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, 05 Feb 2010 13:43:15 -0500
Reruns 30: The Hero
RUNNING COMMENTARY 818[From my memoir-in-progress, titled Reruns. Photo: Munich wasn't all track, all the time. I also went touring, here to a castle with my sisters Emily (left) and Anne, and Janet Newman (right).]
EISENARTZ, WEST GERMANY, September 1972. How much do you care about 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 10,000/5000 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'd 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, on 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 either didn't have 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 village to city. I arrived at a place where Tom Johnson had been from the start… and 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 first-hand 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'd 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 5th. Before we left to board separate planes, I asked Tom Johnson how he'd 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 U.S.) 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'd 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. "I am so glad that you saw Uncle Tom as your hero, because he was my hero too. That was the impact he had on people."
[All completed chapters appear together in the "New Books" section of this website, http://joehenderson.com/reruns.]