Feb 23, 2002

A BETTER BEARDSLEY

Dick Beardsley is one of the most positive people I've ever met. So much so that a psychologist once charged him with faking it.

In his new book, Staying the Course, Dick writes that she "didn't think I was taking this [counseling] seriously... 'I think this is just an act for you,' she said. 'You act like you're so happy all the time.'

"She thought it was just an act. But it's who I am, addict or no. Later she realized it."

Anyone less sunny than Dick might not have faced all that he did, and come out of it alive and sane. The book (which he wrote with Maureen Anderson for the University of Minnesota Press) tells of Dick at his best as a runner, at his worst as a person and now better than ever before because of what he has survived.

I met Dick more than 20 years ago, at the peak of his racing life. He'd just run a 2:09:37 marathon at Grandma's.

But he wasn't running the weekend that we shared a stage. A run-in with a farm dog had left him injured.

He made light of that incident during a talk in which he poked fun at other foibles of his. He was a serious runner who didn't take himself too seriously.

I celebrated with him at Boston the next spring. There he ran both his fastest race and his last great one -- a 2:08:54 in his epic match with Alberto Salazar. Hours later, Dick still burst into tears as he hugged everyone he recognized.

An achilles injury soon afterward would cut short his competitive years. But surgery on that tendon and incomplete recovery afterward would be a pinprick compared to what lay ahead for him.

A brutal series of accidents on his farm and on the road in the late 1980s and early '90s lured Dick into an addiction to pain-killers. He hit bottom with his 1996 arrest for forging prescriptions.

So dependent was he on the drugs that doctors weaned him from them slowly so the shock of withdrawal wouldn't overwhelm him. "My first day of sobriety," he writes, "was February 12th, 1997." This month he celebrated his fifth re-birthday.

My first meeting with the "new" Dick Beardsley had come when he was just one year sober. Rich Benyo of the Napa Valley Marathon had arranged this appearance at a time when Dick still needed permission from his probation officer to leave Minnesota.

I was relieved to see that the "new" Beardsley was much like the "old." He still could laugh at his troubles and cry over his triumphs.

Napa became a recovery event for Dick in another way. It made him a marathoner again.

There two years ago he ran the first marathon of his reclaimed life, in 3:23. At Napa last year he announced a goal of "running Grandma's within an hour of my breakthrough time there 20 years ago." Last summer he ran the Duluth race in 2:55.

Dick's enthusiasm and honesty make him a terrific speaker. I've laughed and cried with him many times at events around the country.

His stories are familiar to me, but Staying the Course fills in details he can't tell in an hour's talk. To his co-author's and editors' great credit, they let Dick write as he talks.

You can "hear" him in the book as the first half covers his glory days and the last half his gory days. The second part is more gripping, and in the end more inspiring as his worst times lead again to some of his best.

He writes, "People say, 'Dick, is recovering from drug addiction as hard as running marathons?' And I say, 'Man, it's not even close.'

"Training for a marathon or running a marathon is such a walk to the mailbox compared to beating an addiction. It's the hardest thing I've ever been thorough, emotionally or physically."

He adds that "it's one of the best things that ever happened to me." He's sorry to have put wife Mary and son Andy through all this, but if they can forgive him, it has been for the best.

"I mean that. I am the LUCKIEST MAN ALIVE."

Dick puts those last three words in italics. This is how he often talks -- emphatically.

His recovery isn't complete. It never is for an addict. But he keeps getting better.


COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

THOU SHALT NOT (March RW). Mike Tymn wrote a perceptive column on cheaters in National Masters' News several years ago. He was of the opinion that there are a few notorious course-cutters, all of whom are well known to experienced race directors and who thus get cut out of the results before they can do any damage.

Mike's thesis was that these people: (a) live in small communities where appearances have to be kept up; (b) they once established a reputation for running prowess; (c) that was long ago, so (d) now being incapable of such performances, they exchange fact with pretense by, e) running in some prestigious race hundreds or thousands of miles away, and (f) return home with tales of derring-do which led to this time and that position in the age-group. They are not criminals, but mentally disturbed, pathetic individuals. (Max Jones)

REPLY: Frank Grey probably triggered this Tymn column. Grey cheated at Honolulu and elsewhere several times ("running" in the 2:40s in his 60s) before getting caught.


CRYING TIME (RC 401). I also have recurring problem with one eye that gets teary. It helps me to cover the eye with a warm facecloth a couple times a day to open up the drainage. (Rob Reid)


TEACHER'S PETS (RC 401). Being a slower runner myself, I empathize with those students in my classes who struggle to run 11- or even 12-minute miles. When I began teaching, I was confounded by the variety of paces among the students, not knowing whether to focus on the stars or the less talented.

My training partner suggested giving special attention to "the serious slower students." That's what I've tried to do, and the rewards have been enormous -- for them and for me.

If there is something more rewarding than this teaching business, I've yet to find it. Have you? (Bill Harkins)

REPLY: It's right up there. For me the greatest joy of teaching is that it gets me out -- out of the house and out of myself. Reclusiveness and self-absorption are occupational hazards of a work-at-home writer.


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