“There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life.

“But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you.

“Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.”

Found what might have been introductory notes for a running seminar that wasn’t paying top dollar.

One of the savviest parts of pretending to be an expert is to quote the experts. Like being a cover band.

For those of you who would rather be listening to Dr. George Sheehan tonight, I offer the following.

“It came about when I was about forty-five. I was following a pre-ordained life. Very dull, stultifying. I was seriously considering becoming a real estate agent or something exciting like that. I’d completely blown my mind. I’d fall asleep in front of the TV, get bombed out on the weekend.

I was developing fat in my body, fat in my brain and fat in my soul. THEN I STARTED RUNNING… It’s changed my point of view. I’m more alive. Life has become a really great day-to-day enjoyment, a puzzle.

Life has become a fantastic game.”

George said it. No source listed.

I knew exactly what he was talking about.

“The distance runner who accepts the past in the person he is, and sees the future as a promise rather than a threat, is completely and utterly in the present,” George said. “He is absorbed in his encounter with the everyday world. He is mysteriously reconciling the separations of body and mind, of pain and pleasure, of the conscious and the unconscious. He is repairing the rent, and healing the wound in the divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace, unique; the everyday, eternal.”

George Sheehan’s Biography from georgesheehan.com

George Sheehan died four days short of his 75th birthday on November 1, 1993. He used to say humans come with a 75-year warranty, but it was not age with which he was concerned. It was life in the present. “Don’t be concerned if running or exercise will add years to your life,” he would say, “be concerned with adding life to your years.” He liked to quote William James, who said, “The strenuous life tastes better.”

George Sheehan lived a strenuous life. He renewed his life at the age of 45 and turned it inside out. He returned to his body, and to running, and he shared with his readers all of his experiences in this new world of exercise and play, of sweat and competition, of physical, mental and spiritual challenge.

He was born in Brooklyn in 1918, the oldest of a doctor”s 14 children. An outstanding student, he was also a track star at Manhattan College. He became a cardiologist like his father. After medical school he served in the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II as a doctor on the battleship USS Daly. Just before leaving for active service he married “the most beautiful woman on the Jersey Shore,” Mary Jane Fleming, and together they subsequently raised a dozen children.

But success and security in the suburbs were not enough for him. He became “bored” with medicine, with getting “bombed out” every weekend, with falling asleep in front of the TV. He went back to reading philosophy. He read The Greeks, Emerson, Thoreau, Ortega, and James. Then he read Irenaeus, one of the early church fathers, who wrote, “The glory of God is man fully functioning.”

George Sheehan knew he wasn”t fully functioning. He started to run. He began in his back yard (26 loops to a mile) and then became something of an oddity in Rumson, NJ running along the river road during his lunch hour wearing his white long-johns and a ski mask.

His new life had begun and its message was soon clear—“Man at any age is still the marvel of the universe.” Five years later, he ran a 4:47 mile, which was the world”s first sub-five-minute time by a 50-year-old.

He began writing a weekly column in the local paper. In short time, the running world was listening. This self-described loner from Red Bank, NJ became one of the most sought out experts on health and fitness. And his door was always open.

He continued the column for twenty five years. Many of these years were served as the medical editor for Runner’s World magazine. He wrote eight books and lectured around the world. “Listen to your body,” was his slogan. “We are each an experiment of one.” One critic referred to his talks as “the running community’s equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen concert, though listening to him was more like taking off with John Coltrane on some improvised solo.”

Dr. Sheehan was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1986. By the time it was discovered it had spread to his bones. For seven years he lived with the cancer, and “made every day count.” He was a runner to the core and he would not let the cancer change that. He ran until his legs could no longer carry him.

Through it all, he remained true to himself, continuing to write about his experiences. This time it wasn”t about running, it was about dying. Going the Distance was his last book. It was published shortly after his death.

George Sheehan never stopped searching for the truths of his life. “We are all unique, never-to-be-repeated events,” he said. His goal was to be the best George Sheehan possible. He was fond of quoting Robert Frost’s line, “I am no longer concerned with good and evil. What concerns me is whether my offering will be acceptable.”

Dr. George Sheehan, Running Figure, Dies at 74

By Frank Litsky for The New York Times. November 2, 1993.

Dr. George Sheehan, a cardiologist who became the philosopher of the recreational running movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s, died yesterday at his home in Ocean Grove, N.J. He would have been 75 years old on Friday.

His son, George 3d, said the cause of death was prostate cancer, from which his father had suffered since 1986.

When he learned he had cancer, Dr. Sheehan ran between radiation treatments and frequently in pain. He seemed concerned mostly that the illness would interfere with his speaking, writing and running, and at one stage he stopped hormone treatment because it had caused him to run slower.

For a while, he cut down on speaking. But when he became restless with his new sedentary life, he resumed training and racing because, he said, “There’s a healthy way to be ill.”

He said he had no time for self-pity.

“The last time I cried,” he said, “was at John Havlicek’s last basketball game.”

A Dynamic Speaker

If Frank Shorter, with his 1972 Olympic marathon victory, inspired the American running boom of the 1970’s, George Sheehan told embryonic recreational runners what they should try to get out of it. As a runner, he was gaunt and ungainly and often successful. As a public speaker and author, he was witty, self-deprecating and encouraging, with an unyielding zest for life.

In April, he was honored at a dinner, where a letter to him from President Clinton, a faithful recreational runner, was read. It said in part, “You have shown us that we run best when we run with the simple joy of children, and that running and racing give us the chance to become in fact what we already are in design.”

Dr. Sheehan gave up his medical practice in 1984 to devote full time to speaking, writing and running. He was a charismatic speaker who would address corporations, conventions and runners’ groups three or four times a week. He once made five talks in one day for one sponsor.

He would stand on a podium, dressed in running shoes, a T-shirt or turtleneck and chinos or corduroy slacks. Without notes, he would chat for an hour. An informal log of one session showed that he quoted 40 philosophers, authors and historical figures, including Ortega, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Anton Gide, St. Thomas Aquinas, Chesterton, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jung, Emerson, Thoreau and William James.

Dr. Sheehan was born and raised in Brooklyn, one of 14 children. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1940 from Manhattan College and a medical degree in 1943 from the Long Island College of Medicine, now known as the State University of New York Medical College Downstate. He interned in the Navy for three years and later practiced as a cardiologist in Red Bank, N.J.

A Return to Running

At Manhattan College, he was an outstanding mile runner. After college, he gave up running in favor of tennis and squash racquets. In 1962, when a patient telephoned him at home at 2 A.M. for what Dr. Sheehan considered innocuous reasons, he punched a wall in anger and broke his right hand. His summer vacation was coming and he could not play tennis, so he started running again. Five days a week, instead of eating lunch, he ran.

“I found running,” he said, “and that made it the best year of my life. I was in middle-age melancholia. I had to pull the emergency cord and get off the train. Before I ran, I was getting bombed every weekend. I didn’t smoke because I was too cheap.”

At age 50, he set a world age-group record for the mile of 4 minutes 47 seconds. But he preferred road races, and starting in his late 40’s he ran in 21 consecutive Boston Marathons.

“When I run the roads, I am a saint,” he once wrote. “For that hour, I am an Assisi wearing the least and meanest of clothes. I am Gandhi, the young London law student, trotting 10 or 12 miles a day and then going to a cheap restaurant to eat his fill of bread. I am Thoreau, the solitary seeking union with the world around him. On the roads, poverty, chastity and obedience come naturally. I am one of the poor in spirit who will see God. My chastity is my completion in the true Eros, which is play. And the Ten Commandments are the way the world works.”

His books included “Dr. Sheehan on Running,” “Running & Being: The Total Experience,” “This Running Life,” “How to Feel Great 24 Hours a Day” and “Personal Best.” He was writing a book on his experiences and feelings about dying. Some of his books were collections of columns he wrote for Runner’s World magazine, The Physician and Sportsmedicine, The Daily Register of Shrewsbury, N.J., and other publications. He was a member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness.

Dr. Sheehan is survived by his wife, the former Mary Jane Fleming; seven sons, George 3d of Sea Bright, N.J.; Timothy and Peter of Brooklyn, Andrew of Pittsburgh and John, Stephen and Michael of Red Bank, N.J.; five daughters, Mary Jane Kroon of Rumson, N.J., Ann and Nora Sheehan of New York, Sarah Adams of East Quogue, L.I., and Monica of Middletown, N.J.; 17 grandchildren, four brothers and five sisters.

Some Reflections From the Road

Selections from the lectures and writings of Dr. George Sheehan:

“The runner does not run because he is too slight for football, or hasn’t the ability to put a ball through a hoop, or can’t hit a curveball. He doesn’t run to lose weight or become fit or to prevent heart attacks. He runs because he has to. Because in being a runner, in moving through pain and fatigue and suffering, in imposing stress, in eliminating all but the necessities of life, he is fulfilling himself and becoming the person he is.”

“Some think guts is sprinting at the end of a race. But guts is what got you there to begin with. Guts start in the back hills with six miles to go and you’re thinking of how you can get out of this race without anyone noticing.”

“When we’re running in the back of the pack, unconcerned with what others are doing, driven by the need to do our best, we make the effort, and we make it more often. And for those few moments we become the equal of anyone else on this earth.”

“I’m not concerned that I’m living with cancer and trying to make an adjustment. I try to make it tougher on the cancer and easier on me. I have to keep myself from overthinking. But I don’t think the problem is the tumor. The problem is my age. Research physiologists find that when you’re about 70, there’s a significant breakdown in performance. I think something happens to set the clock back on you.”

What Would George Sheehan Do?