May/June 2005 On the Road 13 Volume 9, Number 3 With Joe Henderson Travel with Joe as he shares his view from inside the world ST A F F of long-distance running.

Editor: Richard Benyo My Most Unforgettable 141 Marathon (And What Publisher: Jan Colarusso Seeley I Learned From It): 1999 Lead runner: Dick Beardsley Chicago Marathon Copyeditor: Dick Lipsey BY RIVA GRAEME

Proofreader: Erin Cler Lakefront Marathon 163 A tough but scenic race in Interior design & layout: Judy Henderson the footsteps of the ’59ers. Advertising: Jan Colarusso Seeley and The Running Network Letters 182 Cover photo: 2004 Deadwood-Mickelson On the Mark 187 Trail Marathon. Photo by Kevin Smith. Experts answer readers’ trainCover design: Judy Henderson ing and competition questions.

Printed by: Custom Color, Inc. About the Authors 192

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You Want to Put on a 19 Don’t Exercise—Train! 69 Marathon—Where? Improvement and injury Staying ahead of the Taliban, prevention require slow, one step at a time. steady increases in training. IVAN HURLBURT GERARD PEARLBERG

Duel at Deadwood 36 Give It That Good Old 77 It began as a way to honor College Try Billy Mills but soon turned People run marathons for all into a unique experience. sorts of reasons, but for college NANCY GRIFFITH credit? DAVID R. JENNYS Lessons From a 100-Mile 41 Virgin When You Can’t Run 88 Plan for everything and expect Need a break from running? anything. Then go with the flow. There are plenty of reasonable KEVIN POLIN options. JOE OAKES The History of the 53 Marathon in Canada On the Hardrock Board 97 Temporarily in the doldrums, Maybe it’s not as hard as running the Canadians have a vaulted history. race, but sometimes it comes close. MARION E. RAYCHEBA MARC WITKES

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Benefits of Marathoning 107 SPECIAL BOOK BONUS Preliminary results are available. DR. BE a CARSON Thirty Phone Booths 165 to Boston It Was the Best of Times, 117 DON KARDONG It Was the Worst of Times Just What Did the Boycotted Charles Dickens was on to 1980 Olympics Teach Us—Or something when he penned Teach Anyone Else, For That those words; did he have an Matter? Part 4. insider’s take on the vicissitudes that are inherent to the marathon? PAUL CLERICI

THE SAINT Hollywood seems to go through identity pulsations between deep-breath blockbusters that require several major studios to finance and slight intakes of breath where most of the year’s best films are independent productions that distributors were reluctant to take on. Last year was dominated by the latter, with relatively small-bucks films such as Million Dollar Baby, Ray, and Sideways dominating. This year will be dominated by the biggest “independent” film of recent history, the final episode of the Star Wars saga, financed in full by its creator and director, George Lucas. The sixth (or third, whichever way you want to look at it) Star Wars film will detail the origins of that dastardly devil of darkness, Darth Vader. Released at roughly the same time will be a modest film from the other end of the cosmic wormhole, Saint Ralph, a warm, engaging, and very improbable tale set in the 1950s of a young boy who feels that if he can create a miracle, he will free his mother from a coma. The miracle he decides on is winning the Boston Marathon. I use the word “improbable” intentionally, because for anyone who knew Jock Semple, the major domo of the Boston Marathon, the idea of a 14-year-old running, much less winning, the Boston Marathon is patently absurd. But without “improbable” and “patently absurd,” miracles wouldn’t really be miracles. What makes Saint Ralph a delightful running movie is not, as with all delightful running movies, the running. Oh, the running is nice enough, but good running movies need to have good characters—characters who grow and who come across as real and for whom we can cheer. Think Chariots of Fire, which was about two guys who ran. Or think The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which was about a rebel with a cause who happened to run. In the tradition of pitching Hollywood films, how would you pitch Saint Ralph to the suits at the studio? Chariots of Fire meets My Life As a Dog. In the delightful My Life As a Dog, the kid’s mother is dying of cancer, and our little hero’s increasingly wide orbits into the outside world always swing him back to the fierce gravity of his mother’s bedside. Much the same happens in Saint Ralph. There is much of the same genuine acting ability shared by the two young boys. Saint Ralph’s charm derives from the very believable acting of Adam Butcher, but that acting has a lot to work with from Michael McGowan’s script and his directing. (McGowan is a Toronto-based moviemaker who won the 1995 Detroit Marathon. In 1997 he premiered a feature film titled My Dog Vincent. Hmmmmm.) Ralph’s misadventures and coming-of-age incidents in a Catholic high school click in much the same way that Jean Shepherd’s misadventures of Ralphie Parker in A Christmas Story do. They work because they are anchored in incidents with which we can all identify. For running sticklers, the production folks did a very credible job of re-creating the feel of running in the 1950s, both for the Hamilton (Ontario) Around the Bay race and for the Boston Marathon itself. No high-tech running shoes, no space-age running clothing, no ChampionChips. Anne Dixon, the costume designer, went out of her way to attempt to find period running shoes: “For the races, we needed period running shoes for 70 people, so we phoned Italy, England, France, and the U.S. and could only find five pairs. From there we used a combination of bowling shoes, dying them and changing the heels as well as using sneakers and other canvas running shoes and altering them.” The race sequences were shot in Hamilton and in segments of Cambridge where little change was needed to make it look like Old Boston. The marathon crowds are sparse, there are no helicopters circling overhead, and much of the running looks like . . . running. The film is scheduled for release on May 13, which places it squarely in the same universe as Darth Vader. If it does well against those odds, it will be a miracle. But if miracles were easy to pull off, everyone would be foisting them on us. Even crusty old Jock Semple would enjoy this film. But he still would never allow a 14-year-old into his race. —Rich Benyo Coach Roe to Coach Joe If not for Dean Roe, I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t have done any of the running that led to all of the writing. Coach Roe started it all. Or rather, he kept it from stopping after a stumbling start. He coached all the sports at my small-town Iowa school. By 1958, a football team of his had won a state title and a basketball team had reached the state tournament. Dean Roe knew how to develop winners. I wanted to be one but was too timid to win in football and too short for basketball. Track was my last chance, and the best one was in the longest race we could run then—the mile. Body size didn’t matter here, only heart size. I could win by wanting it more than anyone else. My first official day as a runner was almost my last. I tried too hard and beat no one but myself. I started at a dead sprint, which couldn’t last much more than one lap, and didn’t. The pack spit me out the back and off the track, where I sat feeling sorry for myself after failing at another sport. I had lasted less than two minutes as a distance runner. Coach Roe wasn’t a running expert, but he was an authority on the delicate psyches of adolescents. He knew when to kick a butt and when to pat a back. He might have kicked me while I was down by quoting the slogan from his locker room: “Quitters never win.” Instead he gave me a consoling pull to my feet and said, “Try again next week. You’ll do OK if you pace yourself better.” Next time, I started last and didn’t do much passing but reached the first level of winning— that is to finish what you start. You’ve already outrun all the people who never start or don’t reach the end. The next level of winning is improving yourself. That first year I improved enough to qualify for the state meet—and in later years to place at state, then to win there, and finally to set a meet record. My winning against other runners stopped after high school, but improvement of times and distances lasted into the 1970s. Running didn’t stop there. It continues today, which is the highest form of winning: running on without needing any PR payoffs. Every year, every mile, was and is a gift from Dean Roe. I planned to thank him by imitating him, by studying to be a coach of young runners. An early and long detour into writing about running took me off the original path for more than 40 years. When given the chance to teach running classes to University of Oregon students a few years ago, I balked at first. “What if it took too much time away from the writing?” I said to my wife. Nonsense, Barbara told me. “Think of all the new story material this will give you.” That has been the least of what these young runners have given me. If forced to choose now between the writing and the teaching, I would teach. There is no higher calling. And my best possible model for practicing this profession was my first coach. As “Coach Joe,” I try to repay Coach Roe by repeating his lessons on winning running, from start to who knows where.

FIRST CLASS Reading the book and seeing the movie Seabiscuit reminded me of Dean Roe. I don’t connect my first coach with the racehorse but with his trainer, Tom Smith. He spoke one of the best lines I’ve ever heard about coaching: “A horse doesn’t care how much you know until it knows how much you care.” Two-legged runners feel the same way. Coach Roe wasn’t technically savvy in running. But, oh, how he cared about his athletes. The young can sense that without being told. I think of Tom Smith’s line while greeting a new class the first day of each term. These students don’t know me, or I them. They see only a short guy, old enough to be their dad or grandpa, standing before them. I see faces that silently challenge me to make waking up at this early hour worth their while. I say nothing about my credits as a writer. All I tell of my years as a runner is “I won’t ask you to run anything here that I wouldn’t do myself and haven’t done a thousand times. This program will work if you give it a chance.” Some don’t. They don’t like what they hear that day and bail out before the first run. I wish they had withheld judgment until they had seen that the teacher cared and heard what he knew. Withholding judgment goes both ways. Looking over the 30 strangers at the start, I try not to guess which ones will still be with me at the end or how far they will have come in those 10 weeks. Every class brings its surprises. Two memorable men were linked by their size and two women by their talent. A guy named Matt wore his weight proudly enough to quote it to the pound—247. He looked like a linebacker escaped from the football team, and I might have judged him strong but slow. Wrong. Matt ran his 5K that term in 19 minutes. I’ve never seen anyone so big go so fast. Another large student, Aaron, was shrinking when I met him last summer. He had kept his New Year’s resolution to lose weight, dropping 60 pounds in six months but still outweighing “linebacker” Matt. I might have judged Aaron most likely to drop. He always finished way last—but always finished, never missed a class, and improved his mile time by more than five minutes. That’s winning. Of the women, Kim told on her first-day questionnaire of having no running experience. We wondered together whether she could handle this 5K training class. She broke 20 minutes in her first-ever race. “Is that good?” she asked. It showed enough promise for Kim, a freshman, to be recruited for the University of Oregon team. A student named Natalie brought to class a most unorthodox running style. The rough, prancing motion masked a strong heart (in both senses of the word). She would outrun most of the men in class. Natalie ended the term by announcing her plan to run a marathon shortly after her 19th birthday. At Napa Valley last spring, she debuted in 3:08. A student can do as much teaching of the teacher as learning from him. My students have taught me never to prejudge who will catch fire as a runner or how hot and long they might burn.

STARTING AND IMPROVING

No student of mine has flamed brighter, longer, than a woman named Max. Whatever spark brought her to a running class almost died the first week. For my very first class, now more than four years ago, she showed up carrying a motorcycle helmet and wearing boots, bleached hair, enough metal piercings to set off alarms, and a tough look. I couldn’t yet get beyond the costume and see her as a lasting runner. The roster listed her name as Angela Skorodinsky, a grad student who was 32 at the time. But when the class survey form asked what she preferred to be called, she wrote “Max.” It fit— short and strong, just like her. The course began with a timed mile, not an all-out mile race but a simple run to draw a fitness baseline. Max lagged a half lap behind the next-to-last finisher, running (with some walking) 11:02. Afterward she complained about how hard it had been, how finishing so far back had embarrassed her, how she wanted to look for a different fitness class. I did my best possible Dean Roe, your-best-is-good-enough imitation. Somehow the words worked, and Max kept trying. Students in my beginning running class are only vaguely aware, if at all, that Hayward Field is one of the shrines of the sport. To them it is just a classroom where they meet twice each term. During these sessions, the students mingle with hotshot young athletes who know all too well the meaning of Hayward. They finish their morning runs by striding the straightaways at speeds that bring gasps from the students. The hotshots sometimes act amus-ed by our pace. One said with a smile as the beginners took a scheduled walk break, “I thought this was a running class.” Sometimes the fast guys act annoyed when a beginner moves out of their way too slowly, as if it were their track instead of ours for this hour. This scene gives a brief look at the sport as a whole. The idea is afloat among longtime runners that the second running boom is a mirage . . . that the new runners aren’t “real” because they aren’t just like us . . . that the new ones get in our way . . . that they don’t try, don’t care, won’t last. The same might have been said about any of us when we began. Who’s to say that newcomers won’t find the same reasons as we did to keep going? Max kept at it. When our first course together ended with another one-mile test, she asked, “What splits do I need to run to break nine minutes?” Ten weeks earlier she would have thought a split was a stretching exercise. Two months earlier she couldn’t have imagined improving by two minutes, and now she had made it possible. Again she chugged along in last place, but now a close last. She paced herself perfectly, then groaned while pushing each of her final steps to shave seconds. “Eight-55,” I called to her. She thrust her first into the air and shouted, “Yeeesss!”

GRADUATING AND CONTINUING

While writing this piece, I had the great fortune to see Dean Roe for the first time in more than 30 years. We greeted each other with a hug, which coach and athlete (and men in general) didn’t do long ago. Our talk moved quickly to his past athletes. I wasn’t the only one to receive Coach Roe’s gifts. Norm Johnston carried on to almost make the 1968 Olympic team, missing by just three places in the decathlon. Rex Harvey rose to national class as a decathlete in the 1970s. The truest measure of a coach’s success isn’t what athletes do while they’re with him but what they take with them when they leave his team. By that standard, Dean Roe, now nearly 80, has sent hundreds of winners into the world. I hope to send a few. My last day of each class is always bittersweet. I’ve gotten to know these runners and won’t see them again as a group. “I won’t forget you,” I tell them. “Contact me if you have any questions about running.” Few ever do, and that’s a good sign. Educated and experienced runners don’t need further guidance. Students don’t even ask much of me when we’re together. We never run together, talking as only running mates do. By going off without me, they see that the class is about their running and not mine. I’m there to plan, advise, and cheer, but not to be anywhere near the center of their attention. I try to teach students not to need me for long. Most of each run in class, and the runs outside of class, and the future running I hope they’ll do, must come without a teacher watching. The final exam for each of my students comes after the class ends. It has one question: will you continue running when attendance is no longer required? If the answer is yes, we’ve both succeeded. I’m happiest when I see a former student, one who left class months or years earlier, running through town. Or, better yet, when one comes up to say hello at a race. Or, best of all, when we meet at a marathon. Each year I stand in the chute at the Portland Marathon, wondering how many ex-students will pass by. They now number about a dozen annually. Running a marathon wasn’t my idea but theirs. They went on to graduate school in this sport, and this was their graduation day.