An opportunity for the perfect marathon. Part 7. BY JOE HENDERSON

26. The Avenue

suspecting that like perfect love or perfect happiness, they’re unlikely ever to capture it. Maybe it’s this search for elusive perfection that drives us on.

Iran my most perfect marathon yet at Avenue of the Giants, and it left me with decidedly mixed feelings: glad I did it but wondering what’s left now. This race offered both more and less than we had come to expect from marathons. Entrants here numbered in the dozens, not the hundreds or thousands. No bands played, no crowds lined the course, no media coverage appeared outside its immediate area and the publication that employed me. But this race gave more to look at than any other course I had seen. Runners who claimed that scenery didn’t matter, that they were too busy to notice, hadn’t seen the Avenue.

A freeway bypassed this narrow road, leaving it to slow-moving vehicles and slower-moving pedestrians. The whole course passed under trees hundreds of years old and hundreds of feet tall. They shaded the road into semidarkness and at places required headlights at all hours. The redwoods also distorted the senses. So quiet was the forest that while running there I could hear conversations of other runners a quarter mile away. So massive were the trees that I seemed to pass them in slow motion.

I don’t freely toss out the word “spiritual.” But this was one of the most spiritual places I had ever visited. You couldn’t come here without feeling moved by living beings so old and so large. Dozens of generations of humans had hurried past while these big trees had looked on, almost timeless in their longevity. I felt both humbled and honored, humbled in age and size among the ancient giants, honored to move through one of nature’s finest cathedrals.

It seems trivial, almost a sacrilege, to talk about race times on this course. I do it here only because this is the language of modern runners, who understand

what it means to break three hours. I had hit that target in about half of the two dozen previous marathons and did it again on the Avenue (with 2:57) for what would be my last time. That had to happen sometime, and I couldn’t imagine a better place than this.

Update: Personal worst

Ican laugh it off now. But at the time the comment carried the sting of truth that I wasn’t yet ready to accept. I heard it in my first year of working full time in running and first to run marathons, 1967. The course that day was out-and-back, and a runner on his way back recognized me and shouted, “If you know so much, why are you so far behind?” I wanted to trip him.

Twenty-five years later, at Avenue of the Giants 1992, a checkpoint timer who had known me as a faster runner asked, “What are you doing way back here? At this rate you won’t even break four hours.” I responded lightly, “I’m trying to set a PW today”—a personal worst. I didn’t really intend to go my slowest, but it was happening despite my best efforts this day.

If you want to know the runner you really are, not the one you once were or imagine yourself becoming, enter a marathon. Any marathon will do, and this one happened to be the Avenue. Running among the ancient redwoods always cuts you down to size, but never more than when I returned to this marathon for the first time in 20 years.

Much had happened to me since 1972: a marriage, three children, divorce and remarriage; a move from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Monterey Bay Area, then to Oregon; an exit from Runner’s World as editor and a return as columnist; an operation on the heel that was already hurting at my first Avenue; a switch to a run/walk strategy to protect the repaired foot, and a slowing in marathons by more than an hour.

A marathon can always humble you, and this one in 1992 did an especially good job of it. Nature delivered a double whammy of events beyond any runner’s control. The week before this race a 6.9 earthquake shook the area. It heavily damaged the town of Ferndale, a marathon’s distance from the Avenue. Aftershocks big enough to sway redwoods jolted visiting runners awake the night before this race. It’s scary to think you can’t trust the ground beneath you to lie still.

The more immediate concern was heat. The roll of the weather dice brought an 80-degree day, too hot even for the canopy of redwoods to neutralize. I imagined I could outsmart the temperature by slowing to PW pace and drinking often. Neither ploy worked well enough. I turned into one big cramp in the late miles and walked more often, and longer, than planned. I set pride aside in favor of finishing, no matter how long it took.

Near the end I passed a fellow struggler, and we exchanged good wishes. Two decades earlier Paul Reese had set a US single-age record here (of 2:55 at 55).

In 1990 he had run across the United States and had written a book about it (Ten Million Steps, which I edited). Now the day and the course were humbling him as much as me. “Do whatever it takes to finish,” I told him. He replied, “And keep doing it for as long as it takes.” What we had done before, either on the road or on paper, counted for nothing now. We were only as good as what we were doing here, which wasn’t well.

My earlier joking forecast of a PW came true, and Paul set one of his own. But these were “worsts” only by the clock. Marathoners can say of finishes what pilots say of their flights: any you can walk away from is a good one, no matter how rough the journey.

27. The Trials

sion, peaked in the summer of 1972. This was a season of firsts, beginning at the Trials in July and ending at the Games in September: first Trials with qualifying standards . . . first (and last) when the marathoners ran in the same meet as the track athletes, in a summertime afternoon race just two months before the Games … first Trials to follow a full Olympic schedule spanning more than a week .. . first time (and almost certainly last) that the US runners would lead the world, both individually and as a team, at an Olympics.

The Eugene Trials were my first, in any capacity. Mine here was strictly as a reporter. One of my few regrets in running is missing my one chance to enter an Olympic Trials Marathon. In 1964, I was too young, by 1972, too slow. In between I could have run the Trials at Alamosa, Colorado, but didn’t. That race was the last one run open to all. The new standard ruled me out of the Eugene race by almost a half hour.

But I still had a family connection here. Jim Howell is the only member of my family ever to compete in an Olympic Trials. The two of us were related only by marriage, to sisters, but we had lived and sometimes trained together (on his easiest days) before he qualified for the marathon, breaking 2:30 with three-plus minutes to spare. I was almost as thrilled to see him in the 1972 Trials as he was to be there. He had no chance to make the team, so this was his “Olympics.”

In the past year I had grown friendly with another marathoner, Jeff Galloway. He would run in the Munich Games but in his second choice of events. How that happened was the favorite story I took home from Eugene, and it placed Jeff permanently atop my list of most-admired runners. The 10,000 was to be his backup race at the Trials, with the marathon his better one. He made the 10K team, while fellow Florida Track Club runner Jack Bacheler missed out there by one spot.

Bacheler had entered the marathon as his backup race. Now it was his last chance. Jeff Galloway, who didn’t have to run it, paced his buddy and then

»> Teammates (from left) Frank Shorter, Jack Bacheler, and Jeff Galloway all figured prominently in results from the 1972 Olympic Trials.

stepped aside at the end to let him place third. Jeff and Jack would have preferred to switch events, but officials wouldn’t hear of it. Bacheler would go on to finish ninth in the Olympic Marathon. Galloway wouldn’t make the 10,000 final but surely would have been a contender at his better distance. But I would never once hear him voice any regrets over his choice to help a friend. This story helps explain why Jeff would become one of the sport’s most revered figures.

Update: Jeff’s judges

Decades later Jeff Galloway showed up seven hours before the day’s race start in Edmonton, Alberta. His fans and followers wouldn’t arrive until later, and for now he was helping to pitch a tent and set up tables and chairs for the day, though this wasn’t his job here. Jeff would answer questions and hand out advice and encouragement for hours. No question would be too small or silly or repetitive for an answer, and no runner would be too humble for a tip and a good wish.

Watching Jeff in action, you couldn’t imagine a less likely candidate for controversy. A more-interested-in-runners, more-dedicated-to-running guy you would never meet. He is one of the wise elders of the sport. But a certain group of critics can’t forgive his success in attracting a following .. . or for not living in his Olympian past by advising only would-be Olympians . . . or for saying it’s OK to be slow and—gasp!—even to walk. The critics usually haven’t gotten to know Jeff, haven’t read him, and haven’t heard him speak. I’ve done all three, which is why the attacks annoy me so.

Jeff Galloway is almost a second brother to me. And I feel another type of kinship with him. I once felt some of the wrath that he’s feeling now. My LSD book dared to recommend slower, easier training. I never claimed this was the one best way for everyone to run, only an option for some (like me) who had fallen into speed traps. Critics who didn’t know me and never read the booklet cried “heresy.” Some still say that LSD was a plague from which the sport hasn’t fully recovered.

Jeff now faces much the same criticism, only more so. With 100 times more runners active now than I dealt with in the early 1970s, there are that many more potential critics. Among the harshest was Robert Johnson, who was a cofounder of the website LetsRun.com with his twin brother, Weldon. In one column for a Road Runners Club of America publication, Robert devoted six of his first 12 paragraphs to Jeff Galloway, and this wasn’t an expression of devotion.

Johnson began mildly, explaining his disagreements with Jeff over approaches to running. Fair enough. But then he shifted to “shredding” (his term) Galloway. “Tt’s disgraceful,” he wrote, “that a former US Olympic distance runner is dumbing down the sport we all love. Where’s the admiration and respect for the elite competitive athletes who train their butts off?”

I’ve appeared with Jeff at races and camps dozens of times. He is consistently admiring and respectful of hard-training competitors. He simply chooses to spend most of his time advising never-to-be-elites. Wrapping up his Galloway critique, Johnson turned sarcastic: “I hope the tens of thousands of Galloway disciples don’t have heart attacks if they learn that Jeff actually ran the entire 1972 US Olympic Trials 10K.”

Jeff is perfectly capable of answering the critics himself. But he rarely responds, even to the most wrong-headed and mean-spirited attacks. Nor does he ask his many friends and followers to defend him. We do it anyway because we believe in him even more than in his methods.

28. The views

MUNICH, WEST GERMANY, August 1972. The view from the top isn’t always so great. That’s true from both the top rows of the stadium and the top tiers of the sport and especially true for someone like me who is used to seeing running up close and taking it personally. I already knew that my views would be distant: tiny running machines far below, with faces I couldn’t see without binoculars and voices I wouldn’t hear until later.

I knew that as a noncredentialed journalist I would have nothing to report about the events themselves that hundreds of better-positioned reporters hadn’t already said. I knew I would talk with few if any athletes, though I knew more than a few who competed in Munich.

My wife, Janet, watching live TV back in California, saw close-ups that I didn’t (in that pre-Jumbotron era). She knew more about the developing races (via ABC’s commentary) than I did from two dozen rows above the action. She heard the postrace interviews that I never would (before video recorders). She would hear of the grim turn that these Olympics took before I did and would fear too long for my safety (when international phoning, already unreliable, was temporarily unavailable) before I could reassure her.

I knew, as a veteran of previous views from the top, that my only unique report would have to be about my Olympics. These reports about whatever I happened to see would grow almost painfully personal as the news from here leaped beyond the sports pages to the front pages and from the scheduled TV coverage to urgent news bulletins.

I was no closer to these real-world events than to those on the track, but they still affected me. When they did, I turned for comfort to the people closest to me —my sisters Anne and Emily who were in Munich with me, as was our good friend Janet Newman and other friends we had made here. I thought about how the unscheduled events were affecting my acquaintances on the US team. And, as always in times of trouble, I leaned more heavily on my own running and diary writing for temporary solace.

Update: Olympians still

Ihave special feelings for the US distance runners who competed in this tumultuous Olympics—not because I too was in Munich, to watch and write, but because these runners are my age mates. I ran against (well, usually far behind) most of them. Many already were or later became friends of mine. Jon Anderson (10,000), Mike Manley (steeple), Kenny Moore (marathon), and Steve Savage (steeple) now share a hometown with me.

The marathoners supplied the greatest showing ever by Americans: Frank Shorter first, Moore fourth, Jack Bacheler ninth. Steve Prefontaine added another fourth, in the 5,000. It’s little remembered now that Shorter warmed up for his marathon by placing fifth in the 10,000. It’s even less known that 800 winner Dave Wottle doubled in the 1,500 and missed the final by a single place.

My view from
high above the
Munich Olympic
track, before the
terrorists struck.

Ss g bs

‘So z g

The American distance runners as a group did well in Munich. They’ve done even better since, which may be a truer mark of greatness. The Munich team was the first from what would become known as the “running boom.” These runners would be among the first to make a living openly from the sport. (Hard as it is to believe now, earlier generations lost their eligibility if they coached for pay or opened a sports store.)

This group of Olympians was the first not to quit early. Nearly all of them stayed active, one way or another, through their 30s and 40s, and most of them on into their 60s. An earlier Olympian, old Johnny Kelley, has said, “It’s not what you once did that counts the most but what you keep doing.” By this standard, the class of 1972 has enjoyed great success. Of the 17 runners in events 1,500 meters and longer at Munich, a dozen have joined a Hall of Fame—USATF, RRCA, or National Distance Running. They’ve qualified there as much for how they kept contributing as for how they once competed.

Only Frank Shorter, Jim Ryun (1,500), and Steve Prefontaine remain best known for what they once did. Shorter is the last American man to win an Olympic Marathon, Ryun is the last from this country to hold the world mile record, and Prefontaine is the last to place as high as fourth in an Olympic 5,000. Yet all remain active in their own ways. Shorter is a TV commentator, race speaker, and antidrug activist. Ryun, a former US congressman, operates running camps. Prefontaine still fires the imaginations of runners who weren’t yet born when he died.

Kenny Moore won a longtime role for himself at Sports Illustrated in 1972 when he reported from inside the Olympic Village. The writer all running writers look up to wrote a big book about his own (and 1972 Olympic team) coach, Bill Bowerman, and helped script one of the Prefontaine movies and a documentary about Pre.

In 1972, Jeff Galloway (10,000) was one of the lesser-known Olympians. Now he might be more widely recognized than any of them because of his writings and teachings. Jeff coaches by spreading knowledge widely. At least eight other runners from the Munich team have passed along all they know by coaching in the formal team sense.

Four-time Olympian George Young (5,000) spent most of his career as a coach at Central Arizona College. Doug Brown (steeple) coached NCAA champions at Tennessee and Florida. Jack Bacheler once led the North Carolina State women to a national title. Mike Manley—a coach at high school, community college, and club levels—made a distance runner of Marla Runyan.

The women could run no farther than 1,500 meters at Munich, and this distance for the first time that year. Befitting their pioneer status, all three US runners there would keep guiding other women into the sport. Doris Brown Heritage has coached at her alma mater, Seattle Pacific. Francie Kraker Goodridge has coached at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Michigan, and Wake Forest. Francie Larrieu Smith,

who ran the Olympic 1,500 at age 19 and the marathon at 39, has coached at Southwestern University in Texas. Hail to the class of 1972 for all you did then, and more so for all you still do.

29. The athletes

tator sporting event, you need to take it personally. You need to have a rooting interest in certain athletes. You need to think you know them, even when you’ve met only in passing, if at all.

I took the Munich Olympics more personally than any other because I knew more of the runners. All but two of them, though, were Americans. The exceptions came from teams very different from each other, from either side of the great Muslim-Jewish divide. Their stories personalize the events with which Munich would forever be identified.

Mohamed Gammoudi had American Reg Harris as a coach, and Reg knew Runner’s World writer Janet Newman, and he asked if she would like to interview the Tunisian. Janet let me tag along. “Where are we meeting?” I asked her. “In the Village,” she said. “Don’t ask me how we get in without credentials, but Reg said we’d make it.”

Olympic Village wasn’t the fortress it appeared to be from the outside. Getting inside was easy—too easy, as it would turn out. We simply pretended to be athletes and walked through the gates unchallenged. The athletes’ quarters looked like unfinished college dorms. Four bedrooms clustered around a common living room.

We knocked but no one heard us over the wail of Arab music. The door was ajar so we walked inside, startling the athlete listening to a cassette player. We asked about Gammoudi. He motioned outside and pumped his arms running style, then said, “Training.”

Harris returned first. We would learn that this Peace Corps volunteer planned most of Gammoudi’s training but that the country’s sports bigwigs wouldn’t let their top runner—gold medalist in the Mexico City 5,000, silver and bronze in the last two 10,000s—say that a foreigner coached him.

Gammoudi arrived. His bright eyes and boyish smile, set in a round face, gave him the look of someone much younger than his 34 years. He shook hands with us, excused himself for a quick shower, then became a gracious interviewee—even as questions passed from English to French to his native Arabic and back again.

After giving us a full hour of his time, Gammoudi walked us to the door and apologized for not speaking our language. In that hour he had said nothing about winning the 10,000 or breaking a world record. Yet Harris had overheard a Tunisian coach telling Tunisian reporters, who had barged into the room uninvited during our session, “Don’t worry, he says he will win and will probably beat the record.”

Reg Harris shook his head and said, “This is the kind of thing Mohamed has to deal with all the time. The press will report this now as if he himself said it.”

Shaul Ladany was a secondhand acquaintance of mine. I cheered for him because his fans did. A row of Israelis seated behind me had little to celebrate until Ladany reached the track to finish his 20K walk. They knew his story and shared some of it with us: as a child he was swept up with his family and shipped to the Nazis’ Bergen-Belsen prison camp. He would have died there if American Jews hadn’t bought his release with a ransom payment.

Ladany grew up in the United States, earning a PhD there while learning to racewalk. He once held the world 50-mile record, so he belonged in the Olympics. But in Germany? “I don’t say I have to hate Germans,” he told reporters before his race here. “Of course not the younger generation, but I have no special sympathy for the older generation who have been accused of what happened in the Nazi period.”

On his race day, each time a walker emerged from a tunnel onto the track, the question went up and down the row behind me: “Ladany?” Finally their man appeared, and they cheered as if he were winning. In a way he already had won. Floodlights gleamed off his bald head, and at age 36 he looked like a middleaged accountant hurrying to catch a bus. Ladany walked so upright that he almost bent backward. He later told reporters how he felt on this victory lap of sorts: “Arrogant because of what the Germans did to me, proud because I am a Jew.”

Update: September 5

On the off day from track events, invaders broke into the Israeli compound where Shaul Ladany was housed in the Olympic Village. Eleven athletes and coaches from his Israeli team died that day. Ladany was spared but scarred again when Jews became targets in Germany.

Mohamed Gammoudi didn’t complete his medal set in the 10,000 by taking the gold (to go with his silver from Tokyo and bronze from Mexico City). Lasse Viren fell in midrace, taking down Gammoudi with him. The Finn got up and won, in world-record time. The Tunisian didn’t continue.

Gammoudi, along with all Arabic-speaking Muslims, was then drawn into events not of his making. After the terrorists with agendas other than athletic did their dirty work, many athletes from Arab countries were sent home early. The Tunisians chose to stay.

Gammoudi took the silver medal, behind Viren, in the 5,000. By then the seats once occupied by fans from Israel sat empty. So did mine.

30. The hero

the Olympics? How much should you care? The Olympics are entertaining if you watch them as that—an entertainment spectacle. But if you yell at the television for not showing enough distance running and for overexposing Americans at the expense of the world’s majority, or if your running suffers as you use that time to glean every last crumb of news, you probably care too much.

My caring peaked at Munich. Before the running ended at Olympic Stadium, I realized that my nerves couldn’t take another day there. So I missed seeing Lasse Viren complete his 10,000/5,000 double (casually brushing off the challenges of, among others, defending champion Mohamed Gammoudi and American upstart Steve Prefontaine in the shorter race). I didn’t see Frank Shorter become the first American in 64 years to stand atop the marathon victory platform.

I didn’t totally ignore these races but put some distance between myself and them: 100 kilometers, to be exact, between Olympic city and the tiny village of Eisenartz that housed the Runner’s World tour group. From there I watched Viren and Shorter and others on German television, with commentary I couldn’t understand and with the only other stay-behind tourist.

He was a gentle man named Tom Johnson, and I confess to thinking him odd at first. I left here thinking of him as my hero from these Olympics. Before that trip Tom had never flown. He had never ventured far his home in Washington, DC, where he worked as an editorial artist for the Post. When Tom boarded the plane, he was dressed for running. He carried a small backpack holding everything he would need for the next two weeks.

The tour group saw little of Tom after we arrived in Eisenartz, near the Austrian border. His second home became the trails through the Sound of Music-like hills and along the trout-rich local river. Here he ran-walked for hours on trails. Buses took the tour group by autobahn to Munich each day. Tom skipped most of these rides. A TV at his guesthouse showed him all of the Olympics that he cared to see without leaving this village. When asked how he could be this close to the Games and not watch them in person, he didn’t have either the words or the need to explain. He just smiled and shrugged.

All the travel to and from Munich, all the athletic and real-world events, exhausted me emotionally before these Olympics ended. With two days left, I gave up my stadium seat and quit taking the daily rides from

With sisters Emily
(left) and Anne, along
with our Munich travel
companion Janet Newman (right).

Courtesy of Joe Henderson

village to city. I arrived at a place where Tom Johnson had been from the start . ..and I had much more to lose by doing so.

Runner’s World publisher Bob Anderson had left me in charge of the tour group, and now I let these fans fend for themselves. I also abandoned firsthand reporting of the races in Munich. My no-show could have been a job killer, except that Bob himself wasn’t here to witness my negligence. He had flown home to be with his wife, Rita, and first child, Lisa, who had arrived early. Bob had his priorities straight.

On the day Frank Shorter ran for his gold medal on the streets of Munich, I ran earlier along a forest path, beside a river so clear that the trout looked like they swam under glass. Whole families walked this trail, stepping aside to let me pass and speaking German greetings. I spent most of the run smiling, after doing too little of both—smiling or running—the past week.

On our last day in Germany, some tour members told of being tired of the travel and crowds and haunted by memories of September 5. Before we left to board separate planes, I asked Tom Johnson how he had liked his trip. He called it “the greatest experience of my life.” He himself, and not the Olympic Games, had made it that way.

My Olympic watching wouldn’t end at Munich. I would go to Montreal and watch all subsequent Games (except Moscow, blacked out in the United States) on television. Free of illusions about what the Olympics are, free of caring too much about events I couldn’t control, I could enjoy the spectacle from a safe emotional distance.

Update: Uncle Tom

The report above is adapted from a magazine column, written in 2000. One of its most interested readers was Kathy Clarke, a niece of Tom Johnson. I had heard nothing more from him after our Munich trip, or anything about him, until she wrote that “your article perfectly describes my Uncle Tom, who frequently visited us when I was a child. He always ran the 15 or so miles from Washington, DC, to our house in Rockville, Maryland. Then he gathered up his six nieces and nephews and took us running in the neighborhood with him.”

Travels on foot were typical of him, she said, since he never owned a car. “When I visited him in Washington, he took me to fancy restaurants that he frequented. The owners welcomed him even though he wore his running clothes everywhere.”

Clarke reported that the uncle who planted her own lasting love of outdoor activity died in 1993. “Iam so glad that you saw Uncle Tom as your hero, because he was my hero, too. That was the impact he had on people.”

Going Far will continue in the next issue.