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by Dreary » Tue May 17, 2022 3:21 pm
In the 60's desert town of Phoenix, Arizona, you just never saw anyone out jogging unless they were on a school team. It was generally considered to be something that only weirdos would do.
Cortez High School had a great long distance coach, Emmett Smith, who also taught English and Journalism. Coach Smith ran all of the daily practices with the team and often came in first. For the team, crossing the finish line before him earned you bragging rights for the day.
While some of Coach Smith's training was pretty advanced for those days, like his version of Fartlek, which was running hard for 1 minute then walking for 1 minute repeatedly for an hour, we also had some drawbacks, like wearing sprinter's shoes for long distance, and avoiding drinking water before running (fearing we would get "water-logged" whatever that was). And so we had callouses on our feet and our tongue tended to stick to the roof of our mouth.
Despite that lack of knowledge, because of Coach Smith's strong leadership, our team ruled in our division of schools.
As for marathon distances, our standard Cross Country races was only 3 miles. And so our training focused on winning competitions of that distance. Rarely, like only once a year, did we run marathon distances for training. 20 miles is the farthest we ran, but I won that race and my name was posted on the record board in the school locker room for quite a few years after I had graduated. Vince also ran that race, and when he got home, he passed out onto his bathtub and broke his nose.
I graduated a year before Vince, so I'll give the validity of his claim the benefit of doubt. Regardless, he was a formidable long distance runner.
I haven't run much since then but Alice has.