Running by the book

Legend has it that Dick Beardsley, the two-time Olympic marathon qualifier and the fourth fastest American ever to run 26.2 miles, coached himself from a book.

The story had intrigued me for years. Call me slow, but I only recently realized that Dick's own story, "Staying the Course" was still in print. I finally got a copy and laid the legend to rest. Having just run 2:20 for 44th place in the 1979 Nike/Oregon Track Club marathon, Dick realized he had a good crack at becoming world-class - if he kept improving. (By the way, he still tops the Guinness Book of World Records list for the longest consecutive series of faster marathon times - 13 in all.) At that point, as he puts it: "I didn't have a coach, but I had a book: 'Self-Made Olympian' by Ron Daws. It was my bible. I referred to it constantly for workouts."

So the story was true -- kind of. Within a year Dick had become good enough to "graduate" to the New Balance team, where he met Billy Squires, then already something of a legend himself. Dick describes how the great Coach Squires offered to help him out.

"'Gosh', I said, trying not to sound stupid. He might as well have told me I was pregnant, that's how much trouble I had believing this was happening. 'That would be great,' I finally said. We were at lunch and right away he started scribbling some workouts on the backs of napkins. It was the start of a very strange and very exciting long-distance relationship."

In 1981 he won the London Marathon and in 1982 finished second to Alberto Salazar in the Boston marathon after a police motorcycle got in his way in the finishing straight. He ran 2:08 and finished second! That was the famous "Duel in the Sun," said to be one of the greatest road races ever. He achieved what he did by unstinting hard work and, it has to be said, an apparent unwillingness to say "no" to race invitations. Only injury would stop him, and even then not always. He eventually ran himself into the ground, in one notable incident "shredding" his Achilles tendon almost beyond repair.

The Beardsley story has some unbelieveable twists and turns. To say the guy is accident-prone would be a massive understatement. It seems as though he was singled out by the Gods for testing. "Dick Beardsley's life reads like a Greek tragedy with an upbeat ending," as his website puts it. Dick survived his trials, and is still running. He is a motivational speaker and regularly runs workshops for runners. He ends this year with appearances at the California International Marathon in Sacramento, California (December 2-4), and the Dallas White Rock Marathon in Dallas, Texas ( December 7-10). Catch him if you can, as he has valuable lessons for us.

Winter training? Try fartlek shoveling!
As a measure of his intensity, and as inspiration for us facing the onset of winter, here's Dick, snowed in on his farm, unable to run because of his Achilles, but determined to somehow stay in shape. Hours on the staionary bike are driving him crazy. So he decides to shovel snow. Of course, being Dick, he shoveled so much that he cleared the entire farm. So then he had to "rearrange" it, as he calls it. He shoveled it all back and started again. This seems to have gone on for weeks. He decides to make it even harder by wearing a hypoxic simulator -- a mask and oxygen tanks designed to simulate being at high altitude.

The logical (?) next step is to get into a weekly routine that mimics your running schedule. "Sunday, instead of a two and a half hour run, I did two and a half hours of steady shoveling. Monday I recovered a little bit, shoveling at an easy pace for 45 minutes to an hour. Tuesday instead of repeat miles, I did repeat shoveling. I did my warm-up shovel, followed by what I called fartlek shoveling." On Wednesday he did a medium tempo shovel for 90 minutes, and so on. The low-oxygen made this extremely hard work. "You'll understand why, even though I wasn't marathoning, I was probably in the best shape of my life."

* Dick Beardsley's book, "Staying the course: a runner's toughest race," written with Maureen Anderson, was published in paperback in 2002 by the University of Minnesota Press.
* Dick's website is at http://dickbeardsley.com/index.html