Jim Fixx was a friend of mine. We first became acquainted when I wrote him a letter and said something to the effect, How the hell can you call it The Complete Book of Running and my name is nowhere mentioned?
Jim apologized for the grotesque and inadvertent oversight.
The next edition – Jim Fixx’s Second Book Of Running – had a very nice paragraph or two about Running magazine. So, I forgave him.
Jim contributed this piece for the Winter 1979 issue of Running. – JDW
Stephen Richardson is musing as he runs through a foggy rain.
“Let’s suppose you were a mountain climber,” he says. “You’ve climbed a few twelve-thousand-foot peaks. Out your window you can see a fifteen-thousand-foot peak. Now there’s no reason to climb that fifteen-thousand-foot peak, is there? But don’t you suppose after a while you’d want to try it? I know I would.”
Richardson, who is in his late fifties and is one of the world’s fastest marathoners of his age, was talking not so much about mountaineering as about analogies. Our conversation that day had turned to so-called ultramarathons – races of more, sometimes considerably more, than the standard marathon’s 26.2 miles – and we had found ourselves speculating about why, exactly, runners enter them. Certainly in the ordinary everyday marathon can be found challenge and suffering aplenty for any but a certifiably masochistic competitor. Yet runners by the thousands enter ultramarathons, not just once, but repeatedly. Nor are these runners necessarily the haunted, driven souls you might expect. Some, in fact, are as unexceptional as you or me.
Consider Dr. Charles Steinmetz. Outwardly Dr. Steinmetz is not unlike any other American physician. He has a quiet, wry manner, and as often as not you will find him in shirt sleeves. But Dr. Steinmetz is, among other accomplishments, an ultramarathoner – not, he cheerfully points out, a distinguished one, but certainly a dedicated one.
Recently, for example, he ran in a fifty-mile (50M) race in Central Park one weekend, a one-hundred-kilometer (62.1M) a few Saturdays later, and then, apparently feeling the need for some exercise, another marathon the very next.
“It was really a whim that got me interested in ultramarathons,” he says. “In the same way that it seemed right to run the Boston Marathon in the bicentennial year. It seemed appropriate to try to run fifty miles in my fiftieth year.
So I started training and figuring out my strategy. I decided to do what the great Walt Stack recommends: Start slowly and taper off. That’s exactly what I did. I began dead last and held that position for the whole race. One guy tried to wrest it from me in the closing minutes, but I had my tactics figured out. I slowed down just enough. He finished a few yards ahead of me.”
Steinmetz went on the describe what his first ultramarathon, a fifty-miler, felt like.
“The last twenty miles were sort of a blur of pain and fatigue,” he said. “I walked a lot. I ate some jelly beans to try to keep my strength up. I was tremendously depressed watching the leader lap me three times. Afterward, I went to bed for twenty-four (24) hours.”
Lest ultramarathoners seem like odd and isolated phenomena in the otherwise sane world of running, let me cite as contrary evidence a recent report by Ted Corbitt, himself an ultramarathoner of no little distinction. Writing in New York Running News, Corbitt described so many 50-mile, 100-mile, and 24-hour races that you would think such distances constitute a mere jog around the block.
And – who knows? – perhaps one day they will. Says one ultramarathoner: “The ultra distances are the focus for the next running explosion.”
Jim was super intelligent. He told me they had to do sixty-seven (67!) takes to get him to say his lines correctly.
My favorite Jim Fixx book is Jackpot. Story of what it’s like for a (reasonably) normal guy to hit it big. (Spoiler alert: he gets divorced.)
He died running slowly.