An opportunity to meet the most famous track “nobody. Part 8.

31. The “nobody”

and long enough connected to the sport to have memories reaching back to the mid-20th century. I’m happy to make that claim.

The first foreign name to pierce my consciousness in family talk about track was Emil Zatopek from Czechoslovakia. He won the 10,000 at the first post-World War II Olympics, London 1948, then broke records repeatedly the next few years. He peaked at the 1952 Games when he won the 5,000, 10,000 and marathon—a triple never accomplished before and not since. (Lasse Viren would come closest by placing 1-1-5 in those events at Montreal.)

To me, Zatopek is the finest runner of my lifetime. I remember him that way for how he once raced but more so for how he continued to live and give. I never expected to meet the great man from a then-remote land. But by chance we came together briefly while waiting to leave Munich the day after the troubled 1972 Olympics ended. The troubles were following us out of town. All flights were delayed as security officials took quite seriously the threats to plant bombs on outgoing planes in retaliation for the killing of fellow Arab terrorists on September 5. We had to stay with our bags and have our dirty laundry pawed through repeatedly, thereby delaying our rush to leave Munich behind.

Visitors were barred from waiting rooms during this state of emergency. A trim, balding man waved and blew kisses to friends at the door and spoke his last words of thanks to them in German. I recognized him and worked up the courage to approach. “Uh, excuse me, are you Emil Zatopek?” I asked, not knowing if he understood English. “Why yes, Zatopek,” he answered in my language without

missing a beat. He seemed both embarrassed and pleased to be spotted in the crowd and called by name. “And what is your name, please?” he asked. It meant nothing to him, but he still took time to talk with me for 20 minutes.

Word quickly spread through the Runner’s World tour group that we were in the presence of track royalty. Passengers dropped out of line to shake his hand and ask for his autograph. One also asked if he still ran. Zatopek said, “Sometimes I feel that old desire. Then my body tells me it is 50 years old. I take the easy way instead.”

He had come to Munich as a guest of the Olympic Committee to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his gold-medal triple. “It is odd,” he said, “to have all this… how do you say? … acclaim. In my country I am just a common man, a nobody.” Zatopek didn’t talk politics, but he was officially a “nobody” in Czechoslovakia. When the revolt against the Soviets broke out in 1968, he took the wrong side in the struggle and lost his rank as an army colonel.

The national hero was reduced to working as a garbage collector and then as a street sweeper, jobs normally reserved in his country for the mentally retarded. When Czechs in his hometown learned of this, they rushed out to help him carry the cans and push the broom. He added, “I am now a simple worker. I drill for mineral water.”

He acted uncomfortable with this line of questioning, as if someone unseen were listening. “Please, I dislike very much talking about politics,” he said. Then he excused himself and walked toward the plane that would take him to Frankfurt and his connecting flight to Prague, back to his simple life as a “nobody” whose name will live forever in Olympic history.

Update: Zatopek’s awards

Emil Zatopek outlasted the vindictive government in his country (now the Czech Republic). Later rulers realized what a treasure he was and allowed him to accept acclaim freely. By all accounts he handled it superbly to the end, which came in 2000 at age 78.

One of his finest moves was a quiet one. Ron Clarke, a frequent setter of world records but never an Olympic medalist, came to visit the man who had won so many. As they parted, Zatopek handed the Australian a small package and told him to open it later. Clarke’s worries that he was smuggling something out of the country vanished when he found a gold medal with a note saying, “You earned this.”

The Fifty-Plus Fitness Association, based in California, gives an annual award named for Emil Zatopek, its first recipient. Other winners have included Ron Clarke. In 1999, at the Fifty-Plus Fitness weekend, I fidgeted through the awards-giving that preceded my talk. Dr. Walter Bortz announced the last and biggest award: “And the winner of the Zatopek Award for 1999 is . . .” Then he floored me by calling my name.

Thadn’t known of this and hadn’t composed a proper acceptance statement. Now I can say there could be no finer memory than to be mentioned, just this once, in the same sentence as this man who honored so well the title of Olympic champion.

32. The heel

pens to you. None is minor if it interferes with your running. None is minor if it won’t go away. Mine seemed minor only at its start, a normal aftereffect of running long. One Saturday a year ago, I took the two-hour run that was customary on nonrace weekends. The next morning my left heel was sore. That’s odd, I thought. This is my good heel, not the one that had been lumpy and tender to the touch since age 12.

Of course I didn’t let this latest injury stand in the way of continued running. Long runs often left me sore footed. I thought the pain would disappear, as always, in a few days. This problem stuck around. At first I didn’t have a name for it other than “bruise” and treated it as lightly as that. I raced 20 miles the next weekend and 18 the week after that—and ran other long races periodically for two more months. The last of those was my final sub-three-hour marathon at Avenue of the Giants.

By the time of my trip to the Munich Olympics, an ugly lump had formed on the upper back of the heel bone. This spot the size of a thumb tip glowed red from the irritation and inflammation inside. My runs had shortened and slowed, and racing had disappeared. This was more than a bruise. But what, exactly, and what to do about it?

Finally I saw a general-practice doctor. “Bursitis,” he called it. “Take a week off,” he said. I did, and it didn’t help any. “Take two weeks off,” this doctor told me at our follow-up appointment. Again, no improvement. “It looks like you’re going to need months off instead of weeks,” he said. “And if that doesn’t work, you might need to find another sport.”

Instead I found another doctor—or rather, he found me first. Dr. Steve Subotnick, a podiatrist, called to ask if I would be interested in hearing about his research on running injuries and their treatment. He wanted to write about it for Runner’s World and invited me to visit his Saturday clinic for injured athletes. I wanted to talk about my injury, and he fit me in among a dozen other runners for an exam.

He quickly diagnosed my problem as a “retrocalcaneal exostosis.” A retro what? “That’s a bony growth on your heel bone,” he explained. “The bigger it grows, the more it irritates the surrounding tissue. You need to make some changes that will ease the irritation.” Dr. Subotnick prescribed stretching exercises for my woeful state of inflexibility, recommended better shoes for my foot type, fashioned heel lifts and arch supports from strips of felt, and never said to stop running but

Courtesy of Joe Henderson

<4 The skilled hands of Dr. Steve Subotnick repaired my run-damaged foot.

to “run as pain allows.” The pain continued, so he treated it with ultrasound. When that didn’t work as quickly and thoroughly as we had hoped, he shot me with cortisone. Even then, the pain seriously limited my running. And even then, this podiatrist didn’t recommend shop- ” x ping for another sport. Instead, he concluded that my el N injury had passed beyond the reach of conservative se = treatments. Only then did he mention surgery, which

* he promised would not mean the end of running but Update: Foot docs

a new beginning.

Looking down now at my bare left foot, I see the thin scar line on my outer heel. Only its faint reddish-purple blush keeps me from forgetting it is there. Dr. Steve Subotnick cut into that spot four decades ago, thereby adding that many years to the foot’s running lifespan.

Podiatrists like Dr. Subotnick were back then the runner’s best friends among medical professionals. These doctors who specialized in faulty feet gave help and hope at a time when other doctors offered little of either. In the hazy prehistory of modern distance running, I ran as most other runners did then—which is to say unwisely. We trained too many miles and ran too many races, without much cushioning or support in our shoes and without any complementary activity such as stretching. We ran until we faltered. Then we tried to run some more, surrendering only when our feet and legs refused to take another step.

General-practice doctors of that era had little training or experience, or interest, in treating otherwise healthy people who refused to stop hurting ourselves. They dismissed us by saying, “If it hurts to run, then don’t run until it stops hurting.” Resting an injury is less than half the answer a runner needs. Sure, rest is essential in the early stages. But it rarely gives lasting relief because it addresses only symptoms, not causes. When the rest ends, the pain returns—and too often remains until the runner retires into another sport, or none at all.

I didn’t need to switch or quit, thanks to podiatrist Steve Subotnick. My small payback to him and his profession was editing two of his books, another by podiatrist Harry Hlavac, and one by Dr. Joe Ellis (who had assisted in my surgery as Subotnick’s podiatry student). All three filled their books with helpful, hopeful advice that saved many a running life, mine included. I need only look at my left heel to see how well a podiatrist had scarred me.

33. The repair

running until you’ve almost lost it. I would never again take it for granted after going almost a year without a pain-free run. After many months of denial, then many more of trying treatments that didn’t work well enough, I had little left to lose. I chose the last hope for relief.

“I’m ready for surgery,” I told Dr. Steve Subotnick. He agreed that “it’s the way we need to go.” When I asked how soon, he said, “How about next Tuesday?” That was four days away, which didn’t give my imagination much time to run wild. Then he had to postpone the operation for several more days, which gave time for dread to erode the hope. What if the knife slipped? What if the expected month off my feet stretched to several months, or forever?

This was to be relatively minor surgery, without general anesthesia, as a shortstay patient who would go home the same day. The doctor would go in and chisel away the excess bone at the heel, then sew me up—almost as simple as pulling an infected tooth. But “minor surgery” is someone else’s. If Dr. Subotnick took a chunk out of my heel bone, that was major enough for me, thank you. And I didn’t run with my mouth.

The doctor said I could be 99 percent sure of full recovery from this procedure—and that by hurting a lot for a little while I could avoid hurting a little for a long time. I placed my faith in his good judgment and firm hand. But even he couldn’t control the 1 percent chance that something would go wrong and that I would be stuck for life with a defective foot.

A shot at waist level deadened both legs. A drape blocked me from seeing the gory details down below. Finally Dr. Subotnick told a student, “You can close it up now.” Then a nurse held up a clear plastic pill bottle and said, “Here’s the troublemaker.” Floating in pink liquid were two rough-edged white chunks with stringy red thread attached. As recently as that morning, these parts of me had sawed into soft tissue when I ran.

“Normally casts are optional in cases like this,” said Dr. Subotnick. “I put some patients into a walking boot right away. But I know you runners. You’re like hyperactive 13-year-olds. If I didn’t give you a hard cast, you’d be out trying to run in two days and would mess up the good work we’ve done on you here.” He slapped on extra strips of plaster, “just to make sure you don’t try anything funny,” and ordered me onto crutches for the next week. “Then I’ll add a heel so you can walk on the cast. You’ll be out of it three weeks from now.”

I never knew that 21 days could stretch so long. Postsurgery night was the worst, uncovering my latent claustrophobia. I hadn’t known of it until the left leg was locked in plaster to the knee, with only the toes showing. I imagined them turning purple .. . then a tightening as the upper calf swelled… then the lower leg heating and itching . . . then realizing that my ankle wouldn’t flex for three weeks.

Courtesy of Joe Henderson

Panic set in. I demanded of my wife, “This cast has to come off…now… at the emergency room!” Janet did what any good nurse would, calling my doctor for advice. “Take him to emergency,” was Steve Subotnick’s reaction. “I’ll call with orders to give him a sedative, but do not let anyone remove that cast.”

The tranquilizer worked. My only regret was that more of it didn’t come home from the hospital with me. I never freaked out again, but neither did I draw many relaxed breaths until Dr. Subotnick freed me from this leg prison. “How long until I can run again?” I asked him. He said, “Don’t try until the stitches come out in another week.”

I tried the same day he unstitched me, four weeks after the surgery. I lasted one lap of a high school track, shuffled it in five minutes as walkers passed me. Never had so little meant so much.

Update: After life

This surgery revealed the extent of my running addiction. I had never noticed it before because I had never gone without a run for this long. The day after surgery, I crutched around the neighborhood until my blistered hands and cramping shoulders would allow no more. For the next week my “drug” of choice had to be bicycling. Once the doctor added a walking pad to the cast, I wore through it twice while walking to and from the office. These stand-ins were better than nothing, but they didn’t come close to satisfying my need to run. Notice that I say run, not race. Tentered my first race two months after surgery and completed a marathon within six months. But never again would I race as far, or as fast, or as often as before. The rebuilt heel didn’t slow me, nor did an exaggerated fear of reinjury. My why-run reason had changed, permanently. Before, I had run mainly to train for races. After, the daily runs themselves mattered the most, and I never wanted to put those at risk again.

<4! could stand and walk but only watch runners during post-surgery recovery.

The best result from my convalescence had nothing to do with running or recovering. Janet, the future Planned Parenthood nurse, planned her own conception to the hour. She announced in my first week of recovery, “It’s time.” Cast and all, I made my contribution to this project. Not the most romantic of beginnings, but it led to the best of conclusions to that medical year: the birth of our first child.

34. The heart

of the early 1970s, it was both oversold as a lifesaving activity and overstated as a life taker. A group of runner-doctors led by Thomas Bassler claimed that “true marathoners, those who complete the 26.2 miles, appear to be immune from coronary heart disease (CHD). We have yet to find a marathoner of any age with fatal CHD.” However, the doctor team of Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman wrote in Type A Behavior and Your Heart that running is a form of “mass suicide” that destroys hearts instead of saving them.

Both claims failed tests of time. Runners, including marathoners, did die of heart attacks—usually from disease that had developed before they ran and had gone either undetected or untreated. But the number of fatalities was minuscule compared with the number of runners who aimed to improve heart health and succeeded. How many runners avoid a heart attack is impossible to quantify. Deaths can be counted and headlined.

The first time I saw a runner’s heart fail was at an event with an ironic name: a Fun Run. Runner’s World now promoted these weekly low-key races, a shorter and longer one back to back. They provided an intermediate step between routine training and more formal competition.

I knew this particular runner only by face, not by name. When he finished the mile, he told RW publisher Bob Anderson, “This was my warm-up for the six mile.” An hour later, near the longer event’s finish, this same runner dropped to the pavement. Medics from a nearby fire station were on him almost instantly, but it was already too late. This was the first time I had seen someone take his last steps and breaths and had watched a wife become a widow. She identified herself as Selma and him as George Herzl, 46.

She told a doctor on the scene that her husband had a history of high blood pressure but no known condition serious enough for doctors to warn him away from running. A doctor later told me, honestly but not callously, “He probably was gone before he hit the ground. If he had been running through a hospital with all the most advanced equipment, it’s unlikely we could have saved him.”

Bob Anderson briefly considered dropping the Fun Run program that he had conceived. But medical experts from Stanford University, runners themselves,

convinced him that these runs remained a force for good. These Fun Runs would continue for 20-plus years (long after Runner’s World left town). Participants would number in the thousands, and never again would a heart fail there. But one death was still one more than I ever wanted to see or would ever forget.

Update: Dying young

Looking back now, I see that Arne Richards was a fast runner. It didn’t seem so at a time when everyone who ran was fairly fast, but he ran marathons in the 2:30s before the deluge of sub-2:30 marathoners. He won some minor national championships. His winnings were incidental, though. The important fact about Arne was how he approached his running, not how fast he did it. In the 1950s and 1960s, he lived the sport the way others would start to live it years later.

He ran every day, of course, and traveled by train or bus, or bummed rides, to every race he could find. In the dark ages of the sport, that meant running the gantlet of insults at home as he trained, then riding outrageous distances to find a handful of runners for a race.

Besides running himself, Arne worked to make the sport better. He never earned anything for this as he wrote for what passed as running publications, put on races, and served as an AAU and RRCA officer when no one else wanted those

jobs. He also took time to help young runners, like me, who might not have gone on without a kind word at the right time.

Arne paced me in my first race longer than high schoolers of that era were normally allowed to go. We ran together and talked more that summer of 1960. After I went back to Iowa for my senior year, we exchanged letters. He told me about the longer races he ran, how he trained, and his views of running. His approach sounded much different from and more fun than mine. He helped plant the idea that I would grow up to be a long-time long-distance runner.

Arne Richards helped start me on my way to this page. If I had never met him, I might not have graduated to longer distances. If I hadn’t raced longer, I might not have trained longer. If I hadn’t trained long and slow, I might not have written about the sport (since speed training doesn’t encourage much deep thought).

Icontinued to see Ame every couple of years and to hear from him by letter— neatly typed, lucid letters with the same enthusiasm on the pages that I first saw in 1960. I last saw him 18 years later in Kansas City. He wore an Army fatigue jacket and a backpack to the prerace banquet. Only his graying temples hinted that he was any older than when I had met him.

T hurried to leave the banquet room so I could forget the tongue-tied speech Thad just delivered. Arne followed. We talked briefly, and then I said, “See you tomorrow.” We missed each other at the race, but I figured that more meetings like this would come. You can never assume that. The next winter, Ame suffered a heart attack while running and died alone on a Kansas country road. He was just 46.

35. The group

the magazine’s star writer, George Sheehan, named his main reasons for running: “competition, contemplation, and conversation.” He placed these three in order of importance to him at the time. George was a consummate competitor, the first runner over 50 to break five minutes in the mile. As a writer he treasured the uninterrupted thinking that an hour’s run by himself allowed.

A phrase that came to him while running alone describes the value of training and talking with a group. He wrote, “Running frees me from the monosyllabic inanities of my usual tongue-tied state, liberates me from the polysyllabic jargon of my profession, removes me from the kind of talk which aims at concealing rather than revealing what is in my heart.”

By mid-1973, with a repaired foot still on the mend, I didn’t compete very often or very hard, and I shied away from the training needed to do that. Increasingly, I ran to contemplate. What I lacked was the chance to converse on the run. I had always been a loner there—at first out of necessity because other boys at my school couldn’t keep pace, and later by choice when I trained apart from my

college teammates. I had missed out on the loquaciousness of the long-distance runner, until now.

One of Coach Arthur Lydiard’s unintended gifts when he made the long weekend run a standard training practice was its contribution to conversation. These runs went better with support from a group, and the banter among runners shortened the miles and shrank the hours. The pace allowed and encouraged conversation.

AUS disciple of Lydiard, a high school coach named Forrest “Jamie” Jamieson, accidentally led me into group training by asking, “Would you like to help me with the coaching while I’m out of town this summer?” This reawakened my first career ambition, which was coaching. “Round up the boys once a week for a long run of an hour or so. Nothing hard, but without this they might not do anything until school starts. They aren’t the most committed kids.”

I needed a push myself just then. I had stopped running for a month to have my left foot repaired and was having trouble starting again. Oh, I ran almost every day but was babying myself too much, thinking the foot might fall off at the stitches. Runs seldom exceeded a half hour, so I too needed a shove even to double that amount.

The first Saturday, I waited at the track in Palo Alto for the team to arrive. I held my welcoming talk on note cards so as not to overlook any essential point. The appointed time, nine o’clock, came and went without anyone showing. Fifteen minutes late, a Chinese-American boy named George rode up on his bike. Blonde, tanned surfer dude Ken sauntered over from the parking lot, where he had dozed in his car. After we exchanged handshakes, I asked about their teammates. “They told me they would come,” George said, “but looks like it’s just me and him.” Ken remained silent. His manner said: Make me a great runner, but don’t make me work too hard at it.

We ran together for an hour, a long time for all of us then. George and I did most of the talking. Ken’s only words were complaints, and I guessed (correctly) that we would never see him again. George would return, and soon other runners would join us—not high school kids training for cross-country season but older guys, and an occasional gal, all looking for running companions. The gabfests would follow naturally. These had been too long missing for me and would be too soon gone.

Update: Breaking up

Four years might sound like a long time. But it now seems only a blip in a running lifetime more than 12 times longer than that. The end of my tenure with the group came suddenly, when I realized it had outgrown its use to me.

The original strength of this group, its lack of a leader and its welcoming of anyone, became its weakness. Our only fixed agenda was where and when we would meet (we moved early from the Stanford campus to Foothill College in Los