HOW TOM'S TENNIS SHOES CHANGED MY LIFE AND HE WASN'T EVEN IN THEM.

The Head of Security was coming toward me in the hallway, a pair of sneakers slung around his neck. We passed in the hallways frequently during the week, and that event usually merited no more than a nod. But the sneakers were not part of his uniform, and they piqued my curiosity.

"Hey, Tom," I said, "What's that hanging around your neck"

"My running shoes," Tom said, "Gonna run a few miles after work."

I didn't know Tom ran. I didn't know anybody who ran. Running was an alien activity, and running miles at a time was unimaginable. I said as much to Tom as we paused in the hall. I found out he had been running for years, and his normal run was 5 miles. I told him I thought running 5 miles without stopping was beyond belief.  Tom simply said, "If I can do it, you can do it," and he invited me to come along.

That casual invitation in the hallway leads to further, more serious discussions about running. Within a week I was looking for a pair of shoes, and within the month I was doing laps at a local track, working up to a 3 mile run with Tom. To my delight and amazement, 3 miles soon turned into 5 miles.  The aches and lack of wind that are a new runner's due gradually diminished, and mileage increased. Within a year, Tom and I were occasionally running 12 miles—an astronomical distance from my pre-running perspective—and a respectable workout for any 39 year old man with a life-long indifference to fitness.

Jobs and friends changed over the next two decades, but I maintained my interest in running. After a few years, a 10 mile run was challenging but no longer daunting. In fact, 10 miles felt good. A very small but persistent voice, somewhere on the perimeter of consciousness, began asking me: "Just how far can you run,  anyway?" 

An acquaintance ran marathons. One day I put that hypothetical question to him. Larry shrugged. He told me his preferred distance was 26.2 miles—the standard marathon event—but he knew people who ran 100 mile events. Once again, I couldn't quite wrap my imagination around what I was hearing. And once again, I got curious.

Larry told me that events longer than a marathon were called ultra distance events, and they constituted a kind of closet "Extreme Sport" which seldom got media attention in spite of the awesome athletic feats involved. Larry also mentioned he knew an ultra distance runner, a man then in his early 60's who lived in a neighboring town.  I said, "I'd like to meet him."

Ed Williams was a professor in a state university, just getting ready to retire when I met him. He was quiet and unassuming, so close  in physique to Ichabod Crane it was hard not to smile when I first saw him in running togs.

However, he had completed a number of 100 mile events. His favorite was the Leadville 100 which traversed a couple 12,000-ft  passes while meandering through the Colorado Rockies. After his tenth  Leadville Finish, they  gave Ed a special trophy--a massive silver buckle.  However, trophies and celebrity status meant nothing to Ed,  and he dismissed my wide-eyed awe with a remark I'd heard before. He said, "If I can do it, you can do it."   I rose to his offer to train with him like a famished trout to a perfectly tied fly.

Ed was the most improbable of athletes.  He was a rangy and stringy-muscled 6-footer, and his remaining fringe of hair was close-cropped grey.

When he ran, his gait appeared somewhere between a lope and a shuffle. And after a few miles, before he got his wind, he would emit a strange and disconcerting kind of wheezing-chortle. It was an involuntary vocalization that would convince anyone in hearing distance Ed was going into cardiac arrest or worse. No matter how often I heard it, I never got use to it and my first thought was always, "My God, he's dying."

Not so.

Running with Ed, I gradually developed the impression that the farther he ran, the farther he could run. Instead of getting fatigued after 15 miles, Ed was just warming up.  We spent many a Saturday on the Katy Trail, running 15 or 20 miles of the smooth and uncommonly flat ribbon that stretched almost halfway across the state of Missouri.

Ed told me that on his long runs, which were always on dirt trails, he would walk 3 minutes out of every 15.  At our cruising speed, that worked out to around 5 miles per hour. Not impressive on paper but entirely respectable for distances beyond the marathon. Twenty  miles at a 5 mph pace exhausted me, but that  distance was far shorter than Ed's serious training runs.  

In the time I trained with Ed I developed a fascination with long distance running. I learned that running extreme distances was a recognized and respected sport during the late 1800s, when "Pedestrian Event"  competitors ran/walked distances of 500 miles and more in "Six Day Events."  I was astounded to learn America has had a number of trans-continental running events in the last 50 years. In 1995, Dusan Mravlje, finished the 2,906 miles Trans-American Road Race from Huntington Beach, Ca,  to New York in 427 hours, 10 minutes. There were 10 finishers.  Presently, there is no trans-American footrace, but there are dozens of running competitions of 100 miles or more. And  Sri Chinmoy International  sponsors a 3100 mile track event. I've never seen these events mentioned once in the news channels I watch. How could that be?

Training with Ed, I was able to finish a couple 50 Kilometer (31 mile) events, and a 43 miler in Tennessee improbably named the Strolling Jim in honor of a local race horse. I had my eye fixed firmly on a 50 miler when my ankle began hurting.

By this time, I was no stranger to running aches or running injuries. Mild stress injuries of the joints, muscles, or tendons, are common in  distance running. At one time or another, I'd had just about every joint in my body gripe and complain. Serious runners don't ignore such complaints, they learn what they mean and how to deal with them. Usually it's safe to run with pain if the pain goes away shortly after the activity begins, and for every stress-related injury there's an effective treatment.  An achy ankle was no big deal. I just RICE'ed (rest/ice/compression/elevation) it for a week and went back to running. Now the pain was worse.  After another week or two of hobbling, I visited the office of a Sports Medicine physician. Several visits and many x-rays later, the doc popped into the examination room with my file. He said, "I have good news and bad news."

The good news was, he had  a diagnosis. The bad news: the condition  had no treatment and no cure.

"What you have," he told me, "is Osteochondritis Dessicans of the Talus bone in your right ankle. We don't know what causes it. Sometimes it goes away, sometimes it gets worse. There is no treatment except to quit any activity that causes pain. In worst-cases we have to surgically fuse the joint."

He sent me home with  recommendations for stretches and an admonition not to run.

I didn't need to be admonished—I couldn't run more than a hundred yards without pain.

For nine years, I didn't run. I could still cycle and walk, so I had some fitness options, but I couldn't run and eventually came to believe I never would. Mysteriously, my other ankle began hurting even though I was no longer running. No other joints were even slightly affected, and except for a brief period when I used crutches, I could walk normally.

But I missed running. A lot. I grieved at the loss. I gained weight.

Then about 2002, I noticed (or thought I noticed), a change in my ankles. Did they ache less? I tried running a block, and I did it without pain. I tried running around the block. Then a quarter mile.  The pain was less now, but it was also different though I couldn't have said how. Perhaps I could sense the healing without being able to find words to describe it. I worked up to a mile, and concluded I must be getting better. 

The pain didn't disappear abruptly. It was intermittent and sometimes it got worse after a longer run. But very gradually it faded. After two years I could run several slow miles and never think of my ankles. "Slow" wasn't a problem for me—I wasn't competing with anyone. I had learned long ago that most of the benefits and joys of running can be had without racing. I was an adherent of the LSD—"long, slow, distance"-- school of running popularized in the 60's by Joe Henderson. It was not speed, but the rhythm of the body in motion over time that conferred the benefits. I couldn't have cared less about running fast—I just wanted to be running again.

I guarded my recovery by increasing distance very slowly and stopping at the first signs of pain. I was eventually rewarded with pain-free 5 mile runs. I decided in 2005 I'd run 10 miles in October, as a 65th birthday present to myself. On October 23rd, I finished 10.3 miles of the Katy Trail in 2 hours and 20 minutes. Without walking. It felt  wonderful.

It's October again, and I plan to do the same run on the 21st, at a 4 mph pace. My training run times tell me it's possible. I've already decided to make the "Katy 10" an annual event for me and any friends that care to come along. This year I have one, a 60 year old girl friend who delights in her new-found ability to cover miles of State Park trail without walking.

At 65,  any day I can run is a good day. It's more than that: it's a gift. Distance running enriched my life in many ways, and I am a different person because of it. 

There's no way to be certain, but I've always believed there was a moment in my life that was absolutely pivotal.  Years ago, when I saw Tom in the hallway with his  necklace of running shoes, what if I had said nothing and walked on by? Tom and I didn't hang out. Opportunities for small talk with the Head of Security were few to none.  More than likely , I'd never learned about his running, never come to love it myself, never met Ed Wilson, never had the adventures, highs, and encounters with others, that running was responsible for. And there were many.

But that's another story.