Looks at Books

(February 2001 RW)

Growing up as a runner, I invited the world's finest coaches to make guest appearances at my workouts. They all came when asked -- from England and South Africa, from Indiana and Australia and New Zealand -- bringing the best advice of their era.

None of these geniuses ever came in person to my tiny, remote hometown. None even knew my name back then. They all visited by way of their books I'd ordered from the only reliable source at the time, Track & Field News in California.

Don't try to tell me you can't learn how to run from a book. That's the only way I could have learned about the sport as it operated outside the confines of rural southwest Iowa.

Books travel easily across great distances between writer and reader. They also can span long periods of time between the writing, reading and remembering. Most of my old author-coaches have passed on, but they live on through the effects their words had on me.

These mentors taught me how to dream bigger, then told me how to make these dreams come true. Their books also taught me to read better than any schoolteacher ever did. One of the authors, Fred Wilt, even gave my writing a boost by recommending (in his book How They Train) that runners keep a written record of all running.

Practicing this way for the last 40 years has made me better at writing than running. My words have taken me farther in the sport than my miles ever did. I've either written 22 books or the same one 22 times while trying to get it right.

None of these books has approached best-sellerdom, according to Amazon.com's rankings of running titles. As I write in late 2000, women's books by Claire Kowalchik and Kathrine Switzer, and marathon-training books by David Whitsett and Dave Kuehls occupy four of the top five spots, along with John Bingham's bible for Penguins.

Nothing against any of these books or authors, but none breaks into my list of all-time favorites. Those were never big sellers -- they came out too early for that -- and in some cases they weren't even well written. Their strength was that they spoke the greatest truths to me at exactly the right time.

My early favorites had lasting influences because they arrived at my most impressionable age when all was new and pleading to be tested. In the order read, the first life-changing books were:

-- Franz Stampfl on Running, where Roger Bannister's introduced me to the interval training (then led me to Bannister's own autobiography, The Four-Minute Mile, which bordered on poetry).

-- Commonsense Athletics by Arthur Newton, the true father of long slow distance (LSD) whose ideas heavily flavored my book on that subject a decade later.

-- How They Train, Fred Wilt's compilation of what dozens of runners really did in training.

-- How to Become a Champion by Percy Cerutty, an eccentric whose ideas have proven in years to be less wild as they first sounded.

-- Run to the Top by Arthur Lydiard, the single book that changed the running world's (and my own) training the most.

My list of author-coaches runs much longer. Following those above were Tom Osler and Bill Bowerman, Kenneth Cooper and Ernst van Aaken, George Sheehan and Ron Daws.

I could keep naming names and titles, but now it's time to ask you: What would you like to know, and who would you like to have come to your town to teach it?

Chances are good that you could make those wishes come true with a book. Hundreds of titles -- from recent to ancient, from best-selling and hard-to-find -- are available through long-established sources such as Track & Field News and Cedarwinds (also known as Runner's Books & Software), and through Internet outlets such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

Mentors stand ready to cross time and space for appearances at your workouts. They await your invitation to speak their truth to you whenever you're ready to hear it. Once you translate the words into action and learn that the advice works, the book never closes for you.

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