Oh, one last thing: all that stuff about never running alone at night again—please ignore that. In my preparation for the AC100, I went out and did it again, this time for 12 hours and 60 miles. I will never understand what makes me do that sort of thing. Must be some sort of defective wiring, I guess.

And What | Learned From It

1. Running very long and alone through the night, in the pitch dark, over an unchanging surface, is a surreal experience. It is not unacceptable to question the sanity of those who do such things.

2. A scientific approach will provide a reliable and effective training plan. There is art in turning that plan into an enjoyable adventure every day. Be an artist, and you will be a lifetime runner. Do things that might cause others to question your sanity. It is fun.

3. More than anything, | learned (once again) that life will do whatever it has planned, not what you would like it to do. You simply must take it as it comes. Live for the moments. They are what have meaning. Let the bad moments go. Keep the good ones. Make moments good—you have the power to do so. Live one day at a time.

4. Tragedy is rarely a solitary event. As much as it might feel that only you are hurt, it nearly always is the case that others are affected much more. Keep your training and racing in perspective. Support those in greater need than you. There will always be other races.

5. Preparation is what racing is all about. It is a journey. The race is a symbol. It is the proof of the work, the fun, the commitment. This race did not happen, but | know | was ready. Did | really need to prove it? No, not really, not to myself. When things settled down enough, | finally put my running shoes back on and took off on a rails-to-trails path near Deborah’s father’s house. It was a bittersweet run. | went on and on, getting faster and faster, never feeling as if | would tire. Was | ready to run more than 100 miles in 24 hours? Oh, yes, | was. Did | need to do so to prove it? No.

6. Feeling helpless in the face of forces beyond your control is a part of life. Hopelessness is not. There is always hope.

7. Regrets are part of a full and well-lived life. Risk having a few, learn from them, but do not seek them out.

8. Running is not life. Life is not running. Running is a detail that helps define us, helps us live life, and helps us see light in the darkness. Love p running. Do not become running. Ib

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

If lt Were Proven That Running Offered No Physical Benefits, Would You Still Do It? Part 9.

This is the final installment. The first eight parts of Dr. Sheehan’s book appeared in our last eight issues.

Seventeen QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Is happiness a five-mile fix? Are those runners we see on the roads these early mornings and late evenings there in pursuit of the life, liberty and happiness the Declaration of Independence said was the right of all men?

The answer, according to Edwin Land, the genius who heads the Polaroid Corporation, is probably yes. “Addiction,” says Land, “is a necessity and an opportunity.” And distance running is clearly an addiction of major proportions.

Land’s particular obsession is not running but scientific experiment. Unless he performs one good experiment a day, “the world goes out of focus, becomes unreal.”

Land came to realize the universal nature of addiction when he discussed his reaction to the scientific experience at a university seminar. After hearing the recital of an experiment’s sequence of intuition, mystery, excitement and the final relief and nobility, a bearded youth in the front row turned to a companion and said, “Why, it’s just like heroin, isn’t it?”

You don’t have to tell a genius more than once. Land pounced on the idea and came up with one of the more sensible statements made on the drug problem in memory. Scientific experiment, he reasoned, must be an addiction and must do what heroin is trying to do, but constructively.

The addict is not escaping from reality but is trying to find himself. Runners are doing the same thing, but in a constructive, continually satisfying and maturing way.

Running’s addictive qualities are unquestioned. Doug Hardin, former Harvard cross-country captain, once said that his daily workouts regulate his whole life—his eating habits, his social schedule and his academic future. And why not? “They ranged,” he said, “from deepest drama to mere routine, keen excitement to utter boredom, great sensual pleasure to extreme agony.” Hardin himself considered distance running not as a sport but “an obsession.”

This obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.

* Eo *

“When it’s pouring with rain and you’re bowling along through the wet,” said Peter Snell about running, “there’s a satisfaction of knowing you’re out there and the others aren’t.”

Runners are wondering whether that satisfaction is enough. Their sport has survived charges that it is dangerous. (Dr. Harry Johnson of the Life Extension Institute found that 29 out of 30 cardiologists in his survey recommended against jogging for sedentary men over 50), boring (the New Yorker has called it a “‘pastime of overpowering ennui”) and ineffectual (the American Medical Association says the “burden of proof still rests with those who state that jogging will prevent coronary disease’’).

Now they are being told jogging is safe, interesting and effective—but unnecessary. It can be replaced by something as simple as hypnosis or hatha yoga.

Canadian physicians divided their post-coronary heart patients into two groups. One group was given a program of daily jogging and exercise. The other was put into the hands of psychiatrist E. Harvey Doney (himself a heart victim who practices self-hypnosis), who induced the patients into a hypnotic trance. They imagined themselves jogging or pictured themselves in a beautiful meadow filling their lungs with wonderful fresh air and “feeling the oxygen going through the whole body reaching the heart.”

The results after a year? Identical improvement in both groups. Weight and body fat down, increase in grip strength and EKG tracings, lowering of blood pressure and lessening of the adrenalin production by the body.

Should these findings shake joggers down to their arch supports? Of course not. If they keep their cool they can see what all this means.

It means, for one thing, that heart disease and nervous tension are intimately connected. John Hunter, who first described coronary disease and was himself a sufferer, wrote, “I am at the mercy of any fool who can aggravate me.” This notion of stress and irritation was echoed recently by a leading German heart specialist, Berthold Kern. Kern blames “agitation and aggravation”—and not obesity, excessive cigarette smoking and high cholesterol—for heart attacks.

The Canadian study also suggests that there are a variety of ways of relaxing and overcoming feelings of tension—of which jogging is only one. One alternate

method that comes to mind is hatha yoga. And we may be in for a revival of hypnosis and yoga in the sports and fitness fields.

Hatha yoga was over a thousand years old when it burst onto the sports scene in the person of Lou Nova, poet and heavyweight boxer. It was an inauspicious start. Nova blew in from California with his yoga exercises and his “cosmic punch.” He was, said the west coast scribes, a cinch to take Joe Louis and join the immortals. They were right in one respect—Nova did attain immortality. He became the first and only man to make Louis smile. His cosmic punch missed by so much it broke the Brown Bomber up . . . but only temporarily as Louis soon had the poet in a prolonged meditative pose on the canvas.

Yoga has since surfaced to better press in the form of mini-yoga, said to be the secret of skier Jean-Claude Killy and his French teammates. “You cannot win races,” said Killy, “if you are not relaxed.” And under the direction of coach Honore Bonnet the French skiers did 30 minutes of yoga exercises a day. The object: keep the mind loose and the body limber. “The purpose,” explained Bonnet, “is to liberate the mind and relax the body.”

Hypnosis aims for the same thing. The emphasis is always on relaxed physical and mental well-being: bolstering the patient’s confidence and stressing his capabilities. “It is best suited for handling excessive emotional tension in patients,” says psychiatrist Lewis Wolberg of the New York Medical College, and adds, “It has never gained the acceptance it deserves as a meritorious adjunct in medicine.”

The key word is adjunct—to be used with physical exercise—not in place of it. The runner can be assured that hypnosis alone will not make him fit or allow him to do endurance efforts without fatigue. But he should also know that 30 minutes of running, three times a week, is sufficient for conditioning—if not competition.

Why then must joggers go out almost every day for their 3-5 mile jaunts? Obviously, say the yoga and hypnosis enthusiasts, because they are addicts, mainliners, and this trip is a trip….

Eo * *

I think the first one who said that virtue could not be taught was Socrates. It’s still news, however, to the daily press which made a minor furor about an article in Psychology Today called “Sport: If you Want to Build Character, Try Something Else.” The fact that the authors, San Jose State psychologists Bruce Ogilvie and Thomas Tutko, are consultants for 27 professional teams in basketball, football, ice hockey and golf, and have worked with hundreds of high school and college teams in every major sport should have alerted the journalists to read their conclusions more carefully.

They didn’t, and the country got the impression that the Ogilvie and Tutko opus was anti-sport. It isn’t, except for that catchy title. What they state is that sports may not build character (because nothing will and we’re not sure, anyway,

that we want to), but it can make happy, fulfilled people. This is what most of us are searching for now: exploring our possibilities, trying to become the thing we are.

A close reading of the essay will show Ogilvie and Tutko have nothing but good things to say about sport. The following few quotes will put this conclusion in the proper perspective:

¢ “Athletic competition has no more beneficial effect than intense endeavor in any other field.”

It is, however, one of the few fields into which people will put such intense endeavor. A fortunate few, points out philosopher Paul Weiss, carry an intense interest in their prime activity into their leisure time. Among them are the athlete, the artist, the scientist, the politician and the man of religion.

¢ “The competitive sports experience is unique in the way it compresses the selection process into a compact time and space. The young athlete must face in afew hours the kind of pressure that occurs in the life of an achievement-oriented man over several years.”

Sport has this tremendous potential for self-revelation. What we want to know is who we are. Sport can tell us as quickly, painlessly and as surely as any other human activity. Where else can we risk failure and defeat without the great fear that it will be irrevocable?

¢ “The rapidity and clarity of the feedback in competitive sport provide a fine opportunity for the individual athlete who knows which traits he wants to change and who has the motivation to do so.”

And this article was supposed to be against sports? Our psychologist friends are telling us that here, par excellence, is the learning situation. Here is a laboratory of life where one can pursue maturity without psychological hazard.

¢ “The new direction in athletics will be toward helping athletes make personally chosen modifications in behavior; toward the joyous pursuit of esthetic experience; toward a wide variety of personality types and values.”

Ogilvie and Tutko are revealing their true colors. They are sports fans and enthusiasts from the tip of their Freudian toes to the roots of their Jungian hair. The title was just a ploy—a Trojan Horse to get into the camp of the enemy. Sport will not build character; it will do something better. It will make a man free.

The free man is not what you or society want him to be. He wears no mask. He is the total expression of his body-mind-soul relationship—and nothing else, or he would be false. Sport, says Ogilvie and Tutko, can help you find that fully functioning person your whole being wants you to be.

Tom Tutko specializes in sports psychology and marriage counseling—two areas where pretense and masks will never work. “I am the original frustrated jock,” he says. “I would like to play ball the rest of my life. Unfortunately, I have the motivation but not the talent.”

This deficiency won’t stop either a“ him or us. Talent or not, character and virtue be damned, sport will continue to reveal each man to himself and to his brother.

Eo * *

Arnold Burns is not an athlete or an artist, scientist or politician. He is a garment district executive, and a fictitious one at that.

He exists only in the play, Z “A Thousand Clowns,” where he seems to be all the Romans meant when they coined the world “mediocre,” one who is midway

up the hill.

Burns is a middleclass man handcuffed by the middle-class responsibilities of a middle-class family, living out a middle-class Michael Hughes life. He is everything the sociologists wring their hands over—the American male caught in a mesh of worries, still dreaming the really impossible dream.

But Arnold Burns sees it differently. “You don’t respect me so much,” he tells his brother, the unhappy intellectual. “You want to be a hero . . . I’m willing to deal with the available world . . . I’m not an exceptional man and I have a talent for surrender. I’m at peace. I’m not one of the bad guys. I take pride.” And then in summation, he states, “I am the best possible Arnold Burns.”

Mediocrity, you see, is in the eye of the beholder. Arnold Burns is not halfway up anybody’s mountain. He is at the top of his own. He is the king of his hill. Anyone can be a success, he tells us, unless he tries to climb someone else’s mountain. Man, no matter how mediocre he appears, is still the greatest wonder in the world.

Burns agrees with Bucky Fuller. Man is born to be a success. There are no failures in nature. Failure occurs when our goals are unrealistic, false and too vague, when we have no idea who we are or where we are going.

The key then is to find your own mountain. Otherwise, you will be competing with people who are not even in your event, and running up against the “‘shoulds”

and “oughts” of that world, and the inevitable frustration and depression and feelings of failure. A person can be complete or incomplete, but one thing is sure: he cannot be someone else.

Arnold Burns knows the someone-he-is to be the butt of the jokes of the intellectuals and the academic world, much the same way as men of action, the game-playing jocks, are looked upon as deviants from man’s perfection.

The truth is that there is no such one perfect man or woman. Each of us is able to be the best possible unique person we are—and no other.

What is primary, however, is not the desire to be different or peculiar, but to have that difference, that originality, derive from a course of action natural to your body-mind-spirit totality—the unique person you are. If this person fails to meet the criteria of virtue and achievement and righteousness that other segments of the society have agreed upon, so be it.

Arnold Burns, who is one such original, is telling me that, unlikely as it seems, his life is a masterpiece. And, therefore, unlikely as it seems, mine and yours can be one, too.

* Eo *

“Where have all the heroes gone?” asked novelist Edward Hoagland in the New York Times Magazine. And his question taken up a day or two later by sports writer Bob Lipsyte. “Help! Wanted: Hero or Heroine” was the name of the Lipsyte piece.

Both pointed out that the traditional heroes no longer held our respect or admiration. Hoagland observed that experts and physicians, soldiers and statesmen aren’t heroes to anyone at the present time. And Lipsyte saw no one in the soldier-statesman-athlete pool who could fill Carlyle’s definition of the heroic man: the messenger sent from the infinite unknown with tidings for all of us. There seemed to be no one ready to seize fire and run with it.

In Hoagland’s view, the hero has died from familiarity. “One must love one’s heroes,” he wrote, “notwithstanding their pains, self-doubts and inconsistencies—which is much more difficult with overexposure.”

There you have it. The transistor did them in. TV and the electronic age have freed future generations from the cult of these public successes and private failures. Our communication marvels have shown us that heroes not only have feet of clay, they have lives of clay. This has given us a clue to who are the real winners and losers in this world. More than anything else, we have come to see the hero as a man simply trying to become what he conceives himself to be.

We know that the major battles in life are waged unseen and unnoticed. We the people truly dream the impossible dream, fight the unbeatable foe and bear unbearable sorrows. We are on that quest, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far. And we know it is only in pursuing that quest that we will finally come to rest fulfilled.

So we are all heroes to some degree. We become more so as we base our actions on ourselves and ourselves alone. “Heroism,” wrote Ortega, “is the will to be oneself.” The hero’s will is not that of family or custom or society, but his own. His life is a resistance to what is customary and habitual, to business as usual. The hero takes himself and his place in time and creates his own drama.

Hear Ortega again on this. We come into this world, he says, to play a part for which neither script nor role has been established. It is for us to compose and act out the drama of our existence. No one else can or should do this for us. There is no hero, past or future, who can be used as a model.

Where have all the heroes gone? They’re gone with the simplicities and the pieties and the easy answers of another era. Our lack of heroes is an indication of the maturity of our age—a realization that everyman has come into his own and has the capability of making a success out of his life. Success rests with having the courage and endurance and, above all, the will to become the person you are, however peculiar that may be.

Then you will be able to say, “I have found my hero and he is me.”

This concludes Dr. Sheehan on Running. Our next Book Bonus—Flanagan’s Run—will start in the July/August issue of M&B.