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1. Support the athlete, encourage the team, help the coach. That’s what good track parents do.
2. Cheer for your teammates, regardless of whether they’re fast or slow, veteran or neophyte, varsity or JV. Or rally the spirits of someone who’s had a bad performance. Also, encourage stragglers during tough workouts; jog back to ‘pick up’ a runner who’s behind during a long run.
3. Train at the same pace day after day, week after week, year after year, and that’s the kind of running the body adapts to. But break out of that comfort zone with a little speedwork now and then, and the body will learn to deal with the new demands.
4. Beginning runners come in all shapes, sizes and pre-existing conditions, so there’s no magic formula for determining exactly how much basic running is needed before you start speedwork. Most experts, though, recommend three or four months of preparation.
5. When I went to the starting line of the 1976 Olympic marathon in Montreal, it was with the unsettling conviction that some of my competitors were cheaters.
6. I know runners who have suffered a tick bite and ended up with Lyme disease. I’ll take an angry moose any day.
7. In those long, lonely miles you put in during the off-season, and in those knife-in-the-gut track repetitions and hill repeats that buckle your knees — at that moment in almost every race when you ask yourself how much you’re willing to hurt to catch one more runner — you can draw strength and inspiration from your running mates.
8. An overzealous parent is just one example of the kind of Problem Mom or Dad who pops up at track meets, threatening to put a damper on the day.
9. New nemeses keep racing fresh, but I also find challenge in going longer, with only the distance as foe. I run my first 50-mile race, journey across the Grand Canyon and back, circumnavigate Mount St. Helens.
10. For most teenage runners, the right foods means a varied diet, decreasing the amount of fat found in the typical American diet and replacing those calories with carbohydrates. Avoid saturated fats, such as those found in fried foods, and eat plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.
11. There’s always somebody doing something more extreme than you are. It used to be that if you ran the marathon, that was the end of it.
12. When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.
13. A good teammate is someone willing to get outside of personal thoughts and emotions, a friend who tries to understand, appreciate, and encourage other members of the team.
14. The toughest trail I ever ran was the Escarpment in the Catskills of New York State. This was an 18-mile race through Rip Van Winkle country, routed through boulder fields, across angular juttings of granite and along a path with an unrelenting barrage of roots, rocks and mud, all of it hidden under slick leaves and dangling nettles.
15. My introduction to dissociation had been at Kenneth Cooper’s clinic in January of 1975. Cooper had assembled a gaggle of top American distance runners and a half dozen top researchers, the intent being to figure out what the difference was — physiologically, biomechanically, psychologically — between elite and subelite runners.
16. Cold is not without its risks to runners, of course, especially ones who don’t head south when winter visits their neighborhood. Even pooh-pooh-ers of frozen lungs and lovers of dark jogs over permafrost have been known to be careful about certain hazards.
17. When an athlete has relegated the persistent rumors of cheating to the back room of the mind, he hasn’t really forgotten them. And when he glances back to where rumors hunker in the darkness, he hopes with a savage heart that somehow, some day, those cheaters will be brought to justice.
18. When I started running, a gadget was a wristwatch with a secondhand on it.
19. Even for runners who never make the transition to more sophisticated workouts, easing into speedwork will lead to more enjoyable running.
20. Prior to the 1976 Olympics, I was a 5,000m runner.