Archive For The “Running Free” Category
“Your toughness is made up of equal parts, persistence and experience. You don’t so much outrun your opponents as outlast and outsmart them and the toughest opponent of all is the one inside your head.” When I asked Joe Henderson to be in the first handful of Original Gangsters Of Running, he said, “Happy and…
What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, ‘What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and…
An onion can make people cry, but there has never been a vegetable invented to make them laugh. – Will Rogers What would you get if you crossed Zonker Harris with a Rubik’s Cube? Benji Durden. Multiple sweatsuits in the humid Southern summer. Always thinking. Running the race of his life to make the Olympic…
We was young and we was dumb, but we had heart. – Tupac Shakur Been asked by interviewers why exactly I wrote When Running Was Young And So Were We. Okay, one interviewer. This is what I told him. Somehow, sometime, I must’ve thought, you know, there was a time when Americans were great, when Americans were…
The essence of running cannot be measured by a stopwatch, just as one’s life cannot be measured by a calendar. The people who judge their running by their victories over others, or by the size of trophy collections are the same people who define their lives by the size of their incomes or the make and…
I remember two things about this. They forgot to pick me up at the airport, and standing on a city roof watching skyrockets explode brightly in the night. Three things. I remember I was there. Don’t remember the rain. On The Road column, Track & Field News, November 1986. – JDW Flint, Michigan, August…
Question. Who won the first professional road race? Answers below. 1981 Cascade Run Off: Dashing For Dollars On The Road column. Track & Field News, August 1981. Original title: A REAL Pro Race! Intro: In a move that could well shake track to its foundations, to say nothing of revamping the road circuit, professional racing…
Wasn’t allowed to run when I was in Federal Witness Protection. Wasn’t allowed to have contact with any runners, nobody in the running community. Come back maybe a decade later and all I could think was, what the hell? Felt like the Rip Van Winkle of Running. Seven-hour marathoners, hundred dollar entry fees. One national…
Original title: Virgin Hot At Peachtree. And apparently so was everybody else. Track & Field News August 1980. – JDW Atlanta, July 4 – No one, at least none of the other twenty-five thousand (25,000) other runners present, could keep Craig Virgin from his appointed rounds at the Peachtree Road Race. Ignoring the eighty(80) degree…
My column for Track & Field News ran about a dozen years. “On The Road” began with this note in August 1980. Never has the ever-increasing importance of the road circuit been more pointedly illustrated than at the “Olympic Trials,” when 10,000 winner Craig Virgin skipped the 5000, with its June 29 final in order…