A little booklet on long, slow distance set off a debate. Part 4.

12. The book

OS ALTOS HILLS, CALIFORNIA, August 1969. Journalists stay out of the

stories, but authors are their story. Until this summer I’d been a reporter, largely invisible in the stories and with no obvious opinions. Suddenly, I became a promoter of my ways and views of running. I became a player in the stories, not just a byline at the top. I became an author.

Anarticle on Bob Deines for Track & Field News spawned another for Distance Running News, titled “The Humane Way to Train” (a typo made it “Human’’). It traced the roots and rationale of long, slow distance. LSD, a term I used for the first time there, wasn’t my coinage. Browning Ross introduced me to it in his magazine, Long Distance Log. The practice of long, slow distance wasn’t my invention either. I borrowed and blended ideas that Arthur Newton, Arthur Lydiard, Ernst van Aaken, and Bill Bowerman had already promoted.

These two articles drew a few letters, asking to hear more. They caught the eye of T&FN publisher Bert Nelson. He called me into his office and asked, “Could you flesh out your ideas enough to fill a book?” I would, and could, and did.

I wrote at home, nights and weekends—quickly, banging out the manuscript (on a small portable typewriter that danced across the kitchen counter as I composed) in less than a month. T&FN’s books back then were typically short, few of them reaching 100 pages. Mine was pegged at 64. To fill that modest quota, book editor Ed Fox needed to use large type, many photos, and much white space.

Icouldn’t really call this a book. LSD: The Humane Way to Train was a booklet, even a pamphlet, in size. But it would lay a foundation for much of what, and

The cover of my first book features Amby Burfoot winning
the 1968 Boston Marathon.

how, I’d write for a long time to come. I also would need to defend what I’d written about LSD—often to people who had never read the original.

(That book is now available for e-readers through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)

Update: Not so fast

The stranger apologized for calling late and without warning. Friday night at home wasn’t the time or place for a philosophical discussion, let alone an argument. He said, “I’ll only take a minute of your time,” then talked much longer than that.

“Thave to commend you for your latest column about the slowing of race times in this country,” he began. Then, as readers sometimes do, he described what was in my own article as if I didn’t remember. “You mention that one of the reasons for the slowdown is the fun-run factor. I’m happy to see your metamorphosis from the person who promoted long, slow distance in the 1970s. It’s good to see you can admit when you were wrong.” Wrong? Did I say that?

“T tried LSD, and so did many others who ran with me at the time,” the caller continued. “All it did was make us long, slow racers.” Then he thrust his verbal dagger: “LSD was a cancer that hurt the sport for a long time, and you were the person who spread it. I praise you now for having the guts to renounce it.”

I was off duty and too tired to mount a serious argument. My brief comments carried a sharp edge. “Have I put you on the defensive?” asked the caller. Defensive? What did he expect after launching a sneak attack on my firstborn literary child?

I’m protective of this work, which sold modestly and fell out of print before the first running boom struck full force in the 1970s. To claim that this thin, shortlived book influenced the course of running for a generation is a stretch. However, the name far outlived the booklet. People who talk of LSD today and link me to it in terms either flattering or critical probably don’t know what I didn’t say.

Inever suggested, for instance, that this was the one true path to running enlightenment. It was but one choice among many. The opening page noted, “This slim book . . . contains a simple report of experiences [from six runners who each switched to slower running independently] from which you can draw your own conclusions, agree or disagree.”

This booklet never promised faster racing for everyone. All six of us featured here improved most of our PRs with this approach, but this came as a pleasant surprise to us. Mainly, we had shifted to a slower gear only to escape the tyranny of track work, no matter what effect this might have had on our racing.

Our improvement probably didn’t come from any inherent magic in slower running but because it was easier running. It let us freshen up between hard efforts. It let us look forward to the races as actual and figurative changes of pace, instead of dreading them as more of the same. In this way, LSD was less a training system than a recovery system. We raced better by staying healthier and happier, not by training harder.

The book also never advised taking LSD in pure form—nothing but long and slow. All six of us sometimes ran much faster, if only in frequent short races. That fast running, taken in small amounts, made LSD work. Without the purest form of speed, an all-out race as short as a mile on the track, we would indeed have devolved into one-slow-gear runners.

Finally, the book never meant to suggest taking its title literally—running as long as possible at the slowest possible pace in order to pile up the most weekly distance possible. Only two of the runners featured here habitually topped 100 miles a week. They happened to be the fastest two, 1968 Boston Marathon winner Amby Burfoot and Bob Deines, Olympic Trials Marathon fourth-placer that same year. The book’s other four runners averaged what would now be fairly modest distances of 50 to 80 miles a week. We ran what would now be a relatively brisk pace of seven to eight minutes a mile.

However, runners who never read beyond the title were misled by it. Many ran too long and too slowly and suffered from many of the same problems caused by running too fast, too often. Shortly after publication of the book, I quit using the misleading name “long, slow distance.” I preferred the less catchy but more descriptive “gentle running,” modest in length and pace.

One good test for the value of any technique is how long it lasts. If it doesn’t work as well as advertised, it vanishes. If worthwhile, it endures. By that standard, the message in the LSD booklet must have had some value. Runners (myself included) still run this way. Critics like the one who phoned me still say that “all LSD ever did was develop long, slow runners.” I say—after more than 40 years of promoting this practice—that it is far better to be a slow runner than no runner.

13. The world

LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA, December 1969. Eras don’t usually divide neatly into decades. In any year, January | is normally just another day following December 31. But by a pair of pure coincidences, no two days ever marked greater turning points for me than the last of the 1960s and the first of the 1970s.

Later I’ll report the second and bigger change. The first came from Kansas, as Bob Anderson arrived on the new decade’s eve in a U-Haul truck that bore the entire operation of his magazine. Bob had made his first-ever call to me that fall. His voice came low and slow over the phone as he said, “I’m looking to

make a move and would like to check out your area. We have almost no races for out-of-school runners back here, and Northern California sounds like paradise.” l invited him out for a visit that fall, not suspecting that his plans for me went beyond continuing my writing for Distance Running News. “The draft is after me,” he said right after we exchanged greetings. “I need someone to take over the magazine while I’m in the Army, and you’re the obvious choice. Interested?” Of course I was. “But you realize,” I said, “that the Army has its hooks in me, too. The Reserves could call me to active duty.” He said, “That’s a chance we have to take.” And we took it to the benefit of both. Turns out the draft would adopt a lottery system, and Bob would draw a lucky number that freed him from military service. I would never serve more than weekends and summer camps. Now I was about to leave Track & Field News to team up with Bob at his magazine. He would have an editor who could free him to run the business of his magazine, which would have been a fiasco in my hands. The magazine had a new name: The Runner’s World. “World” sounded grandiose for an operation this small. But notice the apostrophe in “Runner’s.” We aimed to cover whatever touched the individual runner, and I outlined our reach in my first editorial for RW. The main line there: “It’s less important to us for one person to break four minutes in the mile with 50,000 people watching than to have 50,000 running eight-minute miles with no one watching.” This would be my central theme as chief propagandist for the magazine: get people running and keep them running, no matter their pace. Bob Anderson also signed this editorial, but the thoughts and words were mostly mine. He didn’t always agree with me but didn’t censor me there and wouldn’t later.

Update: Shouting softly Neither of my early bosses at running magazines bought into my most basic beliefs about training. Bert Nelson green-lighted the Long Slow Distance book project at Track & Field News, yet he found humor in that practice. Bob Anderson at Runner’s World disagreed more actively by never running this way himself.

Nelson had once penned a memorable line about race walking. The T&FN cofounder likened the competitive walks to “seeing who can whisper the loudest.” Fast walkers fight the natural urge to break into a run. Why else would that sport need judges? Why else would walkers break into a run once their race ends?

My first magazine boss ribbed me that slow running was equally odd for the opposite reason. “It’s like seeing who can shout the softest,” Nelson said. It does seem to go against the whole purpose of running, which is to move swiftly. The natural urge when slowing a run is to fall into a walk.

While acknowledging this quirk, I still preach and practice slow running. I’m not opposed to going fast sometimes. Hundreds of times in races and thousands

in training, I’ve run as fast as possible. Many of my stories have lionized the athletes who go the fastest of all.

What I’m against is a sense of racing against time in all my runs—especially when this urge leads to a headlong rush through all of life. This comes of treating the clock as an enemy to be subdued, from trying to finish every 10-minute task in nine minutes. The psychologists call this “hurry sickness.” Runners are particularly susceptible, because our sport rewards hurriers. It always holds up times to beat. But if time is the cause of hurry-sickness, it can also supply the cure.

The best change I ever made in running was slowing down and going longer. The second-best change came soon afterward, when I made friends with the watch. On advice from legendary coach Arthur Lydiard, I quit counting miles and simply ran for a half hour, an hour, or longer without knowing the distance covered.

I began running by time for a practical reason: no need to measure all courses. Running by minutes frees us to run them anywhere, to vary the old routes and to explore new ones. I soon found an even better reason for time-running: relief from rushing. Our natural urge when running by miles is to finish them as quickly as possible. Running by minutes, which can’t be rushed, we naturally ease into an unhurried pace. We come to see the beauties and benefits of relaxing—which isn’t to say that everyone finds slowness appealing. One opponent took the other side in this debate even while hiring me away from Bert Nelson. Forty years later, Runner’s World founder Bob Anderson and I still shout softly in disagreement. Bob liked my work well enough to hire me as his editor. But he told me recently, “T do not think your training ideas make any sense at all. If you train slow, you race slow.”

This is an old argument between us. It came up on his first visit with me in California, in the fall of 1969. We ran together then and saw right away that our paces didn’t match. I can’t recall us ever sharing another training run.

The years have proven us both right in what we did, and why. He trained to race, and I ran to run. We still do that all these decades after our first and

<4. Distance Running News became Runner’s World with this issue, and | became its editor in 1970.

last run together. Bob still races and does it as well as almost anyone his age of 60-plus. I haven’t trained to race in decades. (If Bob thought I was slow before, he should see me now.)

He told me recently that “all of my training is hard,” which allows him to race even harder. “Racing is a blast; jogging at eight minutes a mile is boring. I would rather be reading a book [than training slowly].” Bob’s years of hard and fast racing and training clearly have agreed with him. Now I thank him, personally and publicly, for letting me write stories and books with which he profoundly disagreed.

14. The one

sought is to stop looking for it, letting it come to you when the time and place are right. I’d gone so long without a girlfriend that I had all but given up ever finding one. I had many friends who were female, but they viewed me as a buddy or a brother, nothing more.

By happy happenstance, this drought ended as the new decade began. I welcomed the 1970s at the Midnight 10K race, where a gunshot joined the fireworks to set us off in the first second of the new year. We ran on a college campus, across a freeway from the converted stable that I called home.

No year ever started further out of character for me than this one: to be awake and alert hours past my usual bedtime, to be racing in the dark, to be blind-dating afterward, or maybe not.

My running pal Jim Howell had a girlfriend named Barbara Allardyce. She had a younger sister who was between boyfriends at the moment. Knowing I was unattached, Jim schemed to put me in the company of his future sister-in-law. “Janet is coming to the race with us,” he said. “Afterward there’s a party at her parents’ place. You’re invited.”

Instead I went to my home to shower. If not still adrenaline charged from the race, and if not for houseguest runners who wanted to talk the night away, I would have skipped my “date” and gone to bed. Now I drove out into the first hours of the 1970s, to the address Jim Howell had given me.

When IJ arrived, Janet was playing hostess. She did no more than nod to me across the crowded room. An hour passed before we found ourselves together in the kitchen and finally talked. By then it was four o’clock in the morning. I left without asking her phone number.

<4 | met Janet Allardyce on the first day of 1970, and we married the following year.

New Year’s Day, Jim Howell invited me to watch football and eat party leftovers with him and Barbara. She greeted me with, “Well, how did you like her?” I confessed wanting to know her better but doubting that my awkwardness the night before had impressed her. “You never know,” said Barbara with the smile of already knowing what her sister thought. “Call her. Here’s the number.”

That call set in motion a quick series of life-altering events. Before the year was out, Janet Allardyce and I would share a house with Jim and Barbara. Less than a year after that, we’d be married.

€ = ( = Update: What lasts

This marriage didn’t last, but the offspring of it do. Janet and I produced three very different children in our first 11 years together. In our 12th year we separated and later divorced. Both of us eventually remarried. We have stayed in touch because of the children (and now grandkids) we share, and we’re better friends in some ways now than at the end of that marriage.

In the mid-1990s, I wrote three Runner’s World columns in as many years about those children. Those writings appear later in this book, so here I’ll just introduce the inspirations for those writings:

¢ Sarah Anne (born in 1973) has carried the family journalism tradition into its third generation. Her longest job has been as an editor at the Oregonian newspaper in Portland, where she met her future husband Mark Friesen. They brought her mom and me our first grandchild, Noah. Sarah became our distance runner, starting in college.

¢ Eric Joseph (born in 1977) has limited hearing. He didn’t speak until he was 5 and didn’t learn sign language until his teens, yet he became a top student at the Oregon School for the Deaf. He also developed mechanical skills all but unknown among earlier Henderson men (including his dad) and now works as a computer technician. Eric ran as a sprinter and football player in high school and developed a lasting love for weight training.

¢ Leslie Clara (born in 1982) arrived with a double challenge, Down syndrome and deafness. But she—more than Eric—taught me to sign. She remains childlike—still ordering from the kids’ menu, still taking her dad to G-rated movies and to swing at the park. Leslie has enjoyed running in the Special Olympics.

Having two of three children born with handicaps was hardest at first for us parents, before we realized what their compensating strengths would be. I’m sorry that we put these three through the divorce caused by their parents’ weaknesses, but we made sure that both of us remained fully involved, separately, in their lives. My lingering sadness involves their Grandpa Jim Henderson who never got to see these three. They still carry on the family history for him—as they will for me.

15. The ultra man

when you began to run and first noticed who the big names were in this sport. Nor did the US sport as we know it today start, as some historians now claim, when Dr. Kenneth Cooper moved Americans off the couch and out the door with publication of his Aerobics book in 1968. Or when Frank Shorter’s victory in the 1972 Olympic Marathon led Americans who were already running by then to run longer.

To be sure, Cooper and Shorter were two of the biggest names in the running boom of that era (later to be called the first boom to distinguish it from a bigger one in the 1990s). While they helped light the fuse of the boom, earlier and lesser-sung pioneers had already gathered the fuel that made the explosion of the 1970s possible.

To me there were bigger names than Cooper and Shorter: Arthur Lydiard and his revolutionary training approach that was winning converts worldwide; Bill Bowerman, who was spreading a similar gospel in our country; Olympic winners in 1964, Billy Mills and Bob Schul; world record-setting marathoner Buddy Edelen; writer Hal Higdon; editors Browning Ross and Fred Wilt; Boston Marathon winners Johnny Kelley, another Johnny Kelley, and Amby Burfoot; women’s running trendsetters Roberta Gibb and Kathrine Switzer.

Eventually I would get to know all of these people. But as the 1970s began, I knew most of them only by reputation and from afar. They were giants to me, and I held them in such awe that I feared even talking with them by phone when my new job required it.

My first phone interview was with one of the established giants of the sport, Ted Corbitt. Among other credentials he was a pioneering ultrarunner, which was to be the main subject of our talk. I spent all day working up my courage to dial

his number, finally calling in the evening (at home to avoid being overheard at the office) and hoping that he wouldn’t answer.

He did. Turned out that Ted was as shy as I. He spoke so softly across the line connecting New York with California that I frequently asked him to repeat. I taped our conversation and later had some trouble hearing Ted well enough to transcribe his comments, which were quite detailed despite their low volume.

Since 1962, Corbitt had taken lonesome journeys across the Atlantic to run splendid London to Brighton races at double the marathon distance. The only better-known ultra was Comrades in South Africa. Early in the decade, his efforts earned him little notice in his own country, where even the marathon was still considered beyond human endurance and intelligence.

But now, with marathoning firmly established, marathoners in growing numbers were looking beyond that distance. The times were catching up with Corbitt, who had folk-hero status among ultrarunners. He had run more races, had trained more miles, and knew more of what was involved in this demanding activity than anyone else in this country.

Before this interview, I had run almost a dozen marathons but hadn’t considered going one step longer. The talk with Ted Corbitt left me thinking: maybe I could do this. That year I would take my first tentative steps into this great beyond, and a year later I’d venture even farther. Ted led me there.

Update: Quiet giant

One of my very best moments at my only New York City Marathon, in 1994, came at the starting line. There I lined up beside Ted Corbitt, who stood almost unnoticed at the back where he could see all that he’d helped create. He said, almost apologetically and so quietly I could barely hear him in the race-time din, “T only walk the course now.” His running had ended before this marathon went big time in 1976. And this was only one among many of Corbitt’s proud progeny.

Ted was founding races in his area long before the New York City Marathon’s founder Fred Lebow started running, but pioneers seldom receive much of the later glory. That was fine with the soft-voiced Corbitt. He never sought attention for himself. He never acted as a standard-bearer for African American long-distance runners (of whom there are still few). He never directed a big race, never wrote a biography (though one came out about him, by John Chodes), and never gave a major speech (that prospect would have paralyzed him).

Ted let his contributions speak for him. They reach far beyond his own running—which started early in the rural South, continued in track and cross-country at the University of Cincinnati, and bloomed late in the long distances. He didn’t tun his first marathon until age 32. Then, just a year later, he ran that race for the United States at the Helsinki Olympics. He found more success, if less glory, at even longer distances. In fact, the term “ultramarathon” may be his coinage.

In 1958, Ted helped found the Road Runners Club of America, which would give the sport a framework when it exploded more than a decade later. He helped form the New York Road Runners, which would grow into the world’s largest club, and edited the publication that would become New York Running News. He set up this country’s first course-certification program and watched it become the world standard.

Ted was a relatively young 55 when a severe case of asthma stopped his running abruptly. “Sometimes I think I developed the asthma so that I would stop [running],” he said later. “It had become an addiction, and I was burned out but afraid of quitting cold turkey. I had to taper off.” So he became a walker.

Strolling his New York City neighborhood wasn’t enough, so he matched— and sometimes exceeded—his old running distances. The longest: 303 miles in a six-day race named for him, at age 82. “Since I stopped running,” he told me then, “I sometimes walk around Manhattan Island, which is 31-plus miles by the route I take. I’ve probably run or walked this more than 100 times.”

Running or walking, he remained a beacon for aging actively. His way was as it had always been: “Keep moving. Do something useful.” Few lifetimes have been filled with more movement or more useful

work. But even the best of lives must end eventually.

surrounding the New York City Marathon and men’s Olympic Trials, but now in a wheelchair. Soon afterward, his son, Gary, sent me a note that Ted had advanced colon and prostate cancers and had been flown to a Houston hospital for treatment. He died there, about a month shy of his 89th birthday.

Published tributes listed Gary as his only survivor. That was technically true. He was an only child, and his mother had passed on nearly 20 years earlier. But within the extended family of running, Ted Corbitt left thousands of children and grandchildren. I’m proud to be one of the many.

Going Far will continue in our May/June issue.