WHAT HE TAUGHT

The highest form of flattery for a writer isn’t imitation. It’s repetition—quoting the writer’s words as better than any you could make up, or better yet adopting the writer’s recommended practices as your own.

Jack left me with three lasting lessons for enjoying a long and happy running life. I’ve repeated them often in writing and speaking and practiced all three myself.

1. The one-day-per-mile rule. Jack could race as hard and fast as runners little more than half his age. He just couldn’t race that way as often as those that much younger. Watch time doesn’t necessarily slow with age, he said, but recovery time usually does.

He outlined his recovery needs in Tale of the Ancient Marathoner: “The after-effects [of a hard race] vary, with me anyway. Sometimes I feel fully recovered in two or three days. Other times I have a drained feeling for as long as three weeks.

“My method is roughly to have a day off racing for every mile I raced. If I’ve run a hard 26-mile road race, then I don’t race hard again for at least 26 days. I’ll go for daily runs okay but no really hard effort.”

One easy day per racing mile. That’s the Jack Foster rule—my term, not his.

2. Not training. “A reporter once asked about the training I did,’ wrote Jack. “I told him I didn’t train.

“The word ‘training’ conjures up in my mind grinding out 200- and 400meter intervals. I refuse to do this.”

Nor did he run “the 150 miles a week that some of the top marathoners are doing. I rarely did more than half that. I believe it is possible to achieve results in a less soul-destroying way.”

He concluded, “I don’t train; never have. I don’t think of running as ‘training.’ I just go out and run each day and let the racing take care of itself.

“Tthas to be a pleasure to go forarun, looked forward to while I’m at work. Otherwise no dice. This fact, that I’m not prepared to let running be anything but one of the pleasures of my life, is the reason I fail by just so much.”

3. Timeless racing. Jack added to the paragraph above that “failing” didn’t bother him. Nor did “the prospect of running 2:30 or even 2:50 marathons in the future.”

This would have been almost unthinkably slow to him at the time he penned this line, but “slow” is a relative term. Jack’s times would slip to levels that were slow only to him—a 2:20 marathon at 50 and to six-minute miles for 10Ks in his 60s.

He claimed not to let the old times haunt him. “The drop-off in racing performances with age manifests itself only on timekeepers’ watches,” he wrote. “The running action, the breathing and other experiences of racing all feel the same. Only the watch shows otherwise.”

Jack chose to define a good race by the effort, not by the numbers of a watch. He said, “All the other experiences of racing that attracted me initially are the same as they have always been, and they still appeal to me.”