Long Run Solution

by Joe Henderson

15. Escaping

My dad grew up in the same little Iowa town as his children did. It was so small that if two cars backed up behind each other on Main Street, the drivers called it a traffic jam. So small that everyone knew everybody else's family secrets.

Dad went away for a while to try for fame and fortune in the city. He worked at a job much like mine, as an editor of a specialty magazine. He quit when he was younger than I am now -- partly because, he said, "I couldn't stand the constant pressure of deadlines."

The other part was that he couldn't stand the pressure of all those people in the city. Years later, when the family was settled back in our hometown, Dad said, "Nice people in masses become asses."

I had no idea then what he was talking about, because I never saw people in masses except a couple of times a year -- at the State Fair and the Drake Relays. And those times were kind of exciting for a country boy.

Otherwise, I went for weeks at a time without ever seeing a face I didn't recognize. The small-town folks often seemed too close. They seemed to know each other too well and to smother each other with friendliness. Living there was like having a family of 300.

Then I turned 18. I was itching to leave home and family, and to try my legs in the bigger world -- which soon enough showed me what my father meant about "masses of asses."

The little town was tolerant of my running. Oh, a few people there giggled behind their hands at me or made crude comments, but all in all things were okay. I'd shown the town I would keep running no matter what anyone said, and everyone had long since accepted the sight of me running along the streets in my shorts.

It didn't take much street running there to get to the country roads. A minute or two and I was alone. I never felt so "together" as when I was alone on the dirt road over what was known as the Three Humps -- a stretch where no one lived or drove.

And I found I was never so lonely as when I ran on the streets of the city. I couldn't run away from the traffic, hostile taunts or from stares that hurt as much as the words. I couldn't escape these no matter how far or fast I ran in the city. I got defensive about it. Instead of running along looking calmly inside myself, as I'd always done before, I kept looking around to see that no one was about to run me down or put me down. The harder I looked for trouble, the more I found.

I finally let the real and imagined hostility bully me off the streets. It was a long time before I was sure enough of myself to realize it didn't matter what the hell anyone else thought when they saw me run.

It's human nature to fear what you don't know. And fear grows to suspicion, suspicion to hate. I was alone in the city -- alone against masses of faceless people I didn't know. All I knew about them was that I didn't like them. I suspected the worst of them and tried to make them go away by pretending they weren't there.

I hid from people. I ran on the golf course before dawn or after sunset to keep from being seen. I walked to the track fully clothed and only stripped down to shorts when hidden by the deserted stadium. Running in the darkness or doing laps on the track wasn't much fun, but it was better than putting up with hostile crowds.

College running wasn't much better. This was the big-time. The school's team traveled around the country, racing against top competition, before big crowds. The coach's philosophy was, "Second place ain't worth a damn." His method of drawing the most from his runners was to match them against each other every day. It was an every-man-for-himself, survival-of-the-fittest situation.

I tried it for a year -- looking at everyone else as a competitor, racing everyone all the time -- but it was hopeless. I wasn't made to take running seriously or to fight for my running life every day.


Coach leaned back in his swivel chair, with his fingers laced behind his head. His prematurely gray hair might have given him a fatherly look. But the way that hair was cut -- down to the scalp-- and his beaked nose and piercing eyes blended in the unbending look of a Marine colonel.

I'd been in his office a hundred times before. I knew every picture and poster on the walls and could read the unanswered letters on the desk upside down. I usually liked being here. But this time I was anxious and stuttering.

I was telling the coach how I felt about running. As I poured out my story, he looked puzzled and skeptical. I told him everything. Why I thought I'd broken down. How I wanted to change my running. How I'd be giving up my scholarship if he'd let me change. I was talking down his values, but he heard me out.

"Well," he finally said, "it looks like you're determined to go ahead with this plan of yours. There's not much I can do to stop you. It's an unusual request, you understand. I've had runners try to get out of work before, for all kinds of reasons. But it's always been because they were fed up with running. You seem eager to get on with it."

I nodded.

He leaned forward in his chair, put his arms on the desk and stared at me. "I guess you know that I can't give you any special favors. I'll let you train on your own if you want. But if you want to compete with the team, I want to see you in here every day to tell me what you're doing. I want you running every one of our time-trials. You'll go to meets ONLY if you prove yourself there. If your performances drop, I'll have no choice but to leave you home."

I nodded again.

"Frankly," he said, "I don't give this plan of yours much hope. I've never seen a runner yet who succeeded on his own. Maybe you'll be different, but I doubt it."

I mumbled something.

"This may sound strange," Coach said, "but I think I know your trouble. You like to run too well. It doesn't bother you to lose because you like running so much. The reason you may never be a winner is that you don't mind losing. That attitude will keep you going for years and years, I'm sure. But it won't do you and us much good here and now."

Coach pushed back from his desk and stood up to see me out. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "I think you're throwing away a great future in running. But apparently you're determined, so go ahead."

My running took the turn for the better that I knew it would. And the price of going my own way was about as I'd expected: isolation, misunderstanding and some hostility.

Because I ran my way, I was different. The other runners on the team ran in a pack. I ran by myself. They ran by the coach's schedule. I ran on my own. They ran to the pace of the race. I ran what seemed like my best rate and more or less ignored the leaders.

They thought of themselves as normal, my teammates did. I was the odd one, so I was the subject of locker-room talk. I overheard my actions being explained a lot of ways: lazy, stand-offish, self-centered. I made no real attempt to explain myself since no one seemed too anxious to listen.

It's significant, perhaps, that all of those runners became ex-runners the day they left school. I might have gone the same way but for two coincidences: my small-town upbringing and road racing.


In the small town, there had been no coach telling me what to do. There had been no teammates to lean on for aid and comfort during training. I'd learned to run by myself -- which may be an essential to survival in this sport. The responsibility for doing it ultimately is yours and yours alone. If you depend on others to carry you along, you'll usually end up being dropped.

I've never felt much of a need to hitch myself to other people when I run. Particularly to hyper-competitive, self-serious or faceless people. So it was a great relief to me when college ended. My obligation to coach and "team" were finished, and I was free to turn to an entirely different kind of running. Road running.

Its style wasn't anything like that of college track. That had been an extension of the city -- an impersonal rat race. Running on the roads was more like living in a small town. A slower, friendlier, more casual attitude prevailed. The people were closer to each other, I think, because there weren't so many of them and because competition had a different definition in long runs.

My good friend Bob Deines explained this atmosphere in Distance Running News after he set a 50-mile record.

"Long races seem to facilitate, more than the short ones, the definition of 'success' or 'winning' in personal terms. Although there was still some of the usual 'worship-the-winner' ritual after this 50-mile, it did not seem as dominant as in most shorter events. Here, in the really long runs, there is enough personal accomplishment in just finishing the race so that there is less of a need to look to the winner to identify with a sense of success.

"When each runner crosses the finish line, he knows that he has finished his own personal struggle, and he knows what he has done without anyone else telling him. The almighty stopwatch loses some of its power. Each individual can define his own success in his own terms."

But it was too good to last in this form. Other people -- lots of others -- learned the secret, and road running lost much of its old personality. In short, it grew up and left behind its child-like, play-like quality. Road running changed simply because it got crowded. And even good people in crowds become oppressive.


Five years earlier, almost to the day, I ran in California for the first time at almost this same spot. I was innocent yet, and I saw San Francisco's waterfront through innocent eyes. The Embarcadero didn't look the same now because I was no longer the same.

The city looked weary from trying to keep pace with the growth around it. So did the sport I was in. California and running, two things I'd come here to combine, were showing the wear and tear of growing up too fast.

For most of its life, this race was called the Cross-City. It was a nice event that had attracted a few dozen hard-core distance runners since the time of the great earthquake. These runners didn't cause more than a brief ripple on the surface of city life.

Then the Examiner, a San Francisco newspaper, took over the race and changed its name to "Bay to Breakers." The paper gave the race publicity, and publicity drew crowds. This Sunday morning, the Examiner said on its front page, "2000 Entered in Bay-Breakers." The writer called it the biggest footrace in the history of mankind, but the size spoiled it for me.

Races offered two things -- aloneness and togetherness -- and this one had neither. "Aloneness" isn't the same thing as loneliness. Aloneness is getting close to yourself, getting acquainted with yourself by turning your eyes inward during an act you think is important. Races usually gave me that feeling.

"Togetherness" isn't melting into a mass of people. It is reaching out and touching other persons who have shared the same experiences, and racing experiences usually could be shared this way. But not here. There were so many people that the persons were lost and lonely in the crowd.

Because of its size, the race lost most of the features which usually justified this kind of effort-investment for me. A race had a clearly defined start and finish, with a clear stretch of road in between. The only obstacles were the ones I set up myself. At the end, there was a time and a place, a straightforward verdict.

This race had none of that. It wasn't a race at all, but a human wave rolling across San Francisco. I wasn't running. I was being carried along, with no choice about whether to keep moving or not, to speed up or slow down. I was bobbing across the city, just one more head floating on the wave that covered four lanes of highway and spilled over to the sidewalks.

There was no feeling of uniqueness, and yet at the same time no feeling of community. I saw hundreds of faces, nearly all of them blank and without names to go with them. I stood shivering in my shorts as the ocean breeze sucked up my sweat and took the warmth with it. There were 2000 runners, and I couldn't find one I knew well enough to ask for a ride back to the start. The crowd dwindled, leaving me looking for friendly faces and seeing only the garbage that all of these people had left behind.


For a combination of reasons, only one being disgust with oversized fields, I quit going to races after that. Part of it was injuries. I was finally starting to see that racing too often was hurting me. Part of it was that I wasn't myself anymore. If anyone picked me out of the crowd, it wasn't me they were seeing -- Joe Henderson, just another runner -- but Joe Henderson, editor. I was a symbol, not a person. Before, after, even during races I was sometimes praised for my work, more often complained to about everything from typographical errors to mail service.

The negative things had something to do with my slipping away from the road racing scene -- but not nearly so much as one big positive factor which I'd never experienced before. Group running. Not racing against other people, but running with them. Cooperating, not competing.

Never had there been anything like this, mainly because I could never find anyone in step with my way of running. In high school, there had been no one else who ran at all. No one outside the school season or off the track, anyway -- and most of my running was at other times and places. So I ran alone.

I was still alone in college -- both because I was an "outsider" from the team and because I did most of my running long and on the roads. Not many Iowans in the early '60s had heard of Arthur Lydiard and what his New Zealanders were doing with "marathon training."

Then I came to California. People here had heard of Lydiard, and the better runners were training his way -- 100 miles a week on the roads at 6-7 minute mile pace. I wouldn't or couldn't do that much or go as fast, so I was still alone.

This was okay most of the time. Running alone is the best way to see and think. But fatigue -- the deep-down tiredness that comes of running more than an hour or two -- deadens the senses and brings boredom. The longest runs are hard to do alone. Time drags.

I found myself skipping the long weekend run which is a traditional part of the Lydiard system and going to a race instead. I needed a human crutch to draw strength-building distance out of myself, and when I couldn't find it for training runs I was substituting strength-draining racing.

Just when I was getting run down from racing and a little bit fed up with what went with it, I fell in with The Group. It was spring, 1973, when we started meeting for long runs. The day of the run has changed since then, from Sunday to Saturday. The starting time and place are different. We don't run as far or as fast as we did at the start. I'm the only one left from the original group, and I was away from it for half a year. But The Group has gone on, as if it has a life of its own.

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