Chapter 23 Running Life - 22 Theorists

22 Running Theorists George Sheehan was unlike any doctor you'll ever meet If a runner found himself on a deserted island where only one person was allowed to accompany him, who would that person be?Anyway, a cardiologist named George Sheehan from rural Red Bank, New Jersey, would be the likeliest candidate.In the entire running world, no one has reached the stature of Sheehan, and certainly no one has as much running knowledge and impact on running as he does.When he's not actually out running, he writes and reports about running, presents at conferences and symposiums related to the sport, and talks about running on television shows.He also happily talks medically to runners in the athlete's locker room, maintains extensive correspondence with athletes all over the world who suffer from foot injuries and discomfort, and has developed a system described in Chapter 15 that is now available. Widely adopted gymnastics for runners.Some said that he wanted to do so many and trivial things, that sometimes he could not help expressing annoyance; yet the good he did was undeniable.

Sean was five foot ten, thin, one hundred and thirty-six pounds, and in his late sixties.He was soft-spoken and elegant, with a wrinkled face and a tired look, but he had the body of a man of thirty.A few years ago he set a mile record for people over fifty (4:47.6) And the fifty-four-year-old man's two-mile long-distance running record (ten minutes and fifty-three seconds).But what sets him apart most is his approach to medicine and running. Sheehan is a decidedly loner in a gregarious profession.He was often an outspoken critic of doctors who said running stimulated the spine, loosened vital organs, and confused the brain.He said:

"These people should go out for a run, experience it for themselves, and not take it for granted." He even bluntly criticized those well-intentioned doctors who didn't know the situation very well. (Physicians in general are not interested in sports medicine. They tell people with sports injuries not to play sports, and the treatment is simple enough. If it doesn't improve, these doctors refer patients to orthopedic surgeons Go there.) What runners especially love about Sheehan, however, is his insistence that running is more than just a sport—it is an activity that often reveals its profound and enduring value—and his This attitude is contagious.

In fact, Sheehan is not only a doctor who studies running, but also a theoretical authority in this area.Not long ago, he wrote in a column (which has a self-deprecating title: "Running Madness") edited by Physicians and Sports Medicine: In sports, the whole of human life is compressed into a few hours; in sports there is a conversation about running. He also happily talks medically to runners in the athlete's locker room, maintains extensive correspondence with athletes all over the world who suffer from foot injuries and discomfort, and has developed a system described in Chapter 15 that is now available. Widely adopted gymnastics for runners.Some said that he wanted to do so many and trivial things, that sometimes he could not help expressing annoyance; yet the good he did was undeniable.

In sports, a person's entire life is compressed into a few hours; in sports, the emotions of a whole life can be experienced in an acre of field; in sports, a person runs through a park in New York City. Pain on the six-mile trail, die, and come back to life.Sports is a stage where a sinner can become a saint, an ordinary man an extraordinary hero, where the past and the future merge with the present.Sports are wonderfully capable of giving us zenithal experiences where we feel at one with the world and transcend all conflicts because at the end of the day we reach our full potential. Runners appreciate this insight because it lends meaning to a sweaty, grueling exercise that people don't usually ascribe to it.Reading Sheehan's article reassures one that running is as important as it appears to be.If he could consistently express such positive opinions, who among us would be skeptical?

Sheehan would not have enjoyed such an unquestionable reputation as a running theorist if he were not currently a doctor like himself.Runners are often surprised to see how willing he is to impart so much medical knowledge for free. A middle-aged marathon runner told me about what happened to him after he wrote to Sheehan: “I had some injuries running the Boston and Yonkers marathons. Then it got worse and my I can't move my hip. My knee hurts too. I'm really stuck, so I wrote Sheen a letter. He called me as soon as he got the letter. He told me it seems It was like muscular balance loss, and gave me the name of a podiatrist. I went to the doctor and he fixed it.” Another runner asked Sean why when he ran, The gas always made him uncomfortable.He said: "The gas in my stomach kept churning. Sean told me to eat less fresh fruit and raw vegetables. The problem was resolved the next day."

Sheehan started running from 1936 to 1940, in high school and college, and he ran a mile in four minutes and seventeen seconds, and a half mile in one minute and fifty-five seconds. Such a result was considered very good at that time, and it was not bad by any standard.Then he went to medical school, got married, practiced medicine, had twelve children, gained 160 pounds, and gave up the sport.When he was forty-four in 1962, he broke his tennis handle one day, so he decided to try to see if he could run again.It turned out he was still able to run.His idea was to run a five-minute mile, and to achieve that goal, he participated in a mountain cross-country race in New York's Van Cortlandt Park.He said: "I'm obsessed and this is obviously the race I'm going to be in. If you want to run fast, you do it as fast as you can, but no one pushes you to run fast. You're running through the woods and if you run on your own terms Running at speed hurts."

One day in 1968, the sports editor of The Chronicle, a local weekly in Red Bank, asked Sheehan to write an article on the Olympic Games, which were then taking place in Mexico City.Sheehan, who had written almost nothing for the public press, discovered that he not only had a talent for writing, but also that he took pleasure in it.Before long he was writing a regular column for The Chronicle, as well as writing for Physician and Sports Medicine, the now-defunct Healthy Living magazine, and World Tennis—not to mention The Runner. Regular column as medical advisor to The World (he is now its medical editor), occasionally writes articles for The New York Times, and has books published by Runner's World (among them Encyclopedia of Sports Medicine and his highly successful Dr. Sheen on Running).

He first met Joe Henderson, the future head of Runner's World, at the Olympics in Mexico City, and the two hit it off."It was rare at the time to find a guy who thought the same way I did about running, and that people didn't have to run for competition, just for fun," Henderson said. So when I started the magazine two years later, one of the first people I contacted was George.For a long time he wrote for us for free. " Today, Henderson admits, Sheehan has become one of the magazine's greatest assets."One of the main arguments he makes is that we're both running an experiment where things that work well for one person don't work at all for another," Henderson said. He's also written a lot about preventive medicine He had some disapproval among doctors as a result. They said: 'What he told people was not infallible.' They also claimed that it was illegal to make a diagnosis by phone and letter."

There's no doubt that Henderson understands the medical community's reaction to Shine -- at least some of it. One doctor said to me, "Sheehan is a nuisance. He pretends to be someone who knows everything about running. He's not. Nobody can be." He was asked a lot by difficult doctors, who turned to him when they were at a loss to heal their patients and solve their problems. "The appeal of Sheehan's writing is largely due to the unique style of his writing. It is concise, but to say it is concise is misleading. His writing, unlike most sports writing, often refers to Jung, Teal de Chardin, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Russell and others, as well as Sheehan's favorite Spanish philosopher, Ortega Gasset. Over time, this style become more natural, more fluid, and more attuned to the complex work of combining sport and philosophy. He once wrote in a column on the concept of sport: "If you're doing something you don't things, then you are on the path to liberation.If you can let it go for a minute and forget about the consequences, you're taking an even step forward.

If your mind enters another realm when you do this, you don't need to worry about your future. " Perhaps because of the general popularity of Sheehan and his work, his work has become more personal over time, not long ago he wrote: "I am an excitable, shy, bad I don't feel a hunger for justice. I don't feel happy in a carnival, I don't feel joy in a group. I'm what Brendan Gill said in The New Yorker people like the writers described. They only come into contact with each other casually, keep everything secret, never introduce anyone properly.. to me ideas are more important than people. My world is in my In the heart." The reason runners find this trait contagious is that nearly every one of them thinks—and in fact takes pride in it—that he and his fellow runners are fundamentally different.Sheehan cultivates this attitude, which he uses to reduce loneliness during his runs.He once wrote: "He is out of tune with this ordinary world, his nature and his inner laws are different from the ordinary, which is difficult for anyone including the runner to understand. But once the runner understands this , he can obey this nature, this law." Sheehan is a quiet and intelligent man, and his freshness is constantly revealed in his writing.He once wrote: "The mind must harden as fast as an artery. Don't trust any thoughts that come to mind as you sit there." Once, thinking came up with a way to refrain from overeating at home: "Everything has to be done within means. When I get home at night, I'll probably be handed a menu of pretty big and expensive meals.. Once I start Counting the cost per calorie, and keeping an eye on the right side of the menu, I quickly revert to my miserly nature." The runners realize that Sean is one of them.Because he knows that most of them run not for health, but for fun.Whereas most of the other advocates of the sport urge us to run responsibly—it’s good for us—Sheehan wants us to run for the pleasure we get from it.He recently wrote: "I started running because it was the right thing to do, and it might help my arteries, heart, and circulation in the process, but that wasn't my concern." Sheehan agrees with some cynics who say: "Physical fitness is just a brief phase in the process of learning to run well." It wasn't long after I started running that I learned who Jocha Sheehan was and how much he was respected. When I started playing, I saw him sporadically at Central Park, at Van Cortlandt Park, at various games in New Jersey and Connecticut, and two or three times in Boston; A weak-looking, shabby-looking man in the most unflattering running suit I've ever seen. On such occasions, we just nodded and said hello, we were not familiar with each other.Later, when I began to write the book, I decided that it was time to spend some time with him in Red Bank. I met Sheen at Riverview Hospital, where he is the head of the EKG department, and he took me to the cafeteria to watch the Nevsink River flow through the hospital window, while he was running in an old pair of Tigers sports shoes. The river in the distance was blue, and the sailboats were gliding to and fro at their moorings, and Sheehan said, "The tide was ten feet high there, and they had rowing races or something. Isn't it beautiful here?" It was. We went to the medical library and sat down to talk, but every now and then the phone rang and Sean wanted to talk to the runner. There was a call from somewhere in the Midwest.The opponent's hamstring was injured.Sheehan listened and said, "How do you feel when you drive? Does it hurt to drive? What shoes are you running in? You need to wear a shoe with a wider heel. I think the SL-72 might be suitable." Then Sean pushed back the chair and put his feet on the table."I answer three or four of these calls a day," he said. Unfortunately, there are too few people who know how to treat runners.If you live on the West Coast, it's fine; we have some pretty good doctors in the East as well.But if you're in the middle of the United States, there are all sorts of problems.When someone urinates with blood, it's a really pressing problem.If this happens.They are always on the phone quickly.I had a call from a guy looking for a psychiatrist who does running.Most people do this because they're looking for someone who is both professional and running. " Sheehan said he once hoped to teach doctors about running, but he has all but dismissed that idea.He continued: "These days, I want to get some articles in the press that the athletes can see. I've learned that how much we can achieve in treating runners depends on how much we can reach them. It’s not about the extent of our access to doctors.” Sheehan said that when he first mentioned Morton’s toes, hordes of runners stalked to the orthopedic surgeon’s office, confidently Tell the doctor what is wrong and ask for treatment.There is no doubt that doctors across the country must have worked many days and nights to study Morton's toe. Regardless of what other doctors may think of Sheehan's medical education system, the runners clearly love it and are happy to have it.Sheehan said: "Before Morton's toe, I really wanted to teach the doctors. But it wasn't until the athletes themselves started demanding the right treatment that it made a difference. It was a breakthrough. Now I write The article is not for the doctor at all, but for the patient, who wants the patient to educate his doctor. Most runners know more about physiology, biomechanics, and the human foot than doctors do. If you read "Aerobics" by Ken Courant, you'll know more about exercise physiology than the average physician.I have almost given up on the medical profession. " Before I left for Red Bank, I made a deal with my wife.Although I feel well, she has been pushing me for a checkup for some time now.I told her that I would not only consult Sean but would faithfully carry out any suggestion he made.Now I ask him what he thinks a man who runs ten miles a day without any symptoms should do. Sheehan replied: "Annual sugar checks are a waste of time. It's even dangerous for runners. You could end up with a doctor who doesn't like your EKG, and before you know that, you've been sacked." Sent to Mayo Clinic for a coronary study. You have to pay attention to your body, that's a job that machines can't do. Stress tests, for example, are of little use to athletes—and not always very useful to others.We conduct stress tests at a temperature of 70 degrees and a humidity of 40 percent.You haven't eaten for two hours and you're surrounded by people watching carefully.This isn't usually the case when you're out for a run.Maybe the doctor tells you to run at ten-minute mile pace, but your body tells you, 'No, that's too fast today. 'You can discover this yourself.But if you can find a doctor who is not emotional, I think we can do some tests, and if something goes wrong later, we can compare, and there is still value in this test.Other than that, what you find out during your annual physical is either something you already know, or is not important to you. " I asked Sheen what, in his opinion, was the reason for the appeal of his work.He replied, "I don't understand. These little old ladies who take care of their bodies and rations often come to the hospital and say, 'I love reading your books.' One of them stopped me in the corridor once. Say, 'Doctor, how do you handle the heat?'" According to Sheehan's description, his writing is as strenuous and laborious as polishing a diamond.He said: "It takes me ten to twelve hours to write six or eight hundred words, not including the time spent conducting experiments. It often happens that: I wrote something, but then I wasn't sure if it was right, so I went out for a run to see if that was the case.Only occasionally do I write an article like pulling the handle on a vending machine.I wrote in a swish, and the whole article was about to be completed.All that needs to be done at this point is finishing. ’ Sheen sometimes handles this with enviable dexterity: Where are the heroes?They took away the simplicity and piety and the easy answers of another age.Our lack of heroes is a sign of the maturity of our age.Recognize that everyone has reached adulthood and has what it takes to make life fulfilling.Yet such achievement requires courage and endurance, above all the will to be someone, however unique that person may be.That's when you can say, "I've found my hero, and that's me." Although Sheehan knows his writing is particularly appealing to runners, he doesn't dwell on his accomplishments.He said: "My articles are kind of funny. I never thought I'd write a decent column again. I baffle myself every time. I once told Joe Henderson that I was like a badass The golfers are waiting for someone to replace them, and they really do a good job. But there is no replacement."