A greater number of people signed up to run with me at the Seafair Marathon in Seattle, Washington, on Day 14, than had signed up for any preceding event. Not surprisingly, then, it was the most entertaining run in the entire first two weeks of our cross-country adventure. Forty-eight people started with me, and I got a chance to meet and chat with each of them. A contingent of women from Team In Training, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s national fund-raising/marathon-training program, ran in pink mini skirts. Koop took music requests in the SAG wagon and played them loud over some external speakers he and Garrett had mounted on the roof, sending waves of energy into an already energized group. A young woman with long blond pigtails ran in a T-shirt that read
I DO ALL MY OWN STUNTS,
a motto that was a perfect match for her effervescent personality, I soon discovered.
One of the most memorable participants was a woman named Kris Allen, a thirty-seven-year-old mother of four, who struck me as the consummate “hip mom.” She told me she had started running five or six years earlier as a convenient way to improve her health and get leaner, but had since fallen in love with the activity. I asked her what it was about running that appealed to her so much.
“Running is
my
time,” she said. “It’s one of the rare things I do just for me. The rest of my day is completely devoted to my kids and husband. Running lets me leave everyone else behind and recharge my batteries.”
That’s another thing about running that makes it different from activities that are intrinsically fun: It makes you feel good, or at least better, not just while you do it, but for the rest of the day.
“My kids can always tell when I need a run,” Kris said. “If they see that I’m acting kind of cranky, they’ll say, ‘You haven’t run yet today, have you, Mom?’”
Words to Run By
While running a race in Portugal, I noticed that spectators along the course kept shouting the same phrase over and over:
“Quem corre por gosto, não cansa.”
Afterward I asked someone to tell me what it meant. “Who runs for pleasure never gets tired,” I was told. How true!
How to Run with Flow
The flow state is special. You can’t achieve it every time you run. But there are certain things you can do to facilitate it. Here are some of them:
• Run with a specific goal—for instance, by going for a certain amount of time, though with no particular distance in mind.
• Eliminate distractions, such as listening to music while you run.
• Race only when you’re fit and ready to race. (Flow starts with the body being capable and rested.)
• Believe in your ability to achieve your goals and push all doubts and fears out of your head.
• Be in the moment. Don’t think about what’s still ahead. Just take it one step at a time.
About halfway through the Seafair Marathon, I got to meet Kris’s kids. They were standing alongside the course and cheering for us. I stopped briefly to chat with all four of them. I could see from just the few moments I spent with them that they knew they had one hip mom.
As we resumed running, I looked around at my fellow runners and marveled at what I saw. Every single one of them was engaged in a conversation with at least one other person. The group was broken into clusters of two to four men and women, all of them swapping stories, smiling, and laughing. If I hadn’t been wearing a heart rate monitor and sweating, I would have thought I was at a summer cookout.
As much as I enjoy the flow of running one hundred miles as fast as I can, I’ll be the first to admit that there’s something to be said for this kind of fun.
Kris and the others motored through the last few miles, and we all locked hands and crossed the finish line together. But Kris didn’t stop. She kept right on going until she arrived at her car, got in, and zoomed away to host a birthday party. “Her time” was over.
Only later did I find out that this event had been Kris’s first marathon. What’s more, she had decided to do it only a few days earlier, and her longest training run had been thirteen miles—merely half the distance she ran with me.
Upon receiving this information, I found myself wondering why so many people like Kris are drawn to marathons and other such challenges these days. I can’t help thinking that the phenomenon is in part a largely unconscious backlash against comfort culture and the easy life. Heated seats and online shopping and robot vacuum cleaners have created a void that we’re all sensing. Our modern comforts and conveniences have accumulated to the point that they have stopped making us feel better and started making us feel worse. Some primal instinct lurking deep inside is trying to tell us that what is needed is a good, hard sweat—some struggle in our lives; some physical challenge.
Kris says she does not plan to do a second marathon. She claims it’s because she was spoiled by the first one. Most marathons aren’t as much fun as our romp through Seattle was—in fact, they’re sometimes not fun at all. She says that it can’t get any better, so why bother. She maintains that she is content. But I have my doubts. My sense is that a fire has been ignited.
My hunch seems to be correct. Last I heard, Kris was training for a long-distance triathlon.
Man and Mystique
Day 15
October 1, 2006
Portland Marathon
Portland, Oregon
Elevation: 872'
Weather: 70 degrees; clear
Time: 3:44:12
Net calories burned: 47,805
Number of runners: 9,200
P
ortland is one of my favorite cities
to run in. Not only is it scenic, but the mystique and lore of running in Oregon are unparalleled. The headquarters of Nike, Inc., is located just down the road in Beaverton, and the University of Oregon is in nearby Eugene. Two of my early heroes in the sport were Bill Bowerman, who co-founded Nike in 1964 and coached track and cross-country at Oregon from 1956 to 1970, and Steve Prefontaine, who not only rewrote the record book as a runner at Oregon but, more important, ran with an unbridled passion that incited others to be the best that they could be.
I learned about these two legends during the short first chapter in my running career, which started in my freshman year of high school and ended—in my freshman year of high school. My mom bought me a pair of Nike Waffle Racers to compete in. This shoe was so named because of the waffle-textured tread pattern on its outsole. Bill Bowerman had invented it—literally with the aid of a waffle iron—and it was considered revolutionary at the time due to its combination of light weight and traction. I just thought my Waffle Racers were super-cool. When I wore them, I could imagine myself as one of Bowerman’s “Men of Oregon,” a team of giants running their hearts out to make a legend proud.
The greatest giant of all was Prefontaine, who was killed tragically in a car accident at age twenty-four, just one year before I started running competitively in high school. When a man of greatness dies too young, his mystique is suddenly elevated to a higher level, and Pre’s legend was never more intoxicating for a young runner than when I became one. Memories of his astonishingly courageous run in the 1972 Olympics, where he finished fourth in the 5,000 meters after just about killing himself to win, were still etched in the minds of every American runner.
The thing I liked about Prefontaine was that he ran because he loved to run. He almost didn’t even care about winning. It was the
effort
to win that he lived for. “Most people run a race to see who’s the fastest,” he said. “I run a race to see who has the most guts.”
My first running coach had the same attitude. Benner Cummings was a wise man of the old school who believed that success in running had little to do with speed or efficiency and everything to do with sheer determination and a pure love of running. “Don’t run with your legs,” he once told me. “Run with your heart.” I never forgot that.
When I ran for Benner Cummings, I was only fourteen years old—young enough to view him as a sort of hero. As we become adults, we lose the ability to idolize the people we see every day. We become too perceptive and fault-focused. We develop an eagle eye for shortcomings in those who are familiar to us. But kids still have the ability to view the best people in their daily lives with the same uncritical admiration they feel toward their favorite heroes from the arts, sports, or history.
So Benner Cummings seemed larger than life to me. I knew he was eccentric, almost a caricature of his own personality, but to me there was a poetic near perfection in the way he was. Everything he said was so
Benner
—and so true. He made me want to run hard for him, the way the men of Oregon ran hard for Bowerman. In fact, as much awe as the name
Bill Bowerman
inspired in me, Benner Cummings meant more. Bowerman was like a mythological figure; Benner was as real as they came.
Running Tips from Bill Bowerman
The great Bill Bowerman was as innovative and influential a running coach as he was a shoe designer. Here are four running tips based on his proven methods:
1. Obey the hard–easy rule. You’ll build fitness faster if you do three hard runs and three easy runs per week (for example) than if you do six moderate runs.
2. Practice rational goal setting. Set goals that you are
confident
you can attain, but aren’t
certain
you can attain.
3. Treat yourself as an experiment of one. Don’t blindly copy the way others train. Try new workouts and methods often; keep those that work for you and discard the rest.
4. Train at your goal pace. If there’s a certain time you want to achieve in a race (such as a four-hour marathon), figure out the pace you need to sustain to achieve it (in this case 9:09 per mile) and include workouts at this pace as a regular part of your training.
At fourteen I was still very much a child, and Benner was, as far as I could tell, perfect in every way. An everyday hero, touchable, accessible, and melodiously comfortable being himself. A philosopher named José Ortega y Gasset stated that heroism is the courage to be oneself. Above all, Benner had the courage to be Benner. And, in being so, he helped me realize that by following my dreams, by listening to my heart—whatever direction that might take me—I too could be my own hero, to myself, if nobody else.
Benner entered my life in high school. My dad was my hero from the day I was born. And he remains my hero today. His best character quality is freedom in the expression of his emotions. He’s typically Greek in his strong, almost violent passions. One minute he’s weeping with sympathy while reading a tragic newspaper story. The next he’s laughing and doing a traditional Greek dance, perhaps for no better reason than because he realized he was taking life too seriously.
I had to learn to fully embrace this quality in my dad. My essential nature is more inclined toward Prefontaine’s calculated determination than my dad’s expressiveness. I guess you could say some of our Greek heritage was lost on my generation. We’ve become more American. People are very driven and business-like in this country, and unlike my dad I fell right into that way of being. My dad never really found a career that he embraced. Instead, he embraced life. Work was secondary, just something that needed to be done to provide for the family. When I was in my twenties, I had a completely different attitude. Work, for me, became everything. Making money was the key to happiness. Why didn’t my dad understand this fundamental truth of the universe?
But as I worked myself into exhaustion in my early adulthood, I started to question what was so wrong with the happy zeal for life that my dad had modeled for me from the day I was born. I always appreciated this aspect of his character, but I did not truly embrace it until I was well into my adult years, when I realized my unbalanced drive and blind determination had led me down a path of life that did not make me happy. I had become too narrowly focused on the American dream of making money and climbing the corporate ladder. Luckily, I rediscovered running on my thirtieth birthday, and it brought meaning to my life as work never had.
Running as Play
One of the things I enjoyed most about running for Benner Cummings was that he made workouts seem like play. My favorite Benner workout consisted of running along the beach and repeatedly sprinting away from incoming waves to avoid getting wet. It was an incredible workout, but we didn’t realize how hard it was until after we had completed it. You can mix effective training with play by doing what the Swedes call
fartlek
workouts, meaning “speed play.” During a regular training run, randomly pick out landmarks ahead of you and run hard until you reach them. Go completely by feel. Hold your sprint until you reach your mark. It’ll mix up your workouts and help build fitness quickly.
My dad has been by my side through it all. We’ve experienced some great highs, and some horrendous failures and devastating lows. He has always encouraged me to keep moving forward no matter how badly I failed. “It’s not how many times you fall down that matters,” he once told me. “It’s how many times you get back up.”
One of the questions I am asked most often by other runners is who my greatest heroes in the sport are. Ann Trason and Tim Twietmeyer certainly come to mind. Both are incredible athletes. Ann won many of the ultras she entered over the period of more than a decade. Tim was nearly as dominant, winning five Western States titles between 1991 and 1998 and amassing twenty-five Western States silver buckles over the course of his career.
After becoming an ultrarunner, I quickly came to admire Ann and Tim as much as the rest of the ultra-running community did. And because it’s such a small community, we soon became acquainted. Both of them happened to live in Northern California, not far from me. Over the years, I’ve become fairly close with Tim. We’ve enjoyed many epic runs together, and through these experiences I have come to admire him even more than I did before I knew him. Tim’s passion for running is immense. He simply can’t get enough of it. That’s why he still runs Western States every summer, even after twenty-five years. Tim runs the way my dad lives. I am eternally grateful to him, because he showed me that it’s possible to run with calculated determination
and
for sheer joy. A runner doesn’t have to choose one or the other.