little part of it.

By now I felt as if Nike and Running hadn’t hired me to write but only not to write for its competitor. My writing had gone nowhere since I finished my latest book, The Running Revolution, which itself was going nowhere. My style of writing – sometimes instructional, often personal, always conversational, and built from simple words and short sentences – wasn’t the magazine’s.

The editor, Paul Perry, envisioned this as a literary magazine about running. I can’t fault him for that. It would be a noble effort and an artistic success.

Each issue would include at least one major article by a writer from outside the sport: Hunter S. Thompson’s manic take on the Honolulu Marathon, Ken Kesey’s whimsical view of newly opened China. At best these writers offered a fresh take on the sport, But not all of them succeeded. At worst they lacked insight into running and passion for it.

At the least, Running needed a balance of articles and columns by runner-writers that the magazine lacked at first. My pieces hid in small, dark corners of each early issue. That was just as well, because I wasn’t proud of what little appeared under my name.

The managing editor had come west from Sports Illustrated and tried to bring SI’s ways with her – while seeming to look down on everything that wasn’t New York publishing. She clearly didn’t like my style or content.

Editor Perry required her to accept my byline, but she used my original copy as little more than an outline to produce a revised (and shorter) piece, which read fine but wasn’t mine. Without anyone ever saying so to me, her heavy edits signaled that my writings weren’t good enough for this magazine.

On this first visit to the small suite of offices on the Willamette riverbank, quick greetings were exchanged. Then the staffers went back to work.

I had nowhere to sit and nothing to do. No one wanted or needed my advice. No one asked me to stay when I started to leave.

I retreated next door to write more of what the magazine couldn’t use. Sitting on the deck at the North Bank cafe, I alternately scribbled on a diary page and sipped iced tea while watching Olympic Trials athletes and commoners run past on the bike path.

This was the writing that I did most and liked best. No one saw most of it, but it was as much worth doing as when tens of thousands read it.

I realized while sitting in the summer sun, looking out on the river, on a weekday, that my (non)job at Running magazine came with good (non)working conditions. I would accept them for now.

If I made a mistake in signing on with Running, Nike made one too by agreeing to pay me for doing next to nothing. I decided to ride this gravy train a few stops longer before climbing off to find a real job.

Photo: Shirts on sale at the Trials to Nowhere, which took me to Eugene in summer 1980.

[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, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]