Run It Fast®

The lonely miles stretch through the long night. It is nearing midnight, and I’ve been running seventeen hours; I have seven more to go if I’m going to turn in a respectable time for a 100-mile distance. Around three dozen of us are strung out along dirt roads on this out-and-back course across the Kansas prairie.

So widely spaced are we, no runner’s light is visible to the front or back. Vehicles and houses are rare. I run alone, as I like to do. No human turns me from what I want to see and hear, or alters the thoughts I think.

The running has affected my sight. I can distinguish shapes but details are quite blurry—the Heartland 100-cum-American Impressionism.

Read the full post by Dallas Smith by clicking HERE

Photo by Monte Lowe

Say you eclipse five state records in one race; say they were yours to begin with; say you run a 15K at 5K pace. Then you try to explain it. But you can’t explain it. It sounds like a lie, but it is true. So you end up calling it a miracle. What else could anybody call it? You might as well put that word in the title, too.

I reprised this race again on Saturday, just four days ago, but not with the miraclous results of that earlier time. At Saturday’s start, Running Journal magazine with this story in it had just appeared. That timing was no accident.

Read the full story by Dallas Smith by clicking HERE

Flower Garden in Riverside Park

Sierra Cub members doing grunt work on New York’s Riverside Park. For free. That’s what it was. But one of them was a runner. He took off to Central Park, looking for a magic place.

Lee and Willard, two of my roommates at the hostel, know I’m going. They’ll hardly raise a panic if I don’t return, none of their worry.

“Screw it! He’s a grown man, he knew what he was doing,” they’ll say.

Willard is an educated bubba from Arkansas. He despises Republicans and defies anybody bossing him around. “Let me see your supervisor’s licenses,” he demands.

Read the full story by Dallas Smith by clicking HERE

Photo by Albino Jimenez

Esto es para mi amigo Albino, even though I let you down in Nájera. I stood and watched you run alone across the bridge over Rio Najerilla and into the singeing heat toward Belorado. I could have changed my mind. I could have slung on my bottle pack and caught up. There was time – I hadn’t yet bought the bus ticket. But I didn’t. The the previous day’s heat had wrung all the juice out of me. My heart was not hard so much as weak.

Oddly, when I write about the cold day in Seville, described in the following story, my thoughts fly back to the swelter of Nájera, and my failure there.

But they were not all failures.

Read the full story by Dallas Smith by clicking HERE

On Fridays I would take Momma out for supper. One Friday we ate at Pizza Hut where I could have spaghetti. She wondered why. It was because my first race, a 10K which I’d kept a secret, was the next morning.

Four days after her death, I had surgery, and, following recovery, trained for eight weeks and ran my first marathon. Running began a new life for me. For her, life itself was a hard run. By coincidence, it ended as my new one was beginning. Endurance had threaded her days. She left it with me.

Read Dallas Smith’s full story by clicking Here

We went barreling into the roundabout too fast for the wet cobblestones. The car lurched into a sickening skid. Rafael jerked the wheel, and we swooped through the circle clean as a pin. The lucky fact that no other cars were about at that early hour helped.

My friend Albino was riding shotgun; his older brother, Rafael, was driving, and I was in the back. The brothers and I burst out laughing. We didn’t care. The danger seemed small compared to what we were rushing toward, the place where our minds already were.

Which was the XXI Maratón Ciudad de Sevilla. On this February day that had yet an hour to wait before dawning, we rushed along wet streets heading for a rendezvous with the brothers’ running club. From there, according to plan, we would all drive to the marathon at Olympic Stadium.

The Peugeot’s thermometer showed 4 degrees C and the wipers beat back the rain. A little colder and there wouldn’t be rain—which would be an improvement. As it was, we’d be both cold and wet. Staying warm enough would be a problem.

“This is as bad as it gets, unless there’s wind too,” I said.

Then the wind came…

To read the full story by Dallas Smith click HERE

With this post I broach a topic I’ve avoided ever since I started this blog: me.

So this is new. But it is not an enduring change. It is an exception, and I’ll soon shut up about the boring topic and return to my policy of staying quiet about the ever-indulgent “me.”

So, what brought this on? Why did I think anyone in the whole round world would want to read about what you will find below?

I had a pretty good year.

As a racer, that is. Maybe a remarkable year. My annual racing report summarizes it. I decided I’d put it up for whatever informational, instructional or inspirational value it may hold, and maybe it holds none. But if you are a racer also you may find it interesting. Or maybe not. Anyway, here it comes.

Beat it if you can.

Read the full story by Dallas Smith by clicking HERE (Race Results and State Records)

Morning comes to Barcelona.

The window in our seventh-floor room faces south, overlooking dark patios and balconies of apartments below. The crescent moon hangs low and a pale glow washes the eastern sky. It’ll be daylight soon. Our time is near. The marathon Albino and I’ve long aimed at will start at 8:30 this March morning, just two hours from now. I open the window and stick out my hand, the old anxious question about the weather. Barcelona hums and answers: perfect, calm and warm.

Albino and I meet our bunch in the lobby for the walk to the race. Alejandra, Jorge’s gracious wife, who is not running today, carries my camera to make pictures for me. We drift up Gran Via, a loose collection of six warriors. Morning is creeping over the city. There’s no sense of rush. Eduardo, the youngest of us, strolls with me, the oldest. Today he makes his first marathon attempt.

“How do you feel, Eduardo?”

“Pretty good. A little nervous.”

“Don’t worry. That will fly away as soon as the race starts.”

“I know.”

Read the full story by Dallas Smith by clicking Here

Photo, Jim Clark

The horde of hollow-eyed ghouls making a death march along Cookeville city streets next Saturday will turn out to be a pack of sleepy-eyed runners competing in the 2nd Annual Haunted Half Marathon. For some, the worst nightmare ever; for others, a glory-dream…

Dream? One dream weaver will be Angie Clark. No scar-faced guy with blades for fingers will catch her. The Celina native, now living in Sparta, follows a rigorous training program, regularly running farther than the race’s unlucky 13.1-mile distance…

The race goes to the fit, the trained. Others fall behind, some way behind. Bad luck for those poor wretches. Laggards will be arrested and thrown into the pit where porta potties are pumped…

Read the full story by Dallas Smith on his website by clicking HERE

- Photo by Kathy Piper -

This I didn’t know when I went: Each year they have a “special guest,” and this year it was little four-year-old Emma Smith, who was born with spina bifida and who is my great niece.

I’d never been to the Race for Jordan, had never run any race in Carthage, Tennessee. Driving down that morning I could not have known I was heading for an intersection of racing and family.

It was not the normal date for the race. The seventh running had originally been scheduled for the first Saturday in May. That was a day of storms. Dangerous lightning forced cancellation, and the race was re-scheduled for June 12th.

But I had not known any of this prior to the Sunday before the race, and the way I discovered it then was unlikely: I went to a family reunion…

To read more of Dallas Smith”s story: CLICK HERE ‘Turnaround’