2000 Issues

Volume 4 | Number 1 | January/February 2000

Departments

Editorial
“Closed Course” Road Racing
Richard Benyo

For the most part, road racing—especially marathoning—isn’t much of a spectator sport. Clearly, there are exceptions,
but they come primarily in the form of spectacles, such as Boston and New York, where the marathon is a happening that
draws even those who don’t know what’s going on but want to be part of the fun (especially if the fun involves hanging out
a third-story window on Commonwealth Avenue to spill beer on the revelers below).

As unlikely as it seems, it’s difficult even to get up a substantial crowd at an Olympic marathon once the field leaves the
stadium. Don Kardong, who placed fourth in the 1976 Olympic Marathon in Montreal, shows some slides of his race
where it looks as though he’s out for a workout running through a semideserted suburban neighborhood.

Most spectators at most marathons are friends or relatives of participants. Why the low turnout? Well, some intrinsic
drawbacks to spectating a marathon come to mind. First, it’s virtually impossible to see the whole thing, which diminishes
spectators’ sense of drama and appreciation of racing strategies. Second, the runners blur into a mass, making it hard to
separate who’s who and what’s going on. Third, spectators are not exactly bombarded by readily available amenities along the course; rather, they are forced to fend for themselves on city streets or country roads, where there are few facilities to make watching more enjoyable.
Several years ago an idea began growing in the back of my brain that could make marathoning (and road racing in general)
a much more interesting, enjoyable, profitable, safe sport by making it much more accessible to one and all. It seemed to
me one of those ideas that’s so incredibly simple it could have almost thought itself into existence.

Now, as we kick off the year 2000, seems a perfect time to foist my idea on an unsuspecting public more obsessed with
things like the Y2K threat and a shortage of champagne to celebrate the New Year. But first let’s look at the drawbacks
to putting on a road race, participating in a road race, and spectating a road race.
Read the rest of Rich’s essay on “closed course” road racing in our
January/February issue

On the Road with Scott Douglas
Running Y1K: Fragments From a Lost Log

November 27, 999: Ran easy as the sun moved from one thumb above the horizon to about half a hand higher.
I think this is about the same amount I ran yesterday, but who can say for sure? Someone needs to invent digital
wristwatches so that I can keep more accurate records.

Legs still a little beat-up from weekend race in Northfarminghamshire. Road was even muddier than usual after the
heavy rains lately. (People are saying the recent torrents portend the apocalypse, but I don’t believe that stuff.) Had a
good bleeding with the local barber the next day, but a few vile humors must not have escaped, as my legs are still achy
today.

Ran through the town square and was joined for a little while by the village idiot. I like the guy—after all, before he showed up,
everyone called me the village idiot because I run everywhere—but I found his Y1K doomsday scenarios as predictable and tiresome as
ever. If he really is the village idiot, then most of the villagers are idiotic, too, because so many believe the world will end at the stroke of
midnight on January 1, 1000. This is sheer nonsense. For starters, until those digital watches are invented, we can’t know when midnight
is. Even allowing for a few minutes this or that side of the millennium, they couldn’t be more wrong. At the worst, some of the older
abaci might not be able to account for a four-digit year.

Everyone in his right mind knows that the world will end not 1,000 years after the birth of Jesus, but 1,000 years after his
death. This gives us another 33 or so years—at which point, what do I care? The average age at death here in
Westdorchesterhamandeggs is 42, so I’ll have met my maker long before then. (By the way, it sure was a lot more fun to
think about the afterlife when we were pagans, what with the drinking and singing in Valhalla, compared to a potential
eternity of fire and brimstone).

As it is, I often feel like death these days. Have been gearing up for my entry into the masters ranks next year, but the
body just doesn’t recover at age 24 like it used to. At 19, I could work hard in the fields all day, then head over to the
castle for some hard repeats around the moat. Now I’m so tired all the time, even with the more frequent bleedings and
some good sessions on the Catherine Wheel. Ethelred the Energized is simply amazing—still going at it hard, and he just
turned 32! It will be interesting to see what happens to his motivation next year, though, because he believes the world
will end this year, so keeps thinking, “Gotta train like there’s no tomorrow—because soon there won’t be!”

Travel back in time to the year Y1K as Scott unearths more from this lost log.

My Most Unforgettable Marathon (And What I Learned From It): Boston 1977
Ron Wayne

You’ll enjoy Ron’s tale of his fourth-place finish in the 1977 Boston Marathon, the top running
experience of his 20-year racing career.

Aspen Fila Skymarathon
When Runners Speak of a “Runner’s High,” This Could Be What They’re Thinking Of.

Aspen, Colorado—The 45 tan, chiseled “Skymarathoners,” all of whom qualified for today’s Skymarathon based on
FSA (Federation for Sport at Altitude) performance criteria, seem more focused on their pre-race pasta dinner at the
popular Inn at Aspen (the host hotel for the race) than on listening to the race’s safety and logistics director, Jim Conway,
explain course markings and high-altitude race features.

These athletes have accepted the challenge of “Skyrunning,” and they seem plenty confident that they have what the race
entry form says it takes to be a Skyrunner:

“It’s running a marathon, but at high altitude. It’s adventure. It’s racing up and down a fourteener. [“Fourteener” is Colorado
an for the 54 peaks in the state that are 14,000+ feet.] It’s about being with nature and being one with your body and soul.
Above all, it’s about performance—the ultimate running challenge where only the sky is the limit.”

Whew! The ultimate runner’s high.
Looking for a new marathon challenge. Skyrunning might just be what you’re looking for.
This issue’s marathon profile features a Skymarathon.

Letters
The discussion rages on: Still more thoughts on “charity” races.

On the Mark

Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:

“At what point is it too close to marathon day for tempo and interval training to be
a benefit for that race.”

Our experts answer this question in our January/February issue.

About the Authors
Among this issue’s authors are Guy Avery, running legend Paul Reese, Tim Martin, Marion
Raycheba, Jim Whiting, John Vonhof, and Jonathan Beverly.

Features

Marathon Training: More From Less
By making every training mile count, you can run faster on fewer miles per week. Part One
of Five.

Guy Avery

This article is the first of a five-part series aimed at guiding both novice and veteran marathoners in their training to optimize
their marathon performance without the risk of injury. If followed closely, the training approach I recommend has a 99 percent
success rate in helping runners achieve a challenging but realistic marathon goal time. This approach is for runners who
want to improve their marathon times by training and racing smarter. My approach is not for runners who want only to
finish the marathon but for those who want to finish the marathon faster. Depending on your current fitness level, training
history, and commitment level, I’ll recommend one of four different 22-week goal-based training programs (Levels 1-4) to
choose from.

This approach to marathon training is “sustainable.” That is, if you commit to the training and stick to the race strategy as
described, you’ll find the training plenty challenging without being too much of a burden. In addition, the race will be a
challenging but positive experience from which you’ll recover relatively quickly with a mental and physical eagerness to
train for another marathon.

The approach I recommend is balanced and integrated. Every training element has a purpose, and each element works
with each other element. It’s a holistic approach in which one type of training interacts with other types of training—
everything fits together as a whole to achieve the overall mental, physical, and emotional training effect for optimal and
sustainable improvement in your marathon performance.

Grounded in conventional as well as not-so-conventional wisdom and taking into account all factors that influence training
progress, my system is equal parts science, art, instinct, and experience.

What I’ll be describing here—and in the four subsequent parts of the series—is a marathon training schedule suited to
your individual needs. You’ll log no unnecessary miles. Every mile will be meaningful. In other words, we’ll be looking to
get you good results on the minimum amount of work that it takes to achieve those results. If you read what we have to
say carefully and follow our training and racing guidelines closely, I believe you’ll be pleased with the results.

Continued in our January/February 2000 issue. Guy lays the groundwork for his
five-part marathon training program. If you’ve got spring marathon plans, seriously consider
following Guy’s training program.

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The Marathon: An Impression
The marathon experience varies widely from runner to runner. Can we find any common ground?
Paul Reese

It’s OK to DNF—Really!
The Marathon Will Always Be There, Waiting For You to Return.
Tim Martin

The oddest thoughts flash through your mind when you’re about to drop out of a race. Take my thoughts,
for instance. I had just limped through 12 miles of the Napa Valley Marathon, and I was completely out of steam.
My legs pumped full of lactic acid, my feet moving at about the speed of Dutch Elm disease, all I could think was
find a place to stop where no one will see you.

Yes, I was hurting badly and—I won’t delude myself—filled with burning-cheek humiliation. One minute I was floating
along on a strange three-ounces-of-gin exhilaration, soaking up the fine Napa Valley scenery, and the next I was
overcome with the sort of plummeting despair you feel when you’re driving coast to coast and suddenly realize, in an
isolated area, that you’ve been going in the wrong direction for the past three hours, the oil light is flashing, and you’re
out of gas.

I dragged my drained, depleted, misery-ridden body to the side of the road and stopped.

Did I mention that I was a tad grumpy? Well, I was: grumpy and severely embarrassed. Since marathoners utter
“uncle!” about as often as Jackie Chan, dropping out of a race can have that effect on you. Instinctively, I began thumbing
through my rolodex of plausible excuses: a sore knee? Hamstring pull? Heel spurs? Food poisoning? El Nino?
Continued in our January/February 2000 issue. You’ll enjoy the humbling conclusion to this
article by Tim Martin, a writer we call the Dave Barry of the running world.

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The World’s Fastest Marathon?
Rotterdam has a reputation for being a fast course, but just how fast is it?
Jonathan Beverly

I ran my first marathon in 1980, a year before the Rotterdam Marathon existed, yet I can hardly remember a time
when the Rotterdam wasn’t out there—a nearly mythical, almost unsporting course where people run faster than anywhere
in the world.

For 14 of its 19 years, Rotterdam has held the world marathon record for men. Throughout those years, whenever
the record came up, announcers at Boston, New York, or the Olympics have referenced it as run on “the superfast
Rotterdam course” or “a course designed for records,” usually followed by the assessment that the fastest time on the
course at hand was a better effort than the world record run at Rotterdam.

As a marathoner, I was fascinated by Rotterdam. How had it started? What made it so fast? And, of course, what could I
run there? Was it also fast for mortal marathoners such as myself, with a 2:46 best, or was it superfast only for the elites
up front?

Then last year I moved to Brussels, and suddenly Rotterdam wasn’t “over there” anymore but just down the road, as
close as Philadelphia to New York. I had my chance to discover the truth about Rotterdam and to personally test if it is
indeed the world’s fastest marathon course.

Join Jonathan for his run in the Rotterdam Marathon in our January/February issue.

Tiptoe Through the Tulips

Ottawa’s National Capitol Marathon is well established, pretty, and warmly welcoming

Marion Raycheba

In March 1999, Runner’s World named Ottawa’s National Capital Marathon (NCM) one of the Top 10 Destination
Marathons in North America, ebullient in their praise for the organizers taking full advantage of Ottawa’s Tulip Festival
route.

The American Diabetes Association agrees. In May 2000, the ADA’s Team Diabetes expects to bring in up to 1,000
runners for the weekend’s distance events. Team In Training, the Leukemia Society of America’s endurance sports training
program, also plans to send a contingent in 2000, likely a mix of marathoners and in-line skaters.

It’s easy to see why destination athletes find Ottawa charming. The NCM’s start/finish line is in the heart of the city
near Parliament Hill, which dominates the skyline from its position overlooking the Ottawa River. Like America’s national
capital, Canada’s Parliament Hill is comparable to United States’s Capitol Hill.
Continued in the January/February issue.

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Beyond the Beyond
Can marathoners and ultrarunners find happiness in adventure racing?
John Vonhof

Adventure racing is an evolving multisport discipline fast becoming the sport that challenges individuals where other
sports leave off. Most of us have heard of the Eco-Challenge and the Raid Gauloises. The televised coverage of these
two events has brought the excitement of adventure racing to the public’s attention faster than any other new sport.

Michael Epstein, the executive producer of the Hi-Tec Adventure Racing Series, provides impressive statistics on the
growing interest in adventure racing. In 1997, the Hi-Tec series drew 1,800 participants to four events. The numbers
multiplied to eight events in 1998 with 6,000 participants. He estimates 10,000 participants will have experienced 10
events by the end of 1999.

The Hi-Tec series being an entry-level adventure race translates into a substantial increase in athletes wanting to try
the longer, more challenging adventure races. USA Adventure Racing (formed in 1998), the largest organizing body in
the sport, already has more than 6,000 members. Many runners will be among those numbers and will have the time of
their life in this exciting sport.

Making the transition from marathons and ultras to adventure racing is a logical move—if you enjoy cross-training
and participating in other sports besides running. Taking time off from running to bike, canoe, or kayak and to learn
navigation gives a chance for running injuries to heal and can lead to a better conditioned athlete.

Making the move opens the door to new adventures and extreme sports. With it comes the chance to take your body
to its greatest limits—to see what you are capable of doing. Marathon training has helped many runners with speed and
has formed an excellent mileage base for ultras. Many of these marathoners have then made the transition to ultras and
enjoyed the change of scenery, the different pace, and the added challenges. The goal-setting, discipline, and mental
toughness of marathons and ultras provide an excellent base for the demands of adventure racing.

Some runners are looking for a change and a challenge. Erica Clarkson recalls “wanting the diversity and the
opportunity to cross-train rather than focusing on any single event.” She now has 20 marathons, 11 ultras, and 7
adventure races under her belt, including the Eco-Challenge and the Southern Traverse. Jacques Boutet has 112
marathons and 15 ultras to his credit and remembers “being tired of the repetitive stress injuries associated with too
much running.” He, too, has done the big-name events, the Eco-Challenge and the Southern Traverse, with seven
adventure races completed. Although we love running and we never want to stop running, we can sometimes identify
with Robert Tucker: “I needed a break from the monotony of running, running, running.” Adventure racing offers an
exciting break and a new challenge while testing your limits like no other sport.

If running an adventure race is on your Y2K checklist, this article will tell you
everything you need to know.

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And the Last Shall Be First
What better place to unleash a first (and long overdue) marathon than in Greece?

Jim Whiting

Here’s a clip:

Four abreast, the long parade of grim-faced, goose-stepping Athenians seemed endless. Their fellow citizens lined the
surrounding sidewalks, cheering them on.

But this was not 490 BC, and these marchers were not heavily armed foot soldiers on their way to Marathon to meet the
invading Persians. They were schoolchildren in 1998, and this parade was part of the late-October celebration of Okhi
Day, a national holiday that harks back to another foreign invasion, this one from Italy in late 1939. Mussolini, his already
immense ego swelled even further after overwhelming stone-age warriors in Ethiopia and establishing first-name–basis
relations with Adolf Hitler, had demanded territorial concessions from the Greeks.

The instant reply from Greece: “Okhi!” (“No!”), or perhaps something a little earthier. Mussolini thereupon sent his
legions into Northern Greece. But soon his tattered troops, unexpectedly overwhelmed by the Greeks’ stiff resistance,
were chased nearly all the way back to Italy. This repulse presented a problem for Hitler, as it left his southern flank
open as he prepared to invade the Soviet Union in the late spring of 1940. Accordingly, he deferred that betrayal of an
erstwhile ally for six weeks and diverted troops to Greece. He quickly accomplished what Mussolini had been unable to,
but many historians contend that the six-week delay was fatal to his eastward enterprise, as his troops consequently did
not reach Moscow until the dreaded Russian winter was setting in. If he’d had that extra month and a half, Hitler’s USSR
invasion might have succeeded and altered the course of World War II.

The Greeks, therefore, take a certain pride in that “No.”

Their current pride, however, came at a high price. Hitler’s four-year occupation of Greece was particularly brutal,
more than 8 percent of the population dying of reprisal shootings, starvation, or other related causes—in percentage terms,
by far the largest casualty rate of any country in World War II.

Watching the Okhi Day parade, I found it nearly incomprehensible that a similar celebration could ever take place
on Memorial Day or Veterans Day in the United States. But, then, we never lived through a German occupation.

A mute memorial to the brutality of that occupation stands on the road to Delphi, site of an ancient oracle. A
larger-than-lifesize group of armed men tops a marble plinth dated “April 25, 1944,” and lists the names and ages of
well over 100 men, some identified only by their first name. In the late-autumn silence, the statue is a reminder of a fairly
typical German response to guerrilla activity: a death squad overwhelming a village, then shooting all the men.
The conclusion of this article appears in our January/February issue.

Wounded Warriers
Savvy runners avoid repeating injuries—and if they do get injured, they come back stronger than ever.
Dave Kromer

Special Book Bonus

Wobble to Death
Peter Lovesey

A classic novel uncovered: Murder at a Six-Day Race: Part I

Introduction to Wobble to Death:

There are precious few novels with running as a backdrop, much less ultrarunning—much less ultrarunning in the
19th century! Yet in 1970 a Head of Department at Hammersmith and West London College, Peter Lovesey,
penned a first novel featuring several of his favorite interests: Victorian England, the sporting scene, and crime.
He wrote Wobble to Death, set in the smoky sporting halls of 1879 where go-as-you-please six-day races were all
the rage and where death—not from overindulging in forward movement but by foul means—was part of the
program.

Wobble to Death introduced the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Cribb, and the book won Lovesey the
Macmillan/Panther First Crime Novel award the year it was published. Granada Television made a film of
Wobble to Death, starring Alan Dobie as Sergeant Cribb. Lovesey continued to write novels featuring Sergeant
Cribb to the point where, in 1975, he gave up his teaching duties and dedicated his talents to writing full-time.
Long out of print, Lovesey’s book was brought to our attention by ultrarunning legend and M&B subscriber
Ruth Anderson, who lists the book among her favorite crime novels. A large print edition was issued in 1999.
Arrangements to publish Wobble to Death for a new army of potential Sergeant Cribb fans were made
through Peter Lovesey’s American literary agents at Gelfman Schneider.

We are also proud to present a series of newly created illustrations for the installments of the novel drawn by
our favorite running artist, Andy Yelenak. He did the special cover painting for this issue to mark the novel’s
debut in Marathon & Beyond. Enjoy!

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Volume IV | Number 2 | March/April 2000

Departments

Editorial
“Experts”
Richard Benyo

It was October, 1978, and I had just squeezed into the window seat of a jetliner
traveling from San Francisco to New York City. I was headed for the NYC marathon.
Accompanying me, in the belly of the plane, were 24 cases of sample copies of Runner’s
World magazine, which I intended to hand out to eager distance runners at the “RW open
house” (a precursor to marathon expos).
Generally I avoid eavesdropping-because it’s impolite and usually about as interesting as watching fingernails grow-but on this
occasion I was quickly bored enough to eavesdrop on three runners seated behind me.

The runner in the window seat was quiet. The runner in the middle seat was on his way to New York to run his first marathon.
The fellow on the aisle seat was the hoary veteran of two marathons and had draped upon his bony shoulders the mantle of marathon
sage. He was busy enthusiastically and didactically advising the marathon neophyte on how to run his first marathon. Virtually
everything that came out of his mouth was dead wrong.

Not that I was an expert myself. Yes, I was executive editor of Runner’s World, and I’d done six marathons (all in the then-pedestrian
3:30 range). I knew he was wrong because I knew who the experts were, and I’d read their books. In some cases, I’d worked with them or
interviewed them. Arthur Lydiard, Joe Henderson, Ron Daws, Tom Osler, Manfred Steffny, Hal Higdon, Joan Ullyot, Bill Dellinger, Brian
Maxwell, Bill Rodgers, Ken Young. The list of experts vulcanized by successfully applying the rubber to the road was not extensive at
that point, as it appears to be today. I didn’t recognize the guy in the seat behind me as a member of that exclusive fraternity.

“Saturday Night Live” had premiered three years earlier. For a moment, trapped in a silverfoil tube at 35,000 feet altitude with a
cabin pressurized to a mind-numbing 10,000 feet, I fantasized that the lecture from on high occurring behind me was a “Saturday Night
Live” skit. Coach John Belushi at the lectern.
Read the rest of Rich’s essay in our
March/April issue.

On the Road with Scott Douglas
Here I Stand: 9.5 Theses

My sources tell me that the indulgences controversy has died down a bit since 1517. So Martin Luther need not fear
that the following modest proposals will be confused with his weightier 95 theses. In the spirit of the 16th century’s
Protestant reformers—and to prove to my parents that my seminary education wasn’t a complete waste—I hereby offer
these 9.5 theses, statements of belief about running today. When you find yourself branding me a heretic, remember that
I’m guided by Luther’s immortal advice: “Sin boldly.”

Thesis #1: Running is not an either/or proposition.
Why do you run? To compete? For health? Sanity? Friendship? Because it feels good? Exploration, both of the world
and yourself? Simply because you must?

For most of us, the only reasonable answer to the above list of options is “Yes.” I can no more list my main motivation
for running than I can single out one reason I adore my wife. My life on all levels is better with her presence in it, as it is
multilaterally enhanced by running. A day that doesn’t include either is decidedly a downer.

Yet although most of us would acknowledge our running’s many simultaneous charms, we too easily revert to
monothematics regarding other runners. Frontrunners, it’s often said, care only about their to-the-second race times; they
don’t comprehend the pride that back-of-the-packers evince in getting out the door a few days a week, nor do they
appreciate running’s many noncompetitive rewards. Conversely, slower runners are believed to be lacking in performance
standards.

Nonsense. There would be less misunderstanding among runners if we realized that for every answer you can give to
the why-do-you-run question, there are millions of faster and slower runners who would respond similarly.

Thesis #2: Satisfaction from running must come from yourself.

External rewards for running, such as interest from others, can be powerful inducements to get more out of
ourselves, but they can’t sustain a lifetime of running. For that, we each need to find what we find appealing about being
a runner, then play up those aspects of the sport.

This is a roundabout way of saying that long-time, self-proclaimed “real runners” shouldn’t feel threatened by charity
runners or others whose motivations and mores might seem strange. In no particular order, among my top reasons for
being a daily runner are to break temporarily free from the torpor that the workaday world so often imposes on me; to
prepare for races; to get inside my head; to spend concentrated time with friends; to keep at bay a genetic disposition
toward depression; and to have something quantifiable, however minor, with which to justify how I lived this day of my
life. (Okay, I also like weighing less than I did in 9th grade.)

Other lifelong runners’ reasons, of course, will vary, but they are linked by a common feature: they have nothing to do
with why others run. My experience of being a runner is not affected in the least by the four people in my office who run
with far less dedication than I do. Similarly, when I toe a starting line, I have a hard enough time saying what I’m doing
there; why others might have paid for the pleasure of putting themselves in pain is irrelevant to how I’ll evaluate my race
during the drive home.
You can read the rest of Scott’s 9.5 Theses in our March/April issue.

My Most Unforgettable Ultramarathon (And What I Learned From It): Comrades 1989
Paul Reese

PIETERMARITZBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, May 31, 1989—When I became aware of the Comrades Marathon in
the late 1960s, the first thing I learned was that the race is not a standard marathon of 26 miles, 385 yards. The Comrades
I ran in 1989 was 89.7 kilometers (just short of 56 miles). The distance, so I learned, varies from year to year, from
around 54 miles to 56 miles, depending on road construction and the finish used for that year.

The second thing I learned about the Comrades is that while the start and finish points are always Durban and
Pietermaritzburg, the direction of the race changes each year. On the uphill course, run on even-numbered years, Durban
is the start and Pietermaritzburg is the finish. On the downhill course, run on odd-numbered years, the start is
Pietermaritzburg and the finish Durban.

This being the early 1970s, few runners in the United States had heard of the Comrades, let alone known the details
of the race. I knew about the race after my son, Mark, gave me a book called The Comrades Marathon Story, first
published in 1966. Mark had obtained the book directly from South Africa, which meant it contained information about
the race not readily available in the United States.

As I read the year-by-year accounts by Morris Alexander, I began to feel there was a special lore about Comrades.
I found myself wanting to be part of the Comrades experience: the race itself, its rich history, and its role as the Super
Bowl of South Africa. The continuous 11-hour live telecast makes the race the largest outdoor television production in
South Africa.
You’ll enjoy Paul’s colorful story about his South African odyssey at the 1989
Comrades Marathon.

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Key Bank Vermont City Marathon
A Race with Big City Resources But Small Town Charm.

Looking for a great New England Marathon in May? Try Burlington, Vermont’s Key Bank
Vermont City Marathon. But hurry: The field fills early.

Letters
A discussion of sportmed specialists and “closed course” road races.

On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:

“I AM IN my mid-40s and have only recently decided to join the ranks of the competitive runner. I have
participated in one marathon and will do several more. I have already begun training for a September 2000
ultramarathon. The course crosses a mountain range, with an average altitude of about 7,000 feet. Because of time
constraints, it’s impossible for me to get productive training on the course, so I’m stuck training at 1,000 feet altitude
and below. Is there anything special I can do to properly train for a high-altitude race while living at low altitude?
Our experts answer this question in our March/April issue.

About the Authors
Among this issue’s authors are Theresa Daus-Weber, Mary Nicole Nazzaro, Steve Palladino, DPM,
Fred Ebrahimi, Guy Avery, and running legend Paul Reese.

Features

Recovering From Boston
To Run Boston Is One Thing—to Bounce Back Afterward Is Another.
Steven J. Palladino, DPM

Where is the problem in the following scenario?

Jack meticulously plans and completes an ambitious two-month training program aimed at producing a PR at the
greatest marathon the world has ever known, the Mecca of marathoning: Boston. Race weekend comes, Jack runs the
race, and, when it’s all over, he has accomplished his goal: a brand spanking new PR. Congratulations, Jack!

So far, so good. But what does Jack do after the race? He follows no definite plan. For several months, he oscillates
between catching colds and warding off injuries as, caught in the postrace letdown, he apathetically tries to resume
serious training. He doesn’t return to a systematic training program until four months after the race.

If we turn the spotlight on Jack’s complete marathon experience—from premarathon through race day to
postmarathon—the problem becomes clear: all too often, runners plan their premarathon training and race-day activities
in great detail, but they fail to plan for the hours and days and weeks after the marathon. It’s almost as though, once the
marathon is completed, they lose their running focus.

In this article I’ll implore those headed for Boston to ask this simple question: “What do I do after Patriot’s Day?”
If you’re running Boston this April or have a goal to run Boston someday, this article
is a must-read.

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When In France . . .
A First-Person Account of the U.S. Women’s Team at the 100K Worlds
Theresa Daus-Weber

It felt very much like an attempted escape from the Nazis during World War II as the three of us stealthily tramped
through the dark and convoluted small farm fields of the rural Vendee region of France.

Team manager Lin Gentling, team doctor Lion Caldwell, and I had reconnoitered the route of the 1999 World 100K
Championships the night before to ensure that we had alternate access routes to the closed race course, aid stations, and
finish line. Utterly resourceful, the American support team made it safely to Aid Station A, the first of six aid stations
scattered along the course.

We strategically stashed the cars in farm fields so we would be able to rush to the finish line as our runners came in.
So far, so good. We had only one mishap—a partial drowning of Dave Teason, father and handler of Brian Teason,
fastest 100K runner on the men’s team, when he’d fallen into a pool of swampy water up to his waist as we hurried
through the pitch dark. Dave was in the second car, and if we had in reality been attempting to escape the Nazis, his
splash would have certainly given us away.

We were ready for the first opportunity to see the U.S. team along the course. Only 20 minutes had passed since
we’d left them shivering in their singlets at the start line, edgy with adrenaline.

Well, we wouldn’t actually “see” the team, or for that matter anyone else, this easily in the pre-dawn darkness and
chilly mist. The 1999 edition of the 100K started at 5:00 am, and the runners had only run a small preliminary 2.4K
loop through Chavagnes en Pillares, the 3,000-resident town hosting the World Championships, before they began the
first of four circuits of a 24K loop.

The rest of Theresa’s behind-the-scenes profile of the U.S. Women’s 100K team can be
found in our March/April issue. Theresa is a Leadville 100 Champion.

The Birth and Early Survival of the Marathon
The Marathon Started Wonderfully, Then Sputtered and Wandered and Nearly Died, Until the 1912 Olympics.
Tom Ecker

In the early going, the marathon experienced more than its share of challenging—and sometimes bizarre—setbacks.
Blatant cheating, admitted drug use, professionalism, and the first death associated with the Olympics were a few of the
marathon’s early problems. Then there was the Olympic marathoner who left the course during the race and disappeared
for 50 years. Yet, despite its difficult moments, the marathon has survived to become one of the most popular fixtures in
today’s sports culture.

The first competitive marathon race was held as the final event of the track and field program at the 1896 Olympics
in Athens. Despite many references in literature to the “revival” of the marathon in the 1896 Olympics, there had been
no competitive marathon races in Ancient Greece at any time before 1896.

In 1894, when the 1896 Olympics were being planned, a French linguist and historian, Michel Breal, suggested that
a 40-kilometer (25-mile) race be included in the track and field program. He believed the race, which would
commemorate the run of Pheidippides from Marathon to Athens in 490 B.C., would add local interest to the Games.
The Greek organizers agreed wholeheartedly.

According to legend, Pheidippides, a Greek soldier and a champion runner in the ancient Olympics, had been chosen
as the courier to bear the news of a surprise Greek victory over the invading Persians on the plains of Marathon.
Exhausted from the battle and the 25-mile run from Marathon to Athens, Pheidippides blurted out the message,
“Rejoine, we conquer!” Then he collapsed and died.

Michel Breal’s idea for creating a long competitive race, which became known immediately as the “marathon,”
caught on quickly in the United States. Several members of the Boston Athletic Association, including champion runner
Arthur Blake, ran the first marathon in the United States in September of 1896 (from Connecticut into New York City).
The following April, on Patriot’s Day, 1897, the first Boston Marathon was run.

Continued in our March/April 2000 issue. You’ll enjoy the history of the first five Olympic
Marathon events in 1896, 1900, 1904, 1908, and 1912, respectively. You’ll also learn how the
marathon came to be 26 miles, 385 yards.

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The Secret Marathon
Sometimes There’s No Way to Pull Off a Race Other Than Surreptitiously.

Fred Ebrahimi

Rick “The Mule” Worley had a problem. In October of 1998 he found a glitch in his marathoning schedule.
A glitch in Rick Worley’s schedule is not like the glitch in the schedule of a normal human being who runs perhaps
two marathons a year—which is why Rick is known as “The Mule,” and the rest of us aren’t.

In 1997, in celebration of his 50th birthday, Rick decided to run one marathon a week for 50 weeks. As part of this
effort, he dedicated himself to raising funds for Cal Farley’s Boys’ Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. (“Boys’ Ranch” is a slight
misnomer—it’s really a place where young men and women who have encountered problems in their lives are guided to
become better citizens and, ultimately, often provided with college scholarships.)

Yes, he managed to meet his goal of 50 marathons in 50 weeks . . . but he forgot to stop. Soon he was at
75 marathons in 75 weeks, which broke the world record. By this time, he had built up such momentum that he
decided to just keep going until either his legs wore out or he got sick of airline food.

Rick Worley recently ended his record-shattering streak of consecutive weekly marathons
at #200, which he ran at the 2000 Houston Marathon in mid January. “The Secret Marathon”
tells the story of the marathon that almost wasn’t, which would have been a BIG problem
for The Mule. You can read the whole tale in our March/April issue.

Warrior Tactics for Distance Runners
The Savvy Distance Runner Incorporates Every Training Technique Possible to Improve

Mary Nicole Nazzaro

The playful voice at the other end of the workout room stirs me out of a zombie-like trance.

Around me the students in the class let out a collective giggle while struggling to maintain control over their bodies.
We have been crouching in “neutral horse” stance. We’re doing this in a small cinder-blocked room in the basement of a
Chinese Community center in Toronto. My thighs are burning, and the last thing I can think to do is laugh at the latest joke
to make the rounds in the training hall.

It’s note quite mile 23 of the marathon, but it sure feels like it should be. It is the middle of a class put on by the
Jing Mo Kung Fu Club, and instructor Glen Doyle is at center stage. Doyle may be a three-time Canadian kung-fu
champion, but right now he’s doing what he does best: goofing around with his students, getting them to laugh, to open
up, so that the serious work doesn’t feel so darn, well, serious.

I’m a dedicated marathoner and recreational martial artist from Boston, and I’ve come to Toronto to discover what
all the fuss is about this guy Doyle. He’s a cross-training expert with an extraordinary talent for getting his point across to
his athletes—and he has a track record that would make any coach envious.
He has trained members of the Oakville (Ontario, Canada) Athletiques, track club of 1996 Olympic 100-meter gold
medal Donovan Bailey; the Philadelphia Bulldogs pro roller-hockey team; and, most notably, three-time world figure
skating champion Elvis Stojko, who has been working with Doyle for the last decade. Doyle even has marathoning in his
family tree: his father Greg raced the distance for Canada back in the 1950s.

But I’m not here because of Doyle’s impressive credentials for helping elite athletes to reach new heights. I’m here
because I’m hungry for a marathon PR in 2000, and after 14 years of running, countless miles on the roads, and more
than a few injuries, I need something new to fire up my training routine. When the opportunity arose to train in an entirely
new way with one of the top martial artists in North America, how could I resist? One call to Air Canada later, I was
booked on a flight to Toronto to train with Glen Doyle.

In this article I’ll introduce you to some of the concepts I learned in Toronto. What I discovered will make your
old training log look like a boring mathematical tome. Six by 800 track repeats? Tempo runs with five-minute
surges bookended by one minute of easy running each? Try the following workout on for size: “Dynamic tension, five
minutes horse, five minutes side horse (each side), 20 reps frog-walking.” Now there’s a new entry for your training log!

Continued in the March/April issue.

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Nirvana in Mongolia!
A Select Few Taste Asia’s Best Trail Running in Mongolia’s First Ultra.
Michael Kohn

They came with their camel packs, fanny packs, vitamin supplements, altimeter watches, and fluorescent Spandex.
They came from all over the world: the United States, England, South Africa, Japan, China, France, and Switzerland.
And they came with lots of experience.

The athletes who gathered on the shores of northern Mongolia’s Lake Hovsgol for that country’s first ultramarathon
had cumulatively run thousands of kilometers in training in dozens of countries. Some had even won big-time races.
Klaus Muttke, for instance, had won the Leadville Trail 100, a grueling century race in Colorado run entirely above
10,000 feet altitude. Another runner was a champion of the Hong Kong 64K ultra. Mary Ritz and Kristina Irvin were
both experienced runners from the United States; Ritz is trying to be the first woman to run an ultra on all seven continents
of the world, whereas Irvin has completed more than 70 ultras.

But at the end of the day on July 8, 1999, at the conclusion of Mongolia’s first ultrafest (the 100K and a companion
marathon), it was the Mongolian runners who won. But the word “won” doesn’t do justice to the performances of these
fine and unheralded athletes. “Dominated” or “obliterated” would be more appropriate.

The Mongolians—in their torn shoes, floppy backpacks, and old cotton track suits—stormed out of nowhere to finish in
remarkable times over the wet and often treacherous terrain, setting the pace from start to finish.

Expand your horizons with this article about a run in a far-off land.

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Marathon Training: More From Less
Part 2 of 5: Understanding the Types of Training That Make the Biggest Impact on
Marathon Racing.
Guy Avery

In the first part of this five-part marathon training series (see the January/February
2000 issue), we discussed the larger framework of effective marathon training. Within
this broader philosophy, we learned about the three general guiding principals: 1. the
optimal sustainability of training, 2. the interaction of various training elements, and
3. the probability of goal achievement as the foundation of our marathon approach.

In this second part of our series, we will look more closely at the types of training
that will serve as the building blocks to be laid on this foundation for the most effective
training possible.

Both experience and research show that five types of training can have the most impact on your marathon performance: (1) the
long run; (2) marathon goal pace runs; (3) hill repeats; (4) lactate threshold training; and (5) 5K racing and/or slightly faster aerobic
capacity intervals.

While many physiologists are big proponents of the latest “energy system” theory, which states that certain very
specific training paces and effort levels are necessary to derive maximum benefits from training, the five basic types
of training we suggest are broader in nature and will give you the greatest gains in training to improve your marathon
performance in a sensible, purposeful way.

Our guidelines are much more general and leave room for individual differences and allow for the “feel” of training
properly. However, while the guidelines we provide are general, following them will guarantee that you stay within the
framework of our guiding principles and ensure that you achieve your goal. While our training guidelines are looser, if
you stray from them, you’ll risk not achieving your goal and jeopardize the sustainability of your overall training and racing
improvement.
Guy describes in great detail each of the five types of training that impact marathon
performance in the March/April issue installment of our 5-part marathon
training series.

Special Book Bonus

Wobble to Death
Peter Lovesey
A classic novel uncovered: Murder at a Six-Day Race: Part II

Introduction to Wobble to Death:

We are also proud to present a series of newly created illustrations for the installments of the novel drawn by
our favorite running artist, Andy Yelenak. He did the special cover painting for the
January/February 2000 issue to mark the novel’s debut in Marathon & Beyond. Enjoy!

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Volume IV | Number 3 | May/June 2000

Departments

Editorial
IQ Aerobics
Richard Benyo

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s when many of us were running more marathons than was wise, several of us
hatched a theory that for every marathon run, one’s IQ decreased by two points, each drop in IQ making it that much
easier to dupe oneself into scheduling the next marathon. It was a clever little theory, we thought, surely formulated during
the final miles of a long training run while our remaining IQ points were in a state of distress.

Unfortunately, we never took the theory far enough to explain what happened to a marathoner who ran out of IQ
points.

More recently, aged (and perhaps matured) into a routine of more reasonable recovery spaces between marathons,
we have further extended our IQ theory to conclude that given enough recovery time, the brain will begin to regenerate
IQ points, thereby allowing the long-distance runner to come up with a life-long but reasonable schedule of doing
26.2-milers.

We’ve obviously had way too many loads of fun—again, usually in the later stages of long runs—disassociating with
the mental aspect of marathoning and ultrarunning when we should have been associating with the incredible pain and
depleted stamina.

The mental aspect of running long distances has several aspects worth exploring— primarily the problem-solving
element (in conjunction with the stress-release effect) and what I like to think of as the turbocharged-brain effect (TBE).

I caution that these are only theories at this point, culled from several decades of experience and lots of meandering
conversations with other marathoners—experiences that are increasingly making way too much sense to a brain starting
out from a deficit of 74 IQ points (i.e., 37 marathons).
Read the rest of Rich’s essay in our May/June issue.

On the Road with Scott Douglas
Booking a Trip to Marathoning’s Past

Here’s how the last book on marathoning I read puts it: “Marathon runners feel that the marathon is a microcosm of
life. There’s pain, joy, agony, and ecstasy. There is the challenge of doing something worth doing and then accomplishing it.
Your success is contingent upon the work that went before.”

Sounds like a fine precis of the marathon’s pull for nervous newbies. Who’s the author? Galloway? Glover? Higdon?
Henderson? Herr Penguin? Let’s read on.

“Until recently, few runners would bother to finish a marathon slower than 3:30. They trained hard and raced hard.
But now the vast majority of runners finish between 4:30 and 5:30. Like Rocky in the movie, they run not to win, but to
go the distance.”

Hmmm, soothing encouragement that, in contrast to the hardcore days of yore, marathons today are mostly populated
by John and Jane Q. Public. This hardly narrows the field. (Nor does the antielitist swipe that “not everyone is happy
about the change.”) Better keep reading.

“If you have been running a half hour daily this year . . . you may be ready to extend yourself.” Okay, cross
Galloway off the list. “Under no circumstances are you to run further than 20 miles [in training].” There goes Henderson.
“Run each day at the pace you expect to run the marathon.” So much for Glover and Higdon, proponents of the
hard-easy approach. “During the race you will experience a hellish pain.” Race? Hellish pain? Thus do we lose the
Penguin. Will the real author please stand up?

Allow me to introduce the editors of Consumer Guide magazine, who offered these bon mots du marathon not last
week, or even last year, but in the 1979 summer edition of their health quarterly, titled, “The Complete Book of Marathon
Running: Top Stars Show How Every Runner Can Turn the Marathon Dream into Reality.” Return with me now to those
thrilling days of yesteryear. . . .

You can read the rest of Scott’s Trip to Marathoning’s Past in our May/June issue.

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My Most Unforgettable Ultramarathon (And What I Learned From It): Hardrock 1999
Rich Limacher

SILVERTON, COLORADO, July 9–11, 1999—I can tell you why I’ll never forget this ultramarathon in three little
letters: DNF. Yes, that stands for Did Not Finish, and no, I didn’t. What makes this race so memorable is that I’d never
not finished a race in my life, dating back to 1988 with my first 10K.

Let me put it into perspective: The Hardrock 100-Mile Endurance Run held each July (snow permitting) at Silverton,
Colorado, is regarded by most ultramarathoners as the toughest 100-mile trail race in North America, if not in the whole
wide world. HRH might be the toughest footrace period, were it not for such other well-known tortures as the Hi-Tec
Badwater-to-Mt. Whitney summertime desert run or that silly impossible thing held every spring in Tennessee known as
“The Barkley Marathons.” But Badwater (on roads) is more than a 100-mile race, and Barkley (one 100-mile finisher in
its entire history) in effect has no trail. I’m told you need navigational instruments just to find the Barkley course and then
a machete to bushwhack through it. There was also that bit of whimsy and nonsense called the “Nolan’s 14” inaugurated
this past August, where competitors climb 14 of Colorado’s peaks over 14,000 feet in 60 hours—not surprisingly, this
race had three starters and zero finishers.

Still, you’ve got to give pause to an ultramarathon that sends you a pre-race booklet in which all of the finishers in its
seven-year history are listed on just four pages, and many names appear more than once. The Hardrock Hundred began
in 1992. My assault occurred in 1999. The 1995 race was canceled because of too much snow (remember, this is July).
So mine was the seventh Hardrock actually run, meaning its history when I got the booklet covered six years. At that time
HRH boasted only 200 finishers. Pulling out the duplicates, the number of individuals dropped to 118. I, then, aspired to
be Mr. 119.

A Different Beast Entirely

More important, perhaps, I wanted to be the first person from Illinois to finish the Hardrock Hundred.
Overshadowed as I am by all the fabulous runners from Chicago and downstate, not one of them had ever finished this
race. Certainly, there had been attempts. In fact, the reason I tried it at all was to follow in the footsteps of my coach and
mentor, Chuck Bundy, who made his first assault at the 1997 race. Chuck couldn’t finish because of a rather severe leg
nerve injury he’d sustained just days before while helping mark the course.

Two things that sobered me up about that injury: (1) What kind of a race are we talking about where you can hurt
yourself that badly just by walking and planting little flags? (2) Chuck’s injury was so bad that it also prevented him from
entering the race the following year—and the year after that! His injury, by the way, did not come from anything he’d done
on his legs. No, he got hurt while sliding down snow on his rear end!

So, besides aiming for some distinction as the first Illinoisan to finish Hardrock, I also wanted to earn the respect of my
coach, who is some 18 years my senior and with whom, during normal training, I can hardly keep up. And it was during
our abnormal training this past year that he told me time and again, “Hardrock is a different beast entirely.”

You’ll enjoy the rest of Rich’s colorful story about his first Hardrock 100 attempt in
our May/June issue.

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Quad Cities Marathon

Is This Spirit-Lifting Course One of Running’s Best-Kept Secrets?

Looking for a great Midwest marathon? Try this September’s Quad Cities Marathon.
For a link to the race site, click on Partner Links from the M&B homepage

Letters
Lively responses to our January/February and March/April issues.

On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:
If you run enough shorter races (a 10K, 15K) while building oward a marathon, is it still necessary to do speedwork
at the track?

Our experts answer this question in our May/June issue.

About the Authors
Among this issue’s authors are Johnny J. Kelley, Guy Avery, Mike Tymn, Dave Kromer,
Stephanie Ehret, and Michael Brandt.

Features

Marathon Training: More From Less
Part 3 of 5: Choosing Your Training Level and Setting An Achievable Marathon
Goal
Guy Avery

Welcome to the third part of this special five-part series on optimal marathon training.
While the first two parts dealt with general training principles and the details of certain
types of key marathon training, this article addresses the two most critical decisions you
will make concerning your training and racing. Following our guidelines, you will select
a training level, set a realistic marathon goal time, and finally get started on the
first eight weeks of training.
If you’re looking for a marathon training program, we recommend you give Avery’s
serious consideration.

The Day of the Amby
Every Once in a While the Life of a Coach Receives Some Sunshine.
Johnny J. Kelley

This is the fourth in an exclusive series of marathon memoirs by Johnny J. “The Younger” Kelley of
Mystic, Connecticut. In this piece, from 1962, Johnny is coaching his cross-country team, which includes
current Runner’s World editor Amby Burfoot. The other three articles by the 1957 Boston Marathon winner appeared in volume I, issue
4; volume 2, issue 1; and volume 3, issue 2. Look for the next chapter in a future issue.—Editor

Cruising homeward on the last full-team bus trip of our 1962 Fitch Senior High School (Groton, Connecticut)
cross-country season, I snap to wakefulness as my paperback falls from my lap and lands with a plop on the floor.
October’s Halloween light has already vanished, leaving none but that afforded by the charter bus’s weak overheads.
I wonder why I keep thinking I will sugar over the fretful nut of responsibility by reading while tending a covey of
teenagers.

Yet, these aren’t your standard barnyard flock. I’ve been blessed this time around. With less than a half-hour left to
roll, I can rest assured that no happenstance Groton School Board member will be given the finger or otherwise
disconcerted in the act of driving past this vehicle. Such indelicacies have occurred in past seasons, and they will occur
again. I’d be naive to expect otherwise. But these kids have been better than easy. They’ve been good, both behaviorally
and athletically. Loaded with talent and promise.

As I retrieve my book from the bus floor (The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist), our squad’s star, junior Bob Beardslee,
taps my shoulder. Bob’s runner-up finish in today’s “Class L” state meet has understandably elated him, and he’s up for a
bit of raillery.

“Looks like pretty heavy stuff,” Bob says of my book.

“For sure, Bob, and pretty depressing stuff too, as far as I can tell,” I say.

“You always do seem to go for the depressing ones,” he observes.

“Hmmm, you could be right,” I allow, then change tack with, “So, what am I doing hanging out with you guys?
You’re the life of the party.”

Off his finish today, Bob’s made the cut for next week’s Connecticut Open and, if he shines there, he’ll go on to the
New England championship at Orono, Maine, the following week.

“Oh, we’re here to keep you smiling—and away from those depressing books,” Bob says with a warm chuckle.

He resumes his seat. I gaze idly at our stolid driver’s head and shoulders bathed in the dull red glow of the emergency
light. Then, turning my head, I look out the window at phantasmagoric roadside images punctuated by door lamps and
picture-window jack o’ lanterns. So much for my plan to read. I slip The Dwarf into my teacher’s valise and snap it up
tight. For these final minutes of our final team trip till next fall, it seems more fitting to reflect on the luck of this season’s
draw.

I think of our tall, lean-as-a-runner manager, Brent Nowak, sitting in the seat across the aisle from mine. Brent,
though born stone deaf, reads lips so well than he can “listen” better than his hearing peers. In all areas of school life,
Brent excels. I can depend on him to bring every essential item aboard the bus for our school departure and to run an
equally thorough check before okaying our departure from the meet site.

And there’s our captain, senior Dave Grainer, sitting alone in the seat behind Brent. As talented and committed as
Dave is, he hasn’t realized his hopes for his third and last high school cross-country season. I see him wrapped in
characteristic introspection, possibly pondering the irony of having led this winning combination (closed out 8-4 in dual
meets) while cast into the shadows of Bob Beardslee and our surprising “junior rookie,” Ambrose Burfoot.

Bob has done everything he was scripted to do for two years straight, having come well-advertised out of West Side
Junior High where, among other feats, he built his own telescope and broke five minutes for the mile.

You’ll love the rest of Johnny’s tale of Amby Burfoot.

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Blow Up, Break Down
Rhabdomyolysis: When the Will Is Stronger Than the Body, the Results Can Be Life Threatening.
Stephanie Ehret

A fat woman in hospital pants isn’t much of an anomaly in a Midwestern airport. But it was a unique experience for me,
a normally slight and athletic girl, being that fat woman in hospital pants. A mere four days earlier I had stood at the
starting line of my first 24-hour track race, the 1998 Arizona Road Racers’ Across the Years 24/48/72-hour track run.

Four days later—and twenty-five pounds heavier—I flew back home to Colorado and joked with my husband that I
had skipped the race to hang out at an all-you-can-eat buffet. The real story took me longer to explain and much longer
to understand. But it seemed a story worth understanding, for my own sake as well as that of others. That’s why, 10
months later, I’m still sifting through stacks of medical abstracts and articles, researching and writing about rhabdomyolysis,
an affliction that sounds like a species of dinosaur. I’m hoping that my experience might serve a higher purpose if I can
share it with others.

My Race: A Recipe For Rhabdomyolysis

The race began on Tuesday, December 29, at 9:00 am on what promised to be a clear, sunny day. I was feeling
strong; I had just taken a three-week hiatus from running after a spate of heavy racing and training through the summer
and fall. Always game for an adventure, I’d entered this race on a whim. The enticement of a warm vacation and the
opportunity to run with and learn from my friend Barb Marquer, second-place finisher of the 1998 24-hour national
championships, sounded too good to pass up.

Barb and I started together at a comfortable pace and settled in for the long day. Then, quite suddenly at around mile
15, I began to feel intense nausea. The evening before, in my nervousness over dehydration and loss of electrolytes, I
had consumed nearly six bottles of Cytomax and Metabolol, energy drinks containing carbohydrates and electrolytes.
The mixture swirled in my belly. A few sips of Ensure was all it took to make me expel the whole mess.

Several passing runners offered condolences and a kind of congratulatory encouragement: “Get rid of it all, Steph.
You’re going to feel so much better!” And indeed I did. I began a period of effortless, joy-filled running that took me
through about mile 60.

My coach helped me through the hottest part of the day (about 80 degrees), filling my baseball cap with ice cubes
and draping me in ice-water-drenched shirts. Some time after mile 60, I began to slow. I discarded my Walkman, feeling
the need to focus, and I took an ibuprofen. I found it difficult eating anything but orange slices, watermelon, and other wet
foods. Running became an effort, and my coach’s role became primary. “You just finished your 100K,” he said, “now
focus on 100 miles.”

I began to run three laps, then walk the fourth, later shifting to running the straights and walking the curves. I reached
100 miles in 17:14. Every couple of hours I would take an ibuprofen. By the end of the race I had taken a total of 12.

By mile 120 it was all I could do to keep running the straights. Every lap my coach would offer a word of
encouragement or something to eat or drink. “Give me three good laps,” he’d say, “then take a rest lap.” At some point,
a new person, who would become increasingly important to my well-being, entered the picture. “Hey, mind if I run a lap
with you?” he said. “I’m Jordan.” Jordan Ross ran several laps with me, offering encouragement and bits of humor. I can’t
remember much that he said, but I remember smiling—smiling at mile 122.

If the first 23 hours set the stage for the troubles to follow, the last hour was the coup de grace.

With the lure of 130 miles, I dipped deeply into my spiritual and physical wells and hammered out the final miles,
running harder if not faster than any other time in the race. On December 30th, 9:00 am, the race was over. I had
completed 128.99 miles in 24 hours, the fifth best in the world by a woman in 1998, and the seventh all-time best by a
woman in the United States.

The Aftermath

That should be the end of the story, but my true ordeal had really just begun. As I lay in the tent after the race,
I felt overcome by nausea. I threw up something resembling thick, dark, water-logged mushrooms. I had not eaten
any mushrooms. A hot flash quaked through my body. Something was wrong. And Jordan was back, like a guardian
angel. More accurately, Jordan was an ultrarunning, Mickey Mouse-loving, family physician and chair of Osteopathic
Medicine at Midwestern University. He suspected that I had thrown up the sloughed-off lining between my stomach and
esophagus. I could overhear some discussion about taking me to the hospital. I thought that might be a good idea,
since I was pretty sure I was dying.
The rest of Stephanie’s story appears in our May/June 2000 issue. This piece is a
must-read for any ultrarunner.

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Track Time
The Benefits of a Regular Track Session Can’t Be Overstated.
Dave Kromer

Looking back at my college running days in the mid-1970s, the memories of doing workouts on the track emerge
with crystal clarity. At that time, I was lucky enough to be coached by Bob Sevene, a genuine track-and-field fanatic.
Over the course of the years I spent under his guidance, my appreciation for the benefits of including the track in my
weekly training schedule was greatly enhanced.

The achievements of Sev’s teams were due to a large extent to his challenging track workouts. Not only were there
improvements in our personal bests in track and cross-country, but our road racing times improved dramatically as well.
The key was not excessive amounts of natural ability but that we had the motivation necessary to follow the coach’s plans.

Several decades later, speedwork on the track is recognized as a common staple in many a marathon runner’s diet.
Although there are numerous approaches to this form of training with a number of variables involved, the benefits are quite
clear. What follows are a few of the many good reasons to get thee to a track.
In Dave’s article, you’ll learn some of the advantages of regular track workouts.

A Run Between Two Oceans
South Africa Has the Scenery, Diamonds, Wine, and Another Ultra Besides Comrades.

Michael Brandt

Many people consider Cape Town one of the most beautiful and isolated cities in the world. The city sets on a
peninsula that extends southward with a mountain ridge on its back that descends sharply to the two oceans that border it:
the cold Atlantic and the warm Indian.

Located on the southern tip of the vast continent of Africa, the region is dominated by renowned vineyards, pristine
beaches, and cradled by the steep slopes of the spectacular Table Mountain, Devil’s Peak, Lion’s Head, and Signal Hill.
Cape Town is an emerging world playground for adults with youthful inclinations, and the city hosts an exceptional,
well-organized ultramarathon.

Cape Town was the first European settlement in South Africa, founded by Jan van Riebeeck in 1652. Van Riebeeck
was an official of the Dutch East India Company, and the city he founded is today a major seaport, boasting a warm
Mediterranean climate with dry summers and cooler, wet winters. The Cape Peninsula is the convergence point of the
two aforementioned wondrous bodies of water: the Atlantic and Indian oceans. From this coincidence of geography,
the Two Oceans Ultramarathon was born in 1969.

To the Ends of the Earth: An African Adventure

Our journey began at Miami Airport, where a small group of nine stalwarts met at the South African Airline counter,
some for the first time. Thom Gilligan of Marathon Tours had assembled the group and made all the travel arrangements.
The ages and experience levels of our group varied greatly. For at least one, it would be a test of stamina and
commitments, for this was her first ultramarathon.

For veteran runner Brent Weigner, a 49-year-old teacher from Wyoming, this was old hat: it would be his 89th
marathon and make him the first person to run an ultra on every continent in the world—and that in a mere seven-month
period.

For Knox White, it would be his 47th marathon and sixth continent. A 61-year-old retired entrepreneur from
Arkansas, Knox enjoys collecting antiques with his wife Judi.

For most adventure distance runners, going to a foreign location to run a marathon or an ultra is a social event, like
going to summer camp as a kid. Seven members of our group, for example, were “Arctic warriors”—veterans of the
Antarctic Marathon, a test of endurance and the inner-self against nature’s worst elements. Three of the group were
“Polar Pacers” who had completed the famed and now defunct Nanisivik Marathon, considered the toughest marathon in
the world. The Two Oceans Marathon would be like a vacation for some of our group; for others, it was the adventure of
a lifetime.

Continued in the May/June issue.

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Special Book Bonus

Wobble to Death
Peter Lovesey
A classic novel uncovered: Murder at a Six-Day Race: Part III

Introduction to Wobble to Death:

We are also proud to present a series of newly created illustrations for the installments of the novel drawn by
our favorite running artist, Andy Yelenak. He did the special cover painting for the
January/February 2000 issue to mark the novel’s debut in Marathon & Beyond. Enjoy!

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Volume IV | Number 4 | July/August 2000

Departments

Editorial
Working Assets
Richard Benyo

In recent years many businesses have taken creative approaches, using trips and premiums to motivate employees
to do a better job—a better job that usually involves reaching and surpassing sales goals. We’ve all heard of the insurance
rep who wins an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii.

Lately we’ve heard of a marathon-based incentive program that we hope will become a standard within American
businesses. It also makes us wish we had done better in that required economics course back in the Arts and Sciences
program so that we might pursue, at this late date, a new career in something called “securitized deferred obligations”—which
we interpret to mean making a commission by offering to lend real liquid money against assets (such as long-term seller
mortgages, money inherited but not liquid, real goods collections, state lottery winnings, etc.) that are at the moment not
so liquid. (How’d I do on that? Am I even in the ballpark? Or is my Economics 101 teacher again chuckling behind her
palm, wondering how such a nincompoop ever got accepted to college?)

The incentives this company offers also churns up the ol’ memory circuits regarding running perks offered by
American companies in the bad ol’ days. But I’ll defer that until later in this column. Meanwhile, get this innovative
thinking:

The largest originator and servicer of “securitized deferred obligations” in the United States, J.G. Wentworth
(established in 1992 and based in Philadelphia), has a program in place wherein employees who take up running and are
serious enough about it to enter races, receive one point for each mile raced (i.e., 5K = 3 points, 10K = 6 points,
Western States 100 = 100 points, etc.), with 120 points logged within a seven-month period earning them an
all-expenses-paid trip to the marathon of their choice. These marathons have included Los Angeles, New York,
Vermont, Grandma’s (in Duluth, Minnesota), Adirondack (Schroon Lake, New York), Royal Victoria (in Canada’s
beautiful British Columbia), and London.

This past April, J.G. Wentworth sent 30 of its employees to the London Marathon. The entire company has only
250 employees. Michael Goodman, executive vice-president and chief operating officer (who, in a photo of a group of
the Wentworth Marathon Training Gang that appeared in a newspaper story, looks young enough to still be in college)
puts it this way: “Running is the most effective corporate training program we have. It promotes healthy living. It promotes
teamwork. And it provides a common goal with an uncommon reward.”

Michael didn’t start out as a serious runner. He began as a serious asthmatic. For 12 years he’s gone through three
inhalers and 400mg of theophlynn every day. Lured to a running program by long-time runner Alpha Nickelberry
(Wentworth’s director of sales), Michael went from zero miles per week at Thanksgiving of 1998 to an average of
40 miles per week, to completing four marathons in 1999.

Read the rest of Rich’s essay about this innovative program in our July/August issue.

On the Road with Scott Douglas
Runners: Yeah, We’re Alike

When he was running for president in 1988, Richard Gephardt would tell this story:

The Air Force had these bases up in Alaska, way up, Arctic, freezing up there. And they noticed, the
Eskimos, the native guys, could work out there—three hours, six hours—whatever you needed. But the guys from the
lower 48 states, you’d put ’em out there, and after an hour, they’d be finished, frozen stiff, just couldn’t do it . . . same
clothes, same jobs, same everything. . . .

So they run these tests, physical exams, complete work-ups, everything. They couldn’t find any physical differences
at all. So then they ran psychological tests, the whole battery. They had to find out: What was the difference? You know
what they found?

The Eskimos, the natives . . . they expect to be cold!”

Gephardt told the story to induce in his troops the stoicism needed to soldier on during his candidacy. With the right
attitude, Gephardt told them, you could do anything, no matter how improbable; given enough time, any steady stream will
cut into the deepest rock—his mother had told him.

History buffs among us will note that Gephardt has yet to take up residency in the White House. Similarly, runners are
sometimes defeated in pursuit of their version of a presidential bid, a good marathon. But reading about Gephardt’s
Eskimos a few days after my latest failed attempt at marathon satisfaction, I thought, “Yes, this is why, without consciously
trying to make it so, most of my friends are runners—we expect to be cold.”

Song of Myself Et Al.

That is, at the risk of taking a highly controversial stand, I offer the following observation: it’s really great to be around
other runners. In large part, that’s because our mental outlooks distinguish us from our sedentary acquaintances of
comparable physical gifts. We expect to be cold—or hot, or tired, or thirsty, or achy, or just downright sick of donning
running garb for the 312th night in a row—and we carry on. And when we find ourselves in the company of others who
think and live as we do, we rejoice, or at least relax.

Certainly, this was my experience at March’s Sutter Home Napa Valley Marathon, to which I had somehow
weaseled/lucked my way into an invitation to be part of the race’s “Marathon College.” (Read: Talking heads of various
levels of accomplishment, with my accomplishments being decidedly toward the bottom of the class.) Rather than cringing
at the thought of enforced socializing, I actually looked forward to the gathering. What was up with that?

Continued…You’ll read a softer side of Scott in our July/August issue.

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My Most Unforgettable Ultramarathon (And What I Learned From It): Death Valley 1999

by Marshall Ulrich

INYO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, July 1-4, 1999. Thousands and thousands of miles, six continents, 89 ultraruns,
and 7 adventure races behind me, and I still tend to recall the last event I finished the most poignantly. However, one
event in particular does come to mind as exceptional: The Badwater Solo—the first successful unaided, self-contained
crossing of Death Valley and the ascension of Mt. Whitney.

It started from Badwater, a sinkhole in Death Valley that at 282 feet below sea level is the lowest point in the
Western Hemisphere, and climbed to the peak of Mt. Whitney, at 14,500 feet altitude, the highest peak in the contiguous
United States. The course covers a distance of nearly 150 miles.

The solo attempt was the culmination of desert-racing experiences over a period of many years: seven
Badwater-to-Whitney crossings, as well as the only south-to-north Death Valley crossing of what at that time was a
national monument (now a National Park), plus two different races in the Sahara. These desert races helped me learn
about my body, including what it requires to continue functioning in the extreme conditions encountered on the journey.
The adventure-racing experiences (Eco Challenges and Raid Gauloises) helped me learn the organizational skills
necessary to take care of myself during the self-contained aspect of the completely unaided solo.

Two key elements come immediately to mind regarding my running. The first is that I would have accomplished much
less without the emotional and logistical support of my friends, who many times ran at my side. I also received product
and monetary support from my primary sponsor, Pharmanex.

The second element is my strong belief that ultradistance sports are, for me, a life process condensed into an event
or series of events. The growth process they provide is what drives me; they open the window into my mind and soul.
The events are but a vehicle for this to happen, and I hope that I internalize them all effectively. This process is what
allows me to evolve, which for me is the most compelling part of my sport.

Given these statements, you may well suspect where I am going with this story. A factual account of my solo may or
may not be interesting to you; for me, relating the facts is anticlimactic, in that the significance lies within the process itself.
Some runners will understand what I’m talking about, but I suspect some brows may rise, because many athletes view
records, first-run events, and wins as significant in the scheme of life. But what is really important is that we fight the fight,
dream the dream, and go out and do something.

In what follows, I will tell the story of my solo, as I’ve been asked to do—but the “What I Learned From It” section
is for me far more interesting.

Marshall’s solo journey from Badwater to Mt. Whitney is gripping. Don’t miss it in our
July/August issue.

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Santa Clarita Marathon
A Gem of a Marathon Hides in the Mountains North of Los Angeles

Looking for a small but great late fall marathon in California? Try this November’s
Santa Clarita Marathon. For a link to the race site, click on Partner Links from
the M&B homepage

Letters
Lively responses to our most recent issues.

On the Mark

Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:

I KEEP HEARING fantastic stories about guys who run a marathon every weekend for several years. At the other
extreme, I hear that if you want to preserve your working body parts, you shouldn’t run more than two marathons a year.
For those of us made of flesh and blood and not steel who want to run marathons well, how many marathons per year is
it safe to run?—
Our experts answer this question in our July/August issue.

About the Authors
Among this issue’s authors are Mark Conover, Michael Sandrock, Jonathan Beverly,
Richard Benyo, Guy Avery, Marshall Ulrich, and Laurie Parton.

Features

The Perfection Chasers

The Marathon Provides the Perfect Crucible in Which to Test Your Mettle and Your Resolve.
Here’s our introduction to a six-article special section on the quest for the “perfect” marathon.

Increasingly, physical, mental, and spiritual challenges are vanishing. Modern society has propagated the notion that
the American Constitution somewhere guarantees happiness, safety, and complete medical coverage, instead of merely
proclaiming the equal right to pursue these conditions.

Parents want education for their children but don’t want it to be challenging or painful. Middle-aged folks want good
health and fitness but don’t want to work for it. The overweight seek a svelte body by ingesting diet pills. The young
demand respect merely because they exist. The old demand respect because they have existed. The voters want honest
politicians until one of them tells the truth.

Against the backdrop of millions of timorous souls hoping for that guaranteed safety, one-tenth of one percent each
ear go against the grain and embark on a perilous journey covering 26.2 miles on their own two feet—a journey in which
the only guarantee is that there are no guarantees.

Some new marathoners attempt to make the journey as painless as possible. Other, more grizzled, marathoners
continue to experiment with their training and racing, hoping against hope for that one “perfect” marathon. The pursuit of
perfection, by definition, is fraught with frustration, for it is never really reached. Each approach pushes the perfection
beyond the next hill. Yet the marathon provides an arena in which intelligence, determination, and hard work can combine
to approach perfection, at least against the constraints with which each of us is born. The marathon provides an
opportunity for us to compete against our own limitations.

Jonathan Beverly, our former European correspondent, posed to us the concept of the marathon as a test in which each of us
can pursue our own unique perfection. We thought it would be interesting to pose the challenge to an entire spectrum of
marathoners to share how they have used the marathon as an opportunity to go for the best they are capable of achieving.
Jon broke the reasons for the pursuit into four areas:

A great equalizer. More than any other event, the marathon rewards persistence, planning, and experience.
It is impossible to cram for a marathon, to rely solely on natural ability, or to buy success. This area appeals to those of
us who may not have had the natural athletic ability to enjoy success in other sports but have found in the marathon a
thinking person’s sport.

A test of character. George Sheehan called the marathon a “fitting stage for heroism.” From the initial
decision to train for and race the marathon to the final two-tenths of a mile, the marathon provides occasion to prove
our integrity and courage, rare in this comfortable, compromised age.

A means of escape. Sherlock Holmes once commented, “My life is spent in one long effort to escape from
the commonplaces of existence.” Sherlock solved mysteries; others run marathons. Each marathon presents an infinitely
expandable challenge, with a new and unique set of variables to consider and overcome, requiring total involvement of the
mind and body.

A grand inspiration.The scale of the marathon is so large, it provides purpose and meaning to daily
activities. The experience is so intense and complete, it inspires us to rise above the status quo. Like Machiavelli’s
“Prince,” marathoners are in a constant state of preparation for battle, each day providing another opportunity to better
prepare and move one step closer to the goal.

Herein we’ve enlisted a range of marathoners, from an Olympic marathoner to a marathoner who has broken
4:00, to share their motivations, agonies, challenges, inspirations—and their souls—as they strive for a perfection
impossible to achieve but only too possible and enticing to imagine.

Perfection Chasers…
Running Was My Best Friend
Mark Conover (age 40, 9 completed marathons, 2:12 PR)

When I first began running in high school, I hated it. The possibility of running a marathon seemed about as likely as
giving up television after school. But after memorizing every episode of “Gilligan’s Island,” I decided that I valued my
own self-worth and was capable of achieving accomplishments even more worthwhile than knowing the Skipper’s
hometown. So, after a long, boring winter during my freshman year at Miramonte High School in Orinda, California,
I decided to pursue track as my high school sport. Since running long distances seemed especially painful at the time,
I opted for the event that most mixes speed and endurance—the 800 meters.

In my first 800 that season, I placed third in the frosh-soph race but found myself writhing in pain on the infield
afterward as I tried (in vain) to catch my breath. But the accomplishment of scoring a point for the team felt awesome—
I was hooked. Ten minutes after I finished, a girl ran the distance nearly 12 seconds faster than I had, setting a new girl’s
high school record. I understood that my work was cut out for me.

The summer following my freshman year, I hooked up with the number one runner on the cross-country team, who
lived just down the street from me. He would become my training partner for the next two years. We would go 1-2 in
nearly every race we ran. Toward the end of my junior year in cross-country, I began beating him. I also became
zealous about my running, hitting the trails for lots of miles after cross-country practice. I reached a high one week of
108 miles. After that week, I decided to run the Livermore Marathon.

Mark bares his soul as he searches for the answer to the question: “why do I run?”

Perfection Chasers…
The Grail Was Sub-2:20
Michael Sandrock (age 41, 17 completed marathons, 2:24 PR)

Rob De Castella used to say I was a 2:17 marathoner. I just had not done it yet. Now that nearly a decade has
passed since Deek was in Boulder training, I can look back and say with certainty that I never will run 2:17. Instead,
when I jog up through the Pearly Gates and talk with St. Paavo, St. Phidippides, St. Abebe, St. Jim (Peters), and
others, I will be forced to admit (because you cannot lie in heaven, especially about your PRs) that my personal
best is 2:24:30. And there it will remain for all of eternity.

Not that I didn’t try to run faster. For five years after clocking 2:24:30 at Grandma’s Marathon, I ran nearly every
day with de Castella and his training group, which included Rosa Mota, Steve Jones, Arturo Barrios, Ingrid Kristiansen,
Steve Kogo, Derek Froude, and various and sundry other world-class marathoners. The training went well; the racing
did not.

The perfect race for many of us living in Boulder in the 1980s was 2:19-anything. That was an Olympic qualifier.
We were not Frank Shorters or Rob de Castellas, nor were we meant to be. We were Napolean’s rear guard, the royal bodyguards so to speak, filling out the field behind the world- and national-class runners at local road races.

Sub-2:20 was our Holy Grail. Qualifying for the Olympic Trials would have been as good in my mind as making the
Olympic team. Back then, it was expected we would run that fast. It was attainable. It had to be, because so many
people were doing it. On the University of Colorado cross-country team on which I ran, we had six runners 2:14 or
faster: Kirk Pfeffer, Mark Spilsbury, Mike Buhmann, Mark Anderson, John Hunsaker, and Chuck Hattersley. I was
embarrassed to tell newcomers to town that my bests were 2:24 and 30:23 (for 10,000).

Ever the philosopher, Mike takes us through his quest for marathon perfection, ending his piece on this note:
“Have you ever visited the Parthenon atop the Acropolis in Athens? If you have, perhaps you understand why we
continue to pursue our perfect race. The marathon is like the Parthenon’s steps: not so steep that you can’t ascend
them, but far enough apart that you have to stretch out to make it up them. Isn’t that what being a marathoner, and
a human being, is all about? Knowing there are limits, yet still determined to stretch past our limits? Knowing the
perfect marathon does not exist, yet training every day as if we are going to run the perfect marathon? And perhaps
this above all—running fearlessly along the edge of the abyss, knowing that time, Gravity, and Entropy, those indefatigable
allies, will win in the end, yet sticking it out to run our best race anyway.”

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Perfection Chasers…
Enjoying the Process
Jonathan Beverly (age 36, 17 completed marathons, 2:46 PR)

Two facts characterize my marathon experience. Number one is that I have been successful. I have not set world,
national, or even local records, nor often won awards, but my success in the marathon far exceeds that in any other of
my athletic endeavors. Number two is that I have never mastered the distance. I’ve never finished a race and been able
to state, “Everything went right. I gave everything I had. This is the best I can do.”

These two facts draw me to the distance again and again. The potential of success first lured me to the marathon.
After a childhood of experience that convinced me I was unsuited for athletics, I was thrilled to discover distance running
in high school. I learned I had always been a marathoner. I hadn’t known it then, having never heard of the event until the
late 1970s, but the essential characteristics were present from the start: a wiry frame, a penchant for challenging puzzles,
and, most important, a tenacity that compensated for my small size and lack of athletic instincts.

By my sophomore year I discovered that the longer the event, the greater my comparative advantage. That spring,
Joan Benoit (also from a small town in Maine) ran an American record at Boston, and the marathon began monopolizing
my thoughts and dreams.

During the summer break I ran my first road races, culminating in a hilly 16-miler where I cruised comfortably past
fading runners in the final miles. Afterward, my cross-country coach was more impressed than I was with my
seven-minute-per-mile average. Her enthusiasm, and the congratulations of other runners, convinced me that this ability to
keep running was not shared by everyone.

My road success didn’t translate back to cross-country as well as expected. I ran respectably on varsity that fall,
but my heart had moved to longer things. When spring rolled around, I chose to skip track and train for a marathon.

Continued in our July/August issue.

Jonathan says near the end of his article, “I do not dream of a day when Saturday mornings won’t find me on a
road or trail 10 miles from home and still heading out.” Amen to that!

Perfection Chasers…
Running’s Been Good
Richard Benyo (age 54, 37 completed marathons, 2:57 PR)

Running has been very, very good to me. As a skinny kid with a severe stuttering problem, running many times saved
me from a vigorous thrashing at the hands of my fellow kids. Early on, I discovered that although I was not terribly fast,
if I could get a three-stride jump on a bigger kid, I could always outlast him. I spent much of my childhood on the alert for
attacks from hidden assassins.

Although our high school had no track or cross-country teams in the early 1960s, the gym teacher did conduct an
annual intramural track meet on the rutted dirt road that encircled our football field. The longest event was billed as the
half-mile, although considering the ambling rut in which we ran, it was more accurately a 5/8th-mile steeple chase. In my
junior year I finished a close second in the half; in my senior year I read War and Peace while waiting for the second-
place finisher to come in; everyone went out way too fast and died on the back sort-of straightaway.

I engaged in (and managed to pervert) cross-country in college. Training three times a day left me so tired by race
day that I never placed better than fourth on our team. In my junior year my running was complicated by a toe injury that
I would freeze in a bag of ice before meets. During my senior year the toe would undergo seven surgical procedures
(most of them incompetently performed in a podiatrist’s chair with two aspirin as anesthesia) in attempts to correct the
problem.

In 1977 I joined the staff of Runner’s World, which in a big way rekindled my interest in running. That fall I covered
the New York City Marathon from the rickety press truck. Witnessing Bill Rodgers run like a god behind the
press truck while he sucked foul exhaust fumes from the NYPD Vespas and chatted with press guys convinced me that the
marathon was a race worth pursuing.

There’s lots more in this piece by M&B editor Rich Benyo, including his quest to break 3:00, his conquest of
Death Valley, and, finally, a health crisis that stopped his marathoning cold.

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Perfection Chasers…
It’s a Celebration of Life

Rhonda Provost (age 51, 26 completed marathons, 3:18 PR)

Marathoning, in all its splendor, made a serendipitous entrance into my life.
Roughly 20 years ago, to increase my aerobic fitness level, I embarked on a running program for the third time in my life.
I was 30 years old and had noticed my clothes were fitting tightly. At one time I had been able to eat with abandon,
anything I wanted, but now I felt soft, no longer lean as I had been in my relative youth.

In April 1979, as a native Bostonian, I was introduced as a blind date to the man who would become my husband.
He was a journalist and was in town to cover the Boston Marathon. He was a veteran marathoner; I was a fledgling
runner. As our relationship blossomed, we typically would frequent running events, including marathons, where I would
cheer him on as he crossed the finish line. Within the first year of my running program, inspired by what I was exposed to
in the marathoning community, I was motivated to run one.

My initial efforts to train for a marathon proved unsuccessful, however, for I lacked the endurance to run for more
than 90 sustained minutes. I abandoned the marathon vision, presuming I wasn’t suited for the distance.

Early in my running pursuits I experienced the usual running injuries. As is typical for novice runners, long after my
heart and lungs had adjusted to what I was demanding of them, ligaments and tendons still needed to comply. So I
supplemented my running with strength and flexibility training. What resulted was not only hastened recovery from
existing injuries but also prevention of future injuries. Over time, my running performance improved, fueling a desire
to challenge myself more and test my limits.

Continued…Read how running is a metaphor for life for Rhonda in our
July/August issue.

Perfection Chasers…
The Challenge of Testing Limits
Jenny Hadfield (age 33, 18 completed marathons, 3:40 PR)

My passion for running evolved over time. I remember as a young child seeking out adventure, testing my limits
(as well as my parents’ limits), constantly pushing for more. To go farther, faster, stronger, and to leap tall buildings in a
single bound. It didn’t bother me that I wasn’t the fastest or best athlete. I was motivated by the challenge. Twenty-five
years later, I’m still on that journey of exploration, enjoying all the experiences that cross my path.

In my youth, I would hop on my banana seat Schwinn and ride to the outskirts of town, each day riding a little farther
to see where I would end up. The unknown always fueled me to explore higher ground. I have a constant yearning to
discover new pathways mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. When looking back at my life, I realize that
running has allowed me to reach many places, overcome obstacles, and nurture my inner strength. But that reality has
come over a long stretch of time.

My adolescent goals involved holding a head stand as long as anyone on the block, to ride my green machine down
the driveway and over the grass without falling off, and to bicycle a little farther away from home each day. I’ve always
been active and very competitive. I participated in many sports, which kept me out of serious trouble and provided a
valuable source of motivation to exercise.

Although I was active as a youth, I hated the thought of running. My first experiences with running were not pretty,
most of them being involuntary. Many coaches used running as a form of punishment. If I missed a basketball shot, I
would have to run laps. A volleyball serve into the net earned more laps. And I will never forget the dreaded suicide
sprints!

Because of these training tactics, I quickly developed negative associations with running. The very thought of running
sent me into a nauseous tizzy. Plus, once puberty set in, I was a bit chubby, which made me self-conscious while running.
I never felt completely comfortable. In my mind, running was reserved for the lean of body and the fleet of foot.

Dealing Away the Negative

But my negative associations with running never stopped me from trying. Running was for me the Mt. Everest of
climbs. The inability to succeed infuriated me. I could not see past the wall that stood so dauntingly across my path, and
I was compelled to find a way to break through it. I would strap on my shoes and head down the driveway, thinking
it’ll be different this time. But time after time, I didn’t get much farther than the end of the block. My attempts at running
always ended with frustration, fatigue, and the agony of defeat.

My passion for running developed later in life, when I was challenged by co-workers to run a local 8K race. I had
been active in cycling for a few years but always managed to avoid the “r” word. My friends took me by the hand and
led me, patiently, to the race. Little by little, we sprinkled running into our training. I was clearly tricking my body into
running, and it didn’t even notice.

I finished that first 8K in 59:36. I could have cared less about my time. I was too excited over actually running an
entire race. It didn’t even bother me that I was beaten by a 75-year-old man (this detail, by the way, was announced
over the PA system).

I walked away from that race with my head held high, knowing there would be many more races to conquer. I had tasted
the appetizer and now had a growing hunger for the entree. That night, I wore my race shirt to bed and fell asleep with a
smile on my face.

I had finally found the key to unlock my motivation. Racing provided the tool I had long been without—a carrot, a
target to work toward. Establishing goals quickly helped me to improve my running. I was no longer running purely for
health and fitness; I was training to improve performance. I began using words and phrases like “personal record” and
“endorphins.” I focused more clearly, trained smarter, and ran better. To this day, in the absence of a goal, I lose focus
and begin merely to go through the motions.

Read the rest of Jenny’s story in our July/August issue. Her piece ends with this line: “I know my passion for
running involves learning more about myself and in finding what lies on the other side.”

That Sinking Feeling

The Late Stages of a Marathon Often Dip, But When the Course in Venice Dips, You Better
Tread Water.
Jonathan Beverly

The water taxi driver called me out of the warm, wood-paneled cab of his motoscafi and pointed through the pouring
rain. The lights of my hotel reflected off the water of the Grand Canal, water that overflowed the canal, covered the hotel’s
dock, and rippled over the sidewalk nearly to the hotel door.

“Izz possible,” the driver said, steering the boat to a public landing miles away. Toting my bags over the slick steps of
an arched bridge and along the flooded sidewalk, I asked the question that people had been asking me ever since I
announced my plans to run the Venice Marathon: “How do you run a marathon there?”

In the morning, everything was different. The tide had fallen, and as I set out to explore, a hazy sun sparkled across the
canal’s ripples. Venice, quite simply, overwhelmed me. Every town in the world with more than one canal calls itself the
“Venice of the North” or “Little Venice,” but unlike all these other “Venices” I’ve encountered, the canals here aren’t minor
forays into a predominately land-based culture. Here, canals are the base, with “land” artificially built around over them.
Boats carrying everything from commuters to mail to freshly pressed laundry speed through the maze of waterways,
stopping at docks where their goods continue on foot to their final destination.

Venice peaked as a world power in the 15th century. At the time, the smoothest, fastest, and most civilized way to
travel was by boat. Although the Venetians had fled to these islands in the lagoon 1,000 years earlier to escape attacks
from northern Teutonic raiders, their waterborne lifestyle was well-suited to conduct the Eastern trade that fed their wealth,
and to cater to the high society that wealth produced.

In contrast, land travel of the time was slow, bumpy, and dirty. In Venice, they could step smartly from their boats
directly to their door, or gently walk the short, stone-paved streets and squares between the canals.
Five hundred years later, in the 20th century, the world travels by land and air. Venice, however, remains both a
waterborne city and a pedestrian paradise. Not even Italy’s ubiquitous motor-scooters are allowed past the parking lot at
Piazza Roma at the end of the two-mile bridge from the mainland. In no city on Earth is it more necessary, or more
pleasant, to go by foot.

Wandering this maze of traffic-free lanes, blissfully lost half of the time, I speculated that it might be possible to find 26.2
miles of “road” within the city’s three square miles. And that would certainly be a memorable run: winding through alleys,
crossing ancient bridges, and splashing through flooded courtyards. But staging such a race, I realized, would require
capping the field at 50 and evacuating the rest of the population. Another option might be to precede the race with
uniformed “front-runners,” like those I saw clearing the way for a group of construction workers rolling a giant spool of
cable through a narrow lane. Of course, at marathon pace, they’d be more like football blockers, which might get rather
ugly.

So how do they run a marathon here? I continued to wonder. I discovered the answer when I examined the course map
later in the day: They don’t run a marathon here. They do what many Venetians have done to live in the modern world:
move to the mainland.

In the past 30 years, the city’s population has shrunk from 138,000 to less than 70,000. Vincenzo Sambo, the marathon’s
consultant for foreign competitors, is one of those who left. He considers Venice home but says it is too expensive and
too logistically difficult to stay there. His compromise is to live just across the bridge in the modern city of Mestre and
commute into his work in Venice.

The marathon’s compromise is to start more than 20 miles northwest of the city and not enter pedestrian Venice until the
final two miles. Even for this limited invasion, they have to modify Venice to accommodate the runners. Wooden ramps
cover the steps of the 18 arched bridges along the route, and a special pontoon bridge spans the Grand Canal, keeping
us on the relatively wide walkway bordering the southern waterfront.

I’ve never felt so high-maintenance. While I had to acknowledge that the alternatives were impossible, the compromise
bothered me. I had never before made the connection between road running and . . . well . . . roads. I resented the
realization that we need these wide, smooth, relatively straight throughways designed for automobiles to conduct a
20th-century mass marathon.

Read the rest of Jonathan’s Venetian marathon article in our July/August issue.

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A Dog Day Afternoon
Some Dog Owners Give Their Animals Complexes By Bestowing Them Stupid Names.
Laurie Parton

He was mad. Really mad. Mad at a life that had given him, a fierce brave male dog, the wimpy, effeminate name of
Muffette. An owner who would do something like that should be ticketed for animal cruelty. Muffette, for crying out
loud. This was strike one.

If the name wasn’t bad enough, this past weekend had been the biggest, baddest weekend of the year for local dogs.
It was the weekend of the annual “hunt,” the staged opportunity to chase a fox until either you or the fox dropped.
There was not a single doubt in Muffette’s mind that he was capable of catching any fox in the county, but his master
had picked his farm-dog rival, Bozkatz, for that honor, while Muffette had been left home. This was strike two.

So, there Muffette sat, on a beautiful sunny October day, wallowing in grief and self-pity, left alone to guard the
farm while Bozkatz was up at the house sleeping off an overfeed of Kibbles’n Bits and no doubt dreaming of chasing
the fox over and over like the rerun of a favorite scene from a movie. Meanwhile, Muffette moped and stewed.

And then suddenly perked up. Because out there, on the horizon, he began to make out the unmistakable forms
of a half-dozen tasty runners. And these runners had dared to venture onto his driveway. The gods had made up for the
fox hunt slight. Oh, yes. Those runners were about to be taken out. Strike three.

Muffette held himself in check as the runners came closer. Every nerve in his taut body tingled with anticipation.
Oh, yes.

Does Laurie escape the jaws of the ferocious Muffette? Find out in our July/August issue. Laurie wrote this piece for
us late last fall. Ironically, in the early morning of January 24 of this year, while on a training run, Laurie was struck from
behind by a car. She suffered a broken nose, a herniated disc in her neck, two black eyes, a fractured skull, and
she lost 25 percent of her blood. She was released from the hospital the following day and jogged through an
18-minute workout in order to keep a five-year running streak alive. She had qualified for the U.S. Olympic Marathon
Trials with a 2:49 at the 1998 Ocean State Marathon and was determined to get back into training for the trials in spite
of the accident. She finished 77th in the Trials in a time of 2:56:02. In April Laurie won the New Jersey Shore Marathon
in a new course record.

Marathon Training: More From Less
Part 4 of 5: The Core of Your Training Program: Getting Fitter.
Guy Avery

In this fourth part of Guy’s marathon training program, he walks you through Phase 2:
the second 8 weeks of training.

If you’re looking for a marathon training program, we recommend you give Avery’s
serious consideration.

To get your own copy of the July/August 2000 issue, Subscribe | to
Marathon & Beyond today.

Special Book Bonus

Wobble to Death: Part IV
Peter Lovesey
A classic novel uncovered: Murder at a Six-Day Race: Part IV. Parts I, II, and III appeared
in the January/February, March/April, and May/June issues, respectively.

Introduction to Wobble to Death:

We are also proud to present a series of newly created illustrations for the installments of the novel drawn by
our favorite running artist, Andy Yelenak. He did the special cover painting for the
January/February 2000 issue to mark the novel’s debut in Marathon & Beyond. Enjoy!

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Volume IV | Number 5 | September/October 2000

Departments

Editorial
by Richard Benyo

Too Much?

In this issue we feature five runners who subscribe to the philosophy, “If one is good, 10 must be 10 times better,”
and run with it to the horizon—and beyond.

It will probably surprise no one that if we had wanted to we could have found a dozen more runners who have accomplished
similar feats. In fact, we had originally scheduled two additional stories, but unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately) the potential
authors were too busy running to stop long enough to write for us.

What is it that makes seemingly sane people stretch themselves toward the breaking point? Certainly there’s the lure of doing
something no one else in the history of the world has ever done. A certain segment of human beings has always been imbued
with the crook in the gene that causes them to want to be the first to see, do, experience something that no one else has. We
seem currently to be in a frenzy of adulation for those who wanted to be the first to the top of the highest mountain or the first
across the bottom of the world.

Of course, most people are content to go along on the adventure from the safety of their easy chair, reading about or watching
the documentary of the adventure(s). Most people are, in fact, quite content to stay put just where they are. If it were up to
them, we’d still be living in caves, hoping some dumb animal wanders by in time for supper. It’s sad but true that many people
are too frightened of the world to venture too far afield in it.

This dichotomy in human nature has been pushed to the forefront here on the west coast over the past several years as
we wallow in celebrations of the western expansion of the United States and Canada. Some years ago it was the 100th
anniversary of the Yukon Gold Rush, which drew adventurers from all corners of the world to set sail from San Francisco,
Seattle, and Vancouver and to go over land from Edmonton, Alberta, to the gold fields along the Yukon River. In the United
States, the fascination with pushing our boundaries has taken the form of 150th anniversary celebrations of the Oregon Trail
and, last year, the California Gold Rush.

You can read the rest of Rich’s editorial in the September/October 2000 issue

On the Road with Scott Douglas
The Onion Covers the Olympics

With this go-round of the Olympics being held later than usual, the Marathon & Beyond staff was in a quandary: how to
be in Australia for two weeks to cover the Games and still hit the expo scene at the beginning of the fall marathon season?
Sure, they could take the approach of many journalists—when in doubt, make it up—but such an approach didn’t feel right
for the publication that goes the extra mile. Instead, in exchange for a coveted M&B windshirt, plus a two-issue extension
on a subscription, editor Rich Benyo and publisher Jan Colarusso Seeley were able to enlist the crack reporting squad
from The Onion, which bills itself as America’s finest news source. Glimpses of the glory that was Sydney . . .

American Distance Runners Spotted During Opening Ceremony

CHARLOTTE—In what is being described as a major technical glitch, three members of the U.S. 10,000-meter
Olympic squad were briefly shown during NBC’s coverage of the Sydney Games’ opening ceremony.

Charlotte resident Mark L. Davis was the first to call the NBC switchboard to complain after Libbie Hickman, Deena
Drossin, and Alan Culpepper appeared on his screen for nearly two seconds.

“I told them this was outrageous,” Davis said about his conversation with a switchboard operator. “I don’t watch the
Olympics to see distance runners, except maybe if they’ve overcome some great handicap or something. These three just looked like really fit runners. I don’t know what NBC was thinking.”
NBC quickly apologized for the incident.

“We’re sorry if we alarmed any viewers with these brief shots of highly trained distance runners who come to the
Olympics without a compelling Oprah-like story,” said Jane LaBewie, of the network’s PR department. “You have our word
that you won’t see them again for the duration of the Games.”

LaBewie added, “Unless, of course, one of their parents is diagnosed with cancer in the next couple weeks.”

The network had been planning extensive coverage of Marla Runyon, LaBewie noted, but in July, Runyon had eye
surgery and is no longer legally blind.

Craig Masback, chief executive officer of USATF, welcomed the broadcast error. “As everyone knows, the key to
running’s future is for it to be on TV as much as possible,” Masback said. “We calculate that these few seconds of coverage of
some of our leading distance runners will inspire a new generation to take up our sport.”
Masback added, “Track is back!”

Broadcaster Makes Insightful Comment

SYDNEY—Carol Lewis, former bronze medalist in the long jump and a veteran of NBC’s track broadcast team, made
an insightful comment today during coverage of the women’s long jump.

Lewis’s remark came after Marion Jones, who had hoped to win five gold medals at the Games, finished third in the long
jump. Jones, Lewis said, “was probably tired from her qualifying rounds in the sprints, and she’s competing against women who
specialize in the long jump.”

Watching from his home in Charlotte, NC, Mark L. Davis said, “I can’t believe it! Carol Lewis said something that made
sense!”

Dick Ebersole, president of NBC, said that Lewis’ comment shouldn’t come as a surprise.

“Carol has been on the air with us for what, at least 12 years now?” Ebersole noted. “We knew that if we stuck with her,
eventually she’d have something worthwhile to say.”

Craig Masback, chief executive officer of USATF, welcomed Lewis’ comment.

“With TV ratings being the most important thing in the world, Carol’s new capabilities can only help,” Masback said.

“For years, viewers have had to wait until Dwight Stones was speaking to hear something worth listening to. Now,
viewers will keep tuning in to see when Carol might next make a cogent comment. Track is back!”

You can read the rest of the Onion’s report in the September/October issue.

My Most Unforgettable Marathon (And What I Learned From It): Spitsbergen 1997
by Don McNelly

SPITSBERGEN, NORWAY, September 6, 1997—In the middle of the night, somewhere over the Atlantic, I turned to
my two fellow runners. “How do you feel about having to carry a rifle during this marathon?”

We were on our way to participate in the third Spitsbergen Maraton (not a misspelling; that’s how they spell “marathon” in
Norway). The run is held in Svalbard, a group of Norwegian islands midway between the top of mainland Norway and the
North Pole. Spitsbergen is the main island in the archipelago. Longyearbyen is the capitol and largest settlement. It lies
between 78 degrees and 79 degrees north (the Pole is at 90 degrees) and is about 800 miles south of the Pole and 800 miles
north of the Arctic Circle.

This run is the northernmost organized marathon in the world. Two years earlier, we same three runners had completed
the southernmost marathon, in Antarctica. We were, perhaps, to become the first runners to finish recognized marathons near
both ends of the Earth. We have run in many exotic spots around the world: Bangkok, Panama, Lisbon, Nanisivik, Buenos
Aires, Kilauea, and Cyprus, to name a few. We enjoy the runs and each other’s company.

Wally Herman, 74, is a retired civil servant from Ottawa. He has completed 565 marathons/ultras on all seven continents
and was the first to finish marathons/ultras in each Canadian province and territory and in all 50 U.S. states and D.C.

Dan Newbill, 69, is a microsurgeon from Honolulu. His accomplishments are similar: 150+ marathons/ultras, including
Sahara, Everest, Western States, and Comrades. His side interests are mountain climbing (the big ones) and bow-hunting elk.

As for me, I’m 79 and a retired box plant vice-president from Rochester, New York. I also have completed 560
marathons/ultras, including all 50 states, each Canadian province and 20 countries. Since my 70th birthday, I have racked up
289 marathons/ultras.

Don’s Spitsbergen Marathon story makes for great reading in our September/October issue.

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Atlanta Marathon Marathon
The Marathon With the Ever-Changing Course Serves Up a Thanksgiving Feast.

For a link to the race site, click on Partner Links from the M&B homepage

Letters
Lively responses to our most recent issues.

On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:

I PLAN TO do a marathon on April 29 followed by another the first week of June, just five weeks later. I have never
done marathons this close together before—my closest has been two months. What should my schedule be after I finish
the first marathon and prepare for the other in terms of rest, training mileage, cross-training, and so on? I plan to run the
first marathon relatively easy in terms of effort.
Our experts answer this question in our September/October issue.

About the Authors
Among this issue’s authors are Guy Avery, Theresa Daus-Weber, Paul Reese, Suzanne
Girard Eberle, and Teresa L. Wolff

Features

Marathon Training: More From Less
Part 5 of 5: Adding the Finishing Touches: Getting Ready for Race Day.
Guy Avery
In this final installment of Guy’s marathon training program, he walks you through
Phase 3:
the final 6 weeks of training.
If you’re looking for a marathon training program, we recommend you give Avery’s
serious consideration.

A Hardy Norwegian Marathon

James Hoch
The Nordmarka Skogsmaraton Is For Runners Who Want To Get Intimate With Hills.

When I was accepted to study music composition in Norway by its premier composer, Knut Nystedt, for the month of
June, I was tremendously excited and eager to experience everything Norwegian. Since my month of study would cause me to
miss Grandma’s Marathon, I checked to see if there were any marathons scheduled in Norway while I was there. After a
little searching, I discovered a “wilderness” marathon called the “Nordmarka Skogsmaraton,” which ran through a forest. The
event had a Web site and everything, so I took a look. The first item to catch my attention was this statement: “The challenge
for most of the competitors lies in completing the course rather than pursuing a record time. Enjoy the surroundings and plentiful
refreshments along the track.”
Since I had already been thinking about running a 52-mile ultra in Wyoming to commemorate my 50th birthday, I thought this
race might give me a good taste of what to expect. My wife and I arrived in Oslo on June 2nd. After recovering from jetlag,
I started running each morning. Most of my morning runs were fun because I would set off in a different direction and then
hope to find my way back to the hotel. I would always come back through Vigeland Park, which is a wonderfully large,
beautifully landscaped park full of bronze and stone sculptures from the famous Norwegian Paul Vigeland.
You’ll enjoy this article about an obscure but challenging European marathon.

Fuel Tech
Suzanne Girard Eberle, MS, RD

For the Marathoner, 11 Nutritional Tips Help Ensure Success.

Successful marathons are run on endurance and muscle fueled by nutritious foods and fluids stored in advance and also
taken on the run. Years of research in observing and running marathons has led to what I call “Eberle’s Tips for Marathoners”:

1. Start the race well hydrated and well fueled. Start pushing fluids at least 24 hours before you toe the line. Keep a water
bottle close at hand all day. If you’ve trained properly and eat a normal diet the few days prior to the race, you can expect to
store roughly 2,000 calories of glycogen to use as fuel during the race. Since every mile you run burns approximately 100 c
alories, it makes sense to boost your glycogen stores by carbohydrate loading in order to reduce chances of hitting the wall at
about the 20-mile mark.

2. Keep in mind that carbo-loading does not require you to eat enormous quantities of food, nor does it mean loading up on
high-fat foods. To enter the race feeling fresh and well rested, you’ll want to taper your training as race day approaches. You’ll
be expending less energy (calories), so it’s not necessary to eat hundreds of extra calories in order to boost your carbohydrate
intake. Instead, concentrate on increasing the percentage of your calories that come from carbohydrates and not fat; don’t be
alarmed if you feel bloated or gain a couple of pounds in the days leading up to the race. Your body stores a considerable
amount of water as it stows away carbohydrate as muscle glycogen. This extra water will help prevent dehydration during the
race. Experiment with carbohydrate loading before long training runs to find a routine that works for you.
3. Plan to eat a high-carbohydrate breakfast a few hours before the start of the race, especially if the race features a late
morning or noon starting time. Eating breakfast can help settle your stomach and ward off hunger pangs as you wait for the race
to begin. More important, eating breakfast helps restore your liver’s glycogen level, which helps to maintain your blood sugar
level, and it provides a last bit of fuel for your muscles. If you’re too nervous to eat the morning of the race, try drinking your
breakfast in the form of a breakfast shake or meal-replacement product. Experiment before long training runs or shorter races
leading up to the marathon with the types and quantity of food you can tolerate eating for breakfast.
4. If the race involves travel and meals eaten away from home, be sure to take with you any special or favorite food items that
you can’t do without. Consider using a high-carbohydrate beverage or meal-replacement product to supplement your
carbohydrate needs if time-zone changes or your travel schedule will interfere with your regular eating habits. As much as you
can control it, don’t try new foods or experiment or change your diet in the week leading up to the race.

You can find the rest of Eberle’s 11 Tips in her September/October article.

Special Section: Team Titanium
A four-article special section about runners with an endurance that’s simultaneously mind-boggling
and inspiring. Here’s the introduction:

Some people are built for speed, others for endurance. Those of us ungifted with speed stand in awe of those who can run
at tremendous speeds. We stand in the same awe of people who have mastered the violin, who can score three-pointers with
grace under pressure, or who can smack a baseball 500 feet.

Yes, there are many awesome feats that we of the endurance ilk will never savor the ecstasy of achieving. But, then again, some
pretty awe-inspiring achievements are within our realm of possibility. Though we will never run 100 meters in under 12 seconds,
we may someday run 100 miles in under 24 hours—some of you may have already done so. We are built to last; we know
what it takes to keep going when every molecule in our brains is telling us this is madness—please stop or I’ll get back at
you for this.

Sometimes our excesses of endurance do get back at us, often in dramatic ways. We run ourselves to injury or to burnout or,
sometimes, back to common sense.
But having spent time on the remote edges of endurance, we better appreciate that to get there and stay there is not so much a
talent with which we were born, but a condition of perseverance for which we have trained ourselves—sometimes for a lifetime.
Thus, despite the deep respect we may have for the speedy, the agile, and the graceful, we reserve our deepest awe for those
runners who seem to go beyond the realm of human beings, into the stratosphere where angels and madmen dwell. Think of the
seemingly insane workouts of Emil Zatopek during the late 1940s and early 1950s. All the experts of the time shook their heads
and agreed he was nuts. But Zatopek, by way of his Olympic gold medals, proved the experts wrong. Today, there are many
of these “experts” who make a profession of lowering the bar, who preach that doing less is more (acceptable) in our current
society, who sing the praises of lowered expectations.
Then there are the enduronauts, those slightly (or magnificently) crazed runners who seem to be made from different stuff than
we mere humans. They continually shatter barriers, making the impossible possible. We might think of these folks as Team
Titanium: runners with an endurance that’s simultaneously mind-boggling and inspiring. Run 600 marathons or ultras? No
problem. Hey, I wish there were more weekends so I could do that 15th ultra this year. Run a marathon at least once a
weekend for one year, two years, or more? No problem. I’ll check the race schedules and see how my frequent flyer miles
are accumulating. Run across every state in the Union at an age when I could be rocking contentedly at The Home, waiting for
my next prescription fix? Sorry—there’s no time yet to rest.

We’ve been fielding for years the astonishing accomplishments of some pretty crazy runners. At one time we thought of dealing
these stories out to you one at a time, but then it occurred to us that this is an area where excessiveness is appropriate—so,
we’ve decided to share with you in one issue a batch of our drop-down favorite ultimate-long-endurance folks. If you think
you’re in for a cornucopia of loonies, though, think again: these people are you and me pushed to our limits. We hope you
recognize part of yourself in some of them and are moved to go that extra mile . . . or 10 miles . . . or 100 . . . or more.

Jose Wilkie
Theresa Daus-Weber

If one 100-miler is good, a baker’s dozen or more must be better.
As he approached the 50-mile aid station at 5:00 am, the disappointing realization that he would not make the Hardrock 100-Mile Mountain Run’s 60-mile cutoff time exceeded the burden of finishing his sixth 100-mile race of the year. Motivated by his personal philosophy that “We have such a short time on this planet that you can’t take life for granted. We have to enjoy the moment,” the 35-year-old Venezuelan immigrant decided to challenge himself to see if he could go for a bigger record: completing a record 13 100-mile races in a single year.
Making the tough and risky decision to pull himself out of this race after investing an entire day of running at elevations near 11,000 feet could have shaken the confidence of a less-focused athlete. But if any man is focused, it’s Jose Wilkie. He returned to his home in Louisville, Kentucky, and nine days later ran a 100-mile trail race in slightly over 22 hours through the farmlands of Vermont.
Jose structured his 1999 ultrarunning challenge to set a record for the most 100-mile races ever completed in a single year. Even in a sport as esoteric as ultra-trail-racing, endurance achievements are recorded, and ultrarunners are motivated to set higher, faster, longer, or in some manner, more excessive records. Jose’s record attempt was not unprecedented. Richard Gillespie, an emergency room doctor, had the record for completing an even dozen 100-mile races in 1996. And Jose’s record attempt was not without the pressure of competition. George Musselman of Atlanta, Georgia, was also going for the record. Throughout his year’s challenge, Jose would come to realize that Musselman was a respectable competitor for the honor of completing 13 100-milers.

The Interstate Trekker

Paul Reese

Crossing all 50 states on foot seemed like a good way to enjoy retirement.
Like many things in life that end up taking on a life of their own, it all began innocently enough. At the time, it seemed the height of simplicity. It came as a result of reading a book: My Run Across the United States (Track & Field News, 1970, 184 pages) by Don Shepherd. Eventually, this experience proved to me why one of the first things a totalitarian government should do is ban books. Reading can be very insidious.
Shepherd was a 48-year-old South African mine-worker who came to the United States in 1964 with the express purpose of setting a new world record for running across the country. And that’s just what he did—in 73 days, 8 hours, 20 minutes.
With no more logistical support than a light backpack, he set off solo from Los Angeles and finished 3,200 miles later in New York City, all the while maintaining himself on a budget of $10 daily.
As I read his book, I found myself dangerously drawn in. “I’ve got to try this some day,” I caught myself thinking. That was way back in 1970. But because of real-world commitments (a job, three kids in college), I had to wait 20 years for “some day” to arrive—until 1990, to be precise.
By the time launch day had arrived, the question “Can I run all the way across the country?” had mutated somewhat from Shepherd’s approach. He traveled solo; I was pampered with logistical support from my dear wife, Elaine, who drove a motor home. He focused on a record; I focused on enjoyment and adventure. He averaged 43.8 miles per day; my daily average was barely over 26 miles. He was a mere child of 48; I was a venerable 73. And, oh yes, he acknowledged his debt to 31 ladies he met along the way; though I could not surpass him in quantity, the quality of the TLC I received may have turned him green with envy.
To my way of thinking, the bottom line to the differences between Shepherd and me is this: of all the people who have run across our country (and the number tops 200), I admire him the most because his trip was solo and unassisted. (Come, now—you didn’t think those 31 ladies supported him logistically, did you?)
Conversely, of all the people who have run across the country, I envy him the least, for he was barren of true companionship, of enjoying a mutual achievement (the synergy of runner and pit crew), joys not only of the running experience but also joys forever mutually cherished after the actual running is over. It’s now been a decade since I finished my run across the states, but Elaine and I often look back on it with fondness and gratitude, and the important point is that the memories are ours, not just mine.

On the Long Run
Rudy Ruettiger
Everything fell apart in Terry Hitchcock’s life at the same time. So he Ran from it and with it.
Sue Hitchcock died of breast cancer in 1984. Her husband Terry and their three children (Teri Sue, Chris, and Jason) were bereaved of a wife and mother who had added joy and strength to their lives. A happy marriage had come to a premature end. Just days after Sue’s death, Terry lost his job during a wave of corporate downsizing. With his wife gone and his means of making a living pulled out from under him, he was left with only his children.
A short time later, Terry woke up one night and wrote down on a piece of paper the words, “Children are forever.” He was not sure what it meant, but in the middle of his now-tumultuous life, it seemed to bear some truth. He did not know what he had in mind yet, but he knew he wanted to do something for children like his, those with only one parent to raise them.
After Sue’s death, Terry’s journey was of necessity a path of faith. He learned to be even more of a father, cooking and taking care of three very young children. He struggled with depression, financial hardships, and the loneliness of being a widower. But through their struggles, he and his family grew. They took comfort from the presence of God and the knowledge that He was taking care of them.
Ten years later, the children were all between 16 and 21 years old, and Terry believed they were old enough for him to share with them his desire to help children in the circumstances they had found themselves in at the death of their mother. He was still unsure of how to make a difference, but he believed that God would help him find an answer. Chris suggested that the family all run to California from Minnesota. Terry laughed, and with good reason. He was in his 50s, had run in only one or two 10Ks, and had always come in last. But the more he thought about running a long distance, the more intrigued he became. He remembered Terry Fox’s attempt to cross Canada on one leg. Fox’s feat had etched itself in Terry’s mind as he read the stories in the paper tracking the journey each night.
Terry Fox had lost his leg to cancer; although he never completed his valiant trek, dying shortly after leaving the Canadian highway, his desire to contribute to cancer research, especially for the sake of kids, was something that Terry Hitchcock never forgot. He knew that he wanted to make the world aware of the plight of children like his. So, why not run for it?
Creating a Goal
Terry decided that from Minneapolis/St. Paul to Atlanta was an impressive enough distance—about 2,000 miles. This translated to 75 marathons in 75 consecutive days; if he trained well enough, the trek might be feasible. He knew he could not do 26-mile stretches in record time. His goal was distance, not time.

Beyond the Distance

Teresa L. Wolff

The search for challenges not already exhausted takes a guy to the ends of the earth.
Stringing together world records and then looking for new and unthought-of challenges to add to the string has become the fabric of Brent Weigner’s running life. A member of the 50+D.C. Club, Weigner was in the process of achieving his goal of running a marathon in all 50 states to validate his 50+ membership when he heard that one of his buddies had just run a marathon on every continent on Earth. His challenge to himself: top that!
“I thought, I can run the marathons quicker than anyone else, or I can choose something else. That was when I hit on the idea of running an ultramarathon on every continent,” Brent said.
That was three years ago. During a 390-day period since then, Brent has achieved his goal of running an ultramarathon on each continent, becoming the first person in the world to do so. He was not satisfied with his performance, however, and returned to Canada in August 1999 to run the Cross-Calgary 57K—and in the process break his own record by running an ultramarathon on every continent in 267 days.

Special Book Bonus

Wobble to Death: Part IV
Peter Lovesey
A classic novel uncovered: Murder at a Six-Day Race: Part V. Parts I, II, III, and IV appeared
in the January/February, March/April, May/June, and July/August issues, respectively.

Introduction to Wobble to Death:

We are also proud to present a series of newly created illustrations for the installments of the novel drawn by
our favorite running artist, Andy Yelenak. He did the special cover painting for the
January/February 2000 issue to mark the novel’s debut in Marathon & Beyond. Enjoy!

I just got to have this magazine. How can I Subscribe?

Volume IV | Number 6 | November/December 2000

Departments

Editorial
“& Beyond”

In this issue we carry three profiles of people who, faced with daunting challenges in their lives, stepped forward to
confront and overcome their obstacles. In fact, during the midst of or the wake of their great personal trials, these three took
on an additional challenge of running a marathon as a cathartic quest to expand and celebrate their efforts to live life to the
fullest.

These three represent a special breed of human being that thrives on challenge; they turn their tribulations around and
become greater than they would have been had the challenge not been thrown in their way. While millions of people today
devolve by doing nothing to grow and advance themselves, these three are the epitome of the rugged individuals who move
the human species one big positive step ahead in the evolutionary process.

We have dubbed the special section “& Beyond” as part of the evolutionary process of this magazine.

When Marathon & Beyond was conceived, the title referred to the literal meaning: all things involving the marathon
and the ultramarathon. But as the magazine has grown, the “& Beyond” has taken on several other meanings. Certainly it
retains its original meaning, but it also refers to less tangible aspects of the sport and lifestyle of running marathons and ultras.
“& Beyond” refers to what happens beyond the planting of one foot in front of the other for 26.2 miles or more. It refers to
the psychology, spirituality, and deeper meaning that comes with covering an enormous number of miles under your own
power. It lends depth to the often trite use of the word “empowered.”
Catch the rest of Rich’s editorial in our November/December issue.

On the Road with Scott Douglas
Running for Fame 2000: The Rules

What’s that? You’re not yet famous in the running world? Don’t despair: you can still claim your allotted 15 minutes if
you learn to play by the rules. What will you become famous for? That doesn’t really matter. Runner, guru, training expert,
author . . . take your pick. (The ideal, of course, is to become famous for being famous, sort of the John F. Kennedy, Jr., of
running.) We’ll leave it to you to pick a niche and decide how you’ll occupy it.

What matters far more is that you learn how to conduct yourself so that, once famous, you stay that way. Think of your
pursuit as riding a bobsled. Inertia is a powerful foe, so initially, you’ll have to work quite hard. Once you attain some
momentum, however, the ride will take care of itself, in part because you’ll find friends on board to lean on. Things will go
astray only if you refuse to go with the flow and seek other than the well-greased rut.

Famous baseball figures have it easy. As Nuke LaLoosh learned in Bull Durham, he could handle pretty much any
matter with one of three statements:
* We gotta play ’em one day at a time.
* I’m just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ballclub.
* I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing, things will work out.

Running is a simpler activity than playing baseball, the flip side of which is that its rules for the renowned are
greater, subtler, and, in some cases, contradictory. It’s not expected that you’ll master all of the following prescriptions.
Indeed, for most people, attempting to do so is downright dangerous, calling as they do for mental acrobatics worthy of St.
Ignatius of Loyola, who convinced himself that the white he saw was black if the pope decreed it so. Reaching this state of
samadhi is best left for the biggest of cheeses, such as heads of national organizations. Initially, you should focus on internalizing
a few of the rules, then add others as your needs expand and your spine shrinks.

To be famous in running today, it helps to think and say the following:

Assume that bigger is always better. More, more, more. More ratings, more media coverage, more people in
more races all the time. The more popular something is, the more merit it has. Is this not self-evident? Is questioning this not
unAmerican?

For example, celebrate races that reach their several-thousand-runner limit months before the event as unambiguous
evidence of the health of the sport. When you’re asked how many of the entrants never made it to the start line because they
didn’t know what they were getting themselves into, brush the question aside by predicting that next year’s race will fill even
sooner, and ain’t that swell!

You’ll want to avoid mentioning golf when highlighting the unsullied worth of any and all media attention. Avoid pointing
out that, while Tiger Woods will soon replace Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore and the sport enjoys ever-increasing
TV coverage, its participation numbers are stagnant over the last decade. Remember that the sport to mention in all
how-running-can-turn-itself-around analogies is men’s professional basketball.
Continued in our November/December issue.

My Most Unforgettable Marathon (And What I Learned From It): 2000 Olympic Marathon Trials
by Joe LeMay

PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA, May 7, 2000—I’m going to tell you about my recent experience with the 2000
Olympic Marathon Trials in Pittsburgh. Quite frankly, it just might be my most forgettable marathon, given that I’ve been
working very hard these past few weeks to forget about it. It was an awful experience for me. So, in what follows, expect a
bitter, one-sided, egocentric rant on this subject—and, no, I don’t think I learned a lot, but I’ll try to take something away
from it.

To fully appreciate how important this race was, a little history on the subject of the Olympic Trials and my running career
is in order. For most distance runners, making the Olympic team is their raison d’etre. Make that team, and you can retire
happy. Miss out, and almost no one will have any way of knowing you were once an athlete. Saying you won a couple of 10K
and 15K races doesn’t mean anything to most people on the street—making the Olympic team is about the only thing that
validates your career.

This is especially true for Americans, since winning a major marathon like New York or Boston has become virtually out
of the question in the past 10 years thanks to the African juggernaut that produces an endless supply of 2:06 to 2:08
marathoners every year.

At least if you make the Olympic team, you’ve got something to be proud of that people understand and to which they
can relate. And if you’re an American, it’s in the realm of what is possible.

Finally, no American is likely to come home with any huge paydays any time in the near future, so you may as well run in
the Olympics—a race with no prize money—since it won’t hurt financially. So, yes, the Olympics are important, and
more than one athlete has said that the Olympic Trials is the toughest race you’ll ever come through.
You can read the details of Joe’s race in Pittsburgh in our November/December issue

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Dallas White Rock Marathon
Dallas has for 30 years hosted the White Rock Marathon, which is again evolving.

No, the whitecaps on White Rock Lake weren’t caused by the upheaval that had finally overtaken the long-running
marathon that uses the lake as its jewel in the crown. The cause of the whitecaps lay in the same natural force that causes
waves on the ocean: wind. Wind is no stranger to Dallas.

Anyone who doesn’t understand the term “wind chill” may have benefited from a graphic example of the phenomenon in
Dallas last year. While the course was running through lovely neighborhoods sheltered by low hills and trees, the temperature
was perfect for running a good, high-quality marathon. But at the exposed part of the course around White Rock Lake,
the temperature seemed to plummet while strong headwinds created an extended wall.

The conditions didn’t dampen the spirits of the 3,500 marathoners who had come to Dallas for the 30th annual running of
White Rock. Nor did the weather discourage the hard-core spectators who carried on the tradition of handing up a box of donuts
to the press truck at mile 4 and broken Snickers bars at mile 23. Perhaps one group disheartened by the elements was the
local chapter of the Hash House Harriers, the crew responsible for the annual mooning of the press truck at mile 22.
After great anticipation (escalated by members of the fourth estate who’d been covering the race for years) in which tales of
mass moonings proliferated, it was a bit anticlimactic when mile 22 brought only a hesitant presentation of one timid male butt.
Still, our disappointment was compensated by other Dallas White Rock Marathon traditions that did materialize—such as the
excellent organization and execution of the race.

If there was a shortcoming, perhaps it was the lack of a concerted effort to celebrate the fact that it was The Rock’s 30th
running. Yes, there were T-shirts and other souvenirs available, but the 30th itself was low key. I expected more because the
Dallas running community has bragging rights to hosting one of the country’s eldest—and best—marathons. Tim Loosbrock of
Minot, North Dakota, felt the 30th should have been noted at least by a series of storyboards at the expo displaying the
high points of the race in photos and stats.

The first running of White Rock featured 81 entrants and 62 finishers. Since then, it has been the spawning grounds for
several well-respected marathoners who rose from local to national status by winning in Dallas: Jeff Wells in 1976,
John Lodwich in 1977, and Kyle Heffner (who qualified for the ill-fated 1980 U.S. Olympic team) in 1979.
Continued in our November/December issue.
For a link to the race site, click on Partner Links from the M&B homepage

Letters
Lively responses to our most recent issues.

On the Mark
Experts answer readers’ training and competition questions. This month’s question:

IN MY READING on long-pace runs, I’ve seen several times that it’s best to keep a pace anywhere from 45 seconds
to 2 minutes slower than goal marathon pace. But, if I can run 20 miles at race pace, why shouldn’t I? Wouldn’t that just help
my time when I ran the marathon?.
Our experts answer this question in our September/October issue.

About the Authors
Among this issue’s authors are Ken McCann, Shannon Holley Nadalini, Wally Hild, Guy Avery,
Hal Higdon, and Gloria West.

Features

Special Section: Survivors
& Beyond
Some Runners Approach the Marathon With a Burden Bigger Than the Event. Here’s the introduction to our three-article
special section called “Survivors.”

The “& Beyond” in this magazine’s title has evolved over its four-year span. The literal meaning is “beyond the marathon distance”—that is, ultramarathons.
The philosophical meaning of “& Beyond” includes the experience and lifestyle of those who run the marathon and ultra
—that is, our magazine goes beyond merely running the miles.

The third interpretation, which we’ve applied to the trio of special stories that follow, involves special people who took
on the marathon when, by all logic (and especially by the modern skewed and spineless logic of “victimhood”), they could have
wallowed in their “disability” and not challenged themselves by taking on one of the great physical and mental endurance grails known to mankind: the 26.2-mile marathon.

There have always been inspiring people who approach marathon-training from a less than level playing field, like a ditch, a
basement, or a canyon. They had to claw their way up to the field before they could begin considering the marathon. Harry
Cordellos of San Francisco comes to mind. Harry was blind (and still is), but this didn’t stop him from becoming one of the
fiercest competitors in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s. He regularly competed at the grueling Dipsea
cross-country race over the shoulder of Mt. Tamalpias. He frequently ran marathons. Fortunately for him (and us), he ran in an
era when many runners were running quickly, or it would have been difficult for Harry to find running partners who could stay
with him to keep him on the course. Harry Cordellos, who ran a 2:57 at Boston, continues to run and motivate the rest of us.

Then there is the inspiration of Canada’s Terry Fox who, his leg amputated in the wake of cancer, attempted to run a
marathon a day to make his way across Canada in an effort to raise money for cancer research. He died before he could
complete his run. But in this case he crossed the finish line by lining up at the start.

Fortunately for our sport, a plethora of special people have stepped forward to face and conquer their physical problems
(which could have devastated them) and along the way inspire the rest of us. We invite you to meet three of them: Ken
McCann, Wally Hild, and Shannon Holley Nadalini.

RA on the Run
A Bout of Rheumatoid Arthritis Was a New Beginning, Not an End.
by Ken McCann

Eleven years ago, I enjoyed a very active life. I was a tournament racquetball player and an avid swimmer and skier.
I ran for fun and exercise, but I never entered races. I was living a “normal” life, fixing up a house, and starting to plan a family.
Then, I woke up one morning to find my joints swollen and stiff, a feeling I’d never had before. The pain was extremely severe
and persistent. Of course, I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me and was completely freaked out.

I immediately made an appointment with my family doctor. He took one look at me and sent me to the hospital, where I
stayed for a full week to be tested for several diseases. Doctors came up with two diagnoses: lyme disease and rheumatoid
arthritis (RA). Being a resident of Connecticut, I thought lyme disease seemed feasible. But arthritis? Isn’t that for old people?
At the time I was in my mid-30s.

Because of the lyme disease diagnosis, I was prescribed six months of intravenous antibiotic therapy. While the treatment
regimen was long and drawn out, I was comforted by the idea that I would be relieved of the pain and cured soon enough.
Unfortunately, my condition did not improve upon completion of the antibiotic therapy. At this time, my diagnosis was
narrowed down to RA, which initially I could not come to terms with. I finally settled into the idea that I had some type of
inflammatory arthritis. I took the drugs I was prescribed, feeling that I needed to do something for whatever I had.

Caught By Surprise

RA, a chronic and painful autoimmune disease that causes stiffness, swelling, and loss of function in joints and other body
organs, is one of the most common forms of arthritis. An RA patient has an immune system that functions abnormally, attacking
the body’s tissues and organs. This can lead to joint damage occurring throughout the body. RA is a disabling disease that often
occurs suddenly within weeks or months and may persist over a lifetime, ultimately causing permanent joint damage. Damage to the joints begins during the first two years of disease onset and can be irreversible.
The first rheumatologist I saw told me I needed to face the fact that 50 percent of people with RA are completely disabled
within 10 years. He told me I would have to take gold shots, which are injections that reduce the inflammation in joints but
do not relieve pain. As I was leaving his office, he handed me a book called Living With Arthritis. That was the last time
I went to him! I really wasn’t ready to accept that I might be disabled for the rest of my life.
Don’t miss the rest of Ken’s uplifting story.

Marathon Mom
For an Energetic Mother, There’s No Such Phrase As, “Nope, Can’t Do.”
by Shannon Holley Nadalini

Preparing for a marathon is an enormous challenge. Add to the training regimen a bit of
childbirth, a transatlantic move, some unexpected brain surgery, and training with a BabyJogger
on tiny Italian roads in order to run a race in a city (Venice) that has no streets, and the
challenge might at first appear insurmountable.

But with a little organization, a lot of discipline, and some good fortune, we did it.

On our oldest son’s second birthday, and two months after the birth of his baby brother in
Coronado, California, we moved to Italy, where my husband, Jimmy, started teaching English at
the Italian Naval Academy in Livorno, a Tuscan port city just south of Pisa.

Having already set our goals on running the Venice Marathon, a mere 10 months away, we
chose to live outside the city to give us access to more quiet streets on which to run.
Also, the double-seated BabyJogger required space, which we found to be a rare commodity in
an Italian city.

We found a house in Tirrenia, a very small Mediterranean beach town about five miles west
of Pisa. Two weeks after moving into our house, I started having severe headaches and found a
lump on the top of my head. My intuition led me to believe I was experiencing more than what
doctors in Italy were calling “culture shock.” After my pleading to be examined in depth,
I was diagnosed with a tumor on the dura lining of my brain.

The uncertain nature of the tumor and having to wait through the logistics of returning to
the United States for surgery were some of the hardest aspects to endure, but those were
not the full extent of the difficulties. Moving into an Italian house proved to be a feat
in itself. I was not yet fluent enough in Italian to communicate with the plumbers and
electricians who seemed to buzz in and out at will. Telling the plumber that we would rather
have a clothes washer plugged into our bathroom instead of the bidet was like an embarrassing
game of charades.

Due to a malfunction in our heater and the cold concrete walls and marble floors
dissipating what little heat the ancient radiators mustered, for the first week in our home,
with freezing, mid-January weather outside, we slept in our ski clothes all together in one
small rental bed. One day, with the electrician at our house and me in extreme physical pain, I
got the Italian dictionary out to help me tell him I was sick and going to bed. Instead, I
mistakenly told him if he needed me, I would be in my room constrained to the bed.

Between the communication barrier, the diapers, and around-the-clock feedings, I was
exhausted emotionally and physically. And as my headaches intensified, I couldn’t run as much
as I wanted to. It was not an easy time, and the likelihood of running the marathon of our
dreams was seeming less and less possible.

Home for Surgery

Six weeks after the diagnosis of the tumor, we flew to Dallas, where our families were
and where a neurosurgeon had agreed to remove the tumor. I was relieved when a biopsy revealed
the growth to be benign. I was so elated, in fact, that I didn’t care that half of my head
was shaved or that I had 40 staples in my scalp when I awoke in the recovery room.

Does Shannon realize her dream of running in the Venice Marathon? You can find out in our November/December
issue.

A Peach of A Life
After Getting Past Hodgkin’s, No Challenge Seemed Impossible
by Wally Hild

In February of 1994, a cancer specialist informed me I was dying of Hodgkin’s disease, a
lymphatic cancer. He explained the four stages of Hodgkin’s, and he said I’d nearly reached
the final stage. I was almost at death’s door. Many of my internal organs were being
compromised by the cancer, including my spleen and all my lymph nodes. My weight had dropped
from 160 to 140. I had two baseball-sized tumors in my chest, one behind each lung. It hurt to
take a breath. The cancer specialist told me that without aggressive treatment, I could expect
to live less than a year.

That didn’t seem like much of a life to me, so I embarked on eight months of harsh and very
aggressive chemotherapy that came in two doses per month. “Harsh and very aggressive”
translates to losing every hair on your body and throwing up a lot.

But it’s kind of funny—especially in retrospect—how different pieces of a life fit together
like two jigsaw puzzle pieces. It was during this same period that my wife Caroline and I went
into town to watch the 1994 Ironman Canada Triathlon. Ironman Canada is designed after the
original Hawaii Ironman but of course minus the exotic tropical island; Ironman Canada takes
place in Penticton, British Columbia, not far from the U.S. border. Pentiction is in the heart
of the Okanagan Valley, Canada’s version of California’s Napa Valley. We grow wine grapes,
peaches, apples, just about any kind of fruit you can imagine. It isn’t an island, and it
isn’t tropical, but we think of it, as do many visitors, as rather exotic. It’s a wonderful
place to live.

It was August when we went by to watch the Ironman competition, six months into my
chemotherapy. I had gone totally bald, not a hair left on any inch of my body. Because
sunshine is dangerous to chemo patients, and because Penticton gets up into the 80s, 90s,
and sometimes over 100 degrees in the summer, complete with a brilliant sun, staying covered
was in itself a formidable task.

In my tattered straw hat, long cotton sleeves, and loose-fitting jeans, I looked like
someone who gotten his seasons confused.
More Than a Spectator Sport

My attention very quickly moved from my sartorial splendor to the competition we were
watching. Like everyone around me, I was fascinated and inspired. I don’t know for sure today
whether what came out of me was a counter-reaction to what was going on in my body at the
time, or whether I was divinely inspired. But caught up in the moment, I turned to my wife and
choked out tearfully: “I’m going to do this someday—!” I so desperately wanted to live, and I felt
that wrapping a line around an anchor like Ironman might help.

At that point in my treatments, I had gained back 15 pounds through using the steroid
Prednozone. It should be noted that not all steroids function stereotypically. Prednozone
didn’t make me look like Arnold, all pumped up and ready to kick some butt; instead, I was
now sculpted (or perhaps scooped is a better word) more like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

I was unable to walk any longer than 10 minutes without stopping to rest. But by blurting
out those seemingly irrational words, I’d given myself authority to take my healing into my
own hands.

Through my faith, the support of family and friends, and through the encouragement of Dr.
Jack Chritchley, my oncologist, I survived the treatments, which can often be as devastating
as the cancer itself. I thought of Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation: “That which does not
kill me makes me stronger.”
You can read the rest of Wally’s remarkable story in our November/December issue.

Marathon Training: More From Less
Postscript: Questions for Coach Guy Avery
by Guy Avery

For the last five issues, Marathon & Beyond has presented Guy Avery’s tried and true
marathon training program. As with any such program, especially one so multi-faceted, questions
are raised. We have collected the most noteworthy questions regarding the training series and
asked Coach Avery to respond to them as a way of summing up the series and gathering up any
loose ends our readers have had. If you have additional questions regarding the program,
please feel free either to e-mail them to us or send them by regular mail and we’ll pass
them along to Coach Avery.

Here are the questions Coach Avery answers in our November/December issue about his marathon
training series that we published in the Jan/Feb through Sept./Oct 2000 issues of M&B:

1. A 22-week training program is longer than most I’ve seen. Why is your plan so long?

2. I don’t have 22 weeks left before the marathon, but I want to use your program.
Can I “cut in” part of the way, or do I have to wait until some future time when I have 22
weeks?

3. If I haven’t run a recent 10K or half-marathon, what should I do to determine my
realistic and achievable marathon goal time?

4. My 10K PR is 46 minutes, but I’ve run a 3:30 marathon. If I used your chart to
determine my achievable goal time in the marathon, based on my goal time and the Level 2
training plan, I would train to run 3:55—25 minutes slower than I’ve already run.
Why doesn’t your chart work for me?

5. I’m following your 5-day program. Is it okay to rearrange the days of key workouts,
or does the interval between certain types of workouts matter?

6. If I have to miss a key workout, what should I do?

7. If something makes me miss a week or two of your program, where should I pick up?

8. I like your plan for giving up one minute in the first three miles of the marathon
by running miles 1, 2 and 3 slower than my goal pace and then hitting goal pace at mile 4.
What should I do if I’m in a large, crowded marathon and get really behind my pace because
of traffic problems?

9. I have trouble running slow enough in my long runs and goal pace runs. What advice
do you have for me, and what are the risks of running the workouts faster than prescribed?

10. I usually incorporate light weight training into my fitness routine. Should I cut this
out during my 22-week marathon training program?

11. I am a slower runner who usually racewalks a marathon in about six hours. Your
program says that a training program should be no longer than four hours. Is that enough for
me?

12. The duration of the hill repeats in your program is shorter than in most other marathon
programs. Why?

13. For the hill workouts, how do I know if the hill I’ve chosen is steep enough?

14 Can you give me more detail on the “bounding” style running form I’m supposed to use in
my hill workouts?
Guy’s answers are in our November/December issue.

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Up and Running

What Goes On Behind the Scenes to Put On a Marathon Makes Training to Run One Look
Easy.
by Gloria West

Having served as a new marathon director not once, but twice, an uncommon distinction in
itself, I am in a unique position to assure every runner that the anatomy of a marathon is as
complex as the human body, with its intricate network of arteries, veins, and capillaries.

And most marathon directors would add that the event not only has this visceral complexity
of the human body, but it also contains the mystery of the soul. After 10 years of directing
marathons, the mystery is far more accessible, but no less intricate.

It is no simple task, and yet the beauty of this beast is so exquisite that the best way to
associate this endeavor is by remembering your experience of training to be a marathoner.

First comes the Initial Phase, when you say to yourself, “Hey, I’m gonna run a marathon.
No longer will I listen to those naysayers telling me I can’t do it! I’ll show them!”

Next comes the Operational or Training Phase, the long, hard process of preparing to show
yourself and the world that you have what it takes to run 26 miles without being chased. Then
comes the Final Production Phase, where you actually do it.

Now, multiply your level of effort and commitment to that first marathon 500 percent, and
you begin to understand what the race organizers go through. This is the level of intensity a
marathon director works at on a daily basis. So where’s the bumper sticker that asks, “Have
You Hugged Your Race Director Today?”

Perhaps it is time to describe the work that goes into putting on a marathon so that
each runner who runs one can have a brief glimpse behind the scenes at the often fraught,
underpaid, overworked marathon directors and their race committees.
You’ll love Gloria’s behind-the-scenes examination of how a marathon comings in to being.
Don’t miss it.

Under a Midnight Sun

The Klondike Road Relay Offers a Realization of Youthful Dreams
by Hal Higdon

Climbing out of Juneau Airport, our single-engine plane slid into a cloud bank barely a
few hundred feet above the runway. Squeezed between hills on either side of us, I hoped our
pilot knew his job. I glanced nervously at my wife, Rose. But as we turned up the canal toward
Skagway, the clouds parted, and we found ourselves flying in clear sky above blue water rimmed
with snow-capped mountains.

I had come to Alaska to run the 17th annual Klondike Road Relay, a 110-mile running race
that follows one of the routes taken by miners during the Gold Rush of 1896. The event begins
in downtown Skagway on a Friday evening in mid-September and continues through the night
across the White Pass, finishing Saturday morning beside the Yukon River in Whitehorse,
Canada. Each relay team has 10 members who run various distances from about 6 to 16 miles.
I was scheduled to run a 12-mile stage.

The Relay’s connection to history intrigued me. In 1896, gold was discovered in The Yukon,
a Canadian province. Within the next several years, 100,000 prospective gold miners would rush
through Alaska into Canada, seeking their fortunes. Most of these Gold Rushers came to Skagway
by ship, then made their way across the mountains by foot before building rafts to float down
the Yukon River to the Klondike gold fields.

Success did not come easily. The Royal Canadian Mounties refused to let the Gold Rushers
enter Canada unless they had a year’s worth of supplies. Only a few returned wealthy.
Nevertheless, the Gold Rush Days offered an exciting era memorialized in novels by Jack London
and poetry by Robert W. Service.
Secret Tales

Ah, Robert W. Service. It was he who symbolized Alaska for me. As a youth, I was sometimes
required to memorize poetry. In our school, the girls, sweet things, chose Yeats, Milton, or
Frost. I chose Service, who had penned “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” As we landed in Skagway,
several lines from that glorious poem buzzed in my ears:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic Trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold.

Certainly, there weren’t many things stranger than 148 teams (1,434 individuals) rushing
across a mountain pass, mostly in the darkness, bound not for gold, but for glory—and not much
of that!

Despite my youthful memories, Alaska had thus far eluded me during my world travels. I had
visited all 50 states except Alaska and North Dakota. When an opportunity arose to join a team
in the Klondike Road Relay, I said yes immediately.
Continued in our November/December 2000 issue.

Uphill Struggles
The Effects of Battling Gravity on Marathon Performances
by Dan Horvath and Brian Peacock

“What was your time?”
“Five-twenty-twenty-one. What was yours?”
“Two-oh-five flat.”

Translated into talk runners recognize, that brief conversation looks something like this:

“What was your time?”
“5:20:21. What was yours?”
“2:05:00.”

Whether the initial query reflected an altruistic interest in someone else’s performance or
was simply a way of introducing the subject of a new world record, the question can stimulate
some interesting discussion and generate a great deal of information about runners and running.

Physics tells us that time is related to distance. So perhaps the 2:05 was for 10 miles and
the 5:20:21 was for 50K—or perhaps both times were for the marathon distance. If the latter,
there must be some explanation for the differing times.

For a start, physics tells us that running uphill (against gravity) is more difficult and
more work than running downhill (with gravity), and physiology tells us that people differ
(more on this obvious observation later).

Some runners seek out only the flat, fast courses, while others go mainly for the
challenging, hilly types. Most of us fall somewhere in between. We occasionally go for that
flat, fast marathons, where it may be possible to run each and every mile within a variance of
no more than a few seconds or at least notch no nine-minute miles on our record when we’ve
planned for eights. We may seek out a downhill course (Las Vegas, St. George) in order to
qualify for Boston. And then sometimes we accept the challenge of a hilly race to provide a
conversation topic. Many ultrarunners fall into the latter category, where it becomes a badge
of honor to talk about how killer a course was. But then, we all know that there’s something
essentially wrong with ultrarunners, don’t we?
Continued in our November/December issue.

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The 10 Percent Solution

How to Become an Long-Distance Runner by Following the “Rule of 10.”

by Michael Selman

Rules are made to be broken. In fact, some rules beg to be broken. One such rule came to
mind this morning, while I was halfway through my run, trying to figure out how far I was
going to go today. But what I learned, with the help of a calculator, is that, in fact, no
rules must be broken on the road to ultrarunning. It merely takes a little time, a little
patience. Let me explain.

Any runner who knows anything about running knows the 10 percent rule. Let’s make that The
10 Percent Rule so it looks as important as it contends to be. The Rule: Don’t increase your
mileage by more than 10 percent per week, as doing so can lead to injury. Also, don’t increase
your long run by more than 10 percent per week. If you do, you can end up on the sidelines.
Finally, don’t you dare do more than 10 percent of your total miles as speedwork, or you’ll
certainly break down.

Now, I’m pretty good with math, but these formulas leave me scratching my head and asking
lots of questions. And on this particular morning’s run, the following train of thought
chugged through my mind as I tried to determine how far I could run without breaking any
rules. Last week, my long run was 10 miles, and my weekly total was about 28. The week before
my long run was 13.1 miles, as I ran in a local half-marathon. This week, before today, I had
run a total of 10 miles, and I knew I still had tomorrow (Sunday) to go. (My training week
runs Monday through Sunday.)

So, early in my run, I hit my first dilemma. Since I ran only a 10-mile-long run last week,
does that mean my maximum run this week could be only 11 miles? That looks like this:
(10 + 10% [1] = 11). Or am I allowed to carry over the 13.1-mile run I ran two weeks ago,
thus permitting me to run 14.31 miles, which looks like this: (13.1 + 10% [1.31] = 14.31).
The next moment of wonder came a few minutes later. If I chose to run 11 miles today, taking
the 10 percent rule to the letter of the law, that would bring me up to 21 for the week.
Since last week’s total was 28, that meant the most I could run this week was 30.8 miles;
the formula looks like this: (28 + 10% [2.8] = 30.8). That means I would be left with only
9.8 miles for the next two days. If I opted for running 14.31 today, exploiting the
Runner’s Artistic License loophole, I could run only 6.49 miles the next two days in order
to avoid increasing my weekly mileage by more than 10 percent. That would be an average of
only 3.245 miles a day for the next two days. What’s a runner to do?
You’ll love this humorous look at “the Rule of 10.”

The Untimely Disappearance of Madame Anderson

She Came, She Conquered, and Then She Vanished! Who Was She? What Happened?

by Vegas Quixote
This is the historically accurate story of the great 19th-century pedestrienne, Madame Ada
Anderson. Her feats of endurance forever changed people’s minds about the capabilities of women.

Post-Marathon Syndrome

The Worst Part of a Marathon Often Waits Until Monday to Bring You Down
by William Simpson

Nobody ever warned me that the toughest part of a marathon is the Monday morning afterward.
That’s a lesson I’ve had to learn through experience.

It’s now Monday morning, and I’m feeling low. After months of training and anticipation,
God’s Country Marathon is over. That I ran poorly might contribute to my mood, but I’ve had
the same feeling after good races. For months, the training and the anticipation were big
parts of my life. Suddenly they’re gone, and now I have a hole where last week I had a goal.

My condition is a malady known in the medical world as PMS. That’s Post-Marathon Syndrome,
and dealing with it can be much more difficult than actually running the race. I attribute
PMS to factors both emotional and physical. Factor #1 is emotional and involves the loss of a
goal. After working and focusing for months, I find my mind drifting aimlessly. I’ll be back
running tomorrow, but I’ll have to establish another goal.

Actually, I already have another goal somewhere deep within my mind. It’s my next marathon,
and I’m already plotting a better training strategy, but I can’t really begin to deal with it
until I can begin to run reasonably again. And that brings me to Factor #2, which is purely
physical. My legs hurt, though not too badly, so I’m giving them several days of rest from
running. My body is tired, and I’m crashing. When a runner’s high wears off, it can leave a
runner’s low in its wake, especially after a big race.

That’s what I’m suffering right now. I want to run, but I know that my body needs the
rest. It’s a tough battle between my physical and emotional needs. I don’t think I’ll run
today, but if my depression gets worse, I may have to go out for a mile or two, just to get
the endorphins flowing.
Learn if you suffer from Post Marathon Syndrome!

Special Book Bonus

Wobble to Death: Part VI
Peter Lovesey
A classic novel uncovered: Murder at a Six-Day Race: Part V. Parts I, II, III, and IV appeared
in the January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, and September/October issues, respectively.

Introduction to Wobble to Death:

We are also proud to present a series of newly created illustrations for the installments of the novel drawn by
our favorite running artist, Andy Yelenak. He did the special cover painting for the
January/February 2000 issue to mark the novel’s debut in Marathon & Beyond. Enjoy!

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Marathon and Beyond

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2000 Issues

Volume 4 | Number 1 | January/February 2000

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Volume IV | Number 2 | March/April 2000

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Volume IV | Number 6 | November/December 2000

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