People & Pages Many moons ago, in another lifetime, I began writing stories about stock car drivers. This was in the late 1960s. I was just out of college and working at a daily newspaper in eastern Pennsylvania. My college roommate, who had been the sports editor of our college paper, came along with me when I took the newspaper editor’s job. Within a year, however, he had moved from his sports editor job to become assistant public relations director at the fledgling Pocono International Raceway at nearby Long Pond. When I visited him one day, he handed me a letter from a Dr. Dick Berggren, northeastern editor of something called Stock Car Racing magazine, requesting a story on the new Pocono racetrack. My former roommate didn’t have time to write the story, so I did. That started a long association with “Dr. Dick,” who periodically assigned me to write profiles of race-car drivers—local champs, primarily: Bobby Bottcher, Buzzy Reutimann, guys like that. Eventually the editorship of Stock Car Racing magazine opened up, and I took the job. My first move was to change the editorial focus from races and the mechanical side of the sport to the people side. We began carrying more stories on the drivers, mechanics, race officials, track owners—even the fans.

It was my feeling that the races and the mechanical innovations were fine, but people drove the sport. Today stock car racing on television is second only to the National Football League. Fans are still interested in the cars and the races, but it’s the drivers who . . . well . . . drive the sport. There are parallels to long-distance running beyond the fact that a NASCAR Nextel Cup race can last more than four hours, during which a driver can lose 15 pounds of body weight to sweat loss. Marathons (and to a lesser degree ultramarathons) are no longer run in the shadows; they are big news. The New York City Marathon closes in on 40,000 participants; is covered start to finish on TV; draws millions of spectators; features pit stops (known to us as aid-station stops) where liquids splash all over the place; can last four hours or more and often does; and on a hot day, runners lose pounds of body weight through sweat loss. But as with stock car racing, it’s the people who make the sport what it is: the runners, the also-rans, the race directors, the sponsor reps, the volunteers, the fans, the families, and the friends. We carry runner profiles on a regular basis in this magazine. Unfortunately, there are too many worthy stories and too few pages available. So

we decided, as a fitting way to close out our first decade of publishing Marathon & Beyond, to make this a people-heavy issue. In typical M&B fashion, that doesn’t mean only current people who run long distances. In keeping with our philosophy that our readers benefit greatly from a historical perspective of whose footprints they run in, we’re also carrying some classic profiles, such as 1936 Olympic marathon champion Kitei Son. We’re also very pleased to give our readers a first glimpse at the childhood memoirs of our dear friend and this magazine’s special correspondent, John J. Kelley, 1957 Boston Marathon winner. Johnny has shared with our readers many of his classic marathon races over the past decade, but this little story of his first race is special. It’s an opportunity to share with Johnny a few days of his childhood—a childhood not too unlike our own, not too unlike the childhood stories the master storyteller Jean Shepherd used to share with radio listeners. It is people who make our sport tick; it is people who drive all aspects of the sport, whether they are running at the front of the pack or bringing up the rear, running the 110th Boston Marathon or an ultra recently conceived while a race director was on a long run that burned up way too many brain cells. The strange, the unexpected, and the outrageous are aspects of this sport that make it colorful, challenging, universally respected and reviled, and endlessly appealing. What sport, after all, offers this kind of range: from a

40-yard sprint to an around-the-world run? As I write this, Dean Karnazes is about to embark on his demented 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days odyssey. His quest begins September 17 at the Lewis & Clark Marathon in Missouri and ends at the New York City Marathon on November 5. Some runners within the ultrarunning world have been critical of Dean and of Pam Reed for what they consider self-promotional efforts by the two. Pam Reed won the Badwater 135 outright two years in a row. Dean published his autobiography, Ultramarathon Man, and promoted it with an ambitious public-relations blitz. The two of them established a rivalry to see who could be the first to run 300 miles without stopping. They have appeared on all sorts of national radio and television shows. Some runners think these efforts are tasteless and belittle the sport of ultrarunning. The resentment of some people is fueled by jealousy, for others by discomfort with such radical attention-getting changes coming to the ultra world, and for still others by possessiveness that includes keeping news of ultramarathoning from the outside world so it can be kept clannish and cultish. It’s not too different, in its way, from the hoary veterans of the Boston Marathon who resent the B.A.A.’s softening the qualifying standards. If I had to run a 2:50 Boston qualifier back in 1983, runners today should be held to the same standards. Unfortunately, with the aging of the marathoning crowd

and the less-than-vigorous training of some runners, the size of the Boston Marathon field would revert to what it was in the late 1950s. Personally, I’m all for ultrarunning getting some long-overdue attention. And as someone who was crazy enough to run from Badwater to the peak of Mount Whitney and back, I’m always fascinated by ultrarunners who have taken leave of their senses to try something truly ridiculous. If Gordy Ainsleigh hadn’t subbed for his lame horse in the 100-mile Tevis Cup back in 1974, not only wouldn’t we have the proliferation of 100-mile trail runs these days, we would barely have any trail runs at all. Back in those days, almost all ultras were run on the roads. My hat is off to Dean Karnazes— and to Pam Reed—and to Scott Jurek— and to anyone who tries the outrageous or the seemingly impossible. And, to be quite frank, I’m thrilled that Dean and Pam and Scott are our representatives to the outside world. As those who have dwelt within the ultra world know, our patently crazy sport could be disastrously represented by any number of nut cases who live there; we would rather not allow some of those people to get within 100 yards of a microphone or television camera. I certainly don’t envy Dean Karnazes. He has taken on a monumental challenge and in the process has put tremendous pressure on himself. As you all know, all it takes to short-circuit a planned marathon is a twisted ankle or a recurrence of that twinge in the middle of the right calf muscle. Think of the

paranoia that will infuse Dean every night as he goes to bed nursing aches and pains and harboring doubts and worrying about airline connections to get him to the next day’s marathon—not to mention that running two marathons in two days goes against every training principle we’re known to cherish, much less running 50 of them in 50 days. It is true that we as long-distance runners feel we come from a common mold, that we are solitary animals, running for the sake of running, fulfilling the bred-in-the-bone need of our ancient ancestors to move, to enrich the blood, to buoy the spirit, to steam clean the brain, to allow the muscles to realize their physiological potential. We also feel that so much sweat-purifying effort washes us clean of aggressiveness, belligerence, and pride. That is why many marathoners despised Alberto Salazar when he moved up to the marathon and “bragged” in advance of his marathon debut that he was going to break the record for a first-marathon performance. He was stepping outside the self-satisfied mold that long-distance runners had fantasized for themselves: sprinters strut and preen and boast and play mind games; marathoners are modest and withdrawn and thrive on the “loneliness of the long-distance runner.” Bunk. Although marathon runners and ultramarathoners are generally helpful to their fellow runners and supportive, when the gun goes off, the most mild-mannered runner becomes an assassin. Think of good guys like Bill Rodgers and Amby Burfoot and John J. Kelley and Don Kardong—wonderful

guys until you pin a number on them. It’s the same with female marathoners and ultrarunners: they are wonderfully supportive of each other, but once the sound of the starter’s gun rends the air, all bets are off—until the race is over and everyone is once again warm and wonderful. So from us here at M&B: Good luck, Dean. Good luck in Europe this fall, Scott. Go for it, Pam! Move the sports of marathoning and ultrarunning to new heights and widths. It’s flexible enough that it can stand the stress. In fact, like the classic stress + rest = performance, the sport will come back stronger than ever thanks to these cutting-edge efforts. * * * On the matter of long-distance, running-type people, it has been a banner year for biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. In some sort of a lapse from its usual line of training books for runners (many of them ably done by Hal Higdon), Rodale Press spewed forth a glorious array of books about runners. We should all take advantage of this bounty by adding several of these to our library, because the chances of scoring such a wonderful array of biographies again any time soon seems unlikely. The biggest of the books is Kenny Moore’s exhaustive Bowerman and the Men of Oregon, a tome that took Kenny years to research and write. Bowerman, of course, was the coach at the University of Oregon at Eugene and cofounder of Nike. Kenny ran for Bowerman, as did Nike cofounder Phil Knight and

Steve Prefontaine, the James Dean of running. Kenny had access to all of Bowerman’s papers and makes excellent use of them. Most important, Kenny is an old-school journalist (he spent most of his career writing about running for Sports Illustrated) who does his research and reports on what he finds. In this case, although he obviously revered Bowerman, he presents him warts and all. Some of the most fascinating chapters of the book (and of Bowerman’s life) cover his service in the army in World War II and his battle to rein in the craziness of the Indian spiritualist Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his cult followers as they attempted to take over

a section of Oregon near Bowerman’s hometown of Fossil. The book is fascinating and provides an inside look at what most of us heard about only vaguely through news reports, and Kenny Moore proves that a good journalist can cover any story, whether it’s within his usual bailiwick or not. Obviously, Bowerman and the Men of Oregon is of most interest to runners who were active during Bowerman’s era; for the casual reader, the book, at 432 pages, may be too much of a good thing. What raises it above is Kenny Moore’s ability to tell a story well and his attention to the little details that bring the characters alive. As narrow as the focus is for Kenny’s Bowerman book, 26.2 Marathon Stories by wife/husband team Kathrine Switzer and Roger Robinson is allinclusive. The book is, in all respects, beautiful. The printing is superb, the

photographs are outstanding, and the 26.2 stories about marathoning and marathoners are fascinating and inspiring and are told wonderfully well. The stories begin with the legend of Pheidippides and the first marathon in 490 B.C. and runs the legs off every major long-distance tale since then. If you want inspiration, buy the book and save it for the last 27 days of your training program toward your next marathon. Read a chapter each night to be inspired to jump out of bed the next day to put the finishing touches on your training program. Duel in the Sun is John Brant’s expansion of his long article on the Alberto Salazar/Dick Beardsley battle at Boston 1982 that he wrote for Runner’s World. The duel, of course, has become the thing of legend. Salazar and Beardsley battled each other from the start of that hot Boston race, showing no quarter, as they keyed off each other, threw in surges, and tried to psyche the other out until the showdown in the final mile where Salazar pulled ahead to win by two seconds—and in the process to set a new course record on an impossible day. Brant does a good job setting the scene, following both runners as they prepare for the race, taking us along with them through the race, as well as giving us insights to what happened to both of these talented runners in the wake of the race. Neither of them ever ran that well again, and the lives of both Salazar and Beardsley took bizarre turns right out of Greek tragedy—except that both of them were so focused and dedicated that

they wrote their own third acts to their lives and today are safe and successful in their own skins. Pam Reed needs no introduction to ultrarunning fans. She twice won the grueling Badwater 135 race in Death Valley against all comers, and she continues to notch outstanding performances at any distance, from the marathon on up. Her autobiography, The Extra Mile, is astonishingly frank and honest; there is no ultra from which Pam will shrink, and there is no topic in her life that is big enough to cow her. Her writing style is similar to her speaking style: simple, direct, engaging, and honest. Pam and Harry Truman would have gotten along just swell. The most interesting chapter in the book to me is “Desperate Housewife?” where Pam explains, once and for all, her intentions in running, her nonrivalry with Dean Karnazes, and the character assassination that can be perpetrated on you when you let a journalist with less than Kenny Moore’s pedigree do a major magazine feature on you—especially when the story is essentially written before the first interview. Pam Reed has earned a place among not just the great women of ultrarunning like Eleanor Adams, Ann Trason, Sandra Kiddy, and Sue Ellen Trapp but among the greats of all time, regardless of sex. The last, but far from least of Rodale’s biographies, is Dave McGillivray’s The Last Pick, as in spending a childhood always being the last person picked for whatever game the gang was playing because you’re too small, too

slow, or just too damned horrible at the game. Dave’s malady was being too short. He had two choices: give up or get tougher and try harder. Dave is the guy who organizes the Boston Marathon each year, and he has run across the United States. So guess which option he picked. Dave is like the Energizer bunny, the Tasmanian devil, and Speedy Gonzales all rolled into one. And, to mix a metaphor, like a planet, he draws others into his orbit and inspires them to play on his team, where he creates an environment in which they all think Dave picked them first. Rodale isn’t the only publisher that turned out running biographies in 2006. Breakaway Books, which publishes plenty of running books (including Roger Robinson’s fascinating Running in Literature a few years ago), issued American Miler: The Life and Times of Glenn Cunningham by Paul J. Kiell. With all of the well-deserved attention to Roger Bannister over the past several years in the wake of the 50th anniversary of his breaking the four-minute mile, many other milers faded into the background. Cunningham nearly lost his life in a schoolhouse fire at age 7 (his older brother died in the fire) and was severely burned on the legs. In spite of that, he began racing in high school and progressed to become one of America’s premier milers—and an inspiration for a young fellow Kansan, Jim Ryun, many years later. Cunningham was shy, retiring, and a true gentleman, and his story is compelling and inspiring.

Running has benefited from a cast of colorful characters. On the West Coast, we had the larger-than-life Walt Stack, who every morning ran across the Golden Gate Bridge bare chested no matter what the weather; on the East Coast, folks had Tommy Leonard, host of Boston’s Eliot Lounge, the runners’ hangout, and founder of the famed Falmouth Road Race. Tommy was one of the greatest promoters of health, fitness, and running you are ever likely to encounter. He was for decades one of Boston’s primary spark plugs and the guy who knew everyone in running and everything about running. His story is told in what has to be the most awkwardly worded book title of the year: If This Is Heaven, I Am Going to Be a Good Boy by Kathleen Cleary (iUniverse Books). Tommy certainly wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth; when he was 6, his father dropped him off at a mission for children of the destitute. No problem. Tommy made a life for himself—a life that continues to glow, a life filled with more friends than he knows what to do with. “Life without dreams would be intolerable,” wrote Anatole France—a sentiment that Tommy took as his guiding principle of life. Our Life on the Run by Marlin Keesler (Our Life Publishing) is the story of Marlin’s mission to run a marathon in all 50 states and how he turned the adventure into a family affair of careful planning and execution with his wife and two children. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific state, with information of how the trip was put

together and what the family saw and experienced, followed by a summary of how the run went. It is a very quick and easy read, a very pleasant family experience. Women Who Run by Shanti Sosienski (Seal Press) is a compilation of the stories of 20 women who run—including average running-around-the-block women; running pioneers (Bobby Gibb); Lance Armstrong’s ex-wife, Kristin; and extraordinary age-group athlete Shirley Matson. Every runner has a story of how she got into running and what it means to be a runner. These women have all been touched positively by their dedication to the sport and lifestyle of running, which comes across quite nicely under Shanti Sosienski’s pen. A fascinating compilation for the mature runner is Running in the Zone, edited by Canadians Steve King and Dan Cumming, two accomplished runners and now noted editors. It is published by Trafford and consists of excerpts from writings dealing with masters runners; it features contributions from people you’ve heard of (Bart Yasso, Roger Robinson, Bernd Heinrich, Don Kardong, Joe Henderson) as well as folks you will be interested in meeting. The book is broken into what the writers call the zones of a runner’s world: the preparation zone, the inspiration zone, the perspiration zone, and others. It’s a terrific compilation of the practical and the inspirational. None of the excerpts is too long or overwhelming, and the book can be read in small bites by reading one ex14 l MARATHON & BEYOND l NOV/DEC 2006

cerpt per day until all the lessons are digested and a better runner comes out the other end. Human Kinetics continues to be the foremost publisher of hard-core running books and sports participation books in general, and two of its 2006 titles are worth noting. The first is Stretch to Win by Ann and Chris Frederick. OK, right up front, I have to admit it: I don’t stretch. Never have, never will. Of course, I can see how it might be helpful to an athlete. But I can also see how it could hurt someone who doesn’t do it exactly correctly. Way back in 1977 when I returned to running, I used to watch people stretch before races, and I noted that the more that runners stretched, the farther back in the field they finished, so I didn’t bother stretching and managed to get a little better each week. There are, of course, some people who stretch moderately and who run well. For those folks, this is the best book since Bob Anderson’s Stretching came out in the 1970s. The Fredericks move the whole art of stretching into the 21st century by keying it to the actual movements required by various sports. If I were going to stretch, this would be the book I would use, because it treats stretching logically and scientifically, not as though it’s a religion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. We’re marathoners and ultrarunners, and we don’t want to run short or go to the track. Yeah, right. If we want to become better marathoners, we need to run shorter races and go to the track to train our legs to move faster. In fact, it would be-

hoove some of us to take a year off from marathoning and concentrate on shorter races so that we could come back the following year to run marathons better. If you want to incorporate shorter races (5Ks, 10Ks) in your training, Brian Clarke’s 5K and 10K Training, also from Human Kinetics, is the book for you. Clarke ran for Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon back in the ’60s and is today one of the top coaches in Hawaii. He dedicates this book to the legendary coach Arthur Lydiard, at whose feet Bowerman worshipped. The best chapter in the book is chapter 5, Balancing Effort and Fatigue, a topic that was dear to the hearts of both

Lydiard and Bowerman and which is integral to any training program—and which was totally misunderstood by most high school and college coaches in the ’60s and ’70s. Run yourself into the ground, and it’s an early grave for your running. Although the book is aimed at 5K and 10K racing, the principles Clarke espouses are just as applicable to marathon training. This one is highly recommended. Whew. Quite a year for producing good books for the running public. And some very good choices for Christmas presents for your running buddies. Or for yourself. —Rich Benyo