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Reflecting on the years when running grew up—and a writing career took off. Part 1.

Joe Henderson was for more than 30 years a columnist and editor at Runner’s World magazine, and he wrote regularly for Marathon & Beyond from 2004 to 2011. Going Far is his 29th book on running. He is a veteran of more than 700 races, from sprints to ultras. He teaches running classes at the University of Oregon in Eugene and coaches a local marathon team. Many of his titles are available as e-books from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. Hundreds of his columns appear on his website, joehenderson.com.

Author’s Note: These Days

UGENE, OREGON. Sometime between claiming my first Social Security check at 62 and signing on with Medicare at 65, I heard an offhand comment by a fellow writer from the same age group. Rich Benyo, my editor at Marathon & Beyond magazine between 2004 and 2011 and good friend much longer than that, was into his own multivolume memoirs, and he urged me to get going on mine. “Our age is the best time to write memoirs,” Rich said. ““We’re old enough to have had the experiences but still young enough to remember what they were.” My second big push was a prostate cancer diagnosis. Doctors found this disease early and treated it well, but the episode still left me thinking: better get going on this book now, when this scare and then the successful treatment have renewed my appreciation for the life I’ve led.

Writing for this memoir began in 2008, shortly after hearing the three chilling words: “You have cancer.” I wrote and wrote and wrote that year and took the story only as far as 1967. This became the first book in a trilogy, covering my growing-up years in the Midwest.

In 2009, after completing nine weeks of daily radiation treatment, I wrote and wrote some more. This narrative of my peak years as a longdistance racer and journalist living in California ran its course in 1981. Book two is titled Going Far.

Writing the third book took most of 2010. It tells of settling down to the postpeak years in Oregon, my longesttime home state. It’s titled Home Runs.

The processing and polishing of = this memoir series took three years. (y 0 i il Gj Fa r But in a sense, I’ve been writing this

story almost as long as I’ve lived it. Reflecting on the years when The rough draft runs to more than running grew up—and a writing career took off.

50 volumes. Since 1959, I have been a journalist in the truest sense: one

whose writing all starts on a daily JOE HENDERSON journal page.

My first and most enduring literary hero was John Steinbeck. He taught me to read and inspired me to write. The first nonsports book I ever read for pleasure, without a teacher’s grade hanging over me, was Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The best writing instructions I’ve ever seen were in his Journal of a Novel, which solidified my habit of journal-keeping.

Much later, I left full-time magazine work and lived for three years in Monterey County, California—Steinbeck’s youthful home. I hoped that his ghost would guide me to success as an author. I wrote the books, many of them, mostly howto texts for runners like me. Had Steinbeck lived long enough, he would have opened none of these books.

During the Monterey years, I wrote a novel that never found a publisher. One rejection letter read, “This is obviously an autobiography thinly disguised as fiction. You should admit it’s your own story, rework it that way, and resubmit it later.” Good advice, but I took my sweet time following it. I needed 30 more years of writing and reflecting before these memoirs could take their current shape.

Fittingly, John Steinbeck influenced the format of the three books. In one of his minor novels, the Cannery Row sequel called Sweet Thursday, he wrote lines that stayed with me: “Looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas when it happened it was one day hooked on the tail of another. There were prodigies and portents, but you never notice such things until afterward.”

I’ve known days like this, and I revisit dozens of them here. Each chapter of each memoir opens with a journal-like entry from one of my big days; then I append an instant epilogue (called ““Update”’) that tells where the events led. Newera openers abound in every life. I’ve kept a written record of mine.

Marathon & Beyond is serializing the middle book of my memoir series. In Starting Lines, I recreated the stories largely from my memories and family legends because I did no writing of this type at the time. By 1967, however, writing was my job, as a journalist, and also my hobby, as a daily journal-keeper. So this second book draws heavily from published works and diary pages written when events were current. They refresh memories that had faded and correct those that time had edited.

Going Far picks up where Starting Lines ended. I had spent a dream summer, 1963, interning at Track & Field News in the San Francisco suburbs before returning to college in Iowa. Now, four years later, T&F N editor Dick Drake had called me away from a newspaper job in Des Moines.

Meanwhile, after a decade as a track and cross-country runner, I had slowed and lengthened my training in hopes of completing a marathon. Since I couldn’t yet imagine running more than one, that one had to be Boston, which I’d entered in an era before big fields and qualifying times.

The sport was set to boom and my writing career along with it. Looking back, I see 1967 as the start of a new era, though at the time it was just one exciting day connected to the next.

ES Eo *

Prologue: Seeing Ghosts

SUNNYVALE, CALIFORNIA. “Ghost” is another word for “memory.” The better our memories, the greater our population of ghosts. I don’t just believe in them but visit them often. They’re visible only to me but are clearly there, everywhere I’ve ever gone and remembered.

Many of mine live in the Bay Area of Northern California, in what came to be known as Silicon Valley. It sits near the bottom of a thumblike peninsula that points northward, with San Francisco as its thumbnail. Silicon chips hadn’t yet ignited an information revolution when I first arrived here in the 1960s. This area still went by its old name, the Santa Clara Valley. More of the valley’s land still supported vegetable farms and fruit orchards than housing tracts, strip malls, and high-tech research parks.

After a two-day Greyhound ride from Iowa, I landed midway between San Jose and San Francisco, first in ethnically mixed Mountain View. The setting here was spectacular, especially to the landlocked flatlander I’d been before. To the east, the San Francisco Bay and the East Bay hills beyond. To the west, the low but steep Santa Cruz Mountains and on the other side, the Pacific.

A Sunnyvale, California, hosted my first long-distance race. Here | sit in the left foreground as runners receive prerace instructions at Fremont High School for the 1963 National 30K.

The climate here was kind, especially in the dry summer season when I first breathed this air. No rain for a third of the year, no snow that stuck to the valley floor, no extreme cold or heat, no high humidity, no smog (yet), and little of the summer fog that often hung over San Francisco. What drew me here—the look and feel of the place, plus the job prospects—would draw millions more immigrants. The Santa Clara Valley would explode in population, bringing all the attendant growing pains. I would leave without noticing that I’d been a small part of the problems that drove me away.

I would also carry from here a lifetime of memories from my two stays, first during a summer on vacation from college and then for 11 years after graduation. My first job in running and first road race came here, as would my first marriage, first child, first book (which is another type of child), and first home purchase.

I suspected none of the above while stepping sleep-deprived off a bus in mid1963. I’d made my first trip west only to bum around the Bay Area’s running circuit, never thinking I might start a career or stake out a home base here. That first summer, home was a cheap sleeping space in a garage and shared kitchenbathroom space indoors. The developer here had a sense of humor, placing this house at the corner of Fay Way and Jane Lane in Mountain View.

Early in this stay, I walked through the door of a storefront on First Street in Los Altos only for a track-tourist visit. This office, hidden behind curtains and

Photo courtesy of Joe Henderson

bearing the smallest of signs, housed my future employer Track & Field News. Here would begin my career path. That midsummer, on a whim and without proper training, I entered my first long race. Here, in Sunnyvale, began my path toward the marathon—a destination that would take me four years more to reach. When travels lead me back to this area now, I search out the ghosts where I’d lived, worked, and run in the 1960s and 1970s.

The first visit of this latest trip is to a condo development in Sunnyvale. It was new when we moved in with our first child, then less than a year old. The place has been well cared for ever since. Trees that were twigs then have grown tall and shade-giving. If anyone sees me loitering about, trying to peek into our old unit, they see only an unthreatening old guy. They can’t know that I’m visiting my decades-younger self here . . . or that my Sarah took her first walking steps on these floors . . . or that an early book of mine went onto paper in these rooms.

Next stop is Fremont High School. I pull into the parking lot at the track, and

here . . . triple the distance of my longest previous race . . . equally far beyond my longest training run that summer. The kids now training on this track weren’t yet born in 1963, of course. Many of their parents weren’t either. But my ghost remains alive and well here, forever young.

Idrive north, along the old 30K route that could never be run in today’s traffic. It leads to Los Altos and some of the priciest real estate in the country. Track & Field News is long gone from First Street, now residing in a Mountain View high-rise. An upstart publication freshly renamed Runner’s World, which lured me away from T&FN, made Mountain View its first California home and later moved to Pennsylvania.

Those old offices now house new tenants. None of them would know or care that magazines and careers once took shape here, just as old homes with new residents are unaware of the lives once lived here. I don’t linger long at any of these old haunts. Don’t need to. My ghosts are always here, to visit in memory no matter how far I stray or how seldom I visit them in person.

1. The luck

unlikely sources. I owe my life, or at least the one I’ve been lucky enough to lead, to the US Army. Being a reluctant reservist, available for a civilian job almost anywhere, set me on the path I’ve followed ever since. My good fortune came because someone else, my predecessor, Craig, wasn’t so lucky and was drafted. I replaced him at Track & Field News on Saint Patrick’s Day 1967. I couldn’t have felt luckier.

The move west changed much more than my workplace. At the Des Moines newspaper, the standard uniform was white shirts, dress slacks and wingtip shoes. I dressed the part but drew the line at wearing a tie. My hair was buzz cut and face clean shaven, a requirement for my service as an Army reservist but also a style that fit the time and place. By then I’d ditched glasses in favor of contacts, which made me look even younger than my 23 years. If I’d been a drinker, I would have been carded every time and still not believed.

Late badly and boringly. After working nights, I woke up late, went for a run, then almost without fail ate a combined breakfast/lunch of two McDonald’s doublecheeseburgers, a large order of fries, and a big root beer. (I had the misfortune of living a half block from a McD’s.) Dinner at work came from a vending machine.

With the move to the Bay Area of California, everything changed except my lack of hairstyle. The Army cut looked out of place at this epicenter of hippiedom. (My white Afro, droopy mustache, and bushy sideburns would come later.) The benign climate and casual attitudes of the Bay Area instantly altered my wardrobe. It now leaned heavily toward Levi’s cords, T-shirts, and sports shoes.

After the move, my diet improved dramatically. I happened to work with Ed Fox, who moonlighted as a restaurant critic. He introduced me to all types of eating, especially the ethnic varieties that were almost unknown in Iowa at the time. I fell in love with Chinese food, which remains my cofavorite along with Thai.

I couldn’t have known this at the time, but I was entering my best running years. Though I’d switched to longer, slower training, I still retained some of the light stride and latent speed of the miler I’d been as recently as the year before. This legacy—combined with the marathon training I’d done in recent months, the chance to race almost weekly out West, and coworkers who encouraged my efforts instead of dismissing them as temporary insanity—would lead to a memorable Boston Marathon. It had to go well, as everything else was going in that year of great luck and big surprises.

Update: founding father

Dick Drake’s boss, the man who gave him the OK to hire me, became a giant in my life. Bert Nelson cofounded Track & Field News with his brother Cordner shortly after World War Two. It was the first of the modern magazines on this sport and still is the most respected. Both brothers are members of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.

Bert edited T&FN for more than 40 years, yielding that post only as his Parkinson’s disease no longer let him do the job he expected of himself. I remember him now as he looked at 42. That was his age in 1963 when I first walked into his office as an awestruck kid spending a summer bumming around the San Francisco-area running circuit.

T&FN had fed my dreams through high school and into college. I was now a pilgrim, going to the source. That was a cramped storefront in Los Altos, but it looked like mecca to me. Bert Nelson dressed casually and rode an ancient bicycle to work (in an era when executives did neither), but he struck me as regal.

Bert let himself be bothered by a nobody from nowhere. At the time, I had no ambitions to make journalism, let alone running journalism, a career. I would take any odd job that would support my running habit that summer. One opened for me in the T&FN office. Another was mowing Bert and Jeanette’s lawn, which I felt honored to do.

If we’re lucky, we find one person in a lifetime who changes our career course. I’ve had several, but Bert Nelson stands high on that list. Seeing the good life he’d made for himself persuaded me to bail out of teacher-coach training and study journalism.

Bert could have succeeded in almost any field. He had the smarts and skills for teaching, along with a keen business sense. He could have edited, written for, or published much more lucrative journals than T&FN. But this was his baby, his family, his home. He was content here. He stayed through all or parts of six decades.

Bert wasn’t much of a runner himself. He competed in high school and one year of college, then stopped. But he had the trait that we runners admire most, endurance, which can take many forms besides athletic. His good works endure even now.

The day he died, in 1994, I wanted to write a tribute to him. But first I had another column to write, then a journalism class to teach, then a book chapter to polish. This took most of the day. “With all that work finished,” I finally wrote to his staff, widow, and daughter, “it now occurs to me that it was the best possible tribute to Bert. None of it would have been possible without his early help. We feel sadness today. But we also feel enormously proud to be part of his living legacy.”

2. The Boston

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, April 1967. Go or no-go decisions either open the gate to a good long run or lock it, at least until later. I almost made the wrong choice in early 1967, which would have delayed or blocked my entry into marathoning. While moving from Iowa to California and settling in there, I quit training for the Boston Marathon. Three days before the race, I told new boss Dick Drake about being entered but not going because I’d earned no vacation time for this midweek trip. “Not going!” he said. “You have to go. You can’t miss a chance like this, because you might never get another. Take two days off, then come back and work the weekend.”

Boston wasn’t then the Monday race that it would become later but was whenever April 19 happened to fall, which was a Wednesday that year. I would

b> Here | am with Tom Murphy, an lowa State University grad student, before the start of our 1967 Boston Marathon.

spend less than 24 hours in marathon city. I erased most of my savings account for my first coast-to-coast plane ticket. Two friends from Iowa, fellow first-time marathoner Tom Murphy and Boston vet John Clarke, who had come east to watch this race, let me crowd into their hotel room at the Lenox.

A short night’s sleep, a light breakfast, and I boarded a bus for the start in Hopkinton. So much had happened so quickly that I didn’t leave time to worry about never having gone this far before and not having trained long enough lately. That isn’t to say I was calm. Prerace concerns always send a runner looking for a restroom, often repeatedly. This search led to my first meeting with a man who didn’t know how famous (or infamous, depending on who’s commenting) he would become that same day.

I ducked into a locker room at Hopkinton High School. A dozen extremely fit and serious-looking runners sat on benches or the floor. They glanced up as if asking themselves, “Who’s this one?” then retreated back into themselves. Suddenly a wild-eyed little man burst through the door. “What are you doing here?” he shouted. “This room is for top runners, not bums like you!” I stammered, “But

. but. . . just need a bathroom.” He shoved my shoulder while yelling, “Use one out there. Wait in line like everybody else. Out! Out! Out!”

A little later we met again. This time I stood too close to his starting line. “You again!” he roared. “If you give me any more trouble, I’ll pull your number. I don’t want rule breakers in my race.” With the race about to start, he shoved me back into the crowd where I belonged. His race was how Jock Semple viewed the Boston Marathon in those years. It was his greatest source of pride and frustration.

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At the time, this race was his year-round passion, and its storms usually centered on him. In 1967, Semple made international news for a momentous shove. He would later argue that he didn’t jump from a bus that day to rip off a woman’s number because he thought that women shouldn’t run marathons. He would say he did it because she had entered illegally, and he would have done the same if a man had given him cause. He and Kathrine Switzer would forever disagree on his motive, but both would come to realize that he gave women’s running its first great push forward.

Update: friendships grow

I didn’t take away from my first Boston just what I’d gone to find there, a satisfying finish. I also took home a permanent PR and a training program that would become a template for my eventual published advice and even-later coaching. But the best thing I carried with me was the list of entrants published in the Globe newspaper. The value of that list would grow with time, as I added faces, voices, and personalities to those names.

The number right next to mine was assigned to a Dr. G. A. Sheehan from New Jersey. Later I saw him bylined as “George” at the top of what might have been his first published story, about Boston 1967. The next year, George and I met at the Mexico City Olympics. Soon afterward we became a writer-editor team that stayed together the rest of his life.

What strikes me most from the old Boston entry list that I’ve kept since 1967 is how much my friends-to-be have written about running. George Sheehan, Amby Burfoot, Ed Ayres, Tom Derderian, Hal Higdon, Ron Daws, Dave Prokop, Peter Wood, Gabe Mirkin, young Johnny Kelley, Kathrine Switzer, Erich Segal— writers all. Segal wouldn’t write running books but best-selling novels, starting with Love Story. In this and later books, Segal gives minor characters the names of his runner friends such as Walt Hewlett and Hugh Jascourt.

Names of strangers to me then, friends now, jump off that yellowed and brittle newspaper page: Bill Clark, my onetime neighbor in California; Orville Atkins, my roommate as we watched the Mexico City Olympics; the legendary old Johnny Kelley and Ted Corbitt; Flory Rodd, a not-yet-reformed smoker who ran his first marathon that day and many more with me; Roy Reisinger, who has shared the viewing of Olympic track Trials with me.

I haven’t been back to Boston on marathon weekend since 1990 (when my stepson Chris Hazen ran there). Each year I follow this race from afar but more closely than any other. For those few hours of the third Monday in April, memories are less about what I ran in 1967 and more about the people who ran with me then. We’ve come to know each other much better now than we did that day. Times slow, friendships grow.

3. The PR

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, April 1967. Having a good time is just as important as running one. In the long run, the times had are more memorable than the times run. Boston Marathon 1967 brought me both.

My time ambitions were modest: to average the eight-minute miles needed to sneak in under 3:30. This had been the pace of my longest run of 20 miles. I hoped somehow to squeeze out a half-dozen miles more at that same pace.

Neither the watches (which still had hands) nor Boston’s checkpoint distances were reliable back then. The few times I heard along the course either meant nothing to me (as Boston took them at traditional crossroads such as 6 3/4 and 13 1/2 miles) or sounded too fast to be trusted. Roughly halfway at a sub-three-hour marathon pace? Impossible.

About then, passing the midpoint in Wellesley, I basked briefly in the roar that rolled along with every Bostonian’s hero, old Johnny Kelley. He couldn’t have heard me if I’d thanked him for helping bring me here, so I didn’t try.

lalmost topped Heartbreak Hill before knowing this was it. Too soon, it seemed, the Prudential tower loomed in the near distance. The race would finish there in a couple of miles. My watch said, and an occasional building clock confirmed, that nowhere near three hours had passed since the start. Could this be happening?

Ican’t say those final miles were easy. Marathon finishes never are. But neither were those miles slow. Coming down the homestretch, I saw no time displayed. (Digital clocks wouldn’t appear at finish lines until the 1970s.) Confirmation that I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating finally came from my Iowa friend John Clarke. As I walked away from the finish line, he rushed up, thrust his stopwatch into my face, and shouted, “You broke 2:50—by 12 seconds!”

I would never better the clock time run that day but would keep coming back to repeat the good times had on my first day as a marathoner. I couldn’t bask in any of this on that Patriots’ Day afternoon. With work to do the next morning in California, I fled the finish line for the airport. From there only one phone call was possible. I made it to the person who wanted to hear the news the most, my dad in Des Moines.

Update: tough enough?

One race doesn’t prove much. You must retest a program to see how it works versus other programs. I didn’t settle for just one marathon. Instead I raced them (as opposed to running just to survive, which came later) two dozen times more over the next dozen years after Boston 1967. These races taught me why the first one had gone so well and why some others hadn’t.

I set that permanent PR at Boston because I’d guessed just about right on how to train for it. But because I didn’t know what “right” was, I fumbled around in