“..A few older women out for a lark:’—Dr. Nell Jackson Part 6.

21. The women

[AN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, December 1970. Who lines up on which

side of an argument can be confusing. I saw this at the National AAU convention when the debaters seemed to have joined the wrong teams. The men’s longdistance running committee, chaired by Browning Ross, was nearly unanimous in its praise and support of the women joining men in road races. The women’s track and field committee, headed by Nell Jackson, was nearly as unanimous in its opposition to “integrated” racing and to females running marathons.

Give Dr. Jackson credit. At this convention she appeared before the longdistance committeemen to field often-hostile questions and charges on this subject. In essence, she said: /’/] have none of it. And she had the power to keep the women from having full access to long races. ““We’ve approved 10 miles,” she said, “but we’ve never been submitted [requests for] anything longer. I wouldn’t give permission to run a marathon. It’s not in the best interest of the national program. I’m very concerned about the effects of these long distances on females.”

So that’s the first argument: she and her committee are “protecting” women. Another: AAU rules specifically forbade mixed female/male competitions. “By running together,” Jackson said, “not only does the woman or girl threaten her own eligibility but also that of every runner in the race. I have no objection to distances up to a certain point, but men and women must run separate races. I think it’s a sound rule.”

During this convention, Jackson’s committee formally extended the maximum allowable women’s distance to 10 miles. The two-mile was added to the track program, “and the three-mile is permissible” in special cases. But she warned

that “those who are running longer distances without permission are working in opposition to our program. They don’t need to be in the AAU.”

Then came her most inflammatory—some would say ridiculous—statement: “We’re not concerned about those who want to run long distances. There aren’t many of them. We’re more interested in the masses of younger people, the hundreds of little girls running track and cross-country rather than a few older women out for a lark.”

Apparently she included in the latter group women like Sarah Berman and Nina Kuscsik, both mothers in their 30s who trained 80 miles a week—and who ran 26 consecutive miles faster than many of the little girls ran a single one. Berman had won the last three unofficial Boston Marathon titles. Kuscsik would become the first recognized Boston winner after women had triumphed over the Nell Jacksons of this sport.

Update: Following women

Some of my favorite runners are women. There are more of them to like now than ever before, but I’ve been around long enough to remember when there were none. This long memory allowed me to emcee a program at the Napa Valley Marathon devoted to women in running. Panelists included three runners who had lived much of the history of the event: Ruth Anderson, a pioneer among women masters; Gayle Barron, 1978 Boston Marathon winner; and Lorraine Moller, who rose from 800-meter runner to Olympic Marathon medalist.

They and the audience allowed me some introductory reminiscences. I told them that men go back more than a century in the marathon. I’m a little younger than that, so much of the learning about them has been long after the fact. But I’ve lived the women’s history race by race, year by year, almost from day one. I ran with the earliest women marathoners, supported them in print, cheered their first successes, and watched them grow toward equality.

I saw my first woman marathoner in 1963, at the old Ocean to Bay race across the mountains of the San Francisco Peninsula. Lyn Carman finished that day; I didn’t. My first full marathon was Boston 1967. You know what happened there—as Jock Semple struck an unintended blow for women’s marathoning. I never saw Kathrine Switzer that day (or Bobbi Gibb, who ran an hour faster than Kathrine), but all women runners have her to thank for marketing the event in the years since.

Leven welcomed losing to a woman for the first time (not counting DNFing against Lyn Carman). Tens of thousands of women have outrun me since 1971, but it happened first at an eight-mile race in Napa. I couldn’t have picked a better person to lose to: Francie Larrieu. She was just a teenager then and made the Olympic team the next year when 1,500 meters was the longest distance for women. Twenty years later, at 39, she ran in the Games as a marathoner.

I played a minor role in winning Olympic recognition for the marathon by serving with a group rather grandiosely calling itself the International Runners Committee. We specialized in making pests of ourselves with officials until they finally relented and gave women the race they deserved.

US women qualified for the Los Angeles Games at the Trials in Olympia, Washington. Joan Benoit won there, 17 days after knee surgery. I joined the shouts of joy for how far women had come and how far they now could go.

Little more than a decade after a female official dismissed the women’s marathon as a “lark” indulged in mainly by bored housewives, it became an Olympic event—and then a phenomenon. I remember when no woman ran this far, then one, then two, followed by a few. Now they are closing in on their rightful 50 percent of the marathoning population. Women staged a peaceful revolution in this event and won. Men who fought for them, not against, now cheer this as a victory for all of us.

22. The breaks

undeserved, faith in the power of numbers. We once thought, for instance, that reaching 100 miles ina single week was vastly superior to stopping at 99. A runner might sneak out at 10 minutes to midnight on a week’s last day to go the extra mile, which does nothing more for the body but lifts the spirits.

Inever did anything so silly because I never came close enough to 100 miles to try. My best training week ended in the 80s. But if you let me include racing in the total, I did nudge into triple digits—once. That week began with a marathon, a full effort that ended up being my second fastest (and within 37 seconds of my PR). The weekday recovery runs totaled 20 miles, and then the weekend brought another race. It lifted my Sunday to Saturday mileage to at least 105—or higher, depending on whether you count the wee hours of the second Sunday morning as a continuation of Saturday night.

If not for Ken Crutchlow, I never would have believed it possible to go so far, so soon after a marathon. This British adventurer, whose feats had included running from Los Angeles to San Francisco, inspired me to try breaking a long run into segments for the first time. Talking with Ken after he had covered 550 miles in 10 days, I asked how he could have done this on almost no training. “Five-mile bursts,” he said. “That’s how I ran it, five miles at a time with a bit of rest between the runs. Never would have made it otherwise.”

What was good enough for the untrained Crutchlow seemed good enough for mildly trained me. The weekend after my marathon, I entered a 100-mile race to test his technique. My longest run ever had been 32 miles, so my distance limit

shouldn’t have been much longer than that. But Ken had persuaded me to try for more—much more.

I started by running five miles at a time, two laps of this course, then taking a few minutes’ break. This practice brought gibes from fellow runners. ““You’re quitting already?” asked one early in the race. “With 95 miles to go?” I carried on with five miles at a time through 50 and then dropped to two and one-half miles while often stopping longer in between. These weren’t walk breaks between running segments. They were rest breaks, with runs resuming exactly where they had left off. I wanted to say I had run the full distance, even if I had called timeouts.

Midnight passed. The house lights along the route flickered out. Four other runners remained on the course somewhere, but I hadn’t seen any of them for hours. I had never felt so alone. Nothing I had ever done in running seemed quite so senseless as running these laps by myself in the darkness after I had already run so many.

A lone official stood, recording laps, in a golf course parking lot that marked the start and end of each lap. I sat down there for my break after the 70th mile and couldn’t get back up. The thought of going on was too depressing. I mumbled to the scorer, “That’s it for me. Write ‘DNF’ on your sheet.”

Another runner, Peter Mattei, sprawled in the back of his station wagon. He was only resting, not dropping out. “What do you mean you’re quitting?” said Peter. “You can’t stop now. You only have 30 miles to go.” He was serious. Compared with the 70 we had traveled, 30 more didn’t sound like much. But it was almost as far as I had ever gone before this day. It was six to seven more hours of running at a time when I couldn’t face six or seven more minutes.

Ken Crutchlow was right. By taking long runs in small

Finishing my second-fastest marathon, with my longest run to come later that week.

Courtesy of Joe Henderson

bites, physical fatigue can be held off almost indefinitely. Mental fatigue from trying to run all night? Well, that’s a problem Ken solved much better than I did. I would never solve it, never trying to go anywhere near this far again, let alone beyond. But this experience taught me what breaking up a run by stopping or walking could make possible.

Update: Stop signs In one sense that truncated 100-mile race was my greatest failure. Never had I left so much of a race unrun. But in other ways this was a great eye-opener.

After 14 hours on the road, I was very tired of running. But to my relief I wasn’t overly tired from it. All of my marathons, at little more than one-third the distance run at Rocklin, were more exhausting in the doing and in their aftermath. I was weary the next day from lost sleep, but little more so than if I had stayed up for a party until three o’clock in the morning. I also felt far less sore in the days after this run than from any marathon. This showed me that running intermittently is a leg saver compared with nonstop effort.

You might point out that the slower-than-normal pace saved my legs and energy. Granted, my total time for the 70 miles averaged a pedestrian 12 1/2 minutes per mile. But in the running itself, the pace stayed at a surprising 8:13. The day would come, and not long into my future, when I could no longer average that pace for a nonstop marathon.

And soon after that, I wouldn’t know what was possible for me by running nonstop because I no longer tried. The rest breaks had morphed into walk breaks, which I believed in and wrote about from the mid-1970s on. Ernst van Aaken and Tom Osler taught me more about their value, and Jeff Galloway later refined their practice by shortening both the run and walk intervals. The time came when the marathon was my “ultra,” and I wouldn’t think of trying one without these breaks.

23. The good-byes

from the family nest, we never leave our parents. And they never release their hold on us. They stay forever in our actions and our hearts, as well as in our photo albums. One of my most bittersweet mementos pictures my father and his three brothers at the 1970 Drake Relays.

Drake Relays weekend was a family holiday for the Hendersons. They started coming here during the Depression and had returned in various combinations and growing numbers ever since. The 1970 reunion was extra-special because the Henderson who first brought the family here was back for a rare visit from New York State. The oldest brother, Chuck, had been a winner at Drake in 1931. He now taught agricultural science at Cornell University.

The last reunion of the four Henderson brothers at the family’s favorite track meet.

The Drake Relays photo catches them seated in their favorite row—high in the east grandstand, across from the finish line. Looking left to right, they are my dad, focused on the track and not the camera . . . youngest brother Bruce, a magazine editor from Peoria, Illinois . . . Chuck, clearly the tallest even while seated … Milt, a rural-youth worker in southern Iowa and the most outgoing of the clan. Standing behind them on the right is my mother, Virginia. This latest reunion of all four Henderson brothers would be their last.

My next trip back to Iowa, less than a year after that reunion, was for the worst of reasons. My brother Mike had called me here with the terrible news that our dad had died, of an unsuspected brain aneurysm, at age 54.

Now I came to the Coin cemetery to say a private good-bye to my father. I ran out to where a light dusting of early-spring snow covered a fresh mound of earth. Dad had joined both of his parents and his parents-in-law in this hometown resting place. The last of those four, Mabel King, had come here the previous fall after living 90 good years.

My mother, Virginia, had now lost the two people closest to her within six months. She would have to will herself back into the house in Des Moines that she had shared with her husband, back to work as a secretary at Drake University, back to school at Drake where she was earning (one night class at a time) her long-delayed degree.

Courtesy of Joe Henderson

Her family and Dad’s gathered for mutual support and comfort. Chuck Henderson, the first and best of our runners, traveled the farthest. Mike, who handled most of the funeral arrangements, was making a job change that would take him from a hog farm in Texas to the sports information office at Drake. Sister Anne also had followed our dad into journalism, while Emily had adopted his concern for the less blessed and gone into social work.

Irushed back to Iowa that week from California, where I had lived since 1967. As a college runner, I had disappointed Coach Bob Karnes. He had predicted greatness from me, but I had been at best a journeyman athlete for him. He came to Coin for the funeral. This was to honor Dad’s volunteer service to the Relays in recent years.

From the Coin cemetery, I now looked down on what had been Henderson Farm. Littering the old hog pens were carcasses of cars. Looking out on the town, I saw the abandoned high school building. I couldn’t see my family home, long since bulldozed away.

While reflected on losses, a comforting thought came to me. People, as well as places and events, die only when forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten and wouldn’t forget. So this was not a final good-bye to my dad after all. He would stay with me, as would our family and this town, in every step I would ever run and every word I would write.

Update: Passing on

I’m both my father’s and my mother’s son. My dad was a sprinter and jumper good enough to compete in college. From Mom came the gift of endurance. She never ran a distance race, and I couldn’t imagine her ever wearing running shoes, let alone shorts. But she had stamina. She never learned to drive and did much of her daily commuting on foot, always hurrying. I recall her near running through our hometown—in dresses and high-heeled shoes.

Mom was a self-taught journalist. She wrote for local newspapers and found me my first job at one of them, at 17 and with no visible talent. For 30 years, she wrote a weekly newsletter for family and friends. Her mother, my Grandma King, had done the same for 30 years before that. The columns I’ve written most weeks for more than 30 years reflect this enduring family tradition.

In her late years, Mom’s legs and memory failed her, but she remained a sports fan to the end. I have a photo of her embracing Olympic runner Suzy Favor Hamilton as if she were a long-lost granddaughter, though Suzy had no idea who this friendly little old lady was. They met at the Drake Relays, a weekend that is bigger than Christmas in our family. Each April, Mom opened her home to relatives and friends, who sat together at the track meet.

I sat beside her at the Drake Relays in 2003, after too long away. A year later her seat was empty. But she endured through that 2004 “holiday” weekend so

her family and friends, in town for the meet, could come to her hospice room to say good-bye. Three days later she died peacefully at almost 87. We said final good-byes in Coin, whose streets Mom had once run, and so had I.

a “track.” I had planned to celebrate that 50th anniversary with another mile around that same block. It never happened. Instead I came back to Coin in May for Mom’s funeral. A run around that block, with the Methodist church marking its start-finish line, wouldn’t have been right that day. So I just stood outside the church and let memory do the running.

24. The mecca

EUGENE, OREGON, June 1971. You expect so much from a mecca that anything less than perfection found there can mar your first impression. Eugene was already well established as a runner’s dreamland by the early 1970s, and I expected more from this city than it could deliver.

I created my own first disappointment by opposing in print the 2:59:59 time limit for entry into the National AAU Marathon here. I had met the standard myself but had written that it violated the evolving spirit of the sport: everyone is welcome, and there is no stigma in being slow. This editorial didn’t sit well in Eugene and brought spirited rebuttals from two of the city’s most prominent running citizens, Bill Bowerman and Kenny Moore.

Before this debate flared up, I had wavered about running this marathon (which would have been my third in six weeks and second in eight days). Now I felt obliged to back my words with actions and drove here from California with two other marathoners and my now-fiancée, Janet. One runner was Jim Howell, who had married Janet’s sister and who would qualify for the 1972 Olympic Trials. The other was Harold DeMoss, an airline pilot who chafed at the dawdling pace of our drive north.

On Saturday morning before Sunday afternoon’s race, we went to an IHOP filled with runners. One noticed an empty spot at our table and drawled, “Mind if I join y’all?” He introduced himself as Jeff Galloway and told how his drive, from Florida in a sports car he called Mobley, had dwarfed ours. Thus began a friendship with Jeff that would endure for decades.

My protest marathon on behalf of the excluded went all but unnoticed. An exception: while I was running through sister city Springfield, a kid critiqued my run with, “You’re so slow, why don’t you drop out?”

We had started on the Hayward Field track, running two laps there before reaching the road. I had been last to leave the stadium and hadn’t advanced from there when the boy remarked on my pace. “Slow” was relative, as I was averaging better than seven-minute miles. This pace would gain me only four spots by the end.

Place didn’t concern me, but time did. We had a deadline: reach the Hayward Field entrance before 3:00:00 and finish inside, before a track meet began; arrive later and detour to an alternate line outside. I passed through the gate with less than a minute to spare—but not before a gun fired and the full-house crowd roared for the milers.

Later I would tell how I “led” Steve Prefontaine up the backstretch. His crowd cheered his first lap on his track, while I ran unseen in the outside lane. Soon enough, he and the other milers raced past. Too soon, Pre would run his last race at Hayward and at this same time of year, 1975, and this same meet would be renamed in his honor as the Prefontaine Classic.

That evening we marathoners reconvened at the Eugene Hotel for a banquet. I happened to sit across from Frank Shorter, who had debuted at this distance and finished second to Kenny Moore. Frank’s face was now pale and he wasn’t eating, as nausea kept him from enjoying what he had done that afternoon. Suddenly the distinctions between the nearly first and almost last vanished. The aftereffects of the marathon brought the marathoners closer together that evening than their range of times had made them appear that afternoon.

Update: Home runs

“We could live here,” I told Janet during this first visit to Eugene. She nodded agreement. We had seen the city at its early-summer best and couldn’t imagine its long and wet winters. We weren’t yet married but were already casting about for a new home, away from the sprawling suburbs and soaring costs of the Bay Area. Ten years and two children after nominating Eugene as a future home, we moved here.

Our arrival coincided with a local financial crash and a spike in interest rates nationally. The motto of those times was, “Eugene is a great place to live—if you can make a living.” All of my income came from elsewhere, so I imagined myself immune from the harsh economic times. I wasn’t. The outside income declined, and the “bargain” house became too costly to keep and worth less in this dismal market than its loan. We sold at a big loss.

By then, though, this was home and became more so as I joined the local economy and community, first as a journalism instructor at the University of Oregon, then as a teacher of running classes there, and finally as coach of a marathon training team. I’ve now lived almost as long here as I had in Iowa and California combined. Eugene became my most lasting home.

Since I moved here, no one has ever taunted me again for being “too slow” — thought it, maybe, but never shouted it—even as I’ve slowed by a minute per mile per decade since 1971. On that first visit we stayed at race headquarters, the Eugene Hotel. That same building now houses the Eugene Hotel Retirement Center, which could someday bring me full circle as the /ast place I’ll stay in this hometown.

25. The wedding

LOS ALTOS HILLS, CALIFORNIA, August 1971. Life seeks balance. A terrible loss can lead to a great event. In my case, that pairing came on the same day. My proposal to Janet Allardyce wasn’t an occasion of romance but of grief. While still in early shock from news that my father had died in Iowa, I asked Janet that same evening to marry me. I wanted to give some small measure of comfort to my family the next day when we gathered in Des Moines.

“I’m sorry that he never got to meet her and didn’t get to hear this,” I told Mom. She said, “He knew she was the one.” The marriage was inevitable by then. The only question was when I would finally ask, and Dad’s passing kept me from delaying any longer. Janet and I had been a couple for more than a year and had lived quasi-married since the past fall.

We shared a house with her newlywed sister Barbara Howell and husband Jim. Their wedding had been unusual even in an era of marital unconventionality. Guests were invited to a “surprise party,” where the surprise was their ceremony. We enjoyed the fun they had but didn’t want to repeat it. Nor did we want the full-blown church wedding of Janet’s brother, Jimmy. Ours would be somewhere between these extremes.

Janet, her sister Barbara, and her mother, Norma, took over the wedding planning. All I asked was that we wait until my Army reserve term expired in early July. This would free me from the lingering threat of a call to active duty—and would let me grow some real hair before the ceremony. More seriously, I wanted to let Mom come far enough out of mourning to attend. We settled on the date: August 14, a Saturday, with a Congregational minister presiding, in the Allardyce parents’ backyard next to a summer-dry creek.

My mother and sisters flew out from Iowa, and California aunts Connie and Jackie joined them at the wedding. Janet’s mother, Norma, highly wired at her calmest, was in a tizzy as the hostess. Racing home after picking up the cake, she watched it tip over in the backseat. The home repairs left it with a Pisa-like lean.

My most-lasting memories of the ceremony: (1) never feeling so nervous before and during any race or speaking engagement as I did here; and (2) what my new father-in-law Fred Allardyce said afterward, which was, “I can tell you now that I never approved of your previous living arrangement. This makes it OK. Welcome to the family.”

Update: Alone together

Close readers will note an upcoming gap in this narrative. I add no chapter bedone professionally in those months and wrote little that was memorable. I stayed close to home then, busy learning to be a husband.