During my stay in the Raleigh Hills house with Maura, then Charlie, then Mark the Couch, then Frisco the Pig, I decided to take up running, in part to compensate for all of my unhealthy lifestyle choices which I have chronicled earlier, but also because I like getting outdoors, breathing fresh air, and being honked at by angry motorists. So one fine day I donned my snazzy new sweatsuit and Onitsuka Tiger running shoes and embarked on an early morning maiden voyage following a carefully plotted two-mile course around the neighborhood. Mindful of the fact I shouldn’t eat or drink too much before vigorous exercise I fueled up with a blueberry muffin, a banana, and a large glass of grapefruit juice.
Suffice it to say my first effort did not go well. After starting out strong at a brisk pace which likely lasted no more than 100 yards, whatever it was I did that day could not be characterized as running. Not even jogging really.
It was a lot of walking interrupted by brief spasms of sprinting, and when I made it to the finish line after one final spasm, I dropped on all fours and threw up in full view of morning traffic on busy Walker Road. I don’t recall for sure but I’m reasonably certain my second attempt to become a runner came only after a couple of weeks spent nursing very sore muscles and a badly bruised ego.
Eventually I was able to make a habit of these morning runs and to my surprise started to enjoy the feeling, especially afterwards when the endorphin high from aerobic exercise kicked in. And you all know by now how much I enjoyed getting high.
I gradually outgrew the two-mile course and began mapping out longer and more challenging routes, and I became convinced that I alone had discovered the secret to health and happiness because I can’t remember ever seeing another runner. That must have been because I lived in a sleepy suburb of Portland where people were slow to catch on to trends, or just slow, but by 1978 running on roads had become all the rage and belief in my exceptionalism was shattered.
Jim Fixx authored and published his epochal best-seller The Complete Book of Running in 1977, and a year later running, or more accurately jogging for most, had become a bona fide craze. Prior to this time, roadrunners had only been seen fleeing from wily coyotes in cartoons, and anyone seen running on a road was assumed to be looney tunes.
Now jogging was not only socially acceptable and considered normal it was almost de rigueur to achieve and maintain status in many social circles, and it seemed everyone was doing it. Athletic apparel, which had heretofore consisted mostly of baggy sweatpants and a hoodie, exploded in popularity and started showing up at functions worn by people who may or may not have exercised in them. This was great news for Phil Knight and Nike, which had been the failing Blue Ribbon Sports until 1971, as they caught the wave and swooshed to billionaire status.
Nike also pioneered and popularized bespoke shoes which had no other purpose except for road running unless you were willing to take a fashion risk doomed to fail. Their famous ‘waffle trainer’ came out in 1976 and was an instant hit, not only because it sounded delicious, but it offered unique cushioning from the repetitive pounding feet take on asphalt and concrete.
Until Nike co-founder and mad scientist Bill Bowerman created this inspired product using – you guessed it – a waffle iron, running shoes were designed to be used on a cinder or synthetic tracks and had virtually no cushioning at all. Now there was nothing to stop the craze from becoming crazier.
Loyal readers will remember from my days as a cross-country runner in high school I was not genetically predisposed to running. You can revisit The Hairless Harrier episode if you’d like but I think my record speaks for itself.
Being blessed with a cardio-vascular system designed more for watching television than vigorous physical activity, I can tell you that for me the gauzy dream of ‘getting in shape’ crashed hard into the reality of ‘getting kicked in the ass'.
By this time, I had finally advanced through puberty to adulthood, physically at any rate, so theoretically my body was much better equipped to run or jog or play ball games, but for a tyro like me achieving the mythical ‘shape’ people spoke of and being able to hold my own with all the garishly-garbed gazelles out on the roads running like the wind, was neither easy nor fun.
My rude introduction to what officially qualifies as running, as opposed to jogging, came in the form of an ill-advised bet I made while drinking with friends. Admittedly that was not the first time such a thing happened, nor would it be the last.
One of my gang, who also happened to be a recent adoptee of the craze, stated that running a mile in under six minutes was pretty damn challenging. The world record for the mile at that time was just under four minutes and I figured taking two whole minutes more to get it done would be a breeze, so I breezily replied that I could probably run ten of them in succession. To which he gleefully replied, “put your money where your mouth is". The bet was that the next round of burgers and beers was on the loser and of course I accepted. A date was set for me to perform what I assumed would be the tiring and tedious but straightforward task of completing a ten-mile run in under one hour, with my friends present as official observers and timekeepers.
Prior to my date with destiny, however, I had a date with humility. I went to the track in Portland’s Duniway Park and with little or no warmup ran a mile as fast as I could to see how much under six minutes I clocked so I could plan my race pace accordingly. I can’t recall the exact time, but I know for a fact it was quite a bit more than six minutes. And I was holding my shorts and gasping for breath. I did the math and when I got home immediately called my friend to inform him that the allotted day and time for my run would be better used if I were to buy the gang burgers and beers.
Thus, I resigned myself to a lifetime of running mediocrity. Abandoning the foolish notion I could compete at an elite level, I nevertheless developed a lot of stamina and discovered that if I maintained a more modest pace, say seven to eight minutes per mile, I could run longer distances without dying.
I further discovered that this exercise was not only relatively pain free but even enjoyable and almost a Zen experience. So much so that running became a daily ritual that bordered on obsession. As I mentioned before, running hard or long distances causes your brain to produce a lot of endorphins which not only reduce the pain of aerobic exercise but also relieve stress and improve one’s mood. My ultimate discovery was that if I smoked a doobie prior to a long run, I could go on forever.
It became regular practice for me to run a 12-mile loop around Sauvie Island, tackle the steep climbs up Germantown or Newberry Road to Skyline Boulevard and back down again, or follow the winding and hilly Wildwood Trail in Portland’s immense Forest Park for as long as I had time that day. When on vacation, I plotted long courses in unfamiliar neighborhoods and frequently got lost.
What had started as a lark less than two years prior had become a form of meditation and an integral and important part of my life, and I saw no reason it couldn’t or wouldn’t continue to be such. Frankly what made it so special was that it was a solitary thing for me and rarely did anyone join me for one of these daunting ordeals, and those who did rarely joined me again. But then I entered a local road race which had become quite popular and paradise was lost.
The inaugural 1978 Cascade Run-Off was an instant success and drew hundreds of Portlanders and visitors to the starting line. The 15 kilometer course – that’s 9.3 miles to the metrically challenged – started on downtown Portland’s Front Avenue – now Naito Parkway – wound briefly through Old Town and Chinatown, climbed gently through the Park Blocks to Portland State University, then rode the challenging roller coaster of Terwilliger Boulevard, before descending down to Barber Boulevard and finally back down to Front Avenue and the finish line in front of Portland Fire & Rescue Station #1. The elite runners ran times under 50 minutes, but for the ordinary athlete, anything under an hour was an exceptionally good time which put you in the top 5% of runners completing the course.
I don’t recall the finish time for my first Run-Off, but it was in the neighborhood of 65 minutes, of which I was quite proud. Although it should be noted the result meant that I ran slightly fewer than 10 miles at a clip of slightly less than seven minutes a mile and probably should’ve bought my friends another round of burgers and beer.
The following year, the field swelled to three thousand, and I entered the race in the best shape of my life. This had to do with the fact that it was the summer Lucy decided we were getting too close too fast and abruptly left for college in Colorado. For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, there is a direct inverse correlation between pain in one’s love life and gain in fitness and appearance. With nothing better to do with my spare time and fueled by sexual abstinence, I was able to follow a rigorous training regimen that included lots of long distance running but also some speed work called ‘interval’ training. This involves periods of anaerobic sprinting – also known as being in ‘oxygen debt’ which feels as bad as it sounds – in the midst of ambitious aerobic running, with the end result that I got noticeably faster and discovered my endurance and pain threshold had moved on up.
I do remember my exact time in the Run-Off that year. When I crossed the finish line and looked at the clock it read 0:58:48. Thrusting my arms in the air and letting out a victory whoop only served to make me look like an idiot because in reality I was finishing in something like 375th place and you don’t get prize money or a medal for that. But I was ecstatic with the accomplishment of breaking the magical hour barrier and ignored the snickering. So ecstatic in fact that I hung around Waterfront Park for about an hour exchanging pleasantries with other runners, many of whom I didn’t know, using novel ways to casually mention my time.
I ran three more Cascade Run-Offs after that and although I came close on two occasions, never did get under an hour again. This had a lot to do with the fact that Lucy came back and I no longer had the appetite for pain I had in the summer of ’79. But the period between 1978 and 1984 certainly qualifies as my heyday, if you can call it that, as a runner. Along with the Run-Off, I also competed in many local 10K races, of which there were scores to choose from, the massively popular 5K Starlight Parade Run, and a couple of much longer races that were the Portland Marathon.
In 1980 I ran my first marathon, and it should’ve been my last. The fact is that for the average runner completing a marathon is a Pyrrhic victory with a steep price to pay in the days and weeks to come.
The race that year was run through the industrial district of North Portland and the course made a long loop devoid of pleasant scenery, which was bad enough the first time around but had to be repeated in order to measure 26.2-miles and meet the requirement to call it a marathon. On top of that, we ran the entire race in a driving rainstorm with temperatures in the low 40s and that meant the bedraggled field finished the race with not only aching bodies but hypothermia to boot.
Having set a low bar to finish the race without soiling myself, I was thrilled to jump over it, and my time of three hours and 24 minutes seemed more than satisfactory. It fell short of the sub-three-hour time I would need to qualify for the prestigious Boston Marathon, which I secretly harbored dreams of doing, but I assured myself that with more rigorous distance training and a little speed work, it was well within my reach. This was of course nonsense, but the defining thing about being caught up in a craze is that it makes you crazy.
In the year 1981, two things about the Cascade Run-Off changed that would have great significance in the world of running, and in mine. That was the year in which Nike, in defiance of the long history and tradition of not paying elite ‘amateur’ athletes a red cent for their track and field endeavors, put up a significant prize money purse for the race and a large contingent of past, present, and future Olympians gathered in Portland to test their mettle and hopefully cash a big check. It is also the year that the burgeoning popularity of the race forced the organizers to limit entries to 5,000 runners and implement a lottery system to equitably give everyone hoping for a race bib the chance to get one. Naturally, I did not.
That unfortunate turn of events caused me much emotional pain and consequently physical suffering I could not and did not anticipate. I was in great shape despite my love life being stable, so to compensate for this injustice I decided to plunge headlong into an even more aggressive training campaign and target the Portland Marathon instead where I fully believed I would smash the three-hour barrier and then make my way to Boston for the big one. Again, I will remind you I was crazy. What actually happened remains both embarrassing and hilarious to this day.
I should mention that my training was perfectly suited to get me ready to race. For exactly 9.3 miles. I came off the line hot in the marathon and was surprised and pleased to pass the 10K mark in just over 38 minutes – a 6:10 per mile pace – and was shocked and ecstatic to hit the 15K mark at almost the identical time of my 1979 triumph – 58:50 – and that was exactly the moment I realized I was fucked.
My legs were rubbery, my lungs seared, and there was no possible way I was going to complete another 16-plus miles even at a jog, let alone the pace I’d set for myself. Which is why at the half-marathon mark – it should be noted that I made it there in under an hour and a half which was a Boston qualifying pace – where there was a large aid station and medical tent, I faked tripping on a storm drain and took a stunt fall, received some excellent first aid and TLC that I didn’t need, ate as many cookies and drank as much juice as I could without drawing undue attention, and accepted a ride back to the start/finish line with one of the volunteers. To my credit, I did not pull a Rosie Ruiz and pretend to finish the marathon first.
Taking the top prize for irony that year, Jim Fixx died in 1984 while jogging, and to a large extent the craze died with him. Although it was dying anyway because running is just too hard.
I ran a few other races but abandoned the fantasy that I was a competitive runner and settled into a happier place where I was able to get daily exercise and meditate in my own way without feeling like I was going to throw up, as I did on that fateful morning in Raleigh Hills.
As life wore on, running became jogging and even evolved into a social activity at times. I did run one more Cascade Run Off in 1987, and for no good reason another Portland Marathon in 1990, both of which evoked strong feelings of nostalgia and nausea, but after that there would be a decade of steady decline in speed and distance until I was forced to stop and have my hips replaced.
But that’s another story.