Run Wild

Children, those little sacks of raw energy, left to their own devices, resemble wild animals in their enthusiasm for life and movement. Watch a litter of puppies or kittens, and their every waking moment consists of roughhousing—everything from gnawing on mom’s ear to wrestling with a sibling to running around in circles for no discernable purpose. Toss a half-dozen kids into a room and walk away, and their antics are similar. They run around randomly, cavort, jump up and down in the same spot, wrestle with each other, squeal with the joy of just plain living, existing, moving.

Of course, concerned parents quickly attempt to squelch such innerdirected, spontaneous nonsense. These parents spend thousands of dollars on ridiculous imagination-robbing toys and games and “educational” mindnumbing videos, while all the kid wants to do is play with the boxes the expensive stuff came in.

Raw wilderness—the third rail of humanity—is usually beaten or bribed out of us: beaten by corporal discipline or bribed by parents who aren’t disciplined enough themselves to impose discipline on their offspring. It’s all on behalf of the sane preservation of civilization as we know it, or as we would like to envision it.

Certainly we need to control, to some extent, random acts of randomness. Society needs rules and limits or it faces ruin from anarchy and insanity.

Inevery sort of formal sporting arena, the most that can be accomplished comes in the wake of serious and methodical practice. The young gymnast practices the dismount from the parallel bars over and over and over, until it becomes second nature. The swimming competitor logs endless hours in the pool developing endurance and form that would make a dolphin jealous. The runner builds endurance and strength and speed in hopes of bringing them all together on the day of an important race. For an event like the marathon, that process may encompass 16 or 18 weeks of carefully laid-out combinations of long runs, tempo runs, speed work at the track, easy runs toward muscle recovery, carefully scheduled rest days, and often training in other sports in hopes of continuing to build endurance while preventing injuries.

To be successful, careful training toa plan is not an option. It is everything.

And for the obsessive runner, it is anything but a chore. The process of filling in the blanks in a training journal as the workouts progress brings incredible satisfaction.

Certainly, training too hard for too long can become mind numbing and burdensome.

But such training does not go on at the same level year-round. If it did,

the running body would soon become the broken body. There are usually two off-seasons: the heart of summer (when it is too hot to run too much) and the depths of winter (when it is too foul outside to do more than maintenance running).

These periods provide welcome relief from the regimen of regular training. And they provide an opportunity to be a child again, to live like an animal, to burn off excess fitness, to run wild, and to make the transition from one training period to the next.

Think of it as burning the rice paddies. By that I mean getting rid of the period of training you just left in a manner similar to how rice farmers—once the crop is harvested and the remaining stubble has died and dried out—start a fire and let it burn until it consumes the chaff so that after a period of rest, the planting and growing process can begin again.

This burning of the rice paddies can be a glorious period twice a year when the excess training the runner has done so carefully can be burned off in runs that are too fast, too long, too meandering to be part of any sane running program.

The end of your season is a time to finally run as you feel, because there are no dire consequences to your racing program if you do, because your racing program, for this portion of the year, is behind you.

The end of the fall marathon season was always a wonderful time to get into the woods and do a long, fartlek-style cross-country run, being careful, at least

when I lived back in Pennsylvania or was visiting home, to wear red while romping through the woods because the period corresponded with hunting season.

It is a glorious time on the razor’s edge, between the end of autumn and the coming of winter, when the air is chilly, the leaves have fallen, the sky is leaden, and you run into a cloud of your own expelled breath. When the legs are a bit tired from the just-passed racing season, but they still have a little spring left that you want to leave on the trail before the snows come in.

Some runners burn off whatever training effect they have left from the autumn and then go into a whole month of absolutely no running, giving the legs a chance to heal before resuming easy, longer training in preparation for the spring season.

The same process can be incorporated into the late spring when the season is ending and you are headed toward maintenance running through the hot, humid summer months. One last, hard, long, sweaty wild run to cap off the racing season is a terrific means of closing down shop, burning off the fumes of the just-passed season, and changing gears toward going easy before beginning to rebuild.

As long as on that season-ending hard run you don’t run yourself into injury, you can consider it a freeing of the animal side of your running, while putting an exclamation mark on the season.

Call it what you will—running wild, burning the rice paddies, running

as you feel—it can be one of the most memorable and meaningful runs of your entire year: the very antithesis of running under control.

* * Eo One of the most outrageous sporting events of the 20th century was the C.C. Pyle International Transcontinental Foot Race of 1928, better known as the Bunion Derby.

Pyle was the P.T. Barnum of the sports world, a hustler and promoter who promised $25,000 to the winner of his Los Angeles-to-New York footrace. The race was put together in part to promote the opening of Route 66 between Los Angeles and Chicago by Tulsa businessman Cyrus Stearns Avery. On March 4, 1928, 199 runners, from hoary professionals to rank amateurs, left the West Coast on an 84-day, 3,400-mile odyssey that would horribly try their souls and soles and raise some of them to the status of legend in an American era overrun with excess.

Charles Kastner, a Seattle-based writer who has been a frequent contributor to Marathon & Beyond and who wrote a major feature for us on Edward “The Sheik” Gardner (M&B, July/August 2001), one of the five African Americans who ran in the original Bunion Derby, has put his research on the race together in a delightful book, Bunion Derby: The 1928 Footrace Across America (University of New Mexico Press, 256 pages, $24.95).

As in any such major, far-reaching contest, it is usually the nobodies who make for interesting reading, and that is certainly the case here. It wasn’t

the professional runners who stole the show; it was the colorful minor players. There is no doubt that Chuck’s favorite contestant is the aforementioned Ed Gardner, who finished eighth with an elapsed time of 659:56:47. Eddie Gardner was a tall, long-limbed runner who made quite a name for himself in the Seattle area as a very accomplished athlete, three times winning the famous Ten Mile Washington State Championship between 1921 and 1927. Because of the racial climate in some sections of the United States during the 1920s, the Negro runners were sometimes reviled and castigated by locals as they ran through town; at the other extreme, their progress was breathlessly reported in Negro newspapers. (Chuck has contributed profiles of the African American entrants to An Online Reference Guide to African American History.)

The race was eventually won by a young Oklahoma Indian, 20-year-old Andy Payne, who averaged 10-minute miles for the entire race. He used his prize money to pay off the mortgage on the family farm, to speculate on Oklahoma real estate, and to go to college.

Chuck Kastner’s tale of the Bunion Derby is told in a straightforward, chronological manner. He manages to bring the vast array of characters alive while maintaining an easy-to-follow, day-by-day account of the increasingly wearying spectacle. An additional benefit of Chuck’s book is his extensive research; between the copious footnotes and the huge bibliography, no stone is left unturned or unmarked.

We tend to be amazed at some of the running feats that we hear about these days, but most of them pale when put up against this grueling march into running history.

Eo * *

Mike Bouscaren doesn’t run for his health. And he doesn’t really run for sport, either. He runs more for the spiritual uplift that comes with going very, very long—out there in ultramarathon land, where the hype is minimal and the spiritual highs are maxed.

He’s a graduate of Yale and of Harvard Business School, and running long distances was one more form of competition, of trying to be first, trying to be best. But when Mike moved beyond the standard marathon, as he puts

it, he was no longer a pusher, always pushing to be first, but rather he became a puller. “Pullers put resistance behind them; leaning forward in the running stride, pullers allow gravity to help,” he writes.

Ultramarathons were no longer competitions, but rather they became opportunities to meditate on life, opportunities to allow the miles to mellow him out, to find the self hiding behind the daily grind.

Mike put together accounts of 25 of his ultras in a self-published book titled simply Ultrarunning: My Story: Personal Accounts of 25 Ultramarathon Events (210 pages, $13.99, at amazon.com). He breaks his ultra experiences—of which, by the way,

I counted 39—into seven chapters, beginning with “Flashback” and ending with “Heading Home.” You can get the gist of Mike’s approach to ultrarunning by grazing through his bibliography, which he breaks into five categories: Running, Adventure, War, The Edge, and The Center (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, for example).

It is pleasant to travel with Mike from one race to the next, to listen in on his insights, and to anticipate what revelation will come next. For the runner who wants more from his running experiences, Mike is a good guide; one of the byproducts of the book is that Mike gives readers a good review of the ultras he has run, their high and low points, and how they may have been improved or canceled since Mike’s visit.

The philosophy that Mike has developed from his ultrarunning comes across in this insight: “Now I understand to let things simply happen, that I cannot make them or me into something that isn’t, and that circumstances work out better when I remove selfish wishes from imagined outcomes.” Amen.

* * Eo Running for Their Lives (Xlibris, 169 pages, $20.99), by Karl W. Gruber, is an account of his successful effort in 1997 torun 52 marathons in 52 weeks to raise money for the fight against leukemia. Running 52 marathons in 52 weeks isn’t necessarily unique; the challenge was first started in the late 1970s and

continues today, since surpassed by the 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days accomplishments of Sam Thompson and Dean Karnazes.

What makes a book like this work is the personality of the author. Karl Gruber is a likable fellow runner whose positive spirit, self-sacrifice, and low-key approach to the year’s occupation of a marathon a week don’t become boring or repetitive. He keeps his chapters short and produces a nice mix of his travels to and from races, along with tales about the races—most of which he finished in the four-hour range. Karl hoped to raise $1 million to help the fight against leukemia; he fell far short of the goal, but as with many such efforts, the journey is what mattered most. “The greatest victories you achieve in your lifetime will always be the ones you dreamt the most about, visualized clearly, and worked the hardest for,” Karl concludes. And of course he’s right.

If you can imagine it, you can do it—if you’re willing to dedicate yourself, your resources, and in this case a year of your life to it. Karl did. As he summed it up in a recent letter: “It was an amazingly intense year of running and traveling… . It was a year of victory, defeat, fatigue, inspiration, and perspiration, but mainly, as it turned out, it was a discovery of the great people along the way helping me to accomplish this great goal.”

—Rich Benyo

ON the ROAD WITH DON KARDONG

Learning From Alan

Do the exploits of a fleet-footed miler have any traction in the mind of a marathoner? Is a runner a runner, no matter the speed or distance? Or is the relative obscurity of running’s superstars irrelevant in the lives of the millions of Americans who get up, lace up, zip up, and head out every morning for a few miles of mostly comfortable running? Stay with me on this, and maybe we’ll find out.

Let me start with this: Last summer, arunning performance of considerable merit went largely unnoticed. Twentyfour-year-old Alan Webb broke a record that was set before he was born, Steve

Scott’s American record in the mile. In July, Webb ran 3:46.91, eclipsing Scott’s 1982 mark by the better part of asecond. Scott’s 3:47.69 had withstood all assaults for 25 years.

This was an eye-popping time at a distance understood and appreciated by almost every U.S. citizen. Many Americans have raced the mile at one time or another in their lives, and those who haven’t have at least some understanding of the difficulty of dipping under four minutes, a feat once considered impossible. Webb beat that formidable barrier by a hundred yards. He could have stopped at the top of the homestretch, retied his

shoes, hitched up his shorts, waved to the crowd, and still finished under four minutes.

It was a remarkable performance, one any runner, and most nonrunners, should have appreciated. But did you hear about it? My local newspaper never mentioned it. Nothing on the evening sports telecast either. And no ESPN coverage.

TRY TO FIND THE NEWS

Those who were really paying attention may have found a blurb somewhere near the back page of the sports section, right above the results of the weekend badminton tournament and just below the top scores of the 2007 summer shuffleboard season. Or maybe not. Most sports editors didn’t seem to think Webb’s mile rose to that level of importance.

This is not how it has always been. When Roger Bannister broke through to the shady side of four minutes back in 1954, the feat produced banner headlines around the world. TV journalists interrupted their broadcasts to announce the breakthrough. The fastest mile in history was big, big news.

And now?

Big stories on our nation’s sports pages at the time Webb set his record included a juiced-up baseball slugger’s

quest to set a home run record, a star football quarterback’s entanglement in dog fighting, allegations of gambling by an NBA referee, and the daily reports of drug abuse by riders in the Tour de France. Is this sports news, or simply proof that sports writing has descended with the rest of so many papers’ news coverage to the fetid caverns of tabloidism?

I’m not saying that stories about the transgressions of sports heroes shouldn’t be told. I’m just wondering why a historic accomplishment like Webb’s doesn’t deserve at least equal treatment. Not covering his record was an insult to the millions of Americans who run on a regular basis, whatever their speed, distance, and motivation.

Maybe this was just another reminder of how irrelevant newspapers, and maybe standard TV broadcasts as well, have become in this age of instant access to just about everything, everywhere, anytime, via the Internet. Certainly anyone who wanted news about Webb’s performance could have found it with a click or two on any number of running Web sites. There was video of the race itself and an interview with Webb on Flocasts.com, and lots of discussion of his record on LetsRun.com. One of those discussions wondered the same thing I’m wondering here, which is why U.S. newspapers seemed to ignore Webb’s performance. One frequent reaction to that question was, “Who reads newspapers any more?” a response that must have sent William Randolph Hearst spinning in his grave.

WHO WOULD A RUNNER HAVE TO KILL?

Arelated thread on LetsRun.com asked what it would take for a distance runner today to get on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Answers included:

¢ Return a kickoff in the Super Bowl.

¢ Marry Anna Kournikova.

° Catch a fair ball from the stands.

¢ Become a mass murderer.

¢ If Oprah won Boston. And my favorite:

– A sex-change operation in the interim between two gold-medal performances.

Those bloggers are a fairly cynical bunch, wouldn’t you say?

Some respondents took the question of the lack of publicity for distance running more seriously and blamed the relative obscurity of the venue where Webb set the record, a small track meet in the town of Brasschaat, Belgium. There were fewer fans in attendance there than you would see at your typical high school dual meet, so maybe lack of coverage was to be expected. USA Track and Field’s Craig Masback, a talented miler in his day and now, fairly or not, often the target of criticism for the sport’s lack of visibility, deflected criticism this time by emphasizing other occasions when Webb has received substantial media acclaim.

“T would point out that when Webb broke Jim Ryun’s long-standing high school record,” wrote Masback in a

USATF Web site blog, “he was not only the subject of front page coverage in the New York Times and USA Today, he also appeared on the Letterman show, was in People magazine, and was heralded widely by the mainstream media.”

OK, but that was then. What happened this time? The track writer at my local paper claimed that there was nothing on the AP sports wire, which, in his words, is “supposed to have everything.” Someone was asleep at the switch, and no one farther down the line seemed to notice the snoring.

WHAT ABOUT SPORTS INSPIRING PEOPLE?

The ubiquity of Webb on the Web and the declining influence of newspapers notwithstanding, something was lost when Webb’s performance failed to register on the radar screen of the typical American. People were deprived of the kind of inspiration that sports are supposed to engender. You know, the “hard work leads to success” notion that doesn’t rise to the surface in sports reports about dopers, gamblers, and dog killers.

“It’s such a great feeling,’ Webb in the postrace interview on Flocasts.com, “to know that all that

hard work was worth it.”

No kidding. And this brings us to you. You may have never run a mile race (my apologies for the oversight if you have), but every marathoner crossing the line recognizes the veracity of Webb’s salaam to hard work. It is, in a nutshell, what the sport teaches

us. To have a chance to succeed, you have to pay your dues. Miling or marathoning, there’s no other way to enjoy success.

And then there was Webb’s unabashed enthusiasm during his online interview for his next quest—to knock four more seconds off his time, an improvement that would make him the fastest miler the world has ever seen.

“IT need one second per lap,” he announced in the interview, holding up his index finger to the camera for emphasis. “Just one second per lap.” And then he laughed. “Easier said than done; I can tell you that.”

Your own running quest may involve quite a few more seconds than that, maybe even a hefty chunk of time—five minutes faster to break four hours in the marathon, 10 more to break 3:30, or whatever—but you should nevertheless feel the heat of what Webb is saying. It seems so simple, doesn’t it? A few seconds, a few minutes. What the sport teaches us is that those seconds and minutes do not come easily.

And finally, there was Webb’s soulbaring comment about his dream, to become the best miler the world has ever seen.

“T’ve always been searching to be the best ever,” he said. “This is just a step, hopefully, along the way.”

TO BE THE BEST EVER

So there it is, plain as rain. In the end, that goal may well elude him, just as whatever private running dream you’re currently nurturing may never come to

fruition. Most of us, of course, have never set a goal as lofty, as filled with hubris, as unobtainable as being the best ever in any particular discipline—much easier to stay hidden comfortably in the pack.

Even so, my marathoning and ultramarathoning friends, Webb’s embrace of the incredibly difficult is another part of his world that might strum a familiar chord. I’m not talking about becoming the best miler the world has ever seen—that’s his particular crown of thorns—but, rather, to simply announce your goals as a marathoner or ultrarunner, period. To tell your family, friends, neighbors, coworkers that you are training to run 26 miles, 385 yards, or 50 miles, or 100 miles. Making that claim, you are stripped of subterfuge. Your cards are on the table. From now on, there will be nowhere to hide. Make good with the claim, or expect to suffer the consequences. And the slings and arrows of your outrageous family and friends are sharp barbed, no doubt about it.

Ouch. Just ask Alan Webb, because is running has one more lesson that

runners of all abilities, all distances, can relate to: the sting of failure.

As Webb moved from his spectacular mile in July to the rarefied air of the World Track and Field Championships later in the summer, he announced his intention of winning a medal in the 1,500-meter run. Americans have been infrequent occupants of the victory podium at that distance in Olympic and World Championship competition, so his stated goal was considered wishful thinking by many pundits. Still, the man went into the championships with the fastest time in the world in 2007 for both the mile and the 1,500. Who better than the world leader to be considered a favorite to medal?

This time, the newspapers were paying attention. And this time, Webb failed to deliver. Coming off the final turn of the 1,500 meters in decent position, he reached down for that extra gear you need to win a championship race and found . . . nothing. Empty well. Black hole. He struggled to the line in eighth place, while newly minted American Bernard Lagat surged home to become his adopted country’s first

gold medalist in the 1,500 in nearly 100 years. Good on ya, Bernard. But what about Alan?

THE REALITY OF DEFEAT

“T learned nothing. I accomplished nothing,” said Webb ina gut-wrenching postrace interview. “It was a waste of my time. I should have stayed home.”

Ever have one of those races? One of those days when you toe the line with great expectations but end up wondering why you bothered?

Webb may indeed think he learned nothing from his World Championships failure, but sometimes lessons percolate to the surface long after the pain subsides. Perspective sharpens as distance increases. Time heals wounds, and healing often leads to understanding. Of what, you never know.

What I do know is that everyone who has ever chased faster times on the track, road, or trails has had a few of those days when the bottom simply drops out. The body rebels against the mind, maybe even against itself. When you need it, it’s simply not there. And those are the days that try the athletic soul.

I’ve had a few of those days in my own running career. In one that still makes me cringe, I entered the 1971 NCAA Track Championships with the goal of giving Steve Prefontaine a run for the money in the 3-mile run. I ended up jogging painfully to the finish in about eighth place. I nearly quit the sport. Prefontaine had one of those days in the 1972 Olympics, when his quest for a medal evaporated on the

homestretch under the onslaught of a few older, stronger runners. It took the better part of a year for him to regain his enthusiasm and confidence.

And Alan Webb had one of those days last summer, at the end of an otherwise outstanding season. Watching him try to deal with it, to understand it, and to move beyond it will likely show every runner a reasonable path from major failure to the next big accomplishment. Earlier in the year, ‘Webb showed us the value of hard work, the deceptively difficult yet tantalizing challenge of shaving a few seconds off our personal bests, and the nakedness of sharing your dream with anyone willing to listen. Now, we hope, he’s going to show us how a phoenix rises from the ashes of bitter disappointment.

That’s assuming, of course, that we’re allowed to watch. Sport is about inspiring successes and crushing defeats, the highs and lows of chasing a dream. That process can be played out when no one’s watching, but when the player is someone of Alan Webb’s caliber, the rest of us, the athletic dabblers, would like to be allowed to be voyeurs. We can do that on the Internet, but we also like to think this nation’s sportswriters should get in on the fun.

Eo * *

Editor’s Note: A story on Webb’s record did move on AP, just before 6:00 p.m. eastern time on Saturday, July 21. However, it was only six paragraphs, totaling about 160 words, and could well have been overlooked. One paragraph was a one-line quote from Webb: “Tt’s just really been a tremendous year.”

The story went only to the major dailies and most middle-sized papers.