Joan Benoit: Appearances Can Be Deceiving

What follows appears in When Running Was Young And So Were We, my critically acclaimed, award-winning collection. 

Originally appeared in Track & Field News, October 1982. – JDW

A top masters runner once asked me a question about Joan Benoit.

It was a question borne of frustration and admiration, a query full of wonderment and awe.
“How does she do it?”, mused my friend, himself a tensely-sinewed, highly-disciplined athlete still in the hunt for that elusive sub-2:30 marathon.
“Benoit looks like some butterball cherub, without the slightest hint of muscle. Yet she can crush the opposition more often than not,” he continued, admiringly confused. “2:30:16 is incredible for a little girl like that.”
What adjectives must have come to mind when he learned the 5’3″/114 lb. Benoit had run 2:26:11 at the 1982 Nike Marathon. The Boston University women’s coach is suddenly very close to the World Record of 2:25:29.
“I have questioned if I could run with Grete [Waitz] and Allison [Roe],” Benoit admits. “Now I know I can.” The former and current holders of the WR will have to wait to run with Benoit. She has no specific marathons planned: “We’ll just have to wait and see.”
The wait to reach the top has been a brief pause for Joanie: she has been there before. Among the U.S.’s very best road racers in 1978, there she was, one down from the top. Ranked No. 3 in 1980 and No. 2 again in 1981, she had hit the top in 1979. That year, running in only her second 26-miler, she won the illustrious Boston classic with a time of 2:35:15, then an American Record.
Graduating from Maine’s Bowdoin College – as did President Franklin Pierce, poets Nathaniel Hawthorne & Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey – Benoit continued to write her name in the record books with another AR in the marathon (2:31:23) and 10 miles (55:42).
In 1981, she seemed to slow not a tick. Twice she broke the half-marathon standard, ultimately to 1:11:16. She covered 25 kilometers in 1:26:21. But suddenly – or maybe not quite so for a competitor – the music stopped.
Actually, the tunes had first faltered in the Olympic year of 1980 when she underwent a pair of separate operations in less than two weeks time. She came back, but slowly, to gain her No. 3 ranking.
“I think the anesthesia gets me more than the operation itself,” she says.

It was time to go under the knife again last December, both Achilles needing repair. Only two days later, wearing walking casts on each leg, there was Joan Benoit on an exercise bicycle, pumping away, her thoughts already focused on a defense of her Falmouth title.
Biking nowhere for 30-45 minutes daily “against good resistance,” she added arduous interval sessions to maintain her aerobic conditioning. “Actually,” she notes, “my fitness level increased when I wasn’t running.”
So impressed was she with this part of her rehabilitation she plans to reduce her mileage greatly this winter, probably remounting her trusty two-wheeler and not going far at all.
At the beginning of the year, however, mileage was her primary concern. The first week of March, with a 40-mile total, marked her first serious quantity work since the surgery. And 40 is hardly “quantity.”
By the end of the month she had doubled that. Although this gifted athlete normally averages less than 90 miles every seven days, she did exceed the century mark in each of the two weeks preceding the Nike Marathon. Joan was a tad nervous.
She was also somewhat anxious on May 8 when she lined up for her first race of the year – the Old Kent River Bank 25k. Just 131 days after the anesthesia wore off, Benoit was again a winner.
More importantly, she was still marvelously fast, finishing in 1:26:31, a time second only to her own American Record. The 25-year-old Benoit was a bit surprised: ”Originally, I had thought that Falmouth might be my first good run.”
It wasn’t. Wasn’t the first, that is. The Cape Cod Extravaganza, in which Benoit crushed not only a strong field but also Waitz’s course record, was just one pearl in a strand so lustrous only unbeaten Anne Audain’s year can compare.

Testing her fitness, Joan traveled to Norway this summer, recording the best American 20k ever, 1:09:11. Waitz ran 1:07:50. Not discouraged, Benoit decided to test her speed over 5000m in a track race. Now she was discouraged. Despite a personal record 15:40.42, she says, “The race was pretty disappointing. I got walloped.”
Defeat, like surgery, seems to make Benoit stronger. Must be the scar tissue. Winning a couple more short races in decent times, she headed to Falmouth, looking for Grete. When the Norwegian great withdrew with an injury, blitzing Waitz’s course record by 39 seconds with a time that works out to a 5:10 pace for the 7.1 mile route.

Flushed with satisfaction, she tried the Bobby Crim Ten-Miler. She left with the victory and another American Record (53:18). The stage was set for her big marathon.
As we all know, the script is the essence. With coach Bob Sevene as co-author, she fine-tuned. When the curtain went up, she got her act together in a hurry, clocking personal bests at 15k (“50-something’“”), 20k (1:07:40) and 25k (1:25:20). Between miles 10 and 11, she caught a fellow competitor – read, a man – and suggested that they push to catch a large pack of runners just ahead.
“I told him that would make it easier for us,” she explains. “He just looked at me and asked if I knew how fast I was going. I don’t run with a watch, so I said, ‘No.’ When he said, ’ ‘2:20 pace,’ I just thought ‘oh-oh’ and slowed down.”
Between 25k and 35k, hearing no further splits, Benoit experienced a psychological low, but she came on strongly in the last 5000. “I felt so good it was like I was running a track race,” she recalls. “I had too much left. I thought about sprinting but… I didn’t want to showboat.”
She’s just not the type. “I don’t know if I could’ve gotten the World Record but I know I could’ve run another 20 seconds faster,” she avows.