When it comes to marathons, once is never enough. Part 12.

51. The summit

OSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, April 1977. The Japanese have a saying that goes roughly like this: “He who climbs Mount Fuji once is wise. He who does it twice is a fool.” Once this sacred peak is summited, why go back and reconquer it? If the marathon is the distance runner’s summit, Boston is our Fuji, our holy place. A running career is not complete until it includes a marathon finish. And then, never mind if it looks foolish, once is seldom enough. This is especially true of Boston. After my first Boston, in 1967, I had to get back for another try. That didn’t happen for nine years, but I had to wait only from one April to the next to run my third here.

Some runners keep coming back for more in search of the perfect race. George Sheehan wrote, “They are much like surfers seeking the perfect wave. No matter how many times you attack [the marathon], you always think you can do better, find more energy, more fortitude, more courage, more endurance. You always think this time you will be the hero you were meant to be.”

Iran dozens of marathons before I realized that my most perfect one was the first—because everything was fresh and new then, and the place was Boston. I now ran marathons and returned to Boston not so I could top that first one but to remind myself that a race doesn’t need to be perfect to be good.

Marlin Darrah, a young filmmaker from Oregon, created a movie simply titled Marathon. It centered on the 1976 Olympic Marathon Trials, but Darrah wisely chose to use only “marathon” in its title. This was not just a documentary about a single event but a timeless movie about marathoning and marathoners in general.

After a screening of Darrah’s film in Boston, one runner said, “I’m kind of embarrassed to admit it, but I had to fight back tears in a couple of places. You know, watching this made me feel kind of . . .” He fumbled for the right word.

“Tt made me feel . . . noble. Sometimes I feel I’m out there all alone. Sometimes I wonder if what I’m doing is worth anything. Some people make me feel almost perverse. But when I watch this movie, I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m proud to be what I am.”

This is most true at Boston, where we feel doubly noble for earning our way here. After training alone and unappreciated in Grand Forks or Abilene, Walla Walla or Tuscaloosa, for 360 days of the year, we come here to run with each other and before a loving crowd. Boston is more than a one-day race. It’s a national running convention, lasting the better part of a week. Runners arrive early and leave reluctantly. When we aren’t running, we’re talking about this event.

Walking through these hotels, and on the streets and in restaurants before the race, you catch snatches of the same conversation repeated thousands of times: “.. weather report for Monday? . . . sore foot worries me . . . a good pasta place? … hope I don’t lose too much time at the start . . . just barely made the qualifying time… what’s your time goal? . . . under three if all goes well.”

| wasn’t

a Boston bandit, but | ran shirtless (front center) on another warm April marathon day there.

Courtesy of Joe Henderson

After this marathon, or any marathon, says Frank Shorter in the Darrah movie, “Everyone stands around—talking but not really talking, just standing there being beside each other. They’re sharing something. They’ re talking, but they know that nothing really needs to be said.”

This is an experience too good to be had just once.

Update: On schedule

This was my third Boston but the first time I had to accept credit or take blame for a training schedule I had written. I heard comments ranging from “thanks for the program” to “damn your program.” Until 1977, I had successfully avoided giving detailed programs. The only book to carry any of those had been Road Racers and Their Training (1970), and I had carefully stated there that these were the schedules of the featured runners, not my recommendations. Copy them at your own risk, I cautioned.

The Runner’s World publishing year of 1977 began with the last-minute dropout of an advertiser. A half-page hole needed filling, and quickly. Publisher Bob Anderson, who doubled as page-layout artist, said more as an assignment than a question, “How about a training plan for beginning marathoners?”

I thought about what I would do if starting over, and it wasn’t much different from how I still trained. Then within 15 minutes I dashed off a three-month program, mostly numbers with precious few explanatory notes. This filler piece, titled “Running Your First Marathon,” drew more response from readers than anything I had written to date. Comments such as those I heard in Boston that year showed me that while writers love words, runners love numbers even more.

A tidied-up version of the training I had done for Boston 1967 became the template for that 1977 first article on marathon training and then a chapter of the book Jog Run Race, published that same year. Twenty years later the program grew into a full book, titled simply Marathon Training. (Its second edition came out in 2004.)

Critics of my published programs say today that I err on the light side. Not enough total running, not enough long running in distance and number of runs, not enough speed, not enough months of training? I respond that I wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything more or harder than I did myself.

52. The bestseller

been runners first and writers second—better versed in the nuances of the sport than the niceties of journalistic and creative writing. Jim Fixx took the opposite career path: a writer first who became a runner and only later a running author.

First time I saw his name, it was atop a letterhead page. He told me in his 1976 letter how Runner’ s World was “my favorite magazine” and how he considered me “my coach.” He said he would travel soon from his New York home to the San Francisco area and asked if we could meet. Sure, I said, just call when you get here. Then I forgot about him and had to search my memory when a few weeks later the caller said, “This is Jim Fixx.”

We ran long that Saturday morning. That’s when I first learned that he was on sabbatical from magazine work, researching a book about running. He had landed a contract with Random House, which allowed him “‘to indulge myself in my hobby for the better part of a year.” He expected to return to salaried work after the book’s publication in 1977.

Jim said, “I’m starting at the source, RW, and by talking to the editor, you.” I was flattered and didn’t feel the least bit threatened. I had seen the running books that companies besides our own put out, and they weren’t much competition. He spent that afternoon at my house, taping a long and rambling interview. That Sunday we raced a fun-run together, and on Monday we met again for a run. Then we said good-bye.

I didn’t think much more about Jim for several months, except to guess once that he might have dropped the book idea. Then he sent a copy of the chapter on RW and me for fact-checking. Pretty good, I thought. I still felt flattered, not threatened. Later, galley proofs of the book arrived. Jim asked me to look at them, then make a comment of support for the back cover. I did, without thinking this aided the competition.

The Complete Book of Running sold 85,000 copies its first two weeks. It climbed to number one—for all types of books, not just sports—on the New York Times bestseller list by the time its author returned to the Bay Area. This time he came for a national book convention. He sat at an autographing table, signing for a long line of customers who wanted their copy of the Next Big Thing.

I greeted Jim with congratulations and stopped there. I didn’t tell him that we were now competitors—and that he was running away with this race. I didn’t admit to jealousy. I certainly didn’t charge that he had moved into territory that we runners-first, writers-later had staked out years earlier.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Jim Fixx’s blockbuster did everyone in running writing a favor. His book would fill the pool of potential readers for all running books, and magazines as well. I would thank him for that the rest of his too-short life, and beyond.

Update: Running-book boom

Jim Fixx wrote a good book that benefited from great timing. Good books had been written before—Dr. Sheehan on Running, for one—but the time wasn’t yet right, in 1975, for it to sell really well. Just two years later George Sheehan would

say, “The pond is so full of fish now that they’re biting at any hook we writers toss into the water.”

Fixx’s book stayed atop the national bestseller lists for almost a year and eventually sold more than a million copies in hardback. Sheehan’s Running & Being joined The Complete Book among the top sellers, as did The Runner’s Handbook by Bob Glover and Jack Shepherd.

Runners, most of them new to the sport, leaped at any bait dangled before them. I too profited from their hunger. A quickly produced text titled Jog Run Race, which I privately disparaged as “only a recipe book,” didn’t come close to matching the bestsellers in popularity. But this book’s first half-year royalties exceeded my full-year’s income from the day job at RW. Sales of my older books also surged, though JRR would top all the others combined in total copies sold.

That year’s explosive growth in running, and running publishing, led me into double trouble, first with my boss, Bob Anderson, who was rightly upset that the chapter in Jim Fixx’s book about Runner’s World featured me and not Bob, the magazine’s founder-publisher-owner. So raw were the feelings over this misplaced emphasis that I started looking for ways to escape the editorship.

My soaring book royalties seemed to offer a way out. I imagined this income would stay high enough to support my family indefinitely, that I could leave the growing pressures of my office job and retire to being a gentleman author before my 35th birthday, coming in June 1978 at the height of the running-book boom.

53. The stage

it, in expenses-paid travel if not in paychecks. Other runners just get lucky, going along for a free ride as the sport goes pro.

The sport was going pro in the late 1970s, even if several more years would pass before it became openly so. Most prominently, the New York City Marathon was more professionally managed, via Fred Lebow, than any other race to date when it went citywide in 1976. Peachtree, Bloomsday, and Bolder Boulder followed the same trend at about the same time—inviting “name” runners and paying them “speaking fees” in lieu of still-outlawed prize money.

I got lucky, tagging along with the professionalizing of the sport without having to race a step. My voice took me where my legs never had, or would. This began to happen at the Chicago Distance Classic, a 20-kilometer race that identified itself as “classic” in its first year. This was one of very few times to date when I had even had a plane ticket paid for by someone other than my employer.

Invited runners the level of Frank Shorter, two-time Olympic Marathon medalist, and Miki Gorman, women’s winner at Boston and New York City, shared the stage with me. They spoke briefly, on the understanding that they would earn

their way the next day. I was expected to say more, and the unspoken understanding was that I would write (glowingly) about this event later for Runner’ s World.

As the outdoor seminar broke up, a race official handed each of the speakers an envelope, unmarked except for a name. So naive was I that I first guessed it held a ticket for that evening’s pasta dinner. Alone later, I found several new bills inside, with a different dead president’s face than I was used to seeing. No note of explanation was included. I had been paid the same way the runners had, without leaving a paper trail that might have implicated them as amateur-rule-breakers.

My first impulse was to return the cash, saying, “This must be a mistake.” But if [had tried to give it back, the official would have played dumb about its source. My second thought: /’m not a good enough speaker to earn this. My speaking skills didn’t suddenly warrant payment, though they had improved marginally with practice. I kept the money anyway, and thereby turned pro. I justified accepting the bills because other speakers took theirs for doing no more or better work than I did.

Never would I ask for big speaking fees but only for enough to offset the time spent away from my writing office. Yet the time would come when these fees would add up to almost as much as my day job paid. And it could have been more if I had been willing to leave the office more often.

Update: Talk test

While waiting my turn to speak to a group of runners, I watched another speaker suffer. The young woman was to offer only a few lines of encouragement to a group at the last warm-up run before a marathon. She, like the others, was dressed for running. Before she could say a word, her heart monitor sounded an alarm. She had exceeded her maximum running pulse just by standing up to speak.

Conversing is easy, like taking a casual run. Speaking before a group is as hard—and often as frightening—as running a race. A Jerry Seinfeld comedy bit observes that our number-one fear is public speaking. Death ranks second. “This means,” says Seinfeld, “that at a funeral you’re more afraid to give the eulogy than to be in the coffin.”

Speaking, which used to be a near-death experience for me, now is my big event—my substitute for racing. The butterflies in my belly are an expected and accepted part of the warm-up. I’ve gotten over any fear of the audience since no one has yet thrown overripe fruit when I’ve uttered an imperfect line. Everyone has come to the talk by choice, if only to see what the bylined writer looks like in person. (I’m often told, “I expected someone much taller.”) Listeners mainly want their questions answered. They rarely ask me who’s doing what at the sport’s highest levels but usually want to know how they can run farther, faster, and safer.

Listeners sometimes come to express opposing views. In one memorable rebuttal, a man stood up after the talk and said, “I disagree with almost everything

you had to say tonight.” He then delivered a brief speech of his own, outlining points of disagreement. Later I realized that we had done each other favors. I had made him think about his own approach, and he had reminded me that instant feedback such as this is the best part of going on the road to speak. I meet readers, and in person they tell me more honestly what’s on their mind than they would by letter, e-mail, or phone.

Runners don’t often come in large numbers to my talks. I’ve spoken to “crowds” as small as four. I feel bad for the organizers when a talk doesn’t draw as well as they had hoped, but I don’t feel sorry for myself. The speaking trip would have been worthwhile for me if just one person had shown up and taken away even one tip of value.

With a small group I can set aside the prepared speech, forget about treating the talk as a “race,” and simply converse with each person as if we were on an everyday run together. The heart rate calms, the gut unclenches, and seldom does an hour pass more quickly and pleasantly.

54. The rankings

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA, August 1977. Professionalism comes at a cost. When someone’s livelihood is at stake, the work stops being play. Through the mid-1970s my job had seemed like a hobby. I had been paid for it, yes, but could have earned a better living in any of several less fun fields. Then, with the explosive growth of running, came bigger paychecks (not only from Runner’s World but also from books and speeches). I took my tasks a little more seriously.

Certain readers, those with money interests in the sport, took what appeared in RW a lot more seriously. This seemed to happen all at once in 1977. The magazine had published reviews of shoes as far back as its Distance Running News days. No one had raised a stink when Jeff Johnson from Blue Ribbon Sports, which imported Tiger shoes at the time and would morph into Nike, wrote the first set of reviews.

An equally obvious conflict of interest caused little stir when RW, heavily supported by shoe-company advertising, first ranked shoes in 1975 and repeated the next year. A whole new marketplace arose before the third set of rankings— more runners supporting more models of shoes from more shoemakers and more running-specialty stores.

Manufacturers began their lobbying early in 1977 for preferential treatment of their shoes. Adidas offered Bob Anderson and me and our families free vacations at a luxury resort in that firm’s home country, asking only that we pay a brief visit to the headquarters. We declined, not so much on principle as because of busy-ness at the office and at home.

Phil Knight, who would become the fabulously wealthy and famously reclusive head of Nike, paid us a personal visit to introduce his 1977 line. He talked with us runner-to-runners. Other lobbyists were more heavy-handed.

When the companies received advance word of that year’s ranking, the reaction was swift and predictable. One company, Brooks, was thrilled that its Vantage took top honors. It beat out the Adidas Runner. Nike, whose Waffle Trainer ranked third, charged that Brooks had bribed its way to first place. Nike pulled all of its advertising from RW and began legal action intended to expose the rankings as fraudulent.

Flawed as the ranking system might have been, it could not have been secretly skewed to favor Brooks without my knowing it. And I saw no evidence of intentional wrongdoing in our office. At most the magazine might have capitalized after the results were known by winning more ads from Brooks. But this gain didn’t make up for the loss of Nike, which would hurt for years to come.

Standing so close to all of this unpleasantness made me start looking seriously for a way out of the storm center that the Runner’s World office had suddenly become. Ironically, one of the escape routes would take me a few years later into the camp of the “enemy,” Nike.

Update: Traveling light

Even then, in 1977, [doubted the existence of anumber one shoe for all runners. Even then my choice of number one for me little resembled the models that I helped rate highest in the magazine. Over the years the gap between what the industry judged to be best and what I liked best grew wider.

Running-shoe makers would have us believe that the quality and selection of

Perhaps in rebellion against
swirling shoe controversies, | ran
some races barefoot in 1977.

‘So z g