Real, Imagined …or Vitalized?

The dream paid a visit again last night. It’s the second time in the past month.

Why it’s suddenly recurring on a regular basis, I don’t know.

There were years where it stayed away, safely salted in the repository of lost dreams, unrealized daydreams, and banished nightmares.

It’s a dream of a real occurrence. But the occurrence is pushing 25 years of age.

I could pinpoint the exact date by hauling out my journals and doing a manual search of my 3-by-5 diary cards. But the exact date isn’t what’s important. It’s what the dream involves that’s significant.

What it involves is a Saturday morning 18-mile run along a course strewn with rubble from an overnight storm. From above, it would look like one of those aerial views a governor gets in the wake of a hurricane or tornado in hopes of FEMA moving in to grant low-interest loans to the victims.

At the time of the incident, I was living in Palo Alto, California, and working at Runner’s World in nearby Mountain View. Palo Alto was a wonderful place for a runner to live in those bygone days of 60- and 70-mile training weeks. The city prided itself on its extensive bicycle routes, its secluded little neighborhoods, and its eccentric residents, most of them thrown up from

a deep well of eccentrics at nearby Stanford University.

I would like to say that in those days I was not a slave to a training schedule, but that would be bald deception. If my schedule called for an 18-miler and huge steep-sided chasms were opening in the earth because the end of the world was at hand, distress at the end of civilization as we knew it would have to wait until those scheduled 18 miles were behind me. Then I could gaze down into the erupting lava from hell while contemplating the end of days.

On the particular morning of this recurring dream, all hell—a wet, windy hell, at least—had broken loose the night before.

A rainstorm had rolled in from the coast. It was supercharged by extremely high winds that made the windows rattle and the lights flicker out, then on, then out again. Tree branches scraped the side of the house like cats begging to be let in.

In one of those perversions of personality quirks, as long as I have a good blanket to pull up around my neck, a raging storm or the sound of railroad whistles—I grew up in a town with not one but two rail lines going through it—lulls me to sleep like a contented baby.

The occasional drift into consciousness during the night was brief

because the sounds of the storm flexing its awesome power put me right back to sleep.

So it was the next morning that I woke early and refreshed—and more than ready for my 18-mile long run.

The worst of the storm had blown through, although there was still a stiff breeze and occasional sheets of rain skittering through town. From the balcony of our third-floor apartment, I looked down at something that resembled the aftermath of a hurricane.

The streets were littered with debris.

Tree branches were down, leaves were everywhere, and the occasional garbage can had been rolled like a barrel of beer at a German picnic.

And there was not a person or animal about.

Thad the world to myself. A decidedly messy world, to be sure, but one filled with possibilities.

I pulled on a thin, plastic Frank Shorter brand windbreaker and jogged over to Middlefield Road, warming up, cutting a zigzag path through the rubble.

The breeze stirred the tree branches, as though teasing them to guess which ones would be brought down next if the breeze decided to increase in volume. There was a smell of new wood from where broken branches protruded like compound fractures into the street.

When I hit Middlefield Road, I turned south. The traffic light at the

intersection was dead, as were all the lights as far as I could see down Middlefield. The generous bike lanes were littered with leaves and branches, and the street was deserted so I could run down the middle of it if I wanted.

Although I usually run against traffic in order to see oncoming menaces, on Middlefield I was in the habit of running in the right-side bike lane because it was wide and safe and the descending right-side crown served to even out stress usually applied to the left side.

With nothing moving but the tree branches and me, I knitted my way, moving out into the middle of the road when a tree branch blocked the bike path.

As I warmed up, I zipped open the windbreaker and let it flap. The breeze was coming from the right, from the direction of the ocean, and the occasional squall of drizzle was short lived and refreshing.

My stride increased imperceptibly, and I was moving smoothly, clocking 6:25s and 6:30s with little effort. I could see down the street for blocks, so I could begin to make adjustments to my route well before I had to take steps to avoid more fallen branches or the occasional trash can. At one point, I slid out into the middle of the road to avoid not one but two patio chairs painted a garish pink the color of those flamingo yard ornaments in Florida.

Several parked Volvos were wearing sizable tree branches on their roofs. Their owners had convinced themselves that Volvos are indestructible, but today they would find that the branch from

their 75-year-old live oak was more than a match.

By the time I reached my southerm terminus, where Middlefield intersects with Central Expressway, I encountered the beginning of activity. A blue-haired woman bent over on her sidewalk, brushing up fallen leaves using a whiskbroom. A kid of about 10 struggled futilely to drag a branch as thick as he was from the front yard. A city maintenance truck rumbled by, a yellow light atop the cab flashing.

None of the few human beings slowly shuffling about even noticed me. I was like a ghost, wafting through their neighborhood.

Central Expressway, because it was wider than Middlefield Road and had fewer overhanging trees, was easier to negotiate. I played fartlek every few blocks, picking up the pace a mite between telephone poles. It felt good, as fresh as the rain-washed air.

BLOWING OUT THE CARBON

Along Central, an occasional car now moved, the driver steering around fallen branches like a DMV drivertesting course. Most of the cars had their headlights on; it was gray and overcast and uncertain.

I stayed on Central until it dumped me into the downtown area, onto University Avenue, where I turned right and headed east. There was a lot more activity along the avenue as store owners tried to get ready for Saturday morning business. A number of them swept up leaves from in front of their

stores. A pair of merchants stood out front pointing at a slack power wire above the street, comparing where they were last night during the worst of the storm.

A PG&E repair truck hogged one intersection, its yellow lights flashing, an electrician in the basket of a cherry picker trying to return the power to a traffic light.

When I hit Middlefield, I again turned south, on my way to completing a big leisurely loop.

Two dogs crossed the street, occasionally stopping to sniff an overturned garbage can or a broken tree branch.

By the time I returned home, Saturday morning activity had overcome poststorm inertia. People were moving about, cleaning up the street, getting their weekend of at-home activities under way, even if most of it involved removing the rubble from the storm before they could begin checking off chores they had assigned themselves for the weekend.

The postrun shower was one of the most rewarding I had ever taken, as though it was a little reward for an adventure well wrought.

It’s 25 years later, and that run is etched into an easily accessible deep memory.

It comes to me, I suspect, because it ranks as one of the most memorable runs of my running life, one of those handful that someone who has run a lot of miles can cite because something, some hook, makes them stand out for their combination of sweet running and challenging course. I had run that Middlefield/

Central Expressway course dozens of times, but that poststorm Saturday is the only time I can now recall.

Its occasional return makes me feel as an Alzheimer’s patient must feel who can vividly remember exact conversations with a friend from 30 years ago but doesn’t know what day of the week it is.

It’s one of those quietly astonishing aspects of memory that stump scientists, psychologists, and behaviorists.

T. S. Eliot seems to say the opposite:

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden.

Four Quartets. Burnt Norton, I

Perhaps Eliot’s “passage” was not strewn with poststorm debris, for isn’t it often the most trying of occasions that invest our memories? Who dreams of or remembers days when nothing happened—unless we are used to days when way too much occurs—a burnthe-candle-at-both-ends libertine or an average working American who fills each day with too much to remember the rare day of doing nothing?

But perhaps the memory is so vivid because its uniqueness was further spiced with movement. Perhaps in a world where traditional sustained movement has been replaced with endurance sitting, ancient body-use memories are stirred when we move with deep determination through unfamiliar or altered settings. Is the sleeping

domestic dog whose legs seem to be running experiencing a dream of the hunt passed down through hundreds of generations of dog genes?

Or do endorphins etch memories: the greater concentration of endorphins, the deeper the etching?

The other question, of course, is how well do we share memories of memorable runs with others?

Do you ever sit around over a beer and say, “Hey, do you remember that time we did the mud run up along the East Bay ridgeline? Man, my shoes weighed a ton.” And instead of giving you a blank look, your running buddy begins to fill in the details?

Or do we tend to enhance in our memories striking occasions from our

pasts? “History…vitalizes memory,” Cicero wrote more than 2,000 years ago in De Oratore (bk. II, ch. IX, sec. 36).

And do solo memories work as well as shared memories even though unconfirmed by a second source? Can solo runs ever be better than runs made in the company of others? Are we ultimately one with our runs whether we run them alone or share them? As Yeats asked: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

Or do we nudge the dream from the memory?

Or, quoting from one of the truly great philosophers of my youth: “A dream is a wish your heart makes.” (Jiminy Cricket)

—Rich Benyo

ON the ROAD WITH JOE HENDERSON

Golden Agers

John Steinbeck was the first novelist I ever read without a school assign- } ment hanging over me. He remains my favorite.

Great novelists speak truths to the reader through their fiction. In Sweet Thursday, Steinbeck’s little-known sequel to Cannery Row, he writes, “Looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas when it happened it was one day hooked on the tail of another.”

There were signs then of times changing, he says. “But you never notice such things until later.”

My introduction to Steinbeck came in spring 1963. I could tell you exactly when and where this reading came, but I won’t.

Instead I’1l tell what happened soon afterward. That same summer I traveled

from Iowa to California, to the land that Steinbeck had once walked.

My purpose wasn’t to follow his paths but to polish my track-racing skills. Northern California was one of the few places you could do that in summertime, the off-season back then.

Life had other plans for me. One was the unplanned discovery of road races, which would lead to marathons and beyond. The other surprise was a bottom-of-the-staffjob at Track & Field News, which would lead to all the jobs I’ve ever held.

My careers, both running and writing, seemed to have peaked early. Before I was 30, my important PRs all had become permanent. I had edited my biggest-circulation magazine and written the books that sold best.

By age 40, I had gone three years since my last marathon and looked unlikely to start again. I had lost a job when Nike shut down its magazine called Running, my books weren’t selling, my marriage was ending.

As Steinbeck says, you can’t see a golden age coming. You can’t know what you had until it’s gone.

My golden age was gone, appatently for good. I couldn’t have known how high a peak I had climbed until I looked up at it from the valley on the other side.

Everyone who has lived long enough can recognize a personal golden age. This old sport had one too. It ended more than 20 years ago, at least for American marathoners as serious competitors en masse.

The first issue of Track & Field News that I worked on told of Buddy Edelen setting a world marathon record. This began the golden years that lasted through the Frank Shorter, Bill Rodgers years, then ended with Alberto Salazar’s in the early 1980s.

The golden age for U.S. women started later and lasted a little longer. I date it from their first official Boston in 1972, won by Nina Kuscsik, through

Joan Benoit Samuelson’s Olympic title and American record of 1984-85.

Competitive U.S. marathoning, for men and women, tailed off in the mid1980s. The sport as a whole fell into a funk at about the same time.

Half of the marathons founded in the running-boom years of the 1970s disappeared from the schedule in the 80s. Running books that had flown off the shelves before now languished unbought. Running stores folded by the dozen.

We runners who lived through those golden years could now see them as such, from the low side that followed the high. We also can see now that the end of a golden age isn’t the end of everything. The sport has adapted and endured, and so have we.

GOLD STANDARDS

Long gone, maybe forever, are the days when American marathoners could win almost everything. Oh, those were the days! They look better now than they did at the time because of what has not happened since the 1980s.

Frank Shorter won the Munich Olympic marathon, and Joan Benoit (now Samuelson) won at the Los Angeles Games, plus twice at the Boston Marathon and once at Chicago. Between 1975 and 1982, Bill Rodgers won Boston and New York City four times each, and Alberto Salazar won three New Yorks plus a Boston.

Then almost all of this winning stopped. At that most American of marathons, Boston, the last U.S. winner was Lisa Weidenbach (now Rainsberger) in 1985. The last man to win there was Greg Meyer in 1983.

The world grew much tougher. Kenyan men, a minor marathon force in the 1980s, rose to power. Their African neighbors, the Ethiopians, responded by adding strength in numbers of their own. Women’s talent, once centered in Western Europe and North America, spread worldwide—especially to East Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Far East.

Big marathons in this country are much more international now than they were 20 years ago. They’re usually much faster at the front.

Even if Americans ran as fast as they did before, they wouldn’t win as often because the fields are so different. But we can compare the times from the two eras because miles and minutes haven’t changed in length since the 1980s.

Only one man, Khalid Khannouchi, has run faster than Alberto Salazar’s time from 1981. Only one woman, Deena Kastor, has bettered Joan Samuelson’s 20-year-old PR.

Looking deeper, five of the top seven fastest-ever U.S. men ran their best times at least 22 years ago. The second- and third-ranked women ran their fastest in 1983 and 1985.

American marathoners peaked in depth of times at two races: for men the 1983 Boston, for women the 1984 Olympic Trials. Compare those runners with today’s.

At Boston 1983, U.S. men Greg Meyer, Ron Tabb, and Benji Durden all broke 2:10 (while placing 1-2-3).

Twenty-one Americans ran under 2:15 that day. In all 2004 marathons, and not just Boston, the sub-2:10 count was again three, but just 11 runners went under 2:15.

The women’s high-water mark came in 1984 at their first Olympic Trials. As many of them broke 2:35 there (10 runners) as ran that fast in all 2004 races combined, and far more broke 2:40 in those Trials than for all of last year (31 versus 18).

What happened? Yes, the outside competition got tougher, but Americans don’t have to beat the world to run fast times. Why can’t they even outrun their countrymen and -women from a generation past?

OLD GOLD

Three key factors made the golden agers faster in depth than any other group of Americans in the past 20 years. They didn’t wait too long to start racing marathons, they ran with abandon, and they raced mostly for free.

Starting “Too Soon”

An old idea, which should have died in the golden age, has taken root again in recent decades. It’s the myth that marathoning is a refuge for aging and slowing runners—that it’s their parents’ and grandparents’ event, not one for a young speedster to try.

Young runners are urged to wait, exploit their speed first, because the marathon will kill it. Once a marathoner, there’s no turning back to the track.

Oh, no? How about Billy Mills? He qualified for the 1964 Olympic Marathon before making the 10,000-meter team and ran the long race in Tokyo after winning the short one.

Alberto Salazar set American track records for 5,000 and 10,000 meters after running his world-best marathon. Frank Shorter placed fifth in the Munich Olympic 10,000—a week before winning the marathon there.

Shorter and Bill Rodgers both qualified for the 10,000 at the Montreal Games (but neither ran that event there) after going 1-2 in the Marathon Trials. Joan Benoit ran internationally in cross-country and track while in her marathon prime.

These five runners are venerated elders in the sport now but were in their 20s during their golden ages. Mills turned 26 in his golden year. Benoit won her Bostons at 21 and 25 and her gold medal at 27. Shorter was 24 when he won at Munich.

Rodgers won his first Boston at 27 and another plus two New Yorks before his 30th birthday. Salazar debuted in the marathon as a 22-year-old and ran his fastest race at 23.

Back at the dawn of this golden era, Buddy Edelen set his world marathon record at 25. The average age of the best Olympic team in U.S. history (1-4-9 at Munich) was 26.6.

Cathy Schiro (now O’Brien) holds the record for youngest Olympic Trials marathoner. She ran the 1984 race at 16 and then made the next two teams while still in her early 20s.

Young talent still pours out of the high schools and colleges every year. The pool of athletes capable of running fast times in big marathons has never shrunk, only the wish and the will to do so when their speed runs high.

Running “Too Much”

The golden age of marathoning had its roots in the distance-training revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, Arthur Lydiard’s 100-mile weeks. Training big miles on the roads naturally led to racing them there.

One reason the golden era ended in the 1980s was the turn away from distance. The buzz word became “quality”—fewer miles, faster. Runners who avoided “junk miles” rejected road races as inferior to the “real” running that centered on the track.

Even the marathoners ran less. They bought into “scientific” reports that mileage beyond certain arbitrary maximums—S0, 60, 70—was wasted.

Two oddities here: first, the best 10,000-meter track time by a U.S.-born runner is stuck at 27:20, run 20 years ago by Mark Nenow, a high-mileage trainer.

Second, the same runners who praised quality miles also shied away from those highest in quality. They didn’t race as often as the golden agers. Quality was another name for caution: less running, less racing.

This is a way to run pretty well for a long time. But truly great racing might require risking doing too much training and racing. The trade-off often is a shorter stay at the top.

The best of the golden agers ran as if there were no next year, and sometimes there wasn’t. Careers often were as short as they were spectacular.

In 1972, Frank Shorter ran three marathons within five months. The second was his Olympic victory, the third his PR. In 1984, Joan Benoit’s winning race at the Los Angeles Games came just three months after the Trials.

Three of the country’s world record marathoners—Buddy Edelen, Alberto Salazar, and Joan Benoit Samuelson—each ran in only one Olympics. The 1964 Trials triggered an injury from which Edelen never recovered. Salazar’s many big efforts had drained him physically before the 1984 Games.

Benoit took her chances in 1984 and got away with it. She ran the Trials less than three weeks after knee surgery, but her best racing lasted only one more year.

America’s best native marathoner (read: not Khalid Khannouchi) never to make an Olympic team was Dick Beardsley. The 1982 Boston was his fifth marathon within a year and 10th within two years. He PRed in seven of those races but lost his shot at the 1984 team to an Achilles injury.

You couldn’t accuse any of them of being too cautious. They all trained long and raced often.

This wasn’t the way to stay on top for a long time. But it was their way to get there for a little while.

They made their choice. That’s why we remember them so well.

Racing “for Nothing”

You could ask, “Why aren’t more American runners up front at the big marathons anymore?” A better question would be, “Why aren’t the best of them there at all?”

The main reason they don’t show up in any numbers at Boston, Chicago, and New York City is money. The professional era in this country, which took hold here in the 1980s, hasn’t been kind to Americans.

As amateurs, they would run anywhere they could afford to go. As pros, they don’t often go where they won’t be paid. Without another job, they must get paid for their running.

The biggest races buy the best talent, and it usually isn’t American. U.S. runners unable to earn travel expenses and unlikely to win prize money look for other races to enter.

Take Boston as an example. Its invited field, recruited worldwide, isn’t huge but it hogs the prize money. This scares off the lesser pros.

Boston, like other wealthy races, is fast at the front but has thinned at the top. Times right behind the leaders have slowed since the golden age.

The last year before Boston went into a steep but brief decline, and then turned pro, was 1983. That year 83 men broke 2:20, and the majority were American.

Only 16, from all countries, ran sub-2:20 this year (just three of them from the United States). But those 16 drove away other pros with little chance to cash in.

Boston 1983 paid no appearance fees or prize money and helped very little with anyone’s expenses. The peak race for women, the 1984 Olympic Trials Marathon, paid some travel costs but nothing extra to its leaders.

Few runners back then had shoe contracts or ever earned anything for their running. Most of them invited themselves to Boston and the Trials. They got there on their own, with money earned by other means than their running.

Marathoners didn’t have to or expect to finish in the money because there wasn’t any. Their payoffs weren’t monetary but were (as, ironically, a credit card ad says) “priceless.”

I’m not calling for an end to money racing, which is with us to stay. I am saying there are some marathons worth running for free and even paying to get there. America’s amateurs still know this, and the pros might profit from relearning it.

GOOD AS GOLD

The end of a golden age doesn’t mean that the good times are over for good, personally and athletically. For me and for the sport, the low spell that followed the old high led to a new peak.

This peak differed from the last. Maybe it wasn’t as golden, but it still was good.

About 20 years ago, I bottomed out. Then I found a new home for my magazine columns, published more books, ran more marathons, remarried.