Just Joe

Joe Henderson’s career has helped define the sport.

Rich Englehart

© 2010 42K(+) Press, Inc.

It is 1970. You’re a college freshman running for a very mediocre cross-country team. As a high school runner, you were even less than mediocre. But for some odd reason, you really liked running and decided that you wanted to keep doing it in college. You managed to find a school that wasn’t too far from home, that wasn’t too expensive, and that was, well, bad enough that it was happy to let anyone run who wanted to.

Your training is similar to what you did in high school, virtually all of it repeat work done on the track, but much more intense. You frequently lose your lunch beneath the bleachers and often cannot finish the entire session. You’re last man on the team and you know that if this state of affairs persists, you’re likely to fall further behind the rest of the team. You start to look for something better.

You began getting Track & Field News a few months ago, and in one issue, you see an advertisement for a book called Long Slow Distance: The Humane Way to Train. The ad claims that “training doesn’t have to be a pain.” You would like to buy the book, but it’s beyond your price range. But in a later edition of T&FN you see another ad, this time for a magazine called Distance Running News. Back issues are advertised. One of the back issues has an article titled “Long Slow Distance: The Humane Way to Train,” written by the same author as the book with that title. The back issue is cheaper than the book. You order it.

The article tells of three runners who train at seven to eight minutes per mile and race much, much faster. You haven’t heard of any of them, and their times are not world class. (Amby Burfoot, who was well known and had produced world-class times while training slowly, was profiled in the book but not in the magazine article.) But they’re very fast. You would be thrilled to run nearly as well as any of them.

This sort of training is a radical departure from what is normal for the times. You’ve been taught that training needs to be hard to be effective, and you’re skeptical that having an easy, comfortable run on most or all days can get you fit enough to run at a five- or six-minute pace. But you’ve been looking for something else, something different, something that the other guys on your team aren’t doing, and you think, “Heck, if I train slowly, how much slower can I be than I am now?” As a Christmas present, your parents buy you the book.

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