Elite racer Beardsley will speak at Hogeye

If there was an elevation chart tracking Dick Beardsley’s running career, it would look something like the original course for the Hogeye Marathon in Fayetteville: up and down and up, down, up.

His ups have been steeper even than Hogeye’s notorious hills were in the days before course revisions gave the marathon a kinder disposition: winning the London Marathon;

setting course records at Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota and the Napa Valley Marathon in California; his “Duel in the Sun” with Alberto Salazar at the 1982 Boston Marathon and the positive attention it still brings;

making the Guinness World Records as the only man to run 13 consecutive personal best marathons; winning top dairy herd in his county fair, two years in a row; entering the National Distance Running Hall of Fame …

When Beardsley, 58, speaks Saturday night at the pasta supper before Sunday’s Hogeye Marathon and Relays, he plans to talk about those triumphs and tell some funny stories on himself. But if the audience is willing, he also wants to talk about his descents - catastrophic accidents, 20 surgeries, four years of addiction to prescription painkillers, the death of his father, arrest and conviction for forging prescriptions, inpatient and outpatient drug treatment.

And Feb. 12, 1997, the first day in the uphill climb that is sobriety. When Beardsley talks about running hills, he speaks from experience.

“A lot of people, if they look at my running resume, they see I’ve run marathons in that 2:08 to 2:09 range, and they think that I was this great quality runner right out of my mother’s womb and started running as a young kid,” he said last week.

“And really, mine was about the exact opposite. … I was terrible.”

Really, his is a story about hard work.

A shy kid in high school, he decided that the way to get a date was to earn a letter jacket, so he went out for football - once. At 130 pounds, he switched to the track team - where he was not a standout.

“I remember the first day of practice we did a three-mile run and I had to walk the last mile,” he said.

But he kept trying, and after years of work, he became a top flight American distance runner, a potential Olympian.

He had a big career as a runner.

DISASTER

Seven years after his near win at Boston, Beardsley was home on his dairy farm and using an auger to move corn into a bin when the machine grabbed and mauled him. Doctors stitched him back together; he relearned how to run.

Until the day “a lady run a stop sign and smucked our car.” More surgery patched him up, and he even resumed training … until the day he was hit by a truck while running in a snowstorm. That led to a two-week stay in the hospital.

A month later, his Bronco flipped and rolled, also during a snowstorm. Again his back and neck were damaged. Another day, the ground collapsed as he hiked along a cliff.

“Long story short,” he said, “I had 20-some surgeries putting my body back together and ended up getting addicted to narcotic painkillers. And I was a kid that didn’t drink, smoke, had never done any illicit drug.”

He wants to talk about his addiction because, he said, “so many people in different communities around the country, they think, ‘Well, it doesn’t happen in our town.’ Anybody that believes that has the blinders on. So many people think, ‘If we don’t think about it, and we don’t talk about it, nobody will think it’s a problem, and it will just kind of go away.’

“But it’s only making the problem worse when we try to hide it and don’t talk about it.” ON HILLS

Although he strained a hamstring recently while in Jacksonville, Fla., for a speaking engagement, Beardsley plans to run the half-marathon at Fayetteville.

Fayetteville is hilly. Beardsley said that, after all his body has been through (including two knee replacements) he’s still a good downhill runner.

He’s not so fast going uphill anymore, but he’s working on that.

“When you come to an uphill, the key is try to keep the same effort that you’ve been using, like say if you’re running on the flat,” he said. “Now, effort and pace are two entirely different things. If you try to hold the pace that you’ve been running on the flats while going up a hill, it’s going to come back to haunt you.

“But if you use the same effort, it shouldn’t take that much out of you. But you will slow down a little bit.

“I also tell people that every time there’s an uphill - just about all the time unless you’re at the finish line and you have no more race left - there’s going to be a downhill. Take advantage of those downhills. … You can run downhill faster than race pace and still be recovering at the same time.

“A lot of people, they tend to put the brakes on and kind of stop themselves going down the hill instead of taking advantage of it.

“If it’s a real steep hill, obviously you can’t just free-fall down the hill, but for most hills, coming down them, you can open up your stride and let gravity pull you down.

“Once you get the hang of that, ohmigosh, you can take some major minutes off your racing times.”

So when you do hill training, also practice downhills, he said, and not only so you’ll be fast in your race. The eccentric contractions of downhilling can shred the muscles on front of the thighs, the quadriceps. Train them to take the pounding.

Make that over-train.

“Before I ran Boston in 1982 - I’m not making this up,” he said, interrupting himself to laugh, “for about 2 ½, three months, every day I would sit in a chair and I would take my fist and I would pound each one of my quads as much as 1,500 to 2,000 times, as hard as I could.

“I thought, ‘It’s got to help them a little bit. But even if it’s not,’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘I know nobody else is beating their legs this hard. It’s got to give me a little bit of an advantage.’

“Whether it helped my legs that day in Boston? Huh.” He laughed some more.

“But mentally, though, it made me just kind of focus on the race and know that, ‘OK, I’m doing that little bit extra that hopefully will help.’”

(He demonstrated his method as part of a public talk show recorded by Runner’s World magazine in 2012 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the 1982 Boston Marathon, available online at tinyurl.com/ duelinsun.)

“I’ve been running now for going on 41 years, and I can’t even dream about how fast I used to run back in my younger, more competitive days,” he said. “But I still want to train, I still like to race and love to compete.”

ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 03/24/2014

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