few months after that. But the heel was never again as good as new, and it gave me an excuse to never train as much or race as hard again. My peak clearly had passed, and the time had come to settle for fewer miles and less speed.

Full-time running writing followed a similar decade-long climb to a peak. It started later than my racing but also summited early. This career began at Track & Field News as a 23-year-old; by 26, I had published a book; by 27, I was editing Runner’s World (and not just the magazine but its spinoff books, booklets, and newsletter along with many and varied promotional efforts). By 33, my book sales were lofty enough to let me leave the magazine for life as a gentleman author.

But by then the book sales had already peaked, then crashed downward as quickly as they had soared. By my mid-30s I had to seek another job in magazines but was no longer willing to work as hard to climb as high as before. I had worked too much in the glory days at RW. I had given too little thought to how this might have affected my girlfriend, who became my wife and then the mother of our children. It was time to settle down below peak level.

The sport itself passed through a similar cycle of rapid rise, level off, ease down in those years. They came to be known as the “running boom” (and later the “first boom” to distinguish it from another, bigger one that arrived in the 1990s). This boom lasted about a decade, roughly the 1970s. These were the years when running grew up, and they nearly paralleled my most intense period at Runner’s World.

Those times were heady, but this pace of growth couldn’t last. The boom ran its course after about 10 years. The 1980s became a shaking-out period that determined which runners, events, and businesses would retain their early energy and enthusiasm and which would fizzle.

This book, Going Far, is a personal journal of the boom times, for the sport and for me as I went along on that wild ride. Here I offer a series of snapshots from events attended, people met, experiences had, and ideas formed when we were young and all of this was new.

This peak passed while I was still young, not even 40 and with an equal number of years ahead if I was lucky. I couldn’t, and didn’t, stop writing after the boom years—any more than I could, or would, quit running after setting my last PR. These twin passions had been too much a part of me for too long by then to leave behind.

The running/writing did change, though. I slowed the paces of the runs and the writings so they could keep going. The peaks had been nice places to visit, but I couldn’t have lived indefinitely in that rare air.

The third and last book of this memoir series, titled Running Home, will tell what lay on the far side of the peaks for me. It will show how the settling down can be as challenging and rewarding as the climbing up.

Courtesy of Joe Henderson

57. The beach

PEBBLE BEACH, CALIFORNIA, December 1978. Where would you live if you could live almost anywhere? The likely answer: somewhere other than where you now are and must stay, at least until retirement frees you from the current home-nearjob. If you’re young, as I was in this year of turning 35, the dream move is usually a long time from coming true—unless you get lucky, as I did in the late 1970s.

I wasn’t retired, but my job was now portable. I could work anywhere with mail, phone, and airline service. My improved income made resettlement a real and immediate option, and the choice came down to the final one during my now-annual trip to the Boston Marathon.

A random assignment of roommates by our tour leader placed me with Bob Wright, from Monterey, California. I told him this was one of two places my family might move. Our talk about his hometown was exceeded only by our discussion of the race. Bob, a civilian employee of the Army at Fort Ord, said, “I know you’d love it here. And I know a realtor who can give you a look around.”

Within a month we met the real-estate agent named Annie, who spoke with the delightful accent of her native France. In July we moved 80 miles south to the Monterey Peninsula. The actual address was Pebble Beach, a private development within the gates of the 17-Mile Drive. Visitors weren’t excluded. They just had to pay an entrance fee, as if to a theme park.

This area sounds more posh than it really was. I like to say now, “We lived in the slums of Pebble Beach,” far from the mansions (including Clint Eastwood’s) surrounded by the golf courses that border Carmel. Our house was small in size and modest in price. We settled less than a mile from the unseen ocean, on a quiet street amid a forest of Monterey pines. I worked in our guest cottage, which would

<4 The realtor hands over keys to our home in the woods beside Monterey Bay.

become such a magnet for visitors that we had to impose a one-night-stay limit except for immediate family.

Most of our neighbors were retired, many as ex-military officers. Ours was the only young family within miles. I heard secondhand that the older folks wondered why I never left home for local work but disappeared on mysterious trips for a few days every month. He doesn’t look like a drug dealer or CIA operative, they speculated. So he must be either independently wealthy or a house-husband whose wife supports him.

Janet, the nurse, had found a job right away at Planned Parenthood. Our bright and beautiful daughter, Sarah, had started school in nearby Pacific Grove. Our son, Eric, was healthy and happy. We had made local friends. I could run to my limits and beyond on coastal trails and fire roads through the forest. Life here was dreamlike as 1978 ended. But too soon I would start waking up to hard realities ahead.

Update: Backward glances

The stay on the Monterey Peninsula, also known to me as “paradise,” was too brief. It lasted just three years before we moved on to a more family-friendly hometown. I would return to Pebble Beach only as a visitor, and even then only a few times and for quick glances backward.

This time, I was here as Barbara’s tag-along. She had come here for a college reunion. One evening she had a dinner that didn’t involve me, so I decided to drive wherever the car took me into my past. As if reading my wishes, the Subaru went straight to the Country Club Gate of the 17-Mile Drive. This road circles Pebble Beach.

As I handed a toll-taker the cash, I said, “This used to be my home.” With only slight interest, he said, “When was that?” I told him, “Probably before you were born. We left here in 1981.” He said, “You’re right,” then waved me through.

Thad long said, “My old home is gone. It was leveled because the land was worth more than the house.” I had heard that our lot had been subdivided, that two new mansions had sprung up there and that one had sold recently for 50 times more than our house had cost.

Pelican Road is a U-shaped, single-lane street with twin outlets to the main road. Its total length is about 200 yards. Our house sat at the bottom of the U. On each side during our stay here were two houses, all as modest as ours. The

middle of the U held only a grove of trees. Now crowded into the middle of the U were three megahouses.

Idrove slowly into the U. Any faster and I would have missed the most surprising and pleasing sight of the weekend. It wasn’t the monstrosity plopped down where our guesthouse (my office) and garage used to sit. The lot had indeed been subdivided and cleared to make room for a mansion.

I barely glanced at the big house and couldn’t tell you now what color it is or whether it’s one story or two. Another sight had grabbed my full attention. Peeking out from the lower left corner of the mansion was my old house. It looked shy now among the hulking newcomers, or embarrassed at what this neighborhood had become and how much its own age now showed.

The house was still dark brown with white trim and looked like no fresh paint had touched it since the 1970s. The roof was still flat and now bore a stubble of weeds. Never was much of this house visible from the road. Now I saw even less—only the front door and the kitchen window. Then as now, the glass-walled family room hid behind a fence, which faced a thickly wooded ravine then and possibly more housing or a new golf course now.

Barbara would have insisted on stopping for a closer look, maybe even knocking on the door and asking whoever answered, “Joe used to live here. Can we have a tour?” I’m not so bold. I didn’t even park the car and walk the U, stopping for a longer look at house number 1126. I feared that current residents might report me as casing their high-priced homes for robberies after nightfall.

Thad already seen how much the neighborhood had changed in three decades. As if I hadn’t.

Going Far will conclude in the next issue.