Introduction: RUNNING WISDOM

 

In Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll puts these words in Alice’s mouth: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

            Carroll’s classic sequel to Alice in Wonderland was published in 1871, a full century before Jim Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running sold a million copies in hardback and helped launch the running boom. But Carroll was hardly the first writer to tie a phrase to running. “Now bid me run,” wrote William Shakespeare, “and I will strive with things impossible.” The bard of Avon gave that line to Julius Caeser, though no evidence exists that Caeser ever ran a marathon. Come to think of it, the tale of Pheidippides running from the plains of Marathon into Athens, the legend we base our sport upon, owes more to fiction than to fact.

            You will encounter the words of Carroll and Shakespeare in this seminal volume of Running Wisdom, compiled from many sources, but you also can enjoy the words of Burfoot, Henderson, Sheehan and Fixx. And a few quotes from Higdon too. As running has matured from boom to a defining movement that has shaped lives, new writers have emerged to stand on the slender shoulders of Amby, Joe, George, Jim and I. Kenny Moore, Tom Derderian and Roger Robinson for example. Olympic champions Emil Zatopek, Frank Shorter and Joan Benoit Samuelson have proved quotable. Their chosen words help enrich the pages of this book of running wisdom.

            Lewis Carroll and William Shakespeare to the contrary, it seems that the recording of running bon mots began to thrive in the 1960s, a decade both dark with despair and bright with hope, an era when the Boston Marathon attracted only a few hundred starters, most of them capable of breaking 3 hours. I cashed my first paychecks as a magazine editor, then morphed into a freelance writer, embracing the freeness of that discipline partly because it gave me time to run in daylight. During my early career, I wrote about anything other than long distance running, because who wanted to read about that sport back in 1959?

That was the year I ran my first Boston. We were a scurvy lot, the 150 of us who showed up in Hopkinton, our deeds largely unheralded. And certainly there was little advice offered to those who wanted to conquer the marathon.

That soon would change. In 1966, a high school runner from Kansas named Bob Anderson started what was little more than a newsletter, called Distance Running News. It grew in circulation, so three years later Anderson dropped out of college and moved to California, hiring a young staffer from Track & Field News named Joe Henderson as editor. They changed the publication’s name to Runner’s World in time for the January 1970 issue, the first issue of the decade when running finally captured the interest of a public that previously assumed running to be a sport confined to the young and restless.

            Many who would shape the world of running as we view it today came together about that time. Hopkinton Green, starting point for the Boston Marathon, offered the common meeting ground. Dr. Kenneth Cooper, author of Aerobics, ran there in the early 1960s. So did Erich Segal, author of Love Story. Henderson first ran Boston in 1967. In 1968, Amby Burfoot, who one day would become editor of Runner’s World, won the Boston Marathon. That same year and at the Olympic Games in Mexico City, I introduced Joe Henderson to a doctor friend and Boston fellow traveler: George Sheehan. Recruited by Joe, George would go on to become Runner’s World’s most popular columnist as well as a best-selling author. In 1971, I wrote a book titled On The Run From Dogs and People, its title borrowed from an article previously published by Sports Illustrated. Somewhat of a cult classic, that book remains in print today and provides at least one quote for this book.

            All those named above contributed to the growth of a sport that eventually would be accepted by the masses, both those running marathons and watching them. Frank Shorter won the Olympic Marathon in 1972 and after that came Jim Fixx and in the three decades following a host of running writers quoted in the pages following. They provide us with words of running wisdom.

            Use these words as your inspiration and you will be able, as suggested by William Shakespeare, to strive with things impossible. You might even run fast enough to please Lewis Carroll.

 

--Hal Higdon

Contributing Editor:

Runner’s World