Since 1982 I've written a newsletter, Running Commentary. A new issue appears here each week, and material is archived. Click here to subscribe for notification of fresh postings, or to unsubscribe.
Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:26:42 -0500
Reruns 35: The Group
RUNNING COMMENTARY 823[From my memoir-in-progress, titled Reruns. Photo: Dr. Joan Ullyot, author of the first women's running book, sometimes joined our weekend group for her long runs.]
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, July 1973. In an early column for Runner's World 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'd 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'd 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 shrunk the hours. The pace allowed and encouraged conversation.
A U.S. 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 what the most committed kids."
I needed a push myself just then. I'd 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'd 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 only words were complaints, and I guessed (correctly) that we'd 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 welcoming of anyone, became its weakeness. Our only fixed agenda was where and when we would meet (we moved early from the Stanford campus to Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, and from nine o'clock to eight), and how long we would run (about two hours; the distance was anyone's guess). Otherwise we'd take a quick vote on which route the run.
Our only unwritten rule during these runs was: Stay together, letting no one fall too far off the back. At regular intervals the main group would circle back to pick up stragglers. Everyone still ran the same length of time, but the more anyone circled, the more distance he covered. We were mostly "he," but a "she" would join us occasionally. The most prominent was Joan Ullyot, who ran as fast as any of us men and wrote the pioneering book (Women's Running) for her gender.
For most of its years the group numbered about a half-dozen -- never quite the same lineup from week to week but never drawing from a core membership larger than a dozen. We shared goals -- a long run among friends and the good talk they generate -- as well as paces. Then, suddenly, the group grew in size, speed and style. Our numbers tripled. The faster new runners either didn't know the old unwritten rule or ignored it, leaving the slower ones to fend for themselves.
I became a slower one. I saw a line of runners stretching to the horizon, each out of shouting distance from the next person ahead. After a few Saturdays of this, I made a choice: If I'm going to spend most of these runs alone, I might as well start that way. I dropped out of the group, which was already broken beyond fixing and soon disbanded.
Once this group ended, I never sought another. By then I was spending most of my waking hours talking with runners -- in person at races and in the Runner's World office, by phone and letter. I didn't need more of this on my runs, which became mostly solitary again and have remained so.
The delightful irony here is that I now spend most of my days organizing group runs. A generation after my failed first attempt at coaching high school runners, I spend several days a week teaching running classes at a university -- and another day coaching a marathon training team. The big draw for these runners isn't the training program or the old guy who writes it. It's the chance join a group and its running commentary.
[All completed chapters appear together in the "New Books" section of this website, http://joehenderson.com/reruns.]