Steve Jones on Sorting it Out on the Run

I got to talk a bit with former marathon world record holder Steve Jones at the Boston Marathon Expo this year. He was just sitting at a booth alone, so I went over to talk with him. There were lines all over the Expo for the current running stars: Ryan Hall, Shalane Flanagan, and Kara Goucher and I couldn't believe that people were walking right by Mr. Steve Jones. I got to hear about the runners he is coaching in Boulder, the Torres twins (now both retired), and the Falmouth Road Race's Tommy Leonard. He is one of the gutsiest runners of all time and hails from Wales. Speaking of being a gutsy runner, The Guardian just did a feature on How Steve Jones Pitstopped his way to Victory in the 1985 London Marathon. Let's just say that Steve "sorted things out." It's a good read and don't pass by Steve next time! I did forget to ask him if he was a fan of my favorite band, The Alarm, also from Wales.

Thinking about trying to regain your youth. What happens with us aging runners is also happening in the music business. The Alarm's lead singer Mike Peters is my age and has a new soundtrack out for a new movie called "Vinyl" a fictionalized account of the time about 10 years ago when he made a point to the recording industry by having some teenagers lip sync and pretend to be the Artists behind his newest single. The song went to the top of the British charts before he revealed that it was really an Alarm song. He wanted to point out that old guys can still rock and that there is a type of age discrimination in the music industry. Here is a bit on the soundtrack, which I have been listening to a lot lately. I don't know if I am being transported back in time to the 70s or if this is the sound of what music could and should sound like today.



An excellent book to read about a similar British champion from the same time period (and the guy Steve Jones beat in that race in 1985) is Charlie Spedding's From Last to First: How I Became a Marathon Champion.

And if you really wanted to know when the running boom ended or at least jumped the shark, check out  the video produced for the 1985 London Marathon as seen at the bottom of the Steve Jones article. Here it is if you can make it through the entire sappy 42 seconds.

Charlie Spedding: From Last to First: How I Became a Marathon Champion

When the names of greatest runners from the 1980's are mentioned, there is quite a list of runners to discuss. One runner that may be overlooked is the British marathoner, Charlie Spedding; however to overlook his achievements would be a mistake. Who, you say? Unless you are a true fan of the sport, the name might not ring a bell, but just take a look at his marathon record:

1984
Houston Marathon Texas January 15th 1st place 2.11.54 (the result was so close it took 15 minutes to figure out who won and 3rd place was 1 second behind!)
London Marathon 13 May 1st place 2.09.57
Los Angeles Olympic Games 3rd place 2.09.58 (bronze medal)

1985
London Marathon 21 April 2nd place 2.08.33 (English record)

1986
Chicago Marathon 26 October 3rd place 2.10:13

1987
London Marathon 10 May 8th place 2.10.32

1988
London Marathon 17 April 10th
Seoul Olympic Games 2 October 6th place 2.12.19

Charlie Spedding has an Olympic Bronze medal and a 6th place Olympic marathon finish, wins in London and Houston and other impressive finishes and times. He still holds the English marathon record of 2:08:33 set in London in 1985-Steve Jones (from Wales) set the British record by winning the race. Got that? A runner of this caliber certainly begs a bit of study, and fortunately Charlie Spedding himself has written an autobiography chronicling his running career. He describes himself as someone without much talent, so he must have done something right to reach the heights he did. He spells out the secrets to his success in his book From Last to First. I read the recently released Kindle version.


Charlie Spedding winning the 1984 London Marathon


The 1984 Olympic Marathon

The book is a compelling read, but not just because it is interesting to read what is going through his head as he runs the Olympic marathons and other races. He had a deliberate plan to bring a positive mindset to his racing, and it worked very well. Charlie Spedding could be called one of the all-time great peakers, because the bigger the race, the better he ran. Charlie could sense that the highly touted runners like Rob DeCastella did not have a winning attitude as they started and ran the Olympic races as favorites and thus they never got the medals that others predicted they would win. On the other hand, Charlie looked for the positives and produced when it most mattered. This unfortunately led to his demise as a professional runner, as he couldn't muster the mental focus to cash in on his marathon successes after the fact. He could prepare himself for the big races, but that meant he couldn't run the smaller races with the same mental and physical peak.

"The better I became at digging deep in a major race, the less able I was to run hard in any other event. I tried to do my best, but I became less and less able to produce a performance if a race didn't matter to me"

If you enjoy a well-written book and want to learn about one of the marathon greats, then this book is for you. You might also pick up some tips on how to mentally prepare yourself to be the best runner that you can be. One of my favorite running quotes (I listed it in my high school yearbook) comes from Frank Shorter, "...to me the object is not to beat someone, but merely to live up to your potential. If you do this, then you will end up winning a lot..." Charlie had a similar mantra, that he wrote down in his notebook at the start of his quest to become a champion, "Success is measured by how much I fulfill the talent I was born with." Charlie Spedding was a successful runner by all counts!

1984 Olympic Marathon

Bronze and Silver (John Treacy)Medalists in 1984

New England runners got a closer look at Spedding before both Olympic Marathon races as he trained and raced in the Boston area leading up to both races. He also ran the Falmouth Road Race twice: finishing in 9th place in 1981 and 30th in 1988.

Charlie Spedding on reaching goals:

"I achieved my targets because I knew what I wanted. I knew why I wanted it; and I knew how much I wanted it.I also stuck to it when things went wrong, and I wasn't distracted by other things that came along."

Charlie Spedding on his greatest moment in running (a moment that all runners have dreamt about and that Charlie lived) :

"...the question usually includes a choice between winning the London Marathon and being third in the Olympics. Both of these are very high on my list, but neither is my greatest moment....My reply would often cause surprise because my greatest moment was not a result, but a spell of running which lasted about five minutes. The greatest moment in my two decades of running came 22 miles into the Olympic marathon when I took the lead and pushed the pace. After all the setbakcs, injures and failuresm I was living the fantasy that every distance runner has on a long, cold winter run, I had the initiative. I was calling the tune. I was grasping my opportunity with both hands. I was taking part in Olympic proportionsI was running as fast as I dared. I was trying my upmost to fulfill my wildest dreams. Today was indeed the day. I was doing it. I was flying and I felt absolutely fantastic."

Check out the 3:05 mark in the Olympic marathon video above for this moment.

1985 London Marathon 2nd in 2:08:33 with  Steve Jones 2:08:11 1st place.

1986 Chicago Marathon with Mark Curp 12 and Thom Hunt 10

 Here is an interesting interview with Charlie from back in 2003.

How Runners Communicate (through the years)

When I started running in the 1970s everything I knew about running came from my coaches and teammates, books on running, televised track meets, and Runner's World magazine. I was fortunate to grow up in Falmouth on Cape Cod, the home of the Falmouth Road Race and I started running for the Falmouth High School Cross Country team just a couple of weeks after the first Falmouth Road Race. I also learned a lot about the athletes and the sport from participating in the Falmouth Road Race and seeing and reading about all the stars of the sport in the local papers. Being in close proximity to the best in the sport probably helped instill a passion in me for the sport of running.

 High School Communication:

Falmouth High School 1973-1974

 There was no internet. Runners did not even have timers on their watches to accurately record training times.  Results were either written down or mimeographed and distributed later. Results from my first year of running cross-country. I was no running star! The only race that is missing is the final race, a handicap race for the Falmouth XC team. I was one of the first starters, based on my slow best time, and held on for the win in 19:53.

I think this is the first time I was mentioned in the newspaper. It was just for being on the track  team. I was pretty slow.

The Stony Brook School 1974-977

Mimeographed sheets again. Communication with Coach Goldberg in the summer was by mail or phone. The only way I could get to the top of the list was if the top guys did not run, but it was fun to get there.

 Results always seemed to be in purple. These are from the New York State Suffolk County Cross-Country Championships in 1976. We had an outstanding team, and finished third in our NY State division race. I wonder how many race results are lost to history, except for those saved by racers stored  in boxes in garages and attics.







 

 Our outstanding coach, Marvin W. Goldberg, would post workouts everyday on a bulletin board in the gym and send postcards and notes throughout the summer. After a season, he would meet with his athletes individually and go over goals. I think I am the only high school runner, despite loads of effort, who could never break 5 minutes in the mile (all slow twitch fibers and a funky hip and stride).








Wheaton College 1977-1981

In college we had this postcard-newsletter system to keep up with our teammates throughout the summer. How else would you know that a teammate just won an NCAA title or that another teammate spent his summer elongating the necks of Coca-Cola bottles for carnivals (in another newsletter). There was a lot of ribbing and strange humor in these newsletters (maybe the Coke bottle puller was just someone pulling our legs-I still don't know). It was a fun way to keep in contact and stay motivated through a long summer.

Through college and after, if I wanted to stay in-touch with the running world, I had to read magazines and books, run and talk with running friends, go to races, and watch the occasional event of television. It  might take weeks or months to view the results in running magazines of races from around the world and in the US, unless they were printed in a newspaper like the Boston Globe. The computer changed all that.

In the 1990s the Gate City Striders had a computer bulletin board in addition to a mailed out newsletter. You would phone in using your modem (I think one person at a time could gain access) and you could read and send messages to teammates and read messages on a newsgroup called rec.running to hear what people around the world were writing about running. The message board was a lot of fun and a place of inspiration: just when you thought you were training well, you could read the messages of your teammates and find out that they were running farther and more often. It was motivating hearing about their training runs and races, as well as being able to plan workouts and long runs.

As the internet exploded and more people became computer savvy, the bulletin board was eventually laid to rest. The Gate City Striders, like other running clubs, migrated their presence to a web page. Runners could now communicate easier and messages and results flowed more freely and with greater speed. Running forums like Runners World and Letsrun allowed even greater communication and then results started showing up online with sites like Coolrunning. Now, you didn't have to copy results from a printout after a race to keep track of your times and placing, but you could go online and see what your friend's times were in races you didn't attend soon after they were completed. Now you can even see a record of your online results at Athlinks.

Technology soon expanded more, so that you could listen to races online. I recall getting up early one Sunday morning to hear the BBC broadcast of the 2002 London Marathon where Khalid Khannouchi defeated Paul Tergat and Haile Gebrselassie in a world record time before getting in the car to go run the Fred's Marathon. Pretty soon races from around the world could be viewed online, many live. Sometimes you had to pay and sometime they are free for the watching. I have a few VHS tapes sitting around from before that time marathons like London and Chicago, where I had to buy a tape of the race on eBay to see the full action in a race.

Communication is pretty instant with runners and races nowadays. Runners on Letsrun often get a bit angry if results are not posted within minutes of a race's completion. Another type of communication also followed for some runners. I started this blog a few years ago to write about my experiences with running, racing, health, and injuries. I have made many friends in the running community from places all over the world through this blog or reading websites and blogs that other runners, coaches, and therapists provide. I have been able to read and talk with others about common injuries and share my own struggles in hopes that others can find some helpful nuggets of information or provide from their own experiences and knowledge to help me. I also like reading my teammates and friends blogs to be inspired by their races and workouts and encourage each other to become better runners.

Eventually I broke down and got a Facebook account (how else do you communicate with you kids when he is in college). This has provided a new set of friends in the running community. I have met some fellow runners in the oddest circumstances through Facebook. One runner found himself in the background of a photo of my  finish in the 1976 Falmouth Road Race. I have connected again with former teammates from high school and college (every result and article above has one or more of my Facebook refound friends listed) and I made new friends who share their love of running and racing (some are runners I knew about and others are runners I have still to meet). It is always fun to read other runner's  accounts of races and training (as well as the bragging and dissing that goes on). I think that if I was left alone in a bubble, I would probably just give up on the running thing, but I am always inspired by the success and wisdom of others as they relate their own experiences. Who would want to stop running? The running community is full of so many fun and positive people. Technology and computers has certainly changed the world of running and we are all better for it.If you are a runner and like to communicate on Facebook, you can find me here.

Another aspect for having this blog is to practice my writing skills due to the fact that I am a teacher. I try some of the things I have my students do with their writing. So that leaves me with a new avenue, I am tentatively going to try on "Recover Your Stride". I would like to write about other runners and discover their successes and secrets, as well as their history with running. I don't know how it will go, but I would hope to find some willing subjects that might be more interesting to write about them myself, as I am not really that interesting as a runner, I am just persistent runner who loves the sport, I already have my first subject, someone who loves running as much as I do, someone who loves the Falmouth Road Race as much as I do, and someone who has an incredible string of Falmouth runs- even more races than I have done. I have seen him and his brother at plenty of Falmouths in recent years, but have never really met him except online due to this blog, so it will be fun to find out his history and how he has stayed so successful.