<4 Caption to come.

ford at a brisk pace. At 1 3/4 p.m. we arrived at Darien.

At 23/4 p.m. the pedestrian enters the village of Stamford. Here he finds another crowd awaiting his arrival. He makes a short stay at the Stamford Hotel, and is kindly cared for by the proprietor, W. G. Nichols, Esq., who did not care to know whether whether [sic] we had any money or not, and, if we had, [ “i sandal 2 RAND A SONCSAL 8G : would not consent to

have us use it at “that time.” Just as we were leaving the house, a gentleman mounted a platform and proposed three cheers for the “pedestinarian.” It is needless to add that the pedestrian received the cheers.

Amid the acclamations of the crowd, the pedestrian leaves Stamford at 3 1/2 p.M. At 5 1/4 p.M. we arrived at Horseneck (Greenwich), the scene of General Putman’s daring leap. While passing the village a bright little youth about six years of age (whose name we learned was Little Freddie,) came forward and presented Mr. Weston with a medal, bearing the portrait of Lincoln and Hamlin on either side. The pedestrian said he should preserve the medal, and ever after remember “Little Freddie.”

Just before entering the village of Port Chester, we met a baker’s wagon, and obtained a nice, fresh loaf of bread. The pedestrian “blessed that baker” many times before he retired that night. We crossed the dividing line between Connecticut and New York at 6:19 p.m. The pedestrian walked two miles in nineteen minutes, notwithstanding the roads were very rough and muddy, and arrived at the hotel in Port Chester at 6 1/2 p.m. Much enthusiasm prevailed, and he was

loudly cheered by the crowd which had accompanied him during the last mile. Having been introduced to several ladies, he bids them good-night, and proceeds on his journey, arriving at Sibery’s Hotel, New Rochelle, at 10 1/2 p.m. He is much amused at learning that they do not think he is the man, they having been “sold” several times during the evening. As Mr. Weston was about to ascend to his room, he was introduced to several young ladies, who seemed to pity him exceedingly. The pedestrian thanked them for their sympathy and expressed himself as being very well.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 27TH

We arise at 5 A.M. leave New Rochelle for New York. Pedestrian encounters very rough roads, but arrives at Harlem bridge at 9 3/4 a.m. Here he strikes into another fast gate [sic], and arrives at the Metropolitan Hotel, New York at 11 1/2 a.m.

He soon took his departure, passing down Broadway, making several calls on his way to the Courtland-street ferry and at 5 p.m. Mr. Weston crossed the ferry to Jersey City, and in company with Mr. Eddy proceeded on the plank-road toward Newark. He walked very fast and did not slacken his speed during the entire distance, arriving at the city of Newark at 7 p.m. Here a large crowd received him, and he was obliged to call the assistance of several policemen to keep the crowd off his heels. On arriving at the City Hotel, he immediately repaired to his room, and received the congratulations of many of the citizens. He then partook of a hearty supper, and at 8 1/2 p.m. retired.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28TH

We left Newark at 12 1/4 a.m. accompanied by a large crowd; among them was Mr. Eddy, who accompanied the pedestrian as far as Elizabethtown, where he arrived at 2 1/4 a.m. Mr. Eddy then bid us good-bye and we started on toward Rahway. Here the pedestrian encountered a great deal of mud, which was quite deep, and consequently very difficult to travel through; he lunched on sandwiches, and soon after became exceedingly exhausted and sleepy; complained of a severe pain in his chest and attributed it to eating of mustard on sandwiches. He stopped every quarter of a mile and sat down to sleep; was exceedingly irritable, and caused the whole party to have the blues, of the “darkest kind.” Mr. Weston concluded to go back, half a mile, to a public house and sleep (we just having passed the village of Rahway). He returns a few steps, when, suddenly throwing off his blanket, he exclaims: “No I won’t go back,” and, wheeling around, strikes into a four-mile gate [sic] and proceeds about two miles, when we arrive at the residence of Mr. Samuel Forbes. The gentleman kindly invites us into his house, and furnishes us with a hearty breakfast. As he would not accept anything but our thanks, we soon bade him good-morning and passed on toward New Brunswick. The pedestrian

keeps up a brisk walk, and arrives at William’s Hotel, New Brunswick, at 11 1/4 A.M. He was escorted to the house by a large crowd, and immediately retired to his room. The pedestrian sleeps nearly two hours, and at one P.M. prepares for dinner. After dinner, he visited Mr. Williams, who was confined to his room by sickness, and, while there, a lady requested the privilege of cutting a lock of hair from the pedestrian’s head, to which Mr. Weston made no objections. He was also requested by an artist in the town, to sit for a photograph; but, being very irritable at the time, he declined to comply with the request.

At 2 1/4 p.m. we left New Brunswick, followed by a large crowd; and, finding the roads much better, the pedestrian makes good time, and at 6 1/2 P.M. we arrive at the residence of Mr. Charles Shaun (South Brunswick, two miles from Kingston), where we were very hospitably entertained by Mr. Shoun [sic] and his family, who urged Mr. Weston to remain with them over night and offered every accommodation for himself and companions; but Mr. Weston, desiring to reach Trenton that ninght [sic], declining their kindly offer, and after partaking of an excellent supper, bade them good-bye and proceeded toward Trenton.

At 9 p.m. the pedestrian complained of his ankles being very lame, and is fearful that he will sprain one or both. He stops every few minutes and seems to be in excruciating pain. For an experiment we suggest to him the idea of riding into Trenton, but he will not listen to us and becomes exceedingly irritable, which makes him push forward more briskly. Soon after we stopped at a private house on the road, and the inmates flock to the road-side, loaded with various eatables of which we all partook. Mr. Weston was again kindly invited to stop with the family overnight but declined. (Though we did not learn the names of our worthy hosts and its family, we are none the less thankful for their kind treatment.) We proceeded, and soon after arrived at a tavern in Clarksville (7 miles from Trenton) kept by Mr. Fairbrothers. It being then 11 0’clock, the pedestrian concluded it was best for all hands “‘to turn in,’ and all retired at 11 1/2 p.m.

FRIDAY, MARCH 1ST

We arise at 6 o’clock, A.M., feeling much refreshed as it is the longest sleep we have had since our departure from Boston. Mr. Weston appears greatly improved, and seems more confident of success than ever. After partaking of a light breakfast, we left Clarksville at 6 3/4 a.m., and the pedestrian walked as well as any time since our departure from Boston, one week before. The turnpike was perfectly straight, and a beautiful road to travel on. Mr. Weston sprains his great toe which causes him some pain. Notwithstanding this, he arrives at the American Hotel, Trenton, at 8 3/4 a.m. Mr. Weston was kindly welcomed by the proprietor, Mr. J. V. D. Joline, who expressed some regret that he did not arrive the evening previous, as the citizens had made arrangements to give him a grand reception. Mr. Weston felt some disappointment at not arriving there in time, but said, “his

being detained at Worcester, Mass., had caused the deviation from his time-table, and came very near preventing his arrival there at all.”

We soon sat down to a number-one breakfast prepared by our worthy host, and while in the enjoyment of our meal, Mr. Weston is introduced to several prominent citizens of the place who congratulated him upon his arrival and energy. The pedestrian seemed to enjoy the honors conferred upon him, and as much pleased at his reception in Trenton. Breakfast being concluded, he prepares to leave, but before doing so, at the urgent solicitation of several gentlemen, he makes a short speech from the balcony of the Hotel. At 10 1/4 a.m., we left Trenton, and crossed the bridge into the State of Pennsylvania. We met quite a number of people who seemed much interested and wished the pedestrian success. We soon pass Wm. Penn’s manor, find the roads quite dusty, but the weather is clear and the scenery beautiful along the banks of the Delaware River. Mr. Weston keeps a brisk and steady walk until he arrives at Bristol, Pa., where he was kindly received by a large crowd.

At 2 p.m. Mr. Weston left Bristol followed by a large crowd who cheered him on his journey. We find the road to Philadelphia a very pleasant one, though somewhat hilly, and the pedestrian kept a brisk pace the entire distance. He finds it very uncomfortable walking on the flag-stones and brick side-walks, but artives at the Continental Hotel, Philadelphia, at 8 1/4 p.m., where we were kindly cared for by the superintendent of the house, Mr. Jones, [sic] The pedestrian is invited to take a ride to his room on the steam elevator, but declines, saying, “As he commenced to walk he thought he would not alter his mode of travel until he arrived at Washington:” accordingly he walked up to his room. He was favored with a visit by a few Philadelphia friends, and after partaking of a light lunch, and going through the usual process of bathing, retired.

SATURDAY, MARCH 2D.

We arose at 2 1/2 a.m., and through the kindness of Mr. Jones, we sat down to a very good breakfast. At 3 1/2 a.m., we left Philadelphia, and crossing the Market Street Bridge, we proceeded on the old stage-road toward Baltimore. We found it quite hilly, and having proceeded twelve miles, learned that we had taken the wrong road, which caused the pedestrian to be very irritable. He drank a great quantity of water, and this made him feel quite sick and weak. Stopping several times on the road, we obtained some refreshments, and soon after arrived at the Charter House, Media. The pedestrian slept one hour, and decided to stimulate for the first time on the journey, so he drank a very little sherry wine.

He then ate a capital breakfast, and we all felt greatly encouraged. The sun shining very warm, Mr. Weston took off his coats, and changing his shoes for lighter ones, prepared to leave. The crowd which had by this time collected, gave him three cheers, and he proceeds onward.

The road was quite hilly and somewhat sandy, but the pedestrian pushed onward, and at 6 1/2 p.m., crosses the Brandywine at Cadd’s Ford. On the road, during the day, he frequently regaled himself at private houses. Soon after crossing the Brandywine, we arrived at the Washington Hotel, Hamerton, Chester Co., Penn, where we were very hospitably entertained, by the proprietor, Mr. Conlin. Quite a crowd collected in front of the house, but Mr. Weston concluded to sleep a few hours, so retired and slept until midnight.

SUNDAY, MARCH 3D.

We arose and having partaken of a good breakfast prepared by Mr. Conlin, at 12 1/2 A.M. started for Port Deposit. It was a long and tedious walk (40 miles); for from the time we left Hamerton until 1 3/4 p.m., when we arrived at Port Deposit, the pedestrian could not obtain any refreshments to do him any good. Going into Port Deposit we managed to take the wrong road, and Mr. Weston walked down the main street in his undress uniform; it being a mile long and on Sunday, it may easily be imagined that he was not in a very amiable mood when he arrived at the Washington House. Here, though unexpected, Mr. Weston was kindly cared for by the worthy proprietor, Mr. Wm. Crompton. We are greatly indebted to Mr. Crompton for his exertions in our behalf; he used every effort, and succeeded in finding the owners of the ferry boat, and after some delay, she was prepared on purpose to convey the pedestrian and his companions across the Susquehanna River. It being Sunday, the boat was not in running order, and we were obliged to wait some time for them to get her ready. We were well cared for, and partook of a tip-top dinner, after which the pedestrian took a nap, and shortly after 4 p.M., everything being ready, we left Port Deposit, accompanied by a large crowd who escorted us across the river. Mr. Weston observing that he would have to wait a few moments for the crowd to pass through the narrow gateway to the steamboat landing, and being in a lively humor, surprised all present by leaping over a fence nearly as high as himself, [sic] Having crossed the river, the crowd gave him three hearty cheers, and he walked quite briskly for some miles. Soon after passing the village of Belair, the pedestrian became very sleepy and was exceedingly cross. We stopped at the residence of a Mr. Rogers, and Mr. Weston lay down by the side of the stove and slept an hour, when he awoke, and after partaking of a hearty lunch, furnished by our kind host, we proceeded.

MONDAY, MARCH 4TH.

It was very dark and the clouds were threatening in their appearance. The pedestrian grew weary and almost disheartened. We found an innumerable number of toll-gates, and were compelled to wait for each gate-keeper to arise and unlock the gate before we could proceed; what with hills, dogs, and darkness, it was a

long and tedious journey to Baltimore; but we arrived at the Eutaw House, in that city, at 4 1/2 a.m.

At6a.M., Mr. Weston left Baltimore. It began to rain, but only continued to rain a short time. The pedestrian walked very fast, and still felt confident of reaching Washington on time. We had proceeded about seven miles when we found our horse was unable to proceed any farther. We did not know what to do, but Mr. Weston concluded to cross over to the Relay House, (two miles off his road), and endeavor to obtain another horse companion. We accordingly visited the Relay House, Washington Junction (30 miles from the city of Washington), but was unable to secure a horse. Finding that his companion could proceed no farther, and notwithstanding he was then late, after partaking of a light lunch he bade his friends good-bye (telling them to proceed by rail and meet him at Washington). He crossed over to the road and walked the remainder of the distance alone. He said that he met but one team on the road, until he came in sight of the Capitol. Mr. Weston walked very fast, and hardly stopped while walking the entire distance; indeed on his arrival at Washington his lips were very much parched. He touched the back of the Capitol just as the clock struck 5 p.M., after having walked from Boston, Mass., to Washington, D.C. (including all delays and detentions), in ten continuous days, four hours and twelve minutes. Taking into consideration the distance he walked off the direct road, he must have walked during the journey at least five hundred and ten miles. On entering the city he was soon found out, and a large crowd followed him. Being somewhat tired after his journey, he accepted the assistance of an officer, who took him into a house, gave him a glass of ale, and then quietly escorted him to the quarters which had been prepared for him.

He found quite a number of his Washington friends waiting to see him, and after a few moments’ conversation he lay down upon a sofa and slept an hour; he then arose, and after partaking of a bountiful supper, prepared himself to attend the Inauguration Ball. He went to the ball, but being too sleepy to enjoy any thing, he remained but a short time at the ball, but returned home and retired at 10 1/2 p.M. He slept soundly and did not awake until 11 a.m. the next day.

Mr. Weston felt very much refreshed after his long sleep, and declared that he never felt better in his life. After eating very heartily, in company with a few friends he visited the Capitol, where he met Hon. Christopher Robinson, of his native State (Rhode Island). Mr. Robinson introduced him to a number of the members of Congress, among them Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, who congratulated him upon his safe arrival, and extended an invitation to Mr. Weston to visit his house.

A few evenings later, Mr. Weston attended President Lincoln’s first levee, where Mr. Douglas introduced him to Mrs. Douglas and others. He was also introduced to President and Mrs. Lincoln, who seemed much surprised that he should possess such great powers of endurance. The President offered to i pay the pedestrian’s fare from Washington to Boston.

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Eccentricities of a Long-Distance Runner

Stop and Look in the Mirror. If You Can’t Laugh at What You See, What Can You Laugh At?

Ted Veach

y wife tells me I’m anal retentive about my running. She can’t be right, can

she? Perhaps a bit eccentric. Yeah, I can accept that. But anal retentive? Ignoring for the moment the thought that only an anal-retentive person would look up something like “anal retentive,” I looked it up.

The term dates back to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis theory. Essentially, the concept is that frustration during the anal stage of psychosexual development (which includes toilet training) leads to a fixation resulting in certain personality traits or disorders. The term has come back into the modern lexicon in recent

years and is popularly used to describe someone who is obsessive, compulsive, or eccentric in some way. In this context, it is often related to some personal habit, ritual, or activity.

How about you? Are you anal retentive? The fact that you’re reading a publication dedicated to marathoning, ultrarunning, and “beyond” (whatever that means) may be somewhat telling. The medical profession tells us that we need about 30 minutes of aerobic exercise, three times per week. Although doing more may also be helpful, there is some disagreement about this, and there are definitely diminishing returns. So when we are out there running for hours at a time and spending several more of our waking hours preparing for or thinking about our running, aren’t we being just a bit excessive? Might there not be something slightly askew in our brains?

So now perhaps you might admit it. Maybe some portion of your attic insulation could be missing. Mine is, in more ways than one, but that’s a different story. Maybe some nonrunners have referred to you as being a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Look at the person in the mirror. Are you able to take a step back and laugh at yourself and some of the things you do?

Take me, for example. I’m getting over my denial stage. Yes, my name is Dan Horvath, and I am anal retentive. In fact, let me count the ways.

DAN’S DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS

“T’m making a liar out of myself.” That’s what I told myself at 3:45 one morning. It took a moment to stop and think about it—the two cups of coffee and the PowerBar hadn’t entirely kicked in yet. Prior to that thought, I had been in the process of donning

° two layers of undershorts, including one pair of wind briefs; ¢ ASICS brand Gore-Tex pants;

° two LIFA long-sleeve shirts;

e an ASICS brand Gore-Tex jacket;

¢ aski mask;

* astocking cap on top of the ski mask;

° my reflective vest;

° my reflective belt, including the two flashing lights; and

the old socks and adidas shoes.

The reason I had become a liar is that the day before, when I was asked on two separate occasions, “Dan, are you one of those people I see running out there in blizzards and sub-zero windchills?” [had answered as follows: “Actually, I’ve been taking it easy this winter, taking days off of running when the weather is extreme.” As it had been in Michigan almost every day for a couple of months. So here I was, about to go out and do battle with the elements for nearly three hours for my

weekly 20-mile run. Those elements included temperatures around zero degrees Fahrenheit and windchills between minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit and minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit. Last time I looked, that was approaching 0 K. (That’s zero degrees Kelvin, which is absolute zero, for you nonscientific types.)

I suppose I could rationalize and say that I know other runners who are lots crazier than I am. But I guess that I was living life a bit on the edge that day. The thing was that I just had to get that 20-miler in for the week—Boston was looming—and this was the least-bad day to do it. The term “anal retentive” never entered my mind that morning. In retrospect, I’d have to say that not much of anything did.

“Aren’t you afraid of freezing your lungs?” is what my mother often asks me. Lalways answer that my lungs would not be the first body part to freeze. Actually, if you dress appropriately, you can run in just about anything. And I can say from personal experience that both that statement and the corollary are true.

How did I do that morning, you ask? I managed to get my 20 miles in. It wasn’t very pretty, but I managed. And with all my body parts intact, and still attached.

PREVENTION

Over the years, I’ve had my share of injuries. Like many runners, I pretty much go bananas when I can’t run so, I’ll do almost anything (short of curtailing my running, of course) to avoid being put out of action. I’ve gone as far as to add the following activities to my regular routines:

¢ Lifting weights and doing hamstring and quad stretches to help avoid knee problems

° Toe raises and wall leaning to ward off plantar fasciitis

¢ Abdominal crunches and other back exercises to prevent lower back problems

Of course, all this prevention takes time, so much so, in fact, that I sometimes become concerned that I’Il run out of time for actual running.

I’ve come to believe that any eccentric behavior will, when repeated often enough, become accepted as normal. I’ll do some of the routines mentioned above in front of the TV at night. My family has somehow come to accept my lying on the floor and stretching one leg up in the air while holding a towel around my foot as normal. “It’s just Dad, doing his goofy stretching again. Don’t trip over him.”

RACE TACTICS

My wife, Debbie, went north with me to Traverse City, Michigan, one time. I was going to do a race, and this was one of the rare occasions where she would watch. She doesn’t often like to watch marathons, contending that from her perspective

it’s not much of a spectator sport. “Everyone leaves, and then a few hours later they come back, looking somewhat worse for wear.” This time, before the race, she caught me doing some strange things. Of course, they didn’t seem strange to me.

Thad to wear the special running shorts fitted with Velcro pockets to hold my three packets of GU. I was going to need that for energy during the race.

Labsolutely needed to drink that quart of Ultra Fuel stuff by Twinlab before the race to load up on carbs. The same goes for the quart I had had the day before.

And since it was going to be beastly hot, I just had to try out Pro Hydrator brand glycerol. This was to keep the hydration inside me from getting out during the race.

Nobody could question my use of Vaseline petroleum jelly on all of my sensitive areas. Suntan lotion (I think it was Coppertone brand for kids) was a must, of course, on this hot, sunny day. Never mind that it was bright blue kids’ stuff. The blueness went away after a while.

Then there was the Dr. Scholl’s brand toelio preventer. At least that’s what I call it. It’s a tube-shaped foam pad to go around my second toe in a feeble attempt to ward off a malady that I get more than my share of: black toenail, or black toe. For no other reason than the fact that it sounds funny, I’ve come to call it toelio.

And don’t get me started on my prerace bathroom requirements! So, no, I don’t think I was being anal retentive at all. Too bad I wasn’t able to convince Debbie of that.

college in town and then goes out and back on a thin piece of land called Old Mission Peninsula that bisects the bay. It was unbelievably gorgeous the whole way.

Too bad the weather gods refused to cooperate. It was already getting warm at the 7:30 a.M. start. By about 9:00 it was ghastly. Temperatures were hovering in the low to mid-80s, and that relentless sun simply wore me—and everyone else—down.

Another thing I did—here I go again—was count the runners ahead of me at the turnaround so I could figure out what place I was in. The early starters made it a bit tricky, but besides moving slower, they had different colored numbers, so I think my count of 39 ahead of me at that point was pretty close. As I picked it up starting around mile 14, I counted backwards the runners I was passing: 38, 37, and so on. Sometimes I would offer up this information along with my encouragement as I passed someone: “Keep up the good work. Only about 32 ahead of us.”

This sometimes evoked a reaction such as “Huh?”

Everything was going according to plan until my mile splits began to slip around mile 18. Funny how that happens. By 20 or 21, I knew that sub-3:00 was out of reach again for this day. Had I had any energy left, even at that point, I might have made it. But the heat was taking its terrible toll, and I forced myself to slow down some more. Otherwise it would have been a real crash and burn.

I decided to try to enjoy those beautiful views of the bay that came with every turn in the road. It wasn’t easy to enjoy anything, what with feeling like that, but I managed to salvage a bit here and there.

After a couple of even slower miles, I picked it up for the last 1.2, including the final sprint around the track, to finish in 3:06:55. Not bad for this day, but still not my goal. By my counting and figuring, I was about 22nd overall, and 22nd turned out to be exactly correct.

Most of the stuff I did (the GU, the Pro Hydrator, the Ultra Fuel, and so forth) didn’t seem to hurt and may well have helped prevent a greater disaster. Isn’t that the biggest problem with this kind of thing? Unless it causes an obvious disaster, you don’t really know whether it helped at all. There are too many other variables. In any event, I may not fool with that glycerol stuff again though; it’s just a bit scary for me. And I still got toelio—worse than ever—so I probably won’t use that particular toelio preventer anymore. The best thing I can do is to get lucky for a change with the weather gods. Maybe next time. Hope springs eternal.

STUPID DAN TRICKS

You would think that after 25 years of running I would learn a thing or two. You would think that I’d be above making really, really stupid mistakes. But no. I have a few good ones still left in me.

Debbie and I went to visit our friends Brian and Eileen one Friday evening. I was prepared to be talked into running the Crim Festival of Races 10-Mile the next day, even though I had the Scotty Hanton Marathon scheduled for the following weekend. In fact, I had already started devising a strategy for the Crim: go very easy for the first five and then hammer the second half. That way my legs would still be fresh for the next week. Pretty smart, eh?

Thad not been prepared to stay over for the evening, however. But after I stayed later than planned and imbibed more than planned, staying the night seemed like a very good idea. Brian and I would then drive up to Flint together the next morning for the race. Flexibility being my middle name, I borrowed Brian’s shorts and old used shoes—which had originally been mine and which I had been ready to throw out when Brian said he would use them. More on this later. No problem. But then came the socks issue. Brian tried to give me a pair of his cotton socks, but I said that cotton might cause blisters; I would just run sockless. It would be fine, I said. I used to run that way all the time in the ’70s. By now, you can see where this is going.

On a warm and extremely humid morning, the race got started. And I did run the first five miles exactly according to plan: comfortably fast, but not all out. And it was right around that point, when I was going to start to really pick up the pace, that I started to feel the blister pains in my feet. Not too bad, mind you; nothing

I couldn’t handle. As per my plan, mile six was my fastest. Except at this point those little pains in the feet were becoming big pains in the feet. At mile seven, I took the shoes off and ran barefoot. After all, it was good enough for Abebe Bikila at the 1960 Olympics, wasn’t it?

If the race had ended at about 8 1/2 miles, it would have been an enormous success for me. I had overcome my shoe/blister problems by running barefoot. Although I had lost time fiddling with my shoes and my barefoot pace — “=” ro was slightly slower than usual, I would have been happy with the result. And I was getting super comments from the crowd and the other runners! (“What a guy!” “He sure has guts!” “Oooo, that’s painful!” “How can he do that?)

Unfortunately, at about 8.51 miles, my feet began to hurt again. Did you know that even smooth asphalt (and not all of it was smooth) has lots of small sharp stones? Or that black asphalt becomes very hot on a sunny day?

This time it was cuts and different blisters from the barefoot running. These new blisters were beginning to hurt more than the original ones. Good thing I had been carrying a shoe in each hand and that I hadn’t thrown them away as I had

been tempted to do. This would have been the stupidest Dan trick of all, since one of them had the Champion Chip on it, and I would have been assessed $30 for its loss. But the chip was not foremost on my mind. So I put the shoes back on. Well, maybe the shoe blisters were worse than the barefoot blisters.

By mile nine, I was hardly able to walk, either with or without shoes. Then I saw the first-aid station. I got about a dozen Band-Aids and put the shoes back on over them. Then I was able to walk again. I even slogged the last quarter mile on the bricks for a blistering (Get it?) last mile of 21-plus minutes. Had I crossed the finish line holding instead of wearing my shoes, I’m not sure that the Champion Chip would have registered my performance.

I spent a lot of time soaking the ole tootsies after this one. I know: I needed to soak my head, too. Why, oh, why didn’t I just drop out? I guess it’s because

I’ve never dropped out of any of the hundreds of races that I’ve run. I sure didn’t want this to be my first DNF. Maybe it also has something to do with being AR. Needless to say, the following week’s marathon was not one of my best.

IT’S NOT JUST ME

I just know that I’m not alone. I’ve got a few stories to illustrate this.

A friend of mine named Gary had a strange encounter with running shoes at the Detroit Free Press Marathon (aka, Freep) one year. He decided to stay overnight at the downtown Westin for the next day’s Freep run. Gary found out, however, that he had forgotten to pack his running shoes for the race. Either at the expo or somewhere around the hotel, he managed to locate a friend and borrow his shoes.

Gary and the shoes did not get along well at all. Along about 15 miles into the race, he decided that with his blisters and all, he just wasn’t going to make it to the finish in those shoes. But you know the feeling. Gary had trained specifically for this race and did not want to just pack it in. He started to size up the people in the crowd. (Here’s the hard-to-believe part.) Finding a spectator about his shoe size, Gary somehow persuaded him to trade shoes.

At this point, we had Gary in a stranger’s shoes and a stranger in not-Gary’s shoes but a friend-of-Gary’s shoes. Finally, we have Gary’s friend without shoes at all. (Maybe Gary gave him his street shoes.) Anyway, Gary had arranged to meet the other two guys at the finish, provided that he actually made it with his feet intact.

He did. And they did, somehow, actually meet him there at the finish. Gary took them both to dinner. Probably cost Gary as much as a new pair of shoes at the expo would have. But this made for new friends and better stories.

Speaking of shoes, here’s another case. My long time friend Brian runs as much as anyone and can certainly afford to purchase new running shoes. He doesn’t, in fact, buy any. How does he manage to train for and run marathons year in and year out without buying shoes? Simple. He accepts charity donations of everyone else’s old worn-out shoes. For his latest birthday party, he opened an aromatic box containing more than 20 pairs of used running shoes. Such is the value placed on Brian’s participation in the Foxes and Hounds Great Lakes Relay Team. Brian tells me that the sizes of the donated shoes do not matter all that much to him. Lately he has been getting injured a bit more often and he’s actually wondering why.

Then there was that time I was running an extremely low-key six-hour run with Dick, an accomplished ultrarunner. We were aiming to run four eight-mile loops around a lake on a very hot day. It wasn’t enough for Dick simply to run the miles. At the start of the fourth lap, I saw him get some sort of strange contraption out of his car and place it over his nose and mouth as we resumed running. I think I

said something like, “Huh?” It was a homemade device designed to limit oxygen intake, thereby simulating altitude training. Evidently running 32 miles in the hot sun wasn’t enough for Dick.

Too bad there were little kids in the park that day as well. They were pretty scared when they saw him coming at them with that apparatus affixed to his face. In fact, so was I.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

Did you just think of a few somewhat crazy things you do in regard to your running? If not, ask nonrunning loved ones whether you act anal retentive in any

way. They’ ll think of something. Then laugh. It is all that stands in the way of a good cry. Mh

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My Most Unforgettable Marathon

(And What | Learned From It)

OSTON, April 21, 2003—The bus buzzed with activity. Some folks told jokes while people traded stories about past marathons and what they hoped to run. And everyone, at some point, jockeyed for the one bathroom.

On the hour-long ride out, I was talkative at first, getting to know my neighbors, all from Michigan. Some I knew, some I didn’t. I was wearing two hats: one as a 28-year-old runner preparing to compete in my first Boston Marathon and another as a journalist preparing to write a column about my experience for the daily newspaper that employed me, The Flint Journal.

But after arriving in Hopign HOEY MWA,

kinton, the starting point for BOST ON @ waration

this legendary footrace, I was all business about the running, something that was becoming all too familiar. I sat near the back, staying silent, as Nina Simone’s low, rough voice — bellowed through my headphones, soothing my anxiety with her many jazz standards on one of my favorite CDs.

Nothing was to stop me. Not the weather (I ran all year). Not the course (I trained hard on hills). Not the competition (I knew how to run my own race). I knew I was prepared for this Patriots’ Day in April.

Courtesy of Christofer Machniak

A Caption to come.

While I started with the goal of running about three hours—I qualified with a 2:58 in Detroit—I convinced myself that a sub-2:50 was well within reach. Looking back at that moment, all I can honestly say is, boy, did I ever delude myself. In becoming so focused on my time rather than on why I enjoyed running, I somehow lost why it was so worthwhile. It was like listening to that devil voice on one shoulder telling me the only way I could be happy was to get better instead of that angel on the other who tried to remind me that running in itself is a pleasure and a privilege.

WHAT | DIDN’T KNOW WOULDN’T HURT ME—YET

What I didn’t know was that this point-to-point winding and hilly course would be just the tonic I needed. Although taking this medicine would not be easy and would indeed be very humbling, it would remind me of why we spend those countless hours training and how that improved my life.

But such reflections wouldn’t come until later, and at that moment I was psyching myself up to perform. Sure, a sub-2:50 marathon wouldn’t be easy, but I had trained all winter long, running longer and more miles than ever before. I set PRs all over the place, including running a 1:57 in Hamilton, Ontario’s, Around the Bay 30K only three weeks before in which I ran the perfect race, with negative splits. In retrospect, I probably peaked three weeks too early, which I compounded by running yet another high-mileage week instead of beginning to taper. But I wasn’t worried about my body’s increased soreness. I refused to acknowledge how tired T actually was. I was confident, and I believed I would kick butt.

My strategy was simple. Instead of using the first half of the marathon’s predominant downhills to ease into the race, I planned to run more aggressively. Hearing so much about Heartbreak Hill, I felt I needed to take advantage of the early downhills before reaching it. I knew the danger of going out too fast, but I figured a 1:24 would be no problem, especially since I had run a 1:18 half in Las Vegas in January in the teeth of 30- to 40-mile-per-hour sustained winds.

There was good reason that my confidence and swagger were at an all-time high. Five years before, just out of college, I weighed nearly 100 pounds more than I did now and was completely out of shape. Although I ran cross-country in high school, I had given up running, mostly because of not finding the time but also because of a nagging, recurring ankle injury.

But after getting my job as a newspaper reporter at The Flint Journal, not liking how my waistline made me feel, and seeing how many in my family older than I have obesity problems, I decided to join the local YMCA. I didn’t run at first, wary about my weight and the past injury. I started exclusively on a stationary bike and later swam a few laps in the pool, running maybe three miles once a week or a month. I also changed my diet, cutting back on my Pringles addiction

and eliminating nearly all fast food from my diet except for an occasional trip to Pizza Hut or Wendy’s. It took me two years to shave off 50 pounds, bringing me to about 225 pounds on my 6-foot-2-inch frame.

Then I fell in love, and then that fell apart. Not surprisingly, I wanted to lose more weight, but now I wanted to race again. I learned that hobbies were important to have a balanced life, and I wanted exercise and running to be part of that.

ELEVATED GOALS

My goal initially was just to run injury free. But as I slowly improved, I became more and more ambitious. I had already done a couple of 8Ks, with my first over a 10-minute pace, but now I wanted to complete a race held in Flint and well known around Michigan, the Crim 10-Mile.

In training for the race, I surpassed my wildest dreams and started befriending many local runners along the way who would later encourage me to try the marathon—something I never thought I would ever do. I give them the credit for allowing me to believe it was possible. Many were my parents’ age, in their 50s and 60s, and they were training for at least three to four marathons a year. They also came from different careers and backgrounds, which I also found inspiring.

And most important of all, they taught me the importance of consistent training mixed with determination. Running with them took me to times I had never thought possible. I even surpassed my high school cross-country 5K PR by more than a minute, breaking the 18:00 barrier. I dropped nearly an additional 50 pounds. But as I improved, my attitude toward running was subtly changing from being just glad to be running and wanting to see how much better I could get to one that was not as healthy and was potentially obsessive, the “I have a goal and I will reach it no matter what” mentality.

Still, at 28, I knew I was entering the time of a marathoner’s prime. I felt ready to excel, despite some advice from friends, one of whom has done Boston 35 years in a row. He said not to go out too fast, because, while the hills can add speed, they can also destroy your leg strength. Besides, he and others were telling me to enjoy one of the most prestigious footraces in the world.

Of course, I wanted to do that and break 2:50. In my thinking, I had already run five marathons the previous year and felt that I had learned my lessons well. From overtraining and injury to learning to peak and breaking the 3:00 barrier, I experienced it all—or at least so I thought.

But I also was reacting to pressure. I had a lot of expectations to meet. My parents, who I felt had not paid enough attention to my sports when I was growing up, drove from Michigan to watch the race. My coworkers would be monitoring my progress on the Internet and had already taken me out to a good-luck lunch only a few days before. A sports editor was waiting for that postmarathon column. And I expected a lot from myself.

THE TENSION OF HIGH NOON

So much was on my mind as noon inched ever closer that even Nina’s jazz tunes couldn’t relax me. Meantime, my friends laughed and stayed loose.

Ishould have been paying more attention as they talked about the unseasonably warm temperatures. Instead, I just wished for the race to start. For me and many other people, noon was an abnormal time to start a race, and too many people were around. I was worried about arriving at my corral on time and making sure that I would get that last premarathon pit stop before the starting gun sounded. I was concerned I had eaten too much in the past few days. While trying to be diligent about what I ate, I also maybe was having too much fun in Boston, getting in maybe a day too early and draining energy to take in a Red Sox game and watch a free jazz-funk concert by students from the Berkeley School of Music. But all that walking was supposed to help too, right?

I was finally pulled away from my daze as people were writing names on their skin and shirts for the crowd to yell out during the race for encouragement, the first of many things I found distinctive about Boston and likely other big marathons. I grabbed a pen and began writing down some messages from the crowd.

One would particularly prove to be good column material. A Flint-area high school teacher inscribed the name of a marine veteran on a T-shirt that included his unit’s name. The soldier, the son of one of her teaching colleagues, was in Iraq, and his unit was among the first to enter Baghdad. After the race, she told how the crowd reacted supportively, shouting almost nonstop, “USA! USA!”

As for me, I decided I wanted to honor something, too, so I asked a friend to write “Flint” on my shoulder. My adopted hometown is best known as the city that filmmaker and satirist Michael Moore detailed in his documentary Roger & Me in attacking General Motors for closing factories. While the city has a multitude of urban problems, it is a surprisingly good place to live. So I decided that, if any place needed some good vibes from people shouting out a name, “Flint” would be better than my name.

As a group, we also wore pins for one of our elder statesmen, a 70-year-old who almost decided not to run the race after his dog died.

It was soon time to go, and I experienced my second Boston/big-marathon tradition. Seeing that the port-a-john lines were endless, I followed a few people into a nearby stand of trees. A most surprising thing was it wasn’t just men. But if you gotta go—

PRACTICAL PROBLEMS—LIKE A LACK OF SUNSCREEN

After relieving myself, I made my way to my destination: the third corral. As I walked there, I realized the first of many miscalculations of the day as the sun began baking my untanned skin—I had no sunscreen. The temperature was also

very warm, and I would later learn that it was above 70 degrees at the start. Getting worried, I began asking spectators whether they had any extra sunscreen, but without luck.

Once inside my corral, I found a little to cover my shoulders from a sample bottle someone graciously gave me. As the start neared, all my concerns left me as the excitement of the race took over. So many people; so much anticipation. I thought back to the year before when I watched the start on ESPN2. Many of my friends were at that race, and I had dreamed of being here. Any doubt about not racing a sub-2:50 was gone. In fact, if I ran a 2:45, I could enter New York without getting into the lottery.

At the last minute, one of my friends, a college counselor in his early 60s, surprised me with his presence. A veteran of nearly 50 marathons at the time, he talked his way in, saying it was his last Boston. You wouldn’t expect that from a retired high school principal, but my friend has this thing about always being close to the starting line.

Before I realized it, the race started and down the first hill we went, flying way too fast. I tried to slow, but the pack made it difficult as rush-hour traffic seemed tame in comparison. We reached the first kilometer well under six-minute-mile pace.

That was no good. I just tried to relax, and that seemed to work; but I missed the one-mile split. | wasn’t worried until I got to the second-mile mark, showing me at about 14 minutes. Uh oh. Now I was too slow. I stepped it up, surging ahead in the still very crowded phalanx of runners. I began to pass and cut someone off, drawing a stern, dirty look.

This marathon was definitely different. Normally, I would find several runners chatting early in the race with whom I could pace and say a few words. That usually relaxes me and helps the miles go by. Not today. I would see the same runners for many miles as we would pass each other back and forth on the hills, but any conversation at this point seemed out of the question. Everyone seemed way too serious. But the enthusiasm from the crowd made up for it. Even in the more remote areas, people were urging us on, something you don’t get at every marathon. And definitely not like my first in Las Vegas, where you see more tumbleweeds than spectators.

HOPING FOR THE RHYTHM TO KICK IN

Moving on, I began hitting my splits for 1:24, but the hills were taking a toll. Usually in marathons, my pace seems relaxed and almost effortless, especially at the start. But I had to labor to maintain. Still, 1 wasn’t worried. Sometimes in other longer runs, I struggle for several miles before finding that right combination of wind and leg turnover.

» Caption to come.

What I didn’t know was that the sunscreen on my shoulders wouldn’t be enough to protect my back not covered by my singlet. The sun cooked my back as I sped east toward Boston, although I wouldn’t feel it until after the race.

Nearing the halfway mark, I began to hear the screams from the women of Wellesley College. I had heard about the famous offer of a kiss to any runner who slows enough for an embrace. With my nose running and being all business about my sub-2:50, I decided to high-five the crowd as I moved by. But I got more column material when I saw another guy in his 20s take them up on the offer. Soon after, he turned to me and said, ““What a rush!” His reaction made me laugh and regret that I hadn’t done the same. But I definitely wouldn’t have used the race to look for love as several men did, detailing their names, telephone numbers, and occupations on their T-shirts and singlets.

While the Wellesley experience distracted me from how tired I was, not long after it became all too clear that sub-2:50 wasn’t in the cards. I was at about 1:25 at the half, but almost immediately I began to slow down, first by 20 seconds a mile, then by 20 seconds more. I tried fighting it at first but then understood that 3:00 should be my goal. But it was far too late for that. By mile 16, I had to walk—something most humbling because I had walked in only one other race, a marathon in Traverse City, Michigan, the year before where an injury forced me to seek the sag wagon at mile 21. That experience really motivated me here. I decided that I might have to walk, but I was going to finish. Besides, I still looked forward to the downhills after Newton.

For the rest of the race I struggled, running on the flats and downhills and walking most of the uphills. I figured I could still get in under 3:10 and requalify. But when I reached Heartbreak, I barely realized it and didn’t care. I was more concerned about the next four to five miles. Not even my friends could help. One

Courtesy of Christofer Machniak

tried to urge me on to a faster pace. I tried to follow, but while my mind was willing, my legs were not.

A RADICAL CHANGE IN WEATHER

The weather also changed as a strong ocean breeze cooled temperatures. While refreshing at first, the wind later chilled me, especially during my walking breaks. After the race, in the massage area, therapists would have to wrap my body in blankets to stave off symptoms of hypothermia after my fingertips and lips turned blue.

But my body wasn’t that frigid at this point, and here’s where the people in the crowd really helped. They shouted, “Go Flint! Come on Flint! You can do it Flint!” as I fought and clawed just as my adopted town does. There was a groan every time I stopped to walk but a cheer every time I started to run. They shouted in masses of people sometimes three to four deep and from rooftops. My body was toast, but I wasn’t going to quit. I wasn’t as bad as others, some of whom by the end of the race would crawl and refuse to be helped.

Close to the end, I started thinking about my parents, who had said they would be near the 26-mile mark. I really wanted to see them, but with so many people, would I? At mile 25, I began running along one side, peering into the multitude, determined not to miss them.

Within sight of the finish line I almost did, except I heard my mom shout my name after I had passed them. I turned around and jogged back to see them both with big smiles and full of pride. I leaned into the crowd and hugged my mom and grabbed my dad’s hand. They didn’t care about time, and finally neither did I.

And What | Learned From It

Looking back, | was too serious about doing well at Boston instead of just enjoying the race. In the future, | should take a cue from one of my friends who, when faced with the warm temperatures of Boston in 2004, took along a super soaker.

Still, the race itself and the immediate aftermath provided the best lessons. The point about priorities hit home even more when | got back to work a couple of days later. To my complete surprise, | found a huge congratulatory banner hanging above my desk from my coworkers, who signed it with comments. The most poignant, paraphrased from a biblical verse, will forever stand out to me:“The race is not given to the swift nor the strong, but to those P

who endure.” | couldn’t agree more. Ib

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

Thirty Phone Booths to Boston

A Classic Running Book by One of Running’s Classiest Guys.

NTRODUCTION BY JOE HENDERSON

We can’t see a golden age while it is happening. We can’t spot the greatness of an era until we’ve seen how far it stands above the years that followed. Given a generation’s perspective, we now see the 1970s as the golden age of U.S. men’s marathoning. We can say the same for U.S. writing about running, and in two cases the names of runner and writer overlap.

Look at all the *70s yielded and that no later decade has: In Olympic running, Frank Shorter’s gold and silver medals at Munich and Montreal, plus the fourth places of Kenny Moore and Don Kardong. In bestselling writing, for all topics, the running books of Jim Fixx, George Sheehan, and the Bob Glover—Jack Shepherd team.

These authors earned their success. They wrote well and delivered the right message at the right time as running and running bookselling boomed together.

But I would argue that Fixx, Sheehan, and Glover—Shepherd weren’t the best writers the ’70s spawned. For quality and durability of their work, I would go with Moore and Kardong. They have more in common than their near misses at the Olympics. Moore and then Kardong a few years later were Pacific Northwest—born, ran for Pac-8 (now Pac-10) colleges, were world class in track before turning to the marathon, and peaked in the 2:11s.

And both broke into writing about running in a magazine that I edited at the time. Moore first appeared there in 1970 and Kardong five years later.

Kenny would say now that he didn’t “write” for Runner’s World then. The magazine reprinted a piece of his from the University of Oregon alumni publication.

Don wrote an original article for RW. How it came about is a funny story in itself, one best left for him to tell. How he tells stories distinguishes him from his fellow fourth placer. One isn’t better than the other; they’re just different.

When I first talked to Kenny Moore about rerunning his article, he was studying for a graduate degree in creative writing. He was in training for the career to come.

When I asked Don Kardong to write his first article, about his 1975 trip across the newly opened borders of China, he was working as an elementary school teacher. A career as a writer? You can’t be serious.

His apparent lack of seriousness, or at least his inability to take himself and the sport too seriously, would distinguish his writing and endear him to readers. With Moore, you expected to be impressed by his thoughts and observations. With Kardong, you expected to be amused by his experiences and misadventures.

This isn’t to say that Don writes the way a slapstick comic performs. He’s no buffoon. His relaxed style features a gentle jibe here (often aimed at himself) and a clever turn of phrase there. The writing appears to entertain Don as much as it does his readers. It seems to be his break from the serious contributions he makes to the sport and to his community.

He helped professionalize running as a cofounder of the Association of Road Racing Athletes. He served as long-distance chairman of USA Track & Field and as president of the Road Runners Club of America.

At home in Spokane, Washington, he launched and still works on the Bloomsday 12K race, of which he is now executive director.

His writing pace has slowed of late, and not just because of competing obligations. Curiously, Runner’s World hasn’t assigned an article to this long time favorite of its readers for more than two years. (A brief column of his does appear once a month on the RW Web site.)

Don will write feature articles again, somewhere, sometime. Meanwhile you don’t have to wait to read him again. Over the next several issues, Marathon & Beyond will serialize his first book.

Thirty Phone Booths to Boston takes its title from an offbeat article by the same name. He covered the 1981 Boston Marathon by calling pay phones along the course and asking whomever picked up to tell him how the race was going.

This and 22 other pieces of vintage Kardong make up the book subtitled Tales of a Wayward Runner. Smile and laugh along with the author, remembering that this runner—writer from the golden age runs and writes onward a generation later.

INTRODUCTION

You, there! Yes, you, standing at the back of the store, trying to decide whether to buy this book. I have a confession to make about how I moved into the writing game. Please listen.

Thad nurtured, from an early age, a dream of writing something important someday, but the what, why, and when of it, in spite of English and creative writing classes, did not seem to lead anywhere in particular for quite some time. Instead, I spent most of my postcollegiate days running, training for international track and field competition. By 1974, I had become a runner of minor note, and the only writing I had done was in inventing answers to the questionnaires sent out by track and running magazines. “What is your favorite distance?” they once asked. “One light-year,” I replied.

On one occasion (though I’m embarrassed to admit it), I sent a letter to Track and Field News, asking a silly question that I hoped would be printed. I signed the name Kelly Walters, who was my coach’s son, because (does this seem too obvious?) I didn’t want anyone to know the letter was from me. Kelly Walters seemed like a nondescript sort of name to use.

Kelly didn’t agree. When he saw my letter printed with his name attached, he felt I had somehow scored a point in the game of life at his expense. He decided to retaliate.

Unbeknownst to me, Kelly wrote an article and sent it to Runner’s World magazine, signing my name. I learned of his retaliation when I received a note from editor Joe Henderson, telling me that he liked my writing style but couldn’t use the article.

limmediately fired off a letter to Joe, explaining that it had all been a mistake, that the article hadn’t been written by me, that he shouldn’t consider the deficient prose of the evil Kelly to be representative of my own, etc.

Before Joe got that letter, though, he had already written me another one.

“T really did like your writing style,” he confessed, “and I understand you’re going on a track and field tour to China. Would you be interested in doing an article for us?”

Thus was my writing career launched.

Today, people still refer to my style now and then, mostly in praising things I didn’t write or rejecting articles I have written but which “are not the Kardong style.” Is it any wonder I sometimes stare at the typewriter keys, wondering where to start?

Writer’s block or not, though, this collection includes stories I’ve written for Running Times, Running, and The Runner over the past ten years. Many thanks are due to the editors of those magazines for their help, encouragement, and (generally delicate) editing.

I’m tempted to dedicate this collection to Kelly Walters, but I think I’ve already given him enough mention. On the other hand, “my friend Bridgid,” as I refer to her in the earliest of these pieces, who has become “my wife, Bridgid,” since then, certainly deserves whatever honor a dedication might hold, since she put up with the rantings, ravings, mood swings, and caffeine abuse that chased most of

these articles to completion. But I think I’ll wait until the novel I keep promising to write is finished for that one. Now, that’ll be a dedication!

This one, though, the first book, is dedicated to my parents. To my mother, who unselfishly typed the final drafts of my papers in high school while I slept soundly down the hall, and who remembered in the morning to tell me how good they were. And to my father, who still wonders what it is I do for a living. Let’s hope that guy in the back buys this thing, right Dad?

And I hope he enjoys it.

(MAY 1980) MOUNT ST. HELENS

Somehow, someone had talked me into getting up at 6:15 on a Saturday morning. This was in many ways a more bizarre occurrence than the one that would follow. I generally use my Saturday mornings wisely, sleeping soundly as they fade into Saturday afternoons. But on this day I was up and running.

General Volney Warner, a U.S. Army four-star-studded gentleman, was in Spokane to act as grand marshal of the annual Lilac Festival Parade. He had shunned an offer of a round of golf in favor of a five-mile jaunt through one of the city parks, and I was acting as his running guide.

He and IJ and his aide cruised along easily, enjoying the greenery and clear air of that sunny, remarkably beautiful morning. As we ran, we talked of conditioning in general, running in particular, and of course running shoes. I noticed that the four-star general was wearing five-star shoes, a discrepancy I thought it best not to mention.

As we came to the end of the park boulevard, we turned onto another road that followed the edge of a steep embankment, where we could suddenly see miles to the southwest.

“Boy, that’s beautiful,” remarked the general’s aide. “We don’t have anything that looks like that at home.”

And so we continued on our run, occasionally glancing to our left at the green hills and mist-laden valley, a picture-postcard view that in a matter of hours would be turned into an abomination of swirling gray ash.

On Sunday I made up for the previous day’s early rising by sleeping until almost noon. In doing so, I’m proud to say, I slept through the greatest earthly explosion of my lifetime, louder even than the noise emitted by my father when our dog flunked her bowel and bladder control lessons for the third time back in the early sixties.

The volcanic blast of May 18, 1980, occurring some three hundred miles away, made not so much as a flatulent bark in the Spokane earscape on that day, nor had it altered the sunny weather of the previous day by so much as a candlepower by the time I got up.

I awoke to sunshine and the eerie reports of disaster on the radio.

In looking back, it seems ludicrous not to have taken more notice of impending doom. Powerful as the eruption sounded from the news reports, though, it seemed inconceivable that it would have an impact on life as far away as we were. Thus unmoved, I made plans to have breakfast with my fiancée, Bridgid, followed by an afternoon run and a flight to Missoula, Montana, for two days of physiological testing.

We had been warned over the radio that the volcanic cloud was moving our way, but as we drove along the route of Saturday’s run with General Warner, the view to the southwest seemed only slightly darkened. I remembered standing on a hill east of Seattle one night in 1973, foolishly scanning the sky for any sign of Comet Kahoutek, which was promised by astronomers to be a dazzling, phenomenal streak in the heavens, but which ended up being nearly invisible. I suspected that the eruption of Mount St. Helens would turn out to be a disappointment of similar proportions.

The pancake house where Bridgid and I had breakfast was the first real catastrophe of the day. The waitress forgot to bring syrup, coffee, Coke, or silverware, and while we waited for those few items, we talked about a party we had attended the night before.

Ed, our host, had told of climbing Mount St. Helens ten or fifteen years earlier. He had stayed at the Spirit Lake Lodge, spoken with its notorious owner, Harry Truman, and enjoyed camping near the lake. As Bridgid and I were remarking on the irony of having discussed all this on the eve of the eruption, the true irony and tragedy lay in the fact that the lodge and Harry Truman himself lay, unbeknownst to anyone, under at least thirty feet of hot mud. Spirit Lake was history.

The waitress returned with silverware, forgetting syrup and coffee. My waffle was cold. The day was off to a bad start.

An hour later, Bridgid and I were looking out my front window at an everdarkening sky. It was obvious by now that the passing of the volcanic cloud would be a phenomenon worthy of observation after all, but it wasn’t clear how dark it would get. It seemed a notion worthy of science fiction to consider the sky getting any darker than it already was.

Bridgid and I rode with my roommate Steve to the bank overlooking the Spokane River and stood gawking at the sky. It looked like an enormous cold front moving our way. Friends of mine who had failed to catch word of the eruption would later remark that that’s exactly what they thought it was: an approaching storm. Strange, though, they noted, that there was no wind, coolness, or smell that accompanies such a storm.

As we watched, car headlights began to blink on and a few street lights flickered to life. We were overlooking a bridge where two weeks earlier over thirteen thousand runners had stampeded across in the 1980 Lilac Bloomsday Run. As

race director, I asked myself for the first of what would be countless times during the ensuing weeks, “What if this had happened two weeks ago?”

And it continued to darken.

Back at the house, disaster reports were coming in on the radio. We heard of the enormity of the blast and of the anticipated loss of life. It finally began to sink in that this was a disaster, not just an entertaining natural phenomenon.

Still, we couldn’t imagine that we would be feeling much of an impact in Spokane, and we sat entranced by the radio reports, sipping beer and enjoying the novelty of the day.

After a few minutes, the announcer began telling of the situation in Yakima, where an eighth of an inch of ash had accumulated.

“Did you hear that?” I exclaimed. “An eighth of an inch! I wonder if we’ll get any?”

Bridgid suggested an experiment. She put a sheet of plain white paper on top of one of the cars, with the intention of spotting any ash that fell. /f any fell.

A few minutes later we heard her scream, “Come see this!”

On top of the paper were a few minute dustings of ash. We were all excited. Thirty minutes later the paper was covered. We were learning quickly that the sight of ash was nothing to get excited about.

Meanwhile, it had become almost pitch black. In the headlights of cars leaving a nearby golf course we could see swirling clouds of volcanic dust. It looked like a very cold, powdery snowfall in the dark. Cars were being covered with it, as well as trees and houses. As well as everything. It looked unhealthy.

A girl came riding down the street on her bicycle, and Steve yelled at her, “Hey, get out of this stuff!”

“What is this, anyway?” she yelled back.

“It’s ash from a volcanic eruption,” he shouted.

There was a slight pause as she rode away, followed by a cynical, just barely audible, “Yeah, sure.”

We went back inside and listened to the radio in the dark. People were dead, cars were stranded, flights were grounded. It began to feel like disaster. I got up, walked to the refrigerator, and popped another beer.

By this time the airport was closed down, meaning, of course, that I had no way of reaching Missoula. For a variety of inane reasons, this was the fourth time Thad been unable to get there as scheduled, and I would have been embarrassed to cancel again without the ironclad excuse at my disposal. I dialed Ned Frederick, who was planning to meet me at the airport.

“Ned, this is Don.”

“Don?” There was a slight, what-is-it-this-time pause. “What’s going on?”

“Ned, I know this is going to sound like another one of my excuses, but I can’t get over there because of a volcanic eruption.”

After my earnest explanation, Ned politely refused to believe me. The hour of ashfall in Missoula had not yet arrived. I stuck to my bizarre story, though, until he reluctantly pretended to believe it. We agreed to reschedule for another time.

Having freed up my afternoon by canceling the Missoula trip, and having stared out the window for a long time as the sky lightened and revealed a landscape powdered with gray, nasty-looking ash that choked the air and threatened to destroy the lungs of anyone who ventured outside, and having downed my third Oly, there remained only one possible course of action for the afternoon. I turned to Steve.

“Let’s go. We’ve got to run in this.”

In ten minutes, clad in shorts, T-shirts, handkerchiefs, dark glasses, and absurdity, we were off and running.

The ash was still falling, and without dark glasses the tiny bits of pumice seemed to burn the eyes. The handkerchiefs, moistened and worn over nose and mouth, gave the impression of protection for our lungs. The overall visual effect was bizarre. Butch Cassidy and the Some Dunce Kid.

We ran three miles, long enough to realize we didn’t want to be out there at all, let alone out there running. (A friend of mine asked later if we looked “ashen and pale,” a la Jimmy Carter, when we returned.)

Our run had not gone unnoticed, as we discovered later in the day, when we ran to the grocery store for food and more beer. The girl there recognized us as “the joggers” she had seen earlier. She refused to help us, or even look at us, muttering “Idiots” every time we walked by.

Back home, we settled down for dinner and what appeared to be a long siege. On the radio we heard that schools and businesses would be closed the next day. Later the announcer let us know that a second cloud from the eruption had reached Yakima, would reach Spokane after midnight, and was expected to darken the sky again. “Of course, it’Il already be dark then, though,” he said, and then added awkwardly, “So… we won’t notice it.”

By this time, though, sunshine at midnight wouldn’t have seemed unusual.

Having grown up as I did in Seattle, where snow is as unusual as sunshine, I remember the feeling of waking after a freak snowstorm and hearing school cancellations on the radio. That’s what Monday morning after the eruption felt like.

The snow analogy seemed appropriate in other ways, too. Spokanites, used to dealing patiently with accumulations of white stuff in the winter, were using similar methods to deal with the quarter inch of ash that covered everything. Snow shovels were blazing and brooms were flailing in an attempt to impose order on the chaotic landscape.

People were beginning to wash down streets, yards, houses, and trees with garden hoses, though the question of whether a combination of ash and water

would produce sulfuric acid was unanswered, and the problem of what the tons of ash being washed into the sewage system would do was also unsolved.

Other questions—Will there be more ashfall? Should masks be moist or dry? Will our drinking water be poisoned? How long will this last?—continued to mystify all of us. With the vague smell of sulfur and ash in the air, with the absence of auto traffic producing surrealistic, stifling stillness, and with the health questions associated with breathing ash unanswered, I decided not to run that day.

Airport closed. Exercise dangerous. In one week the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials would take place in Buffalo. I was glad, for the first time, that the Olympic boycott had cancelled my interest in that race. It would have been unsettling, to say the least, trying to deal with the eruption if a major race were only a few days away at the other end of the country.

Tuesday brought few answers to the many bizarre questions people were asking about volcanic dust, but it did bring irony to the surface for those who appreciate such things.

This was the first day that, walking to the grocery store, I noticed someone wearing an unusual mask. I was prompted to respond as one might in admiring a new shirt: “Hey, what an interesting mask. Where’d you get it?” Somehow I managed to avoid speaking those silly lines, although it did seem that everyone’s interest in ash-masks as apparel was growing.

In the ensuing weeks, the discussions raged back and forth about which masks to wear, whether to moisten them or not, and how effective they actually were.

No one really had any concrete evidence as to whether breathing the ash was dangerous. After a while, people began to speak of “silicosis,” a lung disease common to coal miners, and a few respiratory pundits dragged “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis” out of the bottom drawer and began waving it around.

Once again irony. In seventh or eight grade a friend of mine had brought the word to school one day, thus supplanting “antidisestablishmentarianism” as the lengthiest word anyone knew. I had carried pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis around in my mind for twenty years, occasionally rolling it around my tongue, enjoying its comical scientific rhythms, having no idea what it meant. Now, possibly, I was dying of it.

Most people were taking no chances with volcanic ash, especially since it was suggested that it might be carcinogenic. Masks of every shape and form appeared in an effort to combat the possible cancer-fiend. The irony this time was in seeing people who smoked cigarettes suddenly worried about lung disease.

In the weeks ahead, people were spotted who had pushed their ash-masks up on their foreheads so they could enjoy a smoke. At least one clever inventor showed up in public wearing a mask in which a small hole had been cut to allow a cigarette to be inserted.

Trony also lay in the fact that this was the second day of Spokane’s “Non-Polluter Commuter Week,” a brand-new civic celebration to encourage alternative transportation. I talked with one of the organizers of the event a few days later and told her she had done an excellent job of reducing automobile traffic, though Thadn’t noticed a great improvement in air quality as a result.

The ironies of Tuesday, coupled with the numerous unanswered questions and a good dose of cabin fever, led me to begin running again. I donned moistened handkerchief and headed down toward the river on a nine-miler.

Running that day was like training on the inside of a vacuum-cleaner bag or the bottom of an ashtray. The lighter part of the ashfall easily blew in the air, making breathing uncomfortable in spite of the mask.

I stopped occasionally during my run to observe tracks in the ash: Birds’ and mammals’ were easily spotted, but most amazing of all were the insect tracks. So fine was the volcanic powder that insects as small as mosquitoes made observable tracks as they struggled to get airborne.

Bees, laden with dust rather than pollen, fell to the ground and struggled to free themselves of the fine powder. It was possible to follow their paths of death in the ash, marks that looked like the tire tracks of tiny unicycles, circling awkwardly around and around and finally crashing. I never expect, no matter how long I live, to observe the death-tracks of bees again.

My run ended with two miles through city neighborhoods, where the scene of masked people hosing down their property and nearby streets was one of postnuclear catastrophe. I know the sight of a runner must have provoked curiosity, amusement, and even anger among the infrequent passing motorists, but with the dust flying no one seemed to care about rolling down windows to shout insults.

I returned home tired, and especially tired of battling a Mother Nature who seemed to have been so frivolous with her ill favors.

Wednesday marked the third day that my store, The Human Race, has been closed. During a morning run, I sensed that the worst part of the disaster was over, since only the passage of cars and the dust clouds they raised made running uncomfortable. Otherwise, it was tolerable, and it seemed that an attempt at going back to work was in order. Perhaps the next day.

I got a telephone call a little later. “Is this the last surviving member of the Human Race?” It was my partner Rick.

We decided to open the store the next morning, though it seemed unlikely that people in town would be chopping at the bit to buy new running shoes. We were very likely going to face severe problems as a result of the sudden loss of income, and we talked of ways we might try to turn the disaster around by selling souvenir T-shirts (“I survived the Mount St. Helens Summit Run: May 18, 1980”) or having a special ““Get-Off-Your-Ash-and-Run sale.”

“After all,” I told him, “if you can’t make money off a disaster, you’re not a true American.”

“Well, all I can say,” he replied, “is that none of this would have happened if Portland had had their annual procession of virgins this year to appease the volcano.”

“Why didn’t they have it this year?” I asked, the eternal straight man.

“One of them was sick,” he answered, “and the other one didn’t want to march alone.”

I spent the rest of the day in the yard, hosing down the roof, trees, and cars. The assault by the volcanic enemy had created a bond among neighbors as everyone struggled for the third straight day to clean up the mess. I felt the sense of community that must have prevailed during World War II, when people shared a common enemy.

The desire for a return to normalcy was very strong, but no one seemed to know when normalcy might be expected to show its face again. How long would life be dusty?

The evening news spoke of riots in Miami and the human disaster at the Love Canal near Niagara Falls, as well as the fact that President Carter would be flying out west to observe our volcanic problems. Hearing of Niagara Falls reminded me of the forthcoming Olympic Marathon Trials, and once again I speculated on what my thoughts and emotions might have been if that race had remained a priority for me. I hadn’t heard an airplane flying overhead since the eruption, and most of the highways were still closed. It would have been one hell of a struggle to get out of town.

The local news showed more pictures of disaster and continued to give contradictory information on what the long-tern effects of the ash might be. “What we really need,” said one newscaster, “is a good rainfall.” She turned to the weatherman. “Is there any rain in the forecast?”

“T wish I could say that there was,” he replied. He went on to describe the dry, dusty conditions our area could expect for the foreseeable future.

I watched television a little longer, then picked up a book I had nearly finished, The Collector by John Fowles. The story of a woman imprisoned in a psychopath’s basement and her yearning for fresh air had a particular resonance by this time. How long would we have to wait for rainfall to wash this stuff away, so that all of us could breathe fresh air again?

Then I heard it. Or maybe I just sensed a change. I went to the front door and opened it, and a breeze of hope blew in. It was raining!

In a few minutes the sky that had promised no precipitation was dumping enormous bucketsful, washing the ash out of trees, off houses, down sewers, into the river.

The rain would continue through the night, and though the morning would be fresh, the ash would fly again and again, resisting like an unwelcome visitor any attempt to send it on its way.

In the ensuing weeks, the rains would continue periodically with unusual vigor, as if Mother Nature were trying to atone for her volcanic wrongdoing. It would be almost a month before people stopped worrying about pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and began breathing easy. There would be many more dusty days, some incredibly bad ones, and innumerable discussions on potential health problems.

The effects of the eruption on Spokane would continue for weeks, months, even years, and yet standing there in the doorway as the rain fell, I realized with relief that nature was already beginning the long process of renewal. The next day, Thursday, I would run ten miles without a mask.

(WINTER 1980-81) THE JOY OF WINTER

I began my running career in Seattle, though that fact only muddies the issue. I began running, I think, in spite of Seattle. Or at least in spite of its weather. It doesn’t rain a lot in Seattle, so the saying goes, it just rains all the time.

I once heard a disc jockey in Spokane reading what he claimed was a letter from his mother in Seattle. “It’s been beautiful weather here this past week,” his mother wrote. “It’s only rained twice. Once for two days, once for four.”

And how about the Seattle method of weather prognostication: If you can see Mt. Rainier, it’s going to rain. If you can’t, it’s already raining.

And on and on. Seattlites hate this kind of talk. To them, Perry Como said it right: “The bluest skies you’ve ever seen are in Seattle.” I prefer it my own way: “The bluest skies you’ve never seen are in Seattle.”

Thate this weather. I detest running in it.

The progression of my athletic career in this climate was logical up to its final point. I gave up baseball, a career destined to be rained out anyway, after I missed the practice where uniforms were handed out, and ended up with a uniform that made me look like a stick in a garbage bag. I forsook football after choosing to be a tackle (that’s another story), and suffering rain-soaked on the sidelines through my first game. I abandoned golf after losing yet another ball in the middle of a muddy fairway. I thought it was unfair that a ball hit straight toward the green, perhaps a trifle high, should be allowed to disappear upon impact with a swampy fairway. Archaeologists may wonder about this some day.

And so, logically, I played basketball, an indoor sport. And there it should have ended.

“What are you doing to get ready for basketball?” the coached asked me one day.

“T don’t know,” I answered. “Shooting a few baskets now and then. What should I do?”

“Why don’t you run cross-country?”

Looking back on it, I suspect he was looking for a way to get rid of me. Really, does cross-country help basketball? Does Dr. J jog? Anyway, before I knew what had happened I was a long-distance runner, with soggy gray sweats that weighed thirty pounds and socks around my ankles. I was all wet.

At the time, the rain really didn’t bother me. I had grown up in that climate. Thad built models of the greatest hydroelectric projects in the world in ditches near my house, until the police told me I was eroding the roadbed. I had gone camping with the Boy Scouts in that weather, huddling in tents while the rain drummed happily on the canvas top, until I read in the manual that moss grows on the north side of a tree. In the Northwest, it grows all the way around, which caused me much confusion and disillusionment with Boy Scout wisdom. I had lived in that weather for years without even knowing my hair was wet. Then I graduated from high school and headed south.

One would assume this was the subconscious speaking, making some kind of urge of its own felt. If I hadn’t realized it yet, my subconscious seemed to know that I hated this cold, miserable wetness. Running in California would be wonderful, just what I needed. Wouldn’t it?

When I left, my mother gave me an umbrella as a gift, the first I had ever owned. Though she seemed guileless, I suspect she knew something I didn’t. Who ever heard of taking an umbrella to California?

At this point you may think I’m going to tell you a story about how it rains in California. You think I’m going to tell a story like this one:

On the way to the Honolulu Marathon last December, I stopped in San Francisco and gave fellow runner Roy Kissin a call. We made arrangements to go for a long run on Mount Tamalpais, in spite of the chance of continued rainfall.

“Once we get in under trees we’ll be pretty well protected,” Roy said, believing it.

“Roy,” I asked him as we began our run, “what’s the worst you’ve ever been deceived on a run?”

“Well, you know. Someone tells you a run is five miles and it ends up ten. Or they say it’s flat and it’s really hilly. That kind of thing.”

“T don’t know,” he said after a pause. ““What’s yours?”

I realized I didn’t have a good answer. “I don’t know either,” I said, surprised. “T wonder what made me think of the question.”

As we headed up the road into the park, Roy looked at the gray sky. “It looks like it’s letting up,” he said. “We might have timed this perfectly.” Meanwhile, as we entered the “shelter” of the trees, huge drops of water began falling from the leaves above us.

“What’s your misery quotient?” Roy asked, as the wetness began to soak through.

“My misery quotient?”

“Yeah, you know. One-to-ten. Mine’s about a five.”

“T’d have to go with a five, too.” I said. “As long as I’m warm I’m all right.”

We continued running up the mountain along a muddy trail for another twenty minutes, and as we rounded one turn the wind hit us full force. “Roy,” I yelled, “Pm a six.”

“Don’t worry,” he yelled back. “I’m a six too, but we’ll be out of the wind and onto a level section at the top of this hill.”

“Which hill?” I screamed. “The one we’ve been on for the last forty-five minutes?”

“Yeah, that one,” he said, grinning soggily. “Mount Tam.”

We did finally crest the hill and get out of the wind, but the rain was increasing, and my misery quotient edged up another point.

“T’m a seven, Roy, and the only thing that keeps me from being an eight is the scenery here. It’s beautiful.”

“Tt’s even better when you can see it,” he said.

We hadn’t seen anyone else along the way, but as we ran around one of the reservoirs we spotted a crew of workmen in yellow slickers burning deadwood. They seemed more interested in staying close to the fire than collecting wood, and as we passed on the trail near them they all stopped to stare at the sight of two thinly clad runners moving through the woods. Interesting comments must have passed between them regarding our presence there.

A mile or two later we passed the furthest point in our voyage and turned to head home. We ran out of the woods and across the top of one of the dams, and this time we were hit in the face by a forty-mile-an-hour wind and near-freezing rain. The hood of my rain jacket was flapping against my ears like a canvas truckbed covering on the freeway, and I struggled to keep Roy in sight ahead of me as we followed the narrow path around the reservoir. The wind was gusting hard enough to blow whichever leg was off the ground out of its normal stride, and at one point my legs got tangled up and I fell. Roy, unaware of the fall, kept running. An image of him getting most of the way back to the car before realizing I wasn’t behind him came to mind. I struggled to my feet and ran to catch up.

“Roy!” I screamed, so he could hear me through the storm. “I’m a full-blown ten!”

“Right!” he yelled back.

The misery quotient of ten lasted only a few minutes, until we managed to get back among the trees. The thought that we were on our way back down the mountain, and that we would soon be finished with this madness, brought it back to a more respectable level.

“T think I lied back there,” I told him. “It was only a nine-and-a-half.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “I understand.”

“You want to know something, though,” I said.

“T’ve finally figured out the worst I’ve ever been deceived on a run.”

I didn’t mean to tell that story. I was talking about the rain I grew up with in Seattle, and I was talking about moving to California with my new umbrella, and the implication is that it was the same thing all over again. Such was not the case.

Certainly I remember rain in the Bay Area, running intervals in the tunnels of Stanford stadium to avoid the downpour, listening to the complaints of native Texans on the team about the bad weather; but I also have trouble thinking of more than a handful of times during college when rain upset our workouts. But I finally figured out why my mother gave me an umbrella, even though I’m sure she didn’t realize it.

It was because there was no variety in California weather, just as there was no variety in the weather I grew up with. It was the same problem in a different guise. In Seattle it was gray, with “the bluest skies you’ve ever seen” every other February 29th, and in California it was the other way around. Neither way was healthy, and when I finally realized that, I moved to Spokane.

In Spokane, and throughout the vast breadbasket of the nation that does not live in either perpetual rain or perpetual shine, there exists something called winter, something that I saw pictures of when I was growing up. Currier and Ives kind of thing, an image of Christmas on the farm, with snow on the ground and smoke out the chimney and grandma and grandpa at the door. I was nostalgic for winter before I had ever experienced one, and I remain to this day convinced of the value of winter in the overall scheme of things.

In an area with four seasons, life is always getting better. Take running, for example.

Spring running is better than winter running because it’s easier to stay warm and the streets aren’t icy. Summer running is better than spring because it doesn’t rain and you can get a tan while you run. Fall running is better than summer because you don’t have to worry about getting heatstroke and the scenery is gorgeous. Winter running is better than fall because you can relax from competition and get your aching body back together.

How hard is it to convince yourself that no matter how bad running is at any particular time, in a month or two it’ll be better?

And aside from that argument, there are those who will actually maintain that of all periods of the year, their favorite time for running is in deep dark dreadful winter. Why?

Because in the dead of winter life is not dead, it’s dormant. Goals have a way of reshaping themselves in anticipation of spring. Competitive plans simmer. In the frozen expectations of dark winter running, dreams are conceived. Warm clouds of breath puff into chilled air, long-johned legs work rhythmically, a lone runner hears the squeak of waffle soles as he propels himself along a snow-crusted, tree-shadowed, star-lit road.

“How would you know? You’re never here in the winter,’ said Bridgid, my wife.

“What do you mean, I’m never here?” I return.

“You’re in Hawaii, or Florida, or Bermuda, or. . .”

“T’m here for most of it. I love running in the winter.”

“Anyone with a tan line where you have a tan line shouldn’t be talking about winter running.”

“You know where it is. . . “’ End of discussion.

Nevertheless, I do love running in the winter. I feel strength developing. I feel dreams flourishing. I feel confidence building. I feel that the struggle of maintaining a training program at freezing temperatures improves my will power.

Think of all the great runners who have come from frozen winter wastelands in the Midwest and Northeast: Lindsay, Meyer, Rodgers, Virgin. Isn’t this cause for thought?

“They all go to Hawaii and Florida too,” Bridgid reminds me.

“Yes, but they didn’t used to,” I reply. I thought this discussion was over. “Winter running is what makes them tough. It tempers the spirit.”

Bridgid rolls her eyes. “Why do you leave all the time, then?”

I once asked Garry Bjorklund if it was true that runners from Minneapolis, as I had heard, ride the bus ten miles into the wind on a cold day so they can run home with a tailwind.

“T’ve never done that,” he responded. “It does get cold there, though. I once ran when the air temperature was minus forty and the wind was blowing. The chill factor made it a hundred below.”

He told me this during a training run in Hawaii.

It isn’t easy, by the way, to get to Hawaii, Florida, and Bermuda. You have to go through Chicago or Newark or Washington, D.C. I ran once across the Mall in D.C. when the wind was whirling enormous clouds of snow all around me. The only humans outside gritted their teeth, squinted their eyes, covered their ears, and dreamed of the Bahamas as they followed the single line of runners ahead of them, like prospectors climbing a narrow mountain pass into the Yukon, nurturing strange dreams of success. Runners.

The next day I was in Florida.

Iran once, when I saw nowhere close to my hotel where a runner might reasonably be expected to train, through an area of New Jersey where young kids gathered around burning trash barrels for warmth and women in fishnet stockings yelled, “Hey, nice legs, honey,” from inside the fur coats where they huddled as I passed.

The next day I was in Bermuda.

Iran once in Spokane when there was no wind, only the chilly temperature and the still whiteness of a winter evening, lit by a full moon. Nice.

The next day I was in Winnipeg. After all, I don’t always get to fly south for the winter.

Perhaps if winter weren’t dark as well as cold, more runners would appreciate the season. But something about the invention of daylight savings time, and the way all the summer light we become accustomed to suddenly disappears when every clock in the country falls back an hour, makes the onset of winter a catastrophic rather than gradual event. We are suddenly running blind as well as cold. I like this too.

Perhaps I enjoy winter running on account of the darkness more than the cold. I have always resonated spiritually to the image of distance running as a solitary sport, a personal journey, a monastic pursuit. Nothing fulfills this image more than an evening winter run. The self-defined hero battling the elements and dreaming of victory in the spring, striding quietly through the faint fading-orange February dusk.

“Would you hurry up and run if you’re going to run,” Bridgid tells me as I dawdle in front of the TV, dressed in long underwear, mittens, and sweatshirt, gulping coffee.

“T have to wait for my caffeine buzz,” I tell her. “It’s cold out there, you know. And it’s dark. I need this unsettling caffeine nudge to get out the door.”

“Well, hurry up and get it over with.”

And finally out the door I go, enlivened by the coffee, more attuned to the mellow symphonies Mother Nature will provide during the run. The coffee has heightened my perceptions. Plus, I can’t sit still.

I was conceived, as I once determined, under the influence of a full moon. I was born on the shortest day of the year. Is it any wonder that I have this affinity for running in the dark?

Magical things happen during a dark run. An undetermined animal, high up in a tree, screeches as I pass. A shooting star drops toward the horizon. An owl asks, “Whoooo?” A lone bird floats in front of the moon. The river passes in shards of reflected light. I hear movement in the bushes.

This is the stuff of dreams, unfolding.

I strode easily around a city park one December evening, the fog thickly settled in the trees around me, an uneasy stillness sitting with it. In the midst of the city, I felt alone as I ran. Suddenly I was aware of music, coming from one of the side streets. Christmas music. As it got louder I noticed a glow coming from the same direction, and I realized that an apparition was materializing out of the mist. In a few seconds I recognized Santa Claus and his reindeer, passing through the streets of the city to the tunes of the season. Santa Claus, visiting me during my run!

“That was a Santa Claus float,” Bridgid told me later. “The shopping center hires someone to drive it around to drum up business.”

“Tt was nice, though,” I told her. The next time I saw Santa in the store I winked. He winked back.

How can one compare this kind of winter epiphany, with all its promises and satisfactions, to the groveling in the rain and flirting with heatstroke that is running in other seasons and locations? Winter running is its own reward.

“Then why do you leave?” Bridgid would ask.

Good question, of course. Why? Because the glitter wears off when the temperature hits twenty below. Because the glamour wears thin when you twist your ankle for the third time in a week or you trip and become a human snowball on the pavement. Because the glory wears ragged when your breath has frozen in tiny ice-balls in your moustache, beard, and sideburns, and your nose is beginning to twitch in the first throes of frostbite.

That’s when, if I can’t fly south, I head for an indoor track.

Indoor running isn’t so much an alternative to winter running as it is a respite, a pause, and a jewel with its own facets. Winter runners like myself learn to appreciate the weekly experience of driving to the nearest facility, changing into shorts and T-shirts, and dropping into the rhythm of an interval workout while the snow falls outside.

There is even the special satisfaction of dodging the tennis players, baseball jocks, and fitness joggers as we tear around the turns at breakneck pace.

“Get out of the way!” someone yells in encouragement.

“Out of the first two lanes!” screams a tennis player.

“Track! Track! Track!” we shout in response.

How can you beat this kind of enjoyment?

And the end of this weekly ceremony, the icing on the cake, is to visit the local grocery store, buy beer and munchies, and take our time driving back to town. Earl plays “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’” on the tape deck while we drive the back road, recalling our lap times and watching our driver maneuver the icy road ahead. We may even stop at the downtown YMCA for a whirlpool and enjoy a few minutes of hot-tub satisfaction and the unusual joy of seeing bikinis in midwinter as the snow falls outside.

It is a long time from that first chilly autumn day when you realize you’re running your morning run clad only in shorts and T-shirt while the reader board flashes thirty-five degrees as you pass, to the day in March when you finally sense that winter’s chokehold on Mother Nature is beginning to relax and you can begin looking for the first signs of spring.

But it finally does happen. You realize that it’s been getting lighter every evening and that you’re beginning to see where you’re stepping as you run.

You sense rebirth in the woods. The ground is moist from melted snow and soft under your feet as you run over it. You imagine the yellow bursts of wild daisies that will punctuate the forest floor in a few weeks. You smell pine in the air. A squirrel squeaks and scurries as you pass. And you realize that somehow all the wonder of this recurring cycle has earned its poignancy as counterpoint to innumerable dark, frozen runs along the same route. Runs that are fading in memory, melting under the onslaught of spring.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of evenings when the peculiar rewards of a toothgritting, frozen-cheeked, finger-numbing, frigid-muscled run are not immediately apparent. One January evening at a local restaurant I eavesdropped on a conversation at the table behind me.

“You know what was great about being in Seattle this week?” I heard a man say. “I could run without bundling up and freezing my lungs. I could actually run without having my feet slip out from under me. It was enjoyable to run again.”

“Didn’t it rain?” someone asked.

I restrained myself with great effort, while outside the snow continued to fall.

Thirty Phone Booths to Boston will continue in our next issue.

The Lincoln All-Sport/ National Guard Marathon

photo to come

In a Land Where Football Is King, the Marathon Has Made Its Own Way.

In early May, the corn in the fields surrounding Lincoln, Nebraska, is knee high, and talk around the water coolers centers on football recruiting, the spring football scrimmage, and whether red is an appropriate color for a wedding dress. Hereabouts, it is.

But in the back pages of the sports section, right below the projected quarterback depth charts, readers begin to see articles about the All-Sport Lincoln Marathon—now renamed The Lincoln All-Sport/National Guard Marathon. And as an event with a 27-year history in this town, it’s worth reading about.

GETTING HERE

Lincoln is accessible by several major air carriers, but it can sometimes be a money-saving alternative to fly into Omaha and make the 50-mile drive west to Lincoln along Interstate 80. For those with more time on their hands and a flare

The Basics

The Lincoln All-Sport/National Guard Marathon

The Lincoln Track Club

882 Lakeshore Drive /00:is this address cq? Marathon entry shows different address. XQQ/ Lincoln, NE 68528

RACE DIRECTORS: Nancy Sutton & Gary Bredehoft PHONE (BEFORE 10:00 p.m.): 402/435-3504

WEB SITE: www.lincolnrun.org/marathon.htm

E-MAIL: markrupp@inetnebr.com /QQ: is this correct? XQQ/

ADDITIONAL EVENTS: Half-marathon; also a Mayor’s Run on Saturday for kids

YEAR RACE ESTABLISHED: 1978

NEXT RACE DATE: O1MAY05

START TIME: 7:00 a.m.

COURSE RECORDS: male 2:20:09, female 2:42:45

AWARDS: $500 first male and female, $125 first master male and female, $100 first wheelchair

NUMBER OF VOLUNTEERS: 750 to 800 MARATHON FINISHERS IN 2004: 873 MALE/FEMALE FINISHERS: 69% male/31% female COURSE MARKINGS: Every mile

AID STATIONS: At least every 2.5 miles

ENTRY FEES: $50 to $75

for the romantic, Amtrak serves Lincoln on the[ ] Line /QQ: California Zephyr? XQQ/, which runs along the northern half of the United States from Chicago to San Francisco. If you’re driving within the city limits of Lincoln, remember that, although the city is driver friendly, the downtown is crisscrossed with one-way streets. Parking on weekends in the spring is easy, as there are many spaces close to the marathon activities.

PRERACE ACTIVITIES

The downtown and warehouse district of Lincoln has undergone a renovation in recent years, and it’s here, at the newly built Embassy Suites, that the expo and registration take place. The expo is modest but often features nationally-recognized speakers. Registration is done exactly as it should be: simple and correct. The pasta dinner the night before the marathon is also very simple and unremarkable. It’s also free to runners and family.

The Saturday before the marathon is also the day of the Mayor’s Race, a one-mile run that attracts more than 3,500 kids each year, the largest such run in the Midwest.

If there’s a downside to your visit to Lincoln, it might be that you are here during the last few days of the spring semester and the downtown area is full of very typical filled-to-overflowing college bars and loud parties. Our advice: stay clear of Lincoln’s infamous “O” Street action.

THE NATIONAL GUARD MARATHON TEAM TRIALS

It doesn’t take long before you notice the significant presence of members of various National Guard units from across the United States. It’s not because of an anticipated outbreak of civil unrest by hundreds of out-of-towners on a lacticacid buzz or anarchy by the college crowd but because Lincoln has become the site for the annual National Guard marathon time trials.

Every year, Army and Air National Guard units from each state and all the territories send their finest marathon runners to Lincoln in an attempt to become a member of the National Guard marathon team. The top 35 men and top 10 women under the age of 40, along with the top 10 masters (men and women) make the team. The National Guard marathon team competes at the San Francisco Marathon and the Air Force Marathon. /QQ: Both? These are only about seven weeks apart. XQQ/ The team’s purpose is recruiting, and it is credited with enlisting more than 530 people in 2003 alone.

THE MARATHON COURSE

The marathon begins and ends just east of Memorial Stadium on the University of Nebraska’s city campus. Prior to the race, there is ample room inside the nearby

Must See/Must Avoid MUST SEE

If you decide that Lincoln is your destination for a spring marathon, come early and stay late. Believe it or not, the city and surrounding area have lots to do, and only some of it involves football.

But, if you are interested in college football history, your first stop should be Memorial Stadium, on the campus of the University of Nebraska/Lincoln. Enter on the west side, and you’ll be able to view memorabilia of past Husker glory and step inside the hallowed Heisman Room. In a state where “triathlon” means punt, pass, and kick, a tour of Memorial Stadium is a good place to begin your visit.

But Nebraska is more than football. It also has corn, milo, soybeans, and large hooved animals called steaks. …| mean cattle. But the two are closely related. Not that a tour of the Crete Farmland Processing Facility (South Highway 103, Crete, NE, 402/826-4381, 20 miles southwest of Lincoln) wouldn’t make for an educational experience./QQ:are tours available? XQQ/ But the prime product of this facility Omaha Steaks—is far more appealing (and nationally renowned) and can be found in several of Lincoln’s family-owned restaurants. For those carnivores and omnivores who are looking for a culinary experience with some real meat on it (pun fully intended), try a meal at Misty’s Steak House (north: 6235 Havelock Avenue, 402/466-8424; south: 200 North 11th Street, 402/4767766) /QQ:are these Misty’s Restaurant & Lounge and Misty’s Steakhouse and Brewery? XQQ/ or The Steak House (34th & Cornhusker Highway, 402/ 466-2472). Both offer delicious meals, and unlike visiting the Crete Farmland Processing Facility, you don’t have to wear rubber boots.

Farmers in Nebraska haven’t always raised cattle, however. In fact, several thousand years ago the inhabitants would periodically feast upon a woolly mammoth that strayed from the mighty herds that roamed the region.Remains of these beasts were discovered in the early 1900s and can now be seen with hundreds of other displays of prehistoric life in Nebraska at Morrill Hall (14th & U, 402/472-2642) on the University of Nebraska campus, just east of Memorial Stadium. Admission is a donation, and the museum also features a section for young explorers and offers several hands-on displays. In front of Morrill Hall stands a life-size bronze statue of an adult woolly mammoth that is just slightly smaller than the typical Nebraska offensive lineman.

If you prefer your history a little more current but equally impressive, then a short trip east on Interstate 80 to the Strategic Air Command (SAC) Museum (28210 West Park Highway, Ashland, NE, 402/944-3100) /QQ: 800-358-5029? XQQ/ is worth a few hours of your time. The SAC Museum is one of the largest

fully enclosed buildings in America and houses a huge collection of America’s military airplanes from the 1930s to the present. Featured exhibits include the B-52, B-29, and B-25 bombers and two high-altitude spy planes, the U-2 and the SR-71.The SR-71 is the fastest aircraft in history. A treat for the flying enthusiast is an F-14 Tomcat flight simulator that takes seven “passengers” on a high-speed ride through canyons, around mountains, and through a landing on a flight deck. | recommend doing this before dinner if you’re having trouble controlling your urges for fine Nebraska steaks. The SAC Museum is impressive in both size and spirit. You can’t help but walk away feeling slightly more secure with not just the machinery but also the stories of the people behind our air defense.

Finally, a stroll through the state capitol building (402/471-2311) /QQ: 4710448 four tours? XQQ/ is interesting if for no other reason than to take a look from high atop the observatory over the plains of Nebraska. Because of its unique architecture, the capitol building has been dubbed the “Phallus of the Plains,” but it really doesn’t look like it, so get that out of your mind right away. | mean it. /QQ: taste? XQQ/

MUST AVOID

The main place to avoid is “O” Street because of the college party scene. The marathon is scheduled very near the end of the semester, and things get pretty animalistic down there in the heart of downtown.Were the woolly mammoths still around, they would likely leave town during college party season.Or maybe they forgot to, and that’s why they’re extinct.

Coliseum (home of NU’s other national champs, the volleyball team) for stretching and relaxing should outdoor temps be too cool.

The first six miles of the course wind south through some of the city’s most beautiful neighborhoods, which feature the homes of Lincoln’s original affluent. The people of these neighborhoods now look forward to the marathon and line the streets, sipping espresso and shouting encouragement.

Miles seven and eight are on a bike path before the course turns back north and encounters the first hill of any significance at mile nine.

At mile 13, the course is once again downtown and near Memorial Stadium. Here, those running the half-marathon leave the course to their finish line while the marathoners continue around the campus.

The second half of the marathon course is an out-and-back section that goes from downtown to Holmes Lake in the southeast part of town. This section is flatter than the first half loop, with only one significant climb as runners reach the lake.

y University COURSE

‘of Nebraska

MAP x START FINISH N : A * + 1 & Aid Station A Y 1 Mile marker s 24

Sunken Gardens’

Folsom

<= 22 = Normal Harrison

NAF Normal

Lincoln Country Club

COURSE OVERVIEW/FAST TIMES

The Lincoln Marathon course is flat. It has two long hills that are not particularly steep and are of no significance overall.

The course is not particularly scenic, but it is impressive in the most important way: course support. Virtually everyone who has run this course echoes this statement. Volunteers are plentiful, responsive, glad to be there, and genuinely supportive. Aid stations provide water and sports drinks as well as bananas, oranges, and candy.

The course is also well marked and staffed at every intersection, thereby ensuring safety.

Also, just before mile 19 runners pass by current Nebraska Governor Mike Johanns and his first lady, who call out: “Welcome to Nebraska! Way to go, runners! Use corn-based ethanol products!” /QQ: seriously? XQQ/

The Lincoln All-Sport/National Guard Marathon course has a reputation for being fast. This is attributed to two significant factors: the flatness of the course

and the involvement of the National Guard. Runner’s Highs/

You’ll be sharing the marathon 1, course with 800 to 1,100 other Runner’s Lows

runners. By today’s standards, you HIGHS would expect about 20 sub-3:00

. Flat, fast course finishers based on the number of

starters. But in Lincoln, the number Typically great weather

is much closer to 50 to 60. /QQ: Start/finish together and easily

44 in 2004. XQQ/ Why so many? accessible

Remember, each state sends its best Aid stations well stocked and National Guard runners to Lincoln maintained

each year. While these aren’t elite Free pasta dinner and postrace food runners, they contribute about one for all

sub-3:00 marathoner per state. Add

in the local non—National Guard KO runners who regularly run sub-3: Web site almost too basic 00, and you have an unusually high Notlaiscenialcourse

number of finishers under the 3:00 barrier. So what?

So, the Lincoln All-Sport/National Guard Marathon has gained a reputation as the place in the Midwest to go if you’re trying to break the three-hour mark or qualify for Boston. It’s not lonely up front in Lincoln. In fact, it’s crowded.

POSTRACE

Lincoln is a town that likes to eat, and the food here is awesome. In fact, once finished with the marathon, runners and their families are once again fed for free. This time, however, it’s a more classic Nebraska item on the menu: pork sandwiches, cookies, and ice cream. Cattle, for at least one day, can rest easy.

FINALLY

The Lincoln All-Sport/National Guard Marathon is a great midsize race that stays within itself and is a reflection of a very modest city in a very unassuming part of the country.

Nebraska has never been known for glitz and glamour. It features just success. This is the home of Tom Osborne, not Ozzy Osbourne. So, if you’re looking for a marathon that’s free of hype and flamboyance (at the expense of organization of execution), then the Lincoln All-Sport/National Guard Marathon is your spring marathon destination. If you want all that fancy stuff, go to Kansas.

The Bottom Line

We have weighed various aspects of a marathon within a 1,000-point scoring grid. Besides the author of the article, two dozen runners at the race were randomly chosen to score the race for us (LM = The Lincoln All-Sport/National Guard Marathon). The results follow:

1, HISTORY/TRADITION Evaluate the race’s sense of history and tradition. Possible points: 30 LM score: 25

2. ENTRY FORM Is the race entry form clear, concise, attractive, complete, and easy to fill out? Possible points: 20 LM score: 19

3. ENTRY COST For most races, the entry fee covers between 30 and 50 percent of the cost of putting on the event. Rate the value of your dollar relative to this race.

Possible points: 30 LM score: 26

4, LOCALE/SCENICS Is the race held in an area that is easy to get to and scenic and offers adequate food and housing services and nonrace activities for family and friends?

Possible points: 50 LM score: 42

5. REGISTRATION Is registration well organized and efficient? Does it bog down unnecessarily? Possible points: 20 LM score: 19

6. PRERACE ACTIVITIES Evaluate activities, such as pasta feeds, parties, and so on, during the days before the race.

Possible points: 50 LM score: 32

7. EXPO

Does the expo offer a fair number and variety of booths relative to the race’s size? Are there quality exhibitors and good guest speakers?

Possible points: 50 LM score: 36]

8. COURSE

Take into consideration the following: degree of difficulty, certified, sanctioned, quality of road or trail surface, adequate mileage and directional markers, aid stations, medical coverage, race communications, accessibility to course for friends and family, typical weather, and so on.

[Possible points: 400 LM score: 330]

9. RACE AMENITIES

This category includes race T-shirt, finisher’s medal, finisher’s certificate, adequate and efficient finish area, ease of sweatbag retrieval, showers, postrace refreshments, awards ceremony, raffles, results postcard, results book, and so on.

[Possible points: 250 LM score: 225]

10. VOLUNTEERS Are the volunteers experienced and adequate in number? [Possible points: 100 LM score: 89]

MARATHON 843 points

TOTAL SCORE FOR THE LINCOLN ALL-SPORT/NATIONAL GUARD tt

The Rest of the Pack

Below, listed alphabetically, are other marathons profiled in Marathon & Beyond, the volume and issue number in which each race’s profile appeared, and the overall score each race received. An asterisk (*) behind the score indicates that a member of the M&B staff has revisited that race and rescored it—either up or down—based on changes that have been made; the changes are briefly detailed at the bottom of the following list. A double asterisk (**) behind a score means the event has no expo and the total score is out of 950 points instead of 1,000. A cross (t) behind a score means the race is now defunct.

Adirondack Marathon (vol.5, issue 2),845 points; Aspen Fila Skymarathon (vol.4, issue 1), 863 points;** Atlanta Marathon (vol. 4, issue 5), 840 points; Big Sur International Marathon (vol. 6, issue 6), 937 points; Boulder Backroads Marathon (vol. 7, issue 4), 886 points; Calgary Marathon (vol. 3, issue 2),876 points; Cape Cod Marathon (vol.7, issue 5), 863 points; Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon (vol. 3, issue 6), 901 points; City of Los Angeles Marathon (vol. 8, issue 1), 788 points; Columbus Marathon (vol. 8, issue 4), 866 points; Crater Lake Marathon (vol. 7, issue 3), 790 points;** Dallas White Rock Marathon (vol. 4, issue 6), 856 points; Detroit Free Press Marathon (vol. 5, issue 3), 892 points; Edmonton Marathon (vol. 2, issue 2),814 points; Fox Cities Marathon (vol. 3, issue 4), 865 points; Glass City Marathon (vol. 6, issue 1), 862 points; God’s Country Marathon (vol.6,issue 2),695 points;** Governor’s Cup Ghost Town Marathon (vol. 2, issue 1), 795 points; Grandma’s Marathon (vol. 3, issue 1), 968 points; Greater Hartford Marathon (vol. 6, issue 3), 898 points; Honolulu Marathon (vol. 2, issue 4), 906 points; Humboldt Redwoods Marathon (vol. 2, issue 3), 809 points; Idaho Great Potato Marathon (vol. 7, issue 2), 771 points; Key Bank Vermont City Marathon (vol. 4, issue 2), 888 points; Kiawah Island Marathon (vol. 6, issue 5), 825 points; Lake Tahoe Marathon (vol. 6, issue 4), 867 points; Las Vegas International Marathon (vol. 1, issue 5), 831 points;* Motorola Marathon (vol. 5, issue 6), 876 points; Napa Valley Marathon (vol. 2, issue 5), 913 points; Nokia Sugar Bowl Mardi Gras Marathon

(vol. 7, issue 1), 837 points; Ocala Marathon (vol. 7, issue 6) 810 points;** Ocean State Marathon (vol. 5, issue 5), 886 points;t Park City Marathon (vol. 8, issue 2), 837 points; Philadelphia Marathon (vol. 1, issue 4), 838 points; Pittsburgh Marathon (vol. 1, issue 6), 904 points;t Portland Marathon (vol. 3, issue 3), 943 points; Quad Cities Marathon (vol. 4, issue 3), 885 points; Royal Victoria Marathon (vol. 5, issue 4), 918 points; San Francisco Marathon (vol. 1, issue 2), 903 points;* Santa Clarita Marathon (vol. 4, issue 4), 866 points; Shamrock Sportsfest Marathon (vol. 2, issue 6), 866 points; Steamtown Marathon (vol. 3, issue 5), 892 points; Twin Cities Marathon (vol. 8, issue 3), 888 points; Vancouver International Marathon (vol. 1, issue 1), 851 points;* Wineglass Marathon (vol. 1, issue 3), 839 points; Yonkers Marathon (vol. 8, issue 5), 751 points;** Yukon River Trail Marathon (vol. 5, issue 1), 870 points

The Las Vegas Marathon score went up due to the race moving its expo from tents at Vacation Village to one of the major downtown hotels and expanding the expo. The finish line area has also been improved: with the new finish line area, the 90degree turn into the final 70 yards is now a thing of the past.

The San Francisco Marathon score rose in the wake of a half-dozen years of enjoying an increasingly stabilized race organization, gradual growth in size, and attention to detail. The course, although not perfectly agreeable to fast times in a city built on seven hills, has been much improved, as have the prerace activities.

At Vancouver, the score has gone up based on several factors: many of the bridges (major uphills) have been removed from the course, as has the industrial area on the far end of the Lions Gate Bridge. In addition, the entire event has been consolidated into one area (the BC Place complex, which is one of the few remaining structures from Expo ‘86), which contains the Vancouver Marathon offices, fitness and health expo, seminars, and the start/finish areas.

LETTERS

Ijust received your September/October issue and immediately went to Joe Henderson’s first column for the magazine. I started running at the age of 35 (I’m now 40) and decided to build a running library stocked with some of the best material written ever written on running. My collection contains every issue of M&B and over 50 running books from the last 30 years, including a number of Joe’s books.

One of my principles in life is to follow best practices and to learn from the truly great ones. In my mind, Joe is truly one of the great ones—bringing Runner’s World to life, introducing George Sheehan to a new career, working with Paul Reese on publishing his inspiring story of running all over the country as a senior, and helping thousands of runners over the years through his writing, speaking, and now coaching at his local university. But most of all, what sets Joe apart are his humanity and his affection for fellow runners, regardless of where they are on the spectrum of ability. Thank you for bringing Joe to the pages of M&B, and I hope we have the privilege of reading his work for many years to come.

Mark Siwik Cleveland, Ohio

Ilike Joe Henderson’s definition of “beyond.” It encompasses a dimension of running that goes beyond sole power to heart and soul power. Moving his

byline from another magazine to this

fine one demonstrates that beyond is just the beginning.

Cathy Troisi

Seneca Falls, N.Y.

Borrowed Wings

Many thanks to you and to Emilio Romero for sharing the story of how running has helped Emilio cope with this wife’s sudden and tragic death (‘Borrowed Wings,” Sept/Oct 2004). In early 2004, I also unexpectedly lost a loved one with whom I shared my passion for running: my 44-year-old brother, Joe. Daily I struggle to wrap my head around the fact that my strong, athletic big brother died of complications from surgery that, we have since learned, might not even have helped him had he lived. My brother’s death has profoundly altered the lives of my whole family. But it has also profoundly altered my running. I am more mindful and more grateful than ever that I have lungs to breathe with and legs to run with.

Like Emilio, when I’m running I sometimes feel that Joe is helping me along; I borrow his wings. Yet, at other times, I feel equally sure that he is borrowing my legs. This knowledge does not leave me bitter but rather produces in me a strong sense of peace and responsibility: I run because my brother doesn’t get to anymore.

Cara Finnegan Champaign, Ill.

Keep Up the Good Work

I just felt compelled to write you. Som ething. Anything. To tell you all what an absolutely incredible periodical you have put together. It is so refreshing that, in the days of cookie-cutter sport magazines (recycled articles, low-carb diet tips, four-minute ab workouts, and so forth), you have managed to completely redefine what a great sport periodical should be.

Lalso subscribe to Runner’s World and Running Times, both of whichI can scan and finish the “important” articles and information in about 10 minutes per mag. With M&B, it takes days to get through all of the great articles, editorials, and other tidbits.

You know what you have figured out? That people, and runners in particular, are willing to read. Yes, read. We don’t need lots of pictures, choppy phrasing and two-paragraph articles. We are willing to turn the page and keep on reading all that we can find about running! I can go on and on, but Iknow you’ve heard it all before. Thank you. Thank you for doing what you are doing. And more importantly, please keep doing it!

Nick Piscitelli via e-mail

Over the Top on Lydiard?

I have just finished Nobby Hashizume’s article on Arthur Lydiard in your May/ June issue. It is presented like a long interview, but is it really close to the transcript of what Lydiard said or had said over the years? If it is, then the

article leaves the impression that Lydiard is quite an arrogant man, claiming credit for a lot of other countries’ running and marathon success. For instance, Lydiard says in the article, “T helped train Lasse Viren in Finland …,” “Think back to how I brought the Finns back to the world’s best,” “Korea owes their two Olympic medals to my training program,” and so on. I have communicated with Nobby before, so Tam aware that he is Lydiard’s number one fan. Did Nobby make the article even more “pro-Lydiard”? If he did, then I feel that he might have gone overboard in doing so.

Harold Or

via e-mail

Nobby Hashizume responds:

Well, I guess I would have to say that I admit there is an element of arrogance in Lydiard’s tone, and perhaps Lydiard himself has gotten carried away in some ways (perhaps you might have picked that up in Peter Snell’s interview?). In leading questions the way I did, Imight have come out being rather defensive. If so, besides my being a mediocre interviewer, it is simply because there are way too many coaches and athletes who think the Lydiard method is outdated, and I was just trying to make the point that it’s not. The truth is that his influence can be seen in more ways than he actually talks about. That Lydiard was responsible for the Finns’ reemergence in the ’70s, with Lasse Viren and Pekka Vasala, has been emphasized not just by me but also by many other authors (for example, Toby Tanser’s recent article on

Viren in Running Times). I don’t know exactly how Lee Bong-Ju trained, but the Korean Federation wanted Lydiard to set up its training program in the early 1980s, and Lydiard sent Barry Magee and, later, Jack Ralston. They ran out of time for their own Olympic Games in Seoul, but they were right on track for Barcelona and beyond—a similar pattern with the Finns. Recently, Yoshio Koide, the coach of Naoko Takahashi and Yuko Arimori, told me that he opens the Japanese translation of Running with Lydiard every day and reads a page.

I understand there’s a hint of exaggeration when Lydiard talks about his influence with Chinese, German, and Kenyan runners, but his influence is actually more than what it appears to be. How many people know that Peter Coe consulted with Lydiard before the 1984 Olympics? I don’t believe Lydiard ever claimed his influence on Seb Coe. Ina way, Lydiard is, believe it or not, a very modest man. While some agent might claim that he coached some already great Kenyan runners and makes tons of dollars off that claim, Lydiard would never do that. When Lydiard reminds us, in his typical blunt tone, of his influence, it simply shows his frustration with the many coaches and runners who do not follow his proven method and do not succeed. To me, arrogance lies in coaches and runners who smear Lydiard’s method as old-fashioned or prehistoric when they don’t have any successful results to show using their method—or, worse yet, they continue to destroy young potential instead of developing it.

By the way, yes, he has not changed much of what he says over the years. I had the opportunity to read a copy of his article in Sports Illustrated from the early 1960s. It is amazing how little his message has changed over the years. His principles have not changed one bit. But I don’t understand why that would make him an arrogant man.

One last thing: Arthur will be in the United States late this year, as the special guest of the Sunmart Texas Trail Endurance Runs.

Send your letter to

Marathon & Beyond,

E-mail: letters @marathonandbeyond.com

ON the MARK

Happy Trails

My company recently relocated me to a big city. It has changed my running habits tremendously—and not for the better. When | lived in the ‘burbs, there were plenty of places to run, from bike trails to river walks. Where | live now, there are few long stretches of anything on which | can run. There are, however, some nearby mountains, and last weekend | drove out there and thoroughly enjoyed the peace and quiet and the challenge of adapting from asphalt to trails, with all the attendant pitfalls. Can you ask some of your trail experts how best to learn to run trails well after constantly running asphalt? | love the nearby hills and would love to learn to roam through them in a more natural and efficient way. —Norbert Vanderhausen, via e-mail

I SYMPATHIZE with you and have friends in similar circumstances. First, there is the fact that you cannot just walk out your door to these runs; they require an investment of time driving to the run. I imagine that most of these runs on the trails will take place on the weekends or whenever you have a big enough chunk of time to make the trip. Summer can be good as well for this since you still may have a good

amount of daylight left after you leave the office.

My suggestion would be to cover the bulk of your mileage on the weekends, even if this means running longer than you usually go. You might even consider back-to-back long runs if your schedule permits. It sounds tiring, but you’ ll be running less on the weekdays so you’ Il have time to recover. This way the bulk of your running is in a pleasant environment, and you’ll enjoy it more. The shorter runs you do in the city during the week won’t be so bad because they’ll be, well, shorter! You won’t have to endure as much traffic and pollution and other things that come with urban running.

I would also suggest taking it very slowly on the trails at first. Trail running is almost always slower than roads to begin with, and it can be discouraging to find you can’t go as quickly on the trails as you can on the roads. You also might feel the movement is awkward, having to negotiate rocks, roots, and branches. This is normal. By taking it slower in the beginning, you’ ll be more relaxed and be able to ease into the run. This is good for a couple of reasons: you’ ll give your body time to warm up, and you will be able to handle hills as well as difficult footing better than if you’re pushing yourself hard from the start. (I almost always fall on trails if I start too fast.)

Even if you feel very slow at the start, you are bound to fall into a groove, and the pace will pick up without your

even trying. And since it will be hard to tell the exact mileage unless someone out there has wheeled the trails, you will be running for time and then estimating the distance. Most trail runners I know count time and not mileage, something road runners usually don’t have to do.

Also, and finally, inevitably you’ ll be out there longer than you might be on the roads, so it would be good to get some of the handheld water bottles or a bottle belt if you don’t own one so you can stay hydrated. Something I’ve noticed about trail running: there seems to be a lot more gear. Good luck!

Ellen McCurtin

is a many-time winner of the Vermont 100, and she once served as this magazine’s “On the Road” columnist.

ILIVED in rural America for more than 20 years of my running career, where there were only asphalt and dirt roads that I could run daily. In one article that was written in Outside Magazine (after Thad won the Badwater 146 race, from Badwater at 282 feet below sea level to the top of Mount Whitney at more than 14,500 feet), I laughed because they mentioned that it stood to reason that I should win this race because I was from the mountains of Colorado! Little did they know that I ran on the plains, with no more than a couple of hundred feet of altitude gain here and there. I was able to get up into the mountains to train maybe once every couple of weeks but was still reasonably successful running in the mountains during races.

So never fear, there are advantages to running any type of terrain. Just

getting out and running on whatever is available is the key to becoming comfortable on that or any other surface. Just as your legs have adapted to running on bike trails and river walks, the more you run in the mountains, the more you train different muscles specific to the mountains—and they will develop! When you go uphill, primarily the calf muscles will benefit; and running downhill will aid the quadriceps muscles with their development.

I take shorter, more frequent running (and yes, walking) steps when going uphill and greatly increase my breathing—sometimes to the point of hyperventilating. For the downhill, I lengthen my stride greatly, to the point where I can really feel it in my gluteus muscles, and concentrate on picking the most efficient straight line down, running over and around unusually rough terrain such as rocks and roots. Needless to say, you will stumble and fall occasionally, but don’t be discouraged because this is all part of the experience and it too will help you become more proficient. Experiment and pick the stride and breathing patterns that work for you.

All of those years of running bike paths and asphalt will be of great benefit to you, because it can translate to speed on the trails. If you have a nearby track or if you can find even a mile stretch where you can run repeats and pickups and do fartlek running, that will help in your ability to run fast, confidently, and smoothly on the trails.

Last but not least, take time to enjoy your environment and smell the roses,

as the mountains are truly a gift; it will add to the experience and to your quality of life. Marshall Ulrich is one of America’s foremost ultrarunners and adventure runners. He is currently working on summiting the highest peaks on all seven continents. He has two peaks to

PROBABLY THE single most important consideration when running in the rough is keeping your eyes firmly fixed on the trail a few feet ahead.

Allow your attention to be diverted for even a heartbeat, and you are likely to find yourself tumbling ass over teakettle into oblivion. Not that the Mad Dog has ever made such a dumb move—hah!

Apart from keeping yourself in one piece and avoiding broken bones, to race successfully on trails, you must learn to run downhill swiftly, smoothly, and safely.

Many trails are so steep that not only will you be unable to run but you may find it necessary to drag yourself up using bushes and rocky outcroppings. Frequently, the only way to make up time and distance is to fly downhill while trying to avoid falling.

Over the years, most of my downhill training has been in tall parking garages. That way I don’t have to worry about rocks, roots, and holes.

Dr. Michael “Mad Dog” Schreiber has been running ultras and trails for almost 30 years and has the scarred knees to

prove it. The Mad Dog trains runners (both beginners and elite) at his award-winning Web site www.training2run.com. He is also happy to answer your specific training and racing questions free fur nuttin’.

CONGRATULATIONS ON finding a new dimension of running to adapt to your new environment! Trail running has advantages that you have already experienced and more, such as quicker recovery than for the same distances run on hard asphalt. To make your trailrunning experience as rewarding as it can be, consider the following aspects of trail running:

Use trail-running shoes that are designed with a tread to make running over trail hazards as safe as possible. To prevent bruising toenails caused from hitting the front of the toe to the toe box when running descents, be sure to get trail-running shoes a half or full size bigger than your road shoes. To keep your foot from moving around in the slightly bigger shoe and causing blisters as you are sliding off the sides of rocks, roots, and other trail hazards, you may need a lacing pattern to keep your foot in the heel of the slightly bigger shoe. Several patterns are helpful, depending on your foot structure and biomechanics. The representative at the running store where you purchase your trail shoes will be able to instruct you about how to lace your shoes if this is a consideration for you.

Because of the friction from the motion of negotiating trail hazards, wear technical socks made for trail running to prevent blisters. There are several considerations in selecting trailrunning socks, such as the temperatures that you will be running trails in and whether you will be including water crossings, snow fields, and so forth in your trail running.

The peace and quiet that you experienced as part of your positive transition to trail running is a challenge, also. To achieve peace and quiet on a trail, you generally are in a remote environment and have to be self-reliant, as there aren’t resources for hydration as frequently as in suburban road environments. Use a hydration system to allow you to carry fluid with you for longer trail runs. Many options are available for hydration systems, depending on the time you will be away from access to fluid, the terrain, the temperatures, and so forth. Options can be as simple as a water bottle with a strap to carry in your hand or as elaborate as 100ounce bladders in a pack carried on your back that has pockets to carry a water-filtration system, calories, and gear. The running-shoe store that offers trail shoes will be able to direct you to the hydration system that fits the type of trail running you prefer.

Happy trails to you.

Theresa Daus-Weber is a winner of the tough Leadville 100, has several times represented the United

States on its LOOK team, and is a frequent contributor to this magazine.

MY ADVICE harkens back to the notion that practice makes perfect: when it comes to trail running, the only way to become more comfortable at it is to

get out and go. Having said that, there are several things to keep in mind. Be patient, practical, and prepared. Because of things like terrain (ups and downs, twists and turns), footing (rocks, roots, gravel, and mud), and the need to pay attention to both, it’s pretty likely that you won’t be moving at the pace you’re used to when you run on roads. S’alright, that’s part of the deal. Take this into consideration when you plot out your run, and don’t expect a fivemiler in the mountains to be the same in terms of effort or time as it would be on a highway that is smooth and flat. Know your course, but always expect the unexpected when you head for the hills. Think fanny pack with food, fluid, and wind shirt if you’re venturing any distance away from your car. In the end, my main advice: get out there and enjoy!

Barry Lewis is a Philadelphia masters ultrarunner who has been known to win races outright; he

served as this magazine’s most recent “On the Road” columnist.

Send your questions to

E-mail: onmark @marathonandbeyond.com

ABOUT the AUTHORS

DENISE DILLON is an award-winning television journalist with a reporting and anchoring career that spans 18 years across the country, combined with another eight years of freelance magazine writing. As an athlete, she has run a couple of dozen marathons. After getting married in the middle of the 100th Boston Marathon, Denise and her husband have run a marathon every year to

celebrate their anniversary. Using the race as an excuse to see the world, they’ve

run in cities like Madrid, Sydney, Paris, and London. Denise is also a triathlete, having competed in the World Championship in Hawaii.

JOHN KESTON began running at age 55 to get into better shape

to participate in other sports. He was at the time an artist in

\ a residence at Bemidji University in Minnesota; he had previously & been a professional actor and singer. In his first race, a 10K, John

y, won his age group with a 44:44. Upon retiring from teaching,

John and his wife, Anne, moved to McMinnville, Oregon. John

typically trains 40 to 60 miles a week. A few months before his 70th birthday, he ran a 2:58:33 marathon. He has since set dozens of U.S. and world age-group records. He regularly sings “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the start of road-racing events.

j JACK McDERMOTT, educated at Colgate University and Harvard University, specializes in Life & Health regulation at the Florida Department of Financial Services. He has completed 42 marathons and 3 ultras with a 2:50 marathon PR. He also writes for the Fleet Foot, and Tales from the Darkside newsletters. He resides in Tallahassee, Florida, and can be reached at Marathonjack @ comcast.net.

JEFF HOROWITZ is a certified personal trainer and marathon coach. He has run 90 marathons across the country and around the world from Arkansas to Antarctica. He also loves long distance cycling. When he’s not busy doing these things, he’s also an attorney. You can reach him at Jeffnsteph1 @msn.com.

GARY DUDNEY has spent 20 years sampling different distances and races around the Monterey Bay area and Northern California. From 5K to 10K, from road marathon to trail marathon, from 50K ultra to the Western States 100, he has never met a good training run or race he didn’t enjoy. Recently, Gary has taken to crosstraining on a mountain bike and spending his free time capturing his years of experience in articles and stories about and for runners. 5A constant, though, has been his annual return to the Big Sur International Marathon, which he has completed 15 times in the race’s 18-year history.

CHRISTOFER MACHNIAK, 29, lives in Flint, Michigan. He writes

e” for The Flint Journal, covering local government. He has a jour1 nalism degree from Michigan State University. He ran one year

s of cross-country for Winston Churchill High School in Livonia, Michigan. He has completed seven marathons. His running PRs

are marathon (2:49:03), half-marathon (1:16:09), 10K (35:43), and 5K (16:46). In September, he competed in the Ironman-Wisconsin in 12:?.

STEPHEN PRUDHOMME remains on the run, returning to his adopted city of Savannah, Georgia, four months ago. A native = of New Jersey, he lived in Georgia for 30 years before moving

to Colorado to work as a newspaper editor. This followed a

10-year stint as sports editor of a weekly newspaper on Hilton

Head Island. Stephen discovered running in his early 30s, getting hooked on the sport after competing in the Peachtree Road Race. His racing resume includes the New York City and Kona marathons, and his ultimate goal is to qualify for Boston. His family includes his wife of nine years, Fran, and his son, Paul, 7.

KENNETH WILLIAMS is a businessman from Corinth, MS. He has run 30 marathons in 30 years, including most of the larger marathons in the U.S., plus Berlin, London, Montreal, and the original marathon in Athens. Last year he helped trained more than 50 finishers in the Memphis St. Jude Marathon and half. He is currently embarking on a 400-mile, five-week border-to-water run through his home state of Mississippi. During his trek he expects to speak to 10,000 middle school students about the importance of physical fitness and exercise. He seeks to raise $100,000 for physical education programs for Boys and Girls Clubs. You can e-mail Kenneth at kwilliams@corinth.ms.

CHRIS RISKER teaches at Webster University in St. Louis. Aside from management courses, he teaches a freshman seminar titled “Reading, Writing, and Running.” He just began competitive running at age 50 and learned that age-group placing depends on who shows up. Chris thanks the St. Louis Running Center to a large extent for his running and Roger Robinson for something he has yet to identify. /QQ: yet to identify? XQQ/ Chris is working on an academic running studies conference to be held the same time as the Utica Boilermaker. He can be contacted at riskerdc @webster.edu.

DAN HORVATH is a software engineering metrics consultant who has also been known to do a bit of running and writing. Dan has written articles for Marathon & Beyond as well as for several running newsletters. He considers his best running achievements to be his seven sub-3:00 marathons and his completion of the Mohican Trail 100. For some strange reason, the other runners near Dan’s home in Broadview Heights, Ohio, no longer fear his racing speed. Dan vows that this will change, that he will once again become a force to be reckoned with on the local running scene.

TITO MORALES is a novelist and freelance writer whose work has appeared in a variety of publications. A former competitive swimmer at the University of California/Berkeley, Tito took up running in his mid-30s and ran his first marathon in Napa Valley in honor of his 40th birthday. A frequent contributor to M&B, Tito last wrote about Alan Culpepper in the July/August issue. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Margo, who also enjoys swimming and running.

ED KOZLOFF has been president of the Motor City Striders for 30 years and has directed over 700 road races. He was the race director of the Detroit Free Press International Marathon for 20 years. In 1991 Ed was named the Road Runners Club of America’s Club President of the year. He has also been Michigan Runner of the Year, and, with his wife, Sue, was recently named the top contributor to the sport of running in Michigan for the last 25 years. Ed is currently finishing his 35th year as a middle school teacher, and, surprisingly, his sanity is still mostly intact.

) DON KARDONG, an outstanding runner at Stanford University, took fourth place in the 1976 Olympic Marathon. Kardong’s contributions to running are enormous. He is the founder of The Bloomsday 12K race in Spokane, Washington, of the country’s _ largest road races, and served for four years as the president of the Road Runners Club of America.

Marathon & Beyond’s mission is to provide practical advice on preparing for and running marathons and ultras. The magazine will do this by scouring the running world for the most reliable authors on a wide variety of topics that will allow the reader to enjoy a well-grounded perspective and knowledge of this sport and lifestyle. The magazine will also provide readers with a forum for sharing ideas, insights, questions, experiences, and concerns. M&B will not publish reviews of running shoes, apparel, or equipment, nor will it carry race reports or schedules of upcoming races.

NOTE TO POTENTIAL CONTRIBUTORS

be reviewed. All due care is taken with unsolicited submissions, but the publication accepts no responsibility for such submissions. Telephone queries are not considered.

SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD

Peter Wood, D.Sc., Ph.D., F.A.C.S.M. Pedro Pujol, M.D.

Professor Emeritus, Stanford University Olympic Training Center (Spain) Ellen Coleman, M.A., M.P.H., R.D. William Oliver Roberts, M.D. California Angels Sport Clinic University of Minnesota

Perry H. Julien, D.P.M. Michael Leo Sachs, Ph.D. Atlanta Foot and Ankle Center Temple University

Michael Lambert, Ph.D. Marcia L. Stefanick, Ph.D. Sports Science Institute of South Africa Stanford University

David E. Martin, Ph.D. Keith Williams, Ph.D.

Georgia State University University of California, Davis Russell Robert Pate, Ph.D. Melvin H. Williams, Ph.D. University of South Carolina Old Dominion University

Marathon & Beyond is a member of the NING cl NETWORK