8 RUNNERS
Words by Simon Lamb (@sixsecondshigh), illustrations by Jack Oelmann Perez
What makes a good runner? Is it noteworthy results and records, or something more? There are many great runners who excel at racing. But being a runner myself who rarely enters races, I don’t know my PR for any distance, and in my appreciation of athletic performance, I’ve always been interested in more than just superior timing skills. There are any number of athletes who are worthy of note despite never breaking world records. Running should be a celebration of life, not just a way to measure it.
One of my patients recently asked me if I had a favourite runner. “That‘s a hard question to answer,” I replied, as I worked through her sore, post-marathon legs. “I‘m not sure I prefer one runner over any other.” “But you have so many books on runners, you must have a favourite,” she said, as she eyed the shelves of running books that line my clinic‘s walls. “I suppose I do,” I replied, “but I have so many, and for such different reasons”.
After she left I began to pull some of the books we had been talking about off the shelves. Her question got me thinking. I realised that my favourite runners are more important to me for their style than their athletic achievements. These are runners who literally mesmerise me, runners who, through the very simple act of moving through space, answering all the questions I have ever wanted to ask about what the human body can achieve.
I laid the biographies out in front of me and turned to the photographs, creating a gallery across my clinic floor. Photographs for me are the most captivating way to see a person for who they really are, especially runners caught mid-flight, unaware they are being watched and recorded. Running is such a fluid motion, sometimes it is good to stop it — freeze that motion and see what it reveals.
My favourite runners are not necessarily the greatest runners, although many of them were at some point. None of them still hold the records they first became famous for. What attracts me to these runners is the sense of identity they manage to portray through their performance; acts that have been carved into the history of sport. The runners I admire the most are the ones who speak of personality and life.
Birds fly, fish swim, humans run. These runners illustrate that simple truth the best.
1. FRANK SHORTER
Frank Shorter was the most graceful runner and there are many wonderful photographs of him in full flight. After he won the Marathon at the Olympics in Munich, he stepped off the track looking like he had just been for a brief jog around the block. Considering this race was marred by the intrusion of an impostor — the West German student Norbert Sudhaus — Shorter still remained completely calm, not expressing a single doubt, confident that he had won gold because he knew no runner had made it past him.
2. KATHRINE SWITZER
How could I not include the iconic images of Kathrine Switzer, the pioneer of women‘s marathon running who, in 1967, became the first woman to officially enter the Boston Marathon. She did so under the name K.V Switzer to avoid detection and although she was not the only or first woman to run the race (Bobbi Gibb was also running unregistered and had done so in the previous year) her determination to run even after race director Jock Semple (seen in this illustration) tried to forcibly eject her, sets her name in stone in the running history books.
3. HAILE GEBRSELASSIE
I’m often asked why my clinic is called Six Seconds High. Jim Denison wrote a book called The Greatest — The Haile Gebrselassie Story in which he describes a meeting between Haile and a group of American journalists who were questioning him about his business projects.
An American screams out, “How big is your new building, Haile?”
“Well, I can tell you that exactly.” Haile says, “Because you see I have measured it very carefully. It’s six seconds high.”
“Excuse me,” the American says, “six seconds high?”
“Yes, six seconds high. That’s how long it takes for a stone dropped from the top floor to reach the ground.”
And immediately the room goes silent as all the reporters scribble down that line… six seconds high — such an honest and earthly metaphor to portray the essence of Haile’s beginnings and everything he has done for his country.
Modern medicine is highly sophisticated, there are a million ways to heal and fix a broken body. I read this quote when I was about to embark on a new career as a massage therapist, one of the most basic, oldest methods of healing. The way Haile described measuring his building, with such honest pride and belief in his method, when he was surrounded more accurate means, rang true to what I was about to initiate. So I chose the name Six Seconds High for my clinic and my bog in honour of Haile and as a reminder to myself to always keep things my methods simple.
4. GRETE WAITZ
Grete Waitz is one of the greatest runners of all time is. Hugely successful on the track, the Norwegian turned to the marathon, debuting in New York in 1978. She went on to win it nine times between 1978 and 1988 and in 1979 she became the first woman in history to run a marathon in under two and a half hours. She lowered the women‘s world record by nine minutes, taking the standard from Christa Vahlensieck‘s 2:34:47 down to 2:32:30 in 1978, 2:27:33 in 1979, 2:25:41 in 1980, and finally to 2:25:29, which she ran in London in 1983. But it wasn’t these statistics that drew me to her. This image shows her leading a group of men over the famous cobbled streets of Tower Bridge during The London Marathon. I love the original photograph of her. She appears so strong and yet serene amongst the pack of tired male runners, a warrior queen leading the battle.
5. DICK BEARDSLEY
Alongside Bill Rodgers is another great American working class running hero, Dick Beardsley. Beardsley’s battle against Albert Salazar at the 1982 Boston Marathon has been described as the greatest marathon that was ever raced. But it’s his own personal battles with drug addiction that make him my true hero. These days he heads up both a summer marathon running camp and a foundation providing assistance for chemical dependency, proving that running is only the start of many great athletes‘ stories.
6. JOAN BENOIT SAMUELSON
I’m a huge fan of Joan Benoit Samuelson. In 1983, the very day after Grete Waitz ran a 2:25 World Best in London, Joan ran 2:22:43 in Boston, taking more than two minutes off an already exceptional record. The new time was not beaten for another 11 years, and was the fastest time by an American woman at the Boston Marathon for 28 years. Joan was also the first Olympic Woman‘s champion at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the year the women‘s marathon was first introduced. This image of her in the classic Silver USA vest triumphantly crossing the finish line illustrates a breakthrough for woman‘s running that was beyond measure.
7. DR. GEORGE SHEEHAN
Sheehan only discovered running late in life, and is perhaps best know as running‘s very own philosopher. A cardiologist, author and medical editor for Runner‘s World magazine, in his book, Running & Being: The Total Experience, Dr. Sheehan says:
The distance runner 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 his divided self. He has found a way to make the ordinary extraordinary; the commonplace unique; the everyday eternal.
‘The commonplace unique and the everyday eternal,’ is what running gives us; a chance to make the most basic of human acts a work of art and an eternal wonder. Since the creation of the modern Olympics, we have strived as humans to become faster, higher and stronger. These runners were amongst the best of this effort. But above all, they show us that running has deeper meanings than competition and comparison. These remarkable athletes demonstrate to us that running offers an opportunity to develop a self-awareness and identity for the mind, through the body.
8. BILL RODGERS
Bill Rodgers, was a true running maverick. In this photo he is leading Garry Bjorkland and Toshihiko Seko, on his way to first place in the 1979 Boston Marathon. He‘s best known for his four victories at Boston, including three straight wins from 1978–1980 and the four straight wins he took in New York between 1976 and 1980 — undoubtedly an amazing achievement. And yet, for all that success, I still prefer to think of Rodgers as the man whose eating and training habits became legendary, who raced in holey old clothes and got locked in bathrooms, but still managed to cut deep marks into the art of marathon running.
Simon Lamb is a runner and sports massage therapist. He works in London and curates the blog sixsecondshigh.com
This feature originally appeared in Meter #0. Take out a subscription at Trackmsith.com to receive future issues of this quarterly magazine. Issue 3 will be released in February 2016.
