50 Years ago, I got a pamphlet from the National Joggers Association.  Their idea was that a really good way to celebrate our nation’s birthday, if you are a runner, would be to run 1776 miles between the 4th of July in 1976 and the4th of July in 1977.  I calculated that that would require less than 5 miles a day and my regular runs were longer than that.

No problem.

Well, it was a problem.  I signed up and among the things they sent me was a card to record my miles.  It had a lot of boxes like the ones you see here.  And not to spoil the ending or anything, this picture shows that on July 2, I ran a regular run of 6.2 miles.  That brought me to 1775 miles for the year.  Then I ran another mile in the afternoon, about which I will say more later.

I put “no problem” in a paragraph by itself because the five mile calculation required that you did not get sick during the year and that you stayed injury-free during the year.  I missed both of those.

I gave it a good run during most of the year and that included both summer—hot and humid—in western Pennsylvania and winter—cold and humid.  Also icy.  And with all that, I would up in March of 1977 283 miles behind the pace.  So that means the regular five miles a day, plus enough to begin to eat into that deficit.

There were very few days that spring when I did not get two runs in; one to keep my pace and one to begin paying off the debt.

The last mile was share with Ron Galbraith, the basketball coach at Westminster College.  Ron was one of the most competitive people I ever knew and it was only friendship that made him willing to ease back a little and let me break the tape.

New Wilmington being a little town, the local newspaper sent someone down to cover the “event.”  The picture is from their story.  Some friends came down to see the last mile.  I remember confetti and a lovely bouquet of daffodils from a friend’s front lawn.

There is nothing particularly meritorious about running a lot of miles in one particular year, but I remember when I looked at the deficit and decided to do it anyway.  And that decision really has stood me in good stead since then.

I remember too, the little games I added.  I would run three miles before my shower in the morning.  It wasn’t the best time to run,  especially if I had been out after dark the previous evening, but I needed the extra miles.  I was living on “new faculty circle” at the time and that circle was half a mile long.  I got into the habit of adding that half mile to whatever the distance it was that I had just run.

I counted on those half miles adding up on the chart.  But what I didn’t count on was that once I started calling that last half mile a “victory lap,” I noticed that my body began to treat that last half mile as “not really running.”  I may have had a stitch in my side or a blister on my foot or a muscle that wanted to keep cramping, but that was “during the run.”  And the victory lap was not a “run;” not really.  So those conditions went away or nearly so.  That taught me a lot.

And once I adopted the “victory lap” metaphor, I began to think of the years of my life as if they represented the four laps of a mile race—twenty years to the lap.  And my years since then, every one of them, is just a victory lap.

It was a really great experience and…you know…only 50 years ago today.