Warning: This is a review of a running book by a friend of the author. The New York Review of books would (almost) never allow it. Is he plugging a pal? Or nursing a grudge? In the interests of transparency, it’s a little of both. So take this review with a grain of salt. I say my friend wrote a very good running book. No kidding. And I forgive him for making unmerciful fun of me in its pages. And if you want to know where I’m coming from in regard to running books, check out the sidebar on classics of the genre following this review.
Roy Wallack’s new book Run for Life is a sequel of sorts, organized in similar fashion, to the successful Bike for Life co-written with Triathlete founder and original Inside Triathlon editor Bill Katovsky. While Run For Life falls short of the all time great running books like Tim Noakes’ classic The Lore of Running, and Kenny Moore’s classic magazine profiles, it has a uniquely novel approach to a subject that all of us eventually -- or will soon -- care about: Staying fit as you age.
As you might guess from the subtitle promising a roadmap to a century on your running odometer, these methods are aimed at achieving Ponce de Leon- magnitude running longevity. They offer ways to stave off the otherwise Inevitable Grim Slide back to terminal couch potatodom. Along the way, it’s good, it’s entertaining, and it contains a wide range of innovative approaches, plus basic and advanced training strategies for long term running health and satisfaction. To synthesize this blizzard of information in Wallack’s own punchy style, it’s about how to “run soft, run strong, run balanced, run fast, run less and run repaired.”
It has how-to training guidelines, photo sequences of effective exercises, it’s chock full of sidebars of the type that fill the pages of magazines like Outside and Men’s Health and the Fitness sections of daily newspapers like the Los Angeles Times – all of which have them graced by Wallack’s work the past 15 years.
The book also explains the origins of and the philosophy behind alternative training methods like Nicolai Romanov’s Pose Method, soft impact form, barefoot running, pool running, Kenneth Cooper’s later-in-life switch from long slow over distance training to a less is more philosophy, the importance of vertical arm swinging, and reliance on natural, HgH-producing high intensity intervals as we age.
But what makes this book ultimately worthwhile, and not just a fascinating opinionated blog, is that this is submits these ideas to rigorous proof and expert testimony. Along the way, he examines several seemingly wacky training tools and in each case provides examples of big-time people who have succeeded with them. Wallack cites the AQx water resistance shoes which have been used by great success by women’s world record-setting half marathoner Lornah Kiplagat. He makes a case for barefoot running, backed by venerable former Stanford and U.S. Olympic coach Brooks Johnson. Wallack also got a near-miracle cure of his long-term hip injury that threatened to end his running career by using the e3 Grips (not related to Mark Allen’s eGrip online coaching), endorsed by 1994 and 1995 US 100k champion Rich Hanna.
But what makes it more cred is that he includes relevant counterpoints to many of the same unorthodox methods. In one sidebar, top Kenyans scoff and laugh at the concept of soft running.
Particularly interesting to aging baby boomers is Wallack’s sections on the latest technologies in chrome hip resurfacing technology used on triathlon familiars two-time Ironman winner Scott Tinley, adventure racer-triathlete Robyn Benincasa, and Ultraman and ultramarathon veteran Cory Foulk. Wallack’s lively recounting of such a hip surgery makes for gripping reading and may motivate readers swear off bad biomechanical habits and overtraining obsessions forever.
While the subtitle title may seem as if this book was aimed solely at the AARP crowd, it’s relevant to all runners, beginners to vets. This book may be calculated to feed the insatiable hunger of runners’ desire for how-to-books in easily accessible format. But contained within that calculated format is far more than another run training cookbook. The chapter on the emergence of the Kenyan running powerhouse, guided by famed agent-coach-manager Dr. Gabriele Rosas of Italy, the Moses who helped lead Kenyan runners to the promised land of international marathon, Olympic and road racing domination, told in fascinating detail by Wallack. His oral history interviews, while the subjects talk at length about how they are staying fit as they age, are also as revealing about their inner spirit as those done by the master of the genre, Studs Terkel. In them, the tales told by superstars Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter; 70-plus ultra running sensation Helen Klein; Hungarian sub-4 minute miler and prominent US coach Lazlo Tabori; aerobics pioneer Dr. Kenneth Cooper; ultrarunning and triathlon pioneer and heart rate monitor guru Sally Edwards; amazing 80-plus champion runner John Cahill (70-plus PR marathon 3:05:49), Bobbi Gibb, the inspiring first woman to run the Boston Marathon (before Katherine Switzer) are often profound, inspiring and cover details and personal challenges that go far deeper than obvious biographical material.
While Wallack’s information and training strategies are excellent and sharply written, to me these life stories provide the beating heart of this wide ranging guide. Reading about the scope of Bill Rodgers’ career, from college cross country runner, cigarette smoking anti-war conscientious objector working in a hospital, to world-class marathon star, and finally to masters runner fighting off injuries, highlights his lifelong passion for the sport. Rodgers, as do the sections on Bobbi Gibbs, Tabori, Cooper, Klein, Edwards, Dixon and Shorter, all give full-blooded self-portraits that should inform and inspire all runners.
Who is this guy?
Wallack is a former Triathlete magazine editor who has written books about bike touring and is a Los Angeles Times fitness columnist. His endurance sports resume is extensive. He has taken on some of cycling’s toughest races – the La Ruta de los Conquistadores, Paris-Brest-Paris, Furnace Creek 508; top adventure races like the Eco-Challenge and Primal Quest; and various runs ranging from his epic Badwater adventure to the Boston Marathon. But my favorite Wallack plays roles beyond journalist. As the enthusiastic Everyman who takes on some huge challenges, he lets himself serve as a cautionary example. In taking on and failing to complete the Badwater 137-mile run, Wallack shows us both how great are the masters of the event and the cost in megablisters, exhaustion and pain of failing to prepare. Wallack of course knows better - but he won’t let occasional egregious lack of training get in the way of a good story.
Many readers will frown on Wallack because he ran Boston as a bandit in 1999, joining several hundred others who did not go through the rigorous qualifying process. But that race served as an excellent proof that the soft running, low impact, Pose method and handgrips transformed the author in record time from a near-crippling hip injury to a Boston finisher.
The personal stuff
Outside the scope of this book, I know personally just how unlikely Roy’s prospects for a good marathon finish were before 1999. In the years before his Boston finish, Roy and I worked together on a magazine. We also shared an ambition to qualify for the Boston Marathon 100th anniversary in 1996 and, failing that, in years thereafter. During this period, Roy was a fearless guinea pig-test pilot of radical training strategies and equipment. At one point, he tried on a running shoe prototype that included huge springs on the soles. They were designed by some whacked-out Gyro Gearloose who thought they would store and release the energy expended with each footfall. I called them Boingers and after five or six miles of this torture, Roy’s IT band and hip flexors and shins were a mess. I think he even ran a 5k in them. They were heavy and simply crazy. Perhaps twisted by the Boingers, I think he suffered back and hamstring issues that plagued him to several spectacular failures to make the Boston qualifying time.
In 1997, after three years of trying, I made the 1998 Boston field with a 3:24:38 at the local Western Hemispheres Marathon in Culver City, California. Roy, with his muscular wrestler’s body, fell off the radar in 1995 after one 18-mile training run at Cloverfield Park aggravated a hip injury he suffered in the 1995 Eco-Challenge. Meanwhile, I finished the 1998 Boston Marathon in 3:28:09. The next year, however, with a career move from LA to Boulder imminent, I fell hard off the fitness wagon. By the time Boston came around again, my qualifying time was still valid, but I had put on 10 pounds and my yearly mileage fell from 1,935 to about 200. Prepping for the 1999 race, I barely struggled through one 20-mile walk-run.
At Boston, I started off trying to fake it and struggled through a 1:52 half, then fell into a death march when Roy came cheerfully chugging up behind me just after Heartbreak Hill. He was carrying two handgrips and had a tremendous enthusiastic grin on his face. Perhaps, I thought, he was tasting revenge for those last few years of my sleeker form, healthier limbs and faster, more consistent running results.
In the book, Roy writes, “A mile into the long, gradual downhill into Boston, I blew by Tim Carlson, a training buddy and fellow Triathlete magazine writer from LA, so fast that his hair surely would have ruffled in my breeze if it wasn't plastered (with sweat) to his skull. Surprised to see him, I slowed and began babbling about my breakthrough with the abbreviated stride and the amazing e3 Grips.
“Tim did not share my elation. Although he had actually qualified for Boston, now he couldn’t speak and looked wasted. As if he had already been to hell and was dreading the return trip. He was on his way to a personal worst.”
Well, if living well is the best revenge, Roy continues to triumph. I’m an out-of-shape, lapsed runner and triathlete, and Roy continues with his irrepressible quixotic optimism to work out, trying out an unending series of cutting edge methods. He still takes on amazing endurance adventures. And he just wrote a very nice tome that will take its place in my beloved collection of favorite running books, just below the masterpieces.
The Great Running Books
While there have been many abject and some near-misses, the ranks of the great running books are slim. The greatest running title-only is Rabbit Run by John Updike, which is not at all about a runner but rather the story of an over-the-hill basketball player who consistently runs away from his pathetic life. There have been a very few worthy novels – Loneliness of the Long Distance Runneris the best, the lesser but more current Once a Runner is more popular, and then the little-known Pepper in the Blood set in the culture of performance enhancing drugs, is my cult favorite. The truly best writing on the sport is non fiction and histories. Roger Bannister’s Four Minute Mile is the very best – written with elegant clarity and perfect sense of history, purpose, place and time. Right behind is 1972 Olympic marathon fourth place finisher Kenny Moore. His Bowerman and the Men of Oregon is a powerful epic covering the sport’s greatest coach and a roster of greats with a special focus on Steve Prefontaine. Even better is Moore’s Best Efforts: World Class Runners and Races, a collection of Moore’s fantastic lyrical dramatic Sports Illustrated profiles of the world’s greatest runners at their own decisive career moments. Out of print, you get an idea of its value when the cheapest used copy sells for $96 on Amazon. After those two, I nominate Tom Derderian’s beautifully done history of the first 100 years of the Boston Marathon, and Michael Sandrock’s Running with the Legends, in which he profiles 20-plus stars from Emile Zatopek to Steve Jones and many more greats of the sport. Pre by Tom Jordan and The Perfect Mile by Neal Bascomb and The Greatest, Jim Denison’s biography of Haile Gebrselassie, are also nicely done. And Dean Karnazes’ entertaining Ultramarathon Man may be the biggest seller ever.
Jim Fixx and George Sheehan, both departed, were the most popular running gurus of the 1970s and 1980s, while John “The Penguin” Bingham now carries the flag for back-of-the-packers.
Books of training and theory are too numerous to count, but Tim Noakes’