OG Coach Roy Benson

“Isn’t it great that our sport doesn’t need human judges? No need for us to worry about ‘artistic’ merit, no one around taking off points for our form. All we’ve got to do is just put low numbers on the objective, non-partisan, incorruptible clock. Best is least.“

I have an old friend I haven’t known long. We both have been the closed-mouth close buddy to the same close-mouthed close buddy for nearly a half century and somehow managed never to meet.

Our stories are both familiar and fresh at the same time.

Not at all surprised to learn Roy Benson – on a bridge overpass one 1972 afternoon in Munich – hollered out to Frank Shorter the size of his lead in the Olympic marathon.

The Coach is an Original Gangster Of Running.

THE JOURNEY

From contract work on heart rate monitors for Polar and Nike to writing a column for both “Running Times” and “Running Journal” magazines; from serving as the Head TF/XC coach at the University of Florida to founding running camps and to writing four books, there’s been a common thread in Coach Roy Benson’s story – running.

As a high school freshman, Roy Benson began his track career as a failed shot-putter. Luckily, his coach sent him off with some older boys to run laps around the gym and he quickly discovered his niche: the half-mile. He graduated from Wisconsin’s Stevens Point Area Senior High in 1959, a school that also produced running sensation Chris Solinsky, the first American to break 27:00 for 10k.  Coincidentally, Solinsky recently served as the Gator distance coach.

Benson began college at Dartmouth College, but didn’t last long. “I was struggling academically and wasn’t sure what I was doing there,” Coach Benson recalls. In December of 1960, at the urging of the Dean, he enlisted in the Coast Guard.   

Benson was stationed at a boot camp in Alameda, California as a physical fitness trainer.  He quickly began helping out with the base’s track team made up of high school and college-aged Coast Guard recruits. By the end of his first year, he took over as the head coach while still competing himself. His teams were notably successful, winning nineteen of their twenty competitions against Bay-area teams from the bases of the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and the Navy.

Their winning streak was only foiled by Olympic-development runners out of the Moffet Air Force base, who were coached by Stanford’s legendary Payton Jordan. Jordan was preparing to serve as the USA’s Olympic Head Coach that year.

“We had a lot of young high school and college graduates who were pretty good, but Moffet had those ringers who helped spoil our perfect record.” Coach Benson joked. “My guys simply loved the chance to get off base during boot camp and maybe see girls during our bus rides to Alameda High school where we practiced.  I was a glorified bus driver/coach who also ran the half-mile, mile, and two-mile on the team, but that’s what got me started with coaching.”

By the end of his time at the Coast Guard, Roy had gotten his times down to 1:53.4 for 880 yards and 4:20 for the mile while competing for the Santa Clara Valley Youth Village Track Club.  It was during that time he was exposed to new training philosophies, including Arthur Lydiard’s 100-mile weeks of endurance-based training.  He even ran a race against Lydiard’s star half-miler, Peter Snell (full disclosure: Snell beat him by seven seconds during an All-comers meet at Stanford.) 

Roy eventually did finish his degree at Dartmouth, despite being on “the Dean’s 8-year plan.”

For the next two years, he taught and coached at Lyndon Institute in Northeastern Vermont, where he could apply what he had learned. Here, he turned out a multi-time state XC/TF champion. 

“If Life Is All Paperwork, I’d Rather Be Writing Training Plans Than Lesson Plans.” – Coach Roy Benson

In the Fall of 1969, it was time for something new. Benson moved South to serve as a Graduate Assistant at the University of Florida while he pursued a MPE degree, focusing on exercise physiology. He worked with the “880-yard guys” that year.

“Of the nine guys who made the final at SEC that year, five were Gators,” Coach Benson remembers.

In 1970, UF Head Coach Jimmy Carnes promoted Coach Benson to be Florida’s first ever full-time Assistant Head Coach. He stayed for ten years, eventually taking over both as the Head Men’s Cross Country Coach and the Head Men’s Track Coach.

“Florida was true on-the-job training. I’d had good success up until that point, but the collegiate idea took some getting used to as I tried to blend classic interval training with endurance-based workouts modeled by the Florida Track Club guys like Olympian Jack Bacheler and Frank Shorter.”  

In the 1970’s, the University of Florida had separate men’s and women’s programs. When Coach Benson started, the men’s program could give out a total of eight full scholarships per year to their incoming student-athletes. The potential for 32 full scholarships existed, although it was rarely – if ever – realized, since any athlete on scholarship who quit before graduation could not be replaced.

“Tennessee and Florida seemed to be the first universities in the SEC to figure out track was important.  That turned the SEC meet into basically a dual meet,” Coach Benson mused. “The other SEC schools became jealous of our success and began passing little rules about how many people you can have on scholarship and how many people you could bring to the championships.”

Problems With Track & Field

These days, programs are given only 18 scholarships for the women and 12.6 for the men. In many other ways, Coach Benson feels that the sport of track and field has lost its way.

“No casual fan knows what the hell a two-meter high jump is or how far 1500 meters are!  When we started using metric measurements and moved away from head-to-head interscholastic competition, we lost Joe Six-Pack track fan,” Coach Benson quipped.

He mourns the loss of dual meets between rivals like Florida and FSU or Georgia and Georgia Tech. “You go to a track meet now and everyone’s just trying to qualify for something by hitting a time, but fans don’t know what time they have to make. Plus, there’s no points awarded and no team wins. It’s a shame.”

“At the NCAA Regional meet last year, I’m thinking, ‘why the hell don’t they have a team championship like at the Nationals? Every team has all the people who’ve met the regional standards, so why not score points? Why not create a competition between the Northeast and the Southeast and the Midwest?  It’s a missed opportunity.”

In some ways, Benson understands; “they’re trying to get the best out of the individual athlete and help them improve without doubling and tripling them.” Nevertheless, he misses the head-to-head, duke-it-out competition that made attending a track meet so much fun.

Shoe Dog

“My boss at UF, Jimmy Carnes, was an organizational, administrative, and promotional genius,” shared Benson.  “While helping me develop those skills, I also learned that he had an entrepreneurial spirit.”   

Around 1970 they heard about a new shoe company started by Phil Knight called “Blue Ribbon Sports.” BRS imported Tiger shoes as the first widespread alternative to Adidas or Puma.  The coaches pooled some money to open up a dealership they called the “Running Gator Company.”  They operated for a year and a half on the sly, out of the track equipment room.  Throughout this time, Benson had the opportunity to work with Jeff Johnson, who was in charge of the East coast distributorship of Tiger Running Shoes for Blue Ribbon Sports.

“On a trip to Vermont to see friends, I stopped by Jeff’s office in Boston to introduce myself. He said, ‘oh good, you’re here; let me show you something!’ and walked me into the back room,” Benson recalls. Johnson held up what looked like an Adidas soccer shoe with the three stripes stripped off. “He had taped this fat, swooshy-looking paper thing on the side. He held it up real proudly and said, ‘what do you think? We’re going to have our own brand of shoe; it’s going to be called Nike.”  Johnson, in fact, had come up with the name during Knight’s urgent effort to re-name the company.

At this point Benson laughs. “I took one look at it and said, ‘well hell, that’s never going to sell!” It looked like a football cleat: a big, clunky, heavy black leather kind of thing.

“So that was the beginning of my ill-fated first business venture,” Benson joked.

Sports Corps

Soon after, Benson read about a program called “Sports Corps” in Track and Field News.  Developing countries were asking the USA National Peace Corps office for help preparing their athletes for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Thinking this would be a good adventure, Benson talked Carnes into giving him a one-year sabbatical to help the Philippines’ track team prepare for the Olympics. Since their shoe company wasn’t incredibly profitable, the pair sold it to some Florida Track Club guys for $1 and Benson set off to the Philippines for the Peace/Sports Corps.

By the time Benson returned after the Olympics in the Fall of 1972, the guys who had purchased The Running Gator Company had built a Sears Garden Shed storage facility and completely filled it top-to-bottom with Nike shoe boxes: swoosh, swoosh, swoosh.  “I guess I made a bad call on that one,” frowned Benson.

Carnes soon went on to found the Athletic Attic running shoe store with a new partner, Marty Liquori. “By 1976, their business was booming so much the University AD forced him to resign from his coaching position. ‘You have to make up your mind: be a coach or be a business man.’ By the time Jimmy sold his business, there were 300 Athletic Attic stores.”

Coaching & Beyond

In 1973, Benson took over as the Head Cross Country Coach at the University of Florida – a position he held for the rest of the decade.  He soon started his own side business, directing running camps during the summers. 

His first was at Brevard College in NC that was originally named the “Florida Track Club (FTC) Distance Runners Camp”, after FTC’s Frank Shorter and Jack Bacheler. The duo had placed first and ninth (respectively) in the Munich marathon. Their FTC teammate Jeff Galloway had also made the team in the 10k.

“I really wanted to capitalize on the Gainesville connection with those guys. A lot of the other stars from Florida Track Club were there to be trail guides and staff coaches,” Benson explained. “That first year, I think we had thirteen people come and I lost $50. I never did tell my wife that.”

After seventeen years, the camp moved to UNC-Asheville, where it soon grew to draw over three hundred high school runners per week each summer. After owning and directing the camp for 40 years, Benson sold the camp to US Sports Camps and retired.

Two years after founding FTC Distance Runners Camp, he also co-founded Green Mountain Running Camp in Vermont. He co-owned and co-directed that enterprise for forty-some years until selling his interest to US Sports Camps.

Ten years into his collegiate coaching career, Coach Benson decided to pursue a new adventure. This was now his third business venture while coaching full time.

“My former physiology professor, Dr. Chris Zauner, and I had started a little fitness company out of a regional hospital. Doctors referred patients to us; we did all these physiological measurements and then reported back every month on the progress their patients made.”

Zauner was the scientist and Benson was the workout designer.  The pair concentrated on exercise prescriptions for each participant, featuring individualized target heart rates. 

“This was cutting edge work for a hospital to support.  We described it as ‘fitness rehabilitation’, but we were just jogging people back into shape while being scientifically sound and medically safe.”

After building up the program, the hospital bought them out and hired Benson as the Director of their new Wellness Center.

The Peter Principle

In 1983, Benson heard that the Atlanta Track Club was looking for an Executive Director and Peachtree Road Race Director. He was excited to move back towards a singular focus on running and relocated to Atlanta.

“I quickly discovered the ‘Peter Principle’,” Benson admits. “I had mistakenly moved up to a position that was not my area of strength. They were really looking for an MBA, not a Masters in Physical Education.”  After a few years, he and the Board came to a mutual conclusion he needed to step down.

“I soon confirmed that I’m just a serial entrepreneur,” Benson observed. He next started and successfully ran a private coaching and consulting business called “Running Limited.”  Those activities fit in nicely with his growing summer camps.   

“I Finally Admitted To Myself That I Was Just A Late Bloomer Businessman. I Thought, ‘I Can Do This. I Can Have My Own Company. I Can Do It My Way. I Don’t Need A Check From Someone Else,” Benson Remembers. “It’s Like Being An Athlete: You Keep Learning And Maturing And Working Smarter.”

During this time, he discovered joy in writing about running, beginning with his monthly magazine columns.  This was the beginning of what become four books about his Effort-Based Training philosophy based on the heart rate response to workouts. 

Before long, however, neighboring Marist Catholic School recruited him to help coach cross-country as a part-time assistant Community Coach: a position that he held from 1993 until 2009.  By his third year, Marist started a streak of 16 total (9 girls and 7 boys) Georgia State Championships. His individuals won a total of 21 state XC/TF titles.  Despite all of the impact Benson had in the running world, he called his years coaching at Marist the peak of his coaching career.

Eric Heintz, now the Atlanta Track Club High Performance Director, eventually joined the Marist coaching staff and soon became Head Coach.  Benson came to respect Heintz’ coaching style with regards to the highly motivated kids that they worked with at Marist. They both believed it wasn’t necessary to constantly push the runners to work harder.

“Here was a guy who was more conservative in training than I am! We had to constantly say, ‘Slow the damn thing down, slow down!’ Stop trying to please the three P’s: your parents, the priests and The Pope.”

In 2009, Coach Benson retired and moved back to Florida, where he currently serves as a volunteer coach at Fernandina Beach High School. He also offers weekly “Misery Loves Company” track workouts for the community and members of the Amelia Island Runners Club.  Runners from 7 to 77 years old and of all speeds and ability attend. After the workout, they adjourn to Townies for pizza and beer. 

While cutting back at the high school, Benson still serves as a mentor to the girls’ and boys’ coaches. 

“Still a camper, Benson serves the relocated Asheville camp as Chief of the Wise Elders.  It is now the Wingfoot Running Camp at U of Alabama-Huntsville as a development program of the Atlanta Track Club.  “I’m just the institutional memory with the job of keeping my successor, Georgia Tech coach Alan Drosky, from repeating any of my bad ideas,” admits Benson.

“My Dad Always Said, ‘Too Soon We Get Old And Too Late We Get Smart,’ Benson Shared. “Even Though I’m Getting Older And Slower, I Haven’t Given Up On Getting Smarter.”  

His latest writing effort was the second edition in 2020 of Heart Rate Training with friend  and co-author Declan Connolly, PhD.  Connolly also happens to be a protégé of Dr. Zauner.   Together the two editions have sold over 30,000 copies and have been translated into Czech, Italian, French and three dialects of Chinese.

An earlier book, Coach Benson’s ‘Secret’ Workouts   explores his coaching philosophy, which he called “effort-based training”: a modification heart rate response with the classic perceived exertion scales that gives coaches additional options for designing workout paces.”

The book explores his coaching philosophy, which he called “effort-based training”: a modification heart rate response with the classic perceived exertion scales that gives coaches additional options.

Original Gangster Of Running Coach Roy Benson is at camp in North Carolina at this very moment, doubtlessly bending some young ears with decades and decades and decades – so many decades – of hard-earned, closely-observed wisdom.

I like how he keeps it simple. I can understand simple.

Coach Benson’s Wise Counsel

The longer you run, the stronger you get.  The stronger you get, the longer you can run.  The longer you run and stronger you get, the faster you can run.  If all that doesn’t seem pretty obvious, please permit me to restate it from my old coachly wisdom  point of view. 

In that first sentence, I mean “longer” in terms of years.   It works this way: as the years of running add up for high school runners, maturing bodies simply get stronger with the development of greater muscle mass.  So, is it just a coincidence that strong seniors usually run faster than weak freshmen?   Not at all.  Mother Nature has made these older runners stronger.  In short, you want to get faster?  Just get older!

In that 2^nd sentence, as your muscles get stronger, you will find yourself capable of running more.  You go for longer Long Runs.  And also adding more miles on Easy, Recovery Days.  Maybe adding a few more miles on your warmdown. Typically, during summer training before his or her first cross country season, a high school frosh averages from little to a few miles per week, maybe up to 15 or 20 tops.  But, by their senior years, most serious runners are getting in at least 40 and often up to 60 miles per week of summer training.  The difference is because mature bodies are simply stronger and can therefore handle the higher mileage without breaking down with injuries like tendonitis or stress fractures.  Because there usually is a limit of 3 to 4 miles per workout of how much high intensity training you can, and need to do, some more easy, aerobic mileage is the most sensible way to increase your weekly mileage.  Running more steps against the resistance of gravity is a great form of progressive resistance training.  And, guess what, the more you run, the stronger you get.  In short, you want to run faster?  Just run more as you get older!

While all this is pretty logical, here is the not-so-logical result of the above improvement.   Once you have run a PR (at whatever speed it takes) at your best-all-out-emotional-mental and physical effort, that 100% effort becomes your standard for enduring pain, torture and agony.  Now, trust me on this: giving it the old college try at 105% or 110% is impossible.  Your body is too smart to fall for that baloney.  You try to take it over 100% and it simply shuts down.  You slow down and/or collapse.   Therefore, as you get older and stronger, you DO NOT need to train harder in order to get faster.  By “harder” I mean, on a effort scale of 60-100%, you don’t need to train at higher and higher levels of intensity.  For example, you DO NOT start running your easy runs at 75% effort instead of the old 70% effort and your tempo runs at 90% instead of 85%. 

So the good news is that all efforts in the standard training and racing zones never feel any different.  A slow recovery day pace at 70% always feels easy while a max VO2 speed workout at 95% always is just as hard as it used to be.   As you get older, stronger, and faster, your paces per mile simply speed up, but always at the same perception of how easy or hard they feel. 

It helps to think about it this way: your PR races at “drop dead” levels of exhaustion at the finish line can never feel any worse.  At your new faster PR paces, you simply end the pain, torture and agony sooner! 

As a mature senior, at 100% all-out PR effort of 17:21 won’t feel a bit different than that freshman 100% all-out PR for 5k of 23:46.  They are both just as difficult; the faster time simply means that you suffer less because it is over quicker. 

And if 100% always feels the same, so will each of your other types of workouts in the typical effort zones.  All your various workouts will be run at faster speed, but the same efforts will be perceived as just as easy or hard as before.  That freshman’s  perception of a 70% effort at 9:25 per mile is the exact equivalent of a senior’s 7:02 pace perception of how easy it feels. They both would describe the workout as slow and easy.

 Nice to know the benefits of aging, isn’t it?   The hard things in life, as you get better at doing them, just take less time.  

*Director Emeritus of SMRC and GMRC, Coach Benson now serves as The Chief of The Council of Wise Elders for both camps.