July 2026 Alumni Update
- Robert Braile, '77
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
Bison,
The request came earnestly. Could I read your running logs?
It came from a current team member, a distance runner and a rising senior. He asked me several months ago, late in the indoor season. He wanted to know if I could bring all four years of my logs to campus the next time I visited, so he could read them.
He knew of the tradition of Bucknell distance running back to 1970, when Art Gulden arrived on campus as the new head coach of cross country and track & field and launched that tradition. He, the distance runner, knew of our accomplishments, impressive especially in the early decades. We were a team that came from nowhere in 1970 to having two cross country NCAA individual qualifiers in 1976, another individual qualifier in 1977, and a team qualifier in 1978, followed by nine team qualifiers and four individual qualifiers from 1979 to 1994. The women's team followed, with an individual qualifier in 1997 and a team qualifier in 1999. It was success enabled by every runner through those years, from our first runner to our last runner, carrying each other. He knew of our legendary hundred mile weeks, the many miles we ran. He had his workouts to run, from his coach. He just wanted to read about our workouts, from our coach.
I was touched, of course, profoundly moved by a Bucknell distance runner now, wanting to read about a Bucknell distance runner then, half a century ago. I promised him I'd bring my logs to campus on my next visit, which was to be in April for the Bison Outdoor Classic. I cautioned him I'd have to locate them first, buried in a box somewhere in my basement, untouched all those years. But I promised him I'd find them. Which I did, indeed buried in a box, five volumes of old, unmarked, and weathered salt-and-pepper notebooks, filled with handwritten entries documenting every workout and every race I ran, from the fall of 1973 to the spring of 1977, prehistoric when compared with Strava and the other online logs now used. But in my haste to leave for campus, I neglected to pack them. Could you bring them to Leagues?, he asked at the Classic, with patience I didn't deserve, referring to the Patriot League Outdoor Track & Field Championships in May at Navy. This time I remembered. But we never had an opportunity at the meet to share them.
As said, the logs are notebooks, the workouts on paper rather than on screen. I couldn't just email him a link. So when I returned home, I decided to scan and email him the passage of my logs I thought might be most interesting to a rising senior in the summer of 2026--my workouts from the summer of 1976, when I was a rising senior. Twelve weeks of workouts on twenty-four pages, senior Bucknell distance runner to senior Bucknell distance runner, half a century apart. I added a note on the highlights and the lowlights of the summer. On the brighter side, the nine consecutive hundred mile weeks and the 10,000 meter road race I'd won. On the darker side, the fatigue in the final three weeks, each just under a hundred miles, exhaustion deepened by having remained on campus for the summer rather than gone home, having taken a graduate English seminar, having worked in construction to pay the bills, and having survived on nutritionless chicken patties scavenged from the kitchen freezer at Kappa Sig, which let me rent a room, even though I wasn't a member. It wasn't an easy summer.
While I thought the workouts might be interesting to him experientially, rising senior to rising senior, I was less certain they'd be interesting to him physiologically, distance running having evolved over the last half a century. Unlike the team now, I did no strength work, no cross training, no stretching, and no speed work that summer, other than the 10,000. I did no fartlek runs, no progression runs, and no tempo runs--what we called lifts and cooks--those to be done during the school year. My sense of pace was approximate at best; I simply ran as I felt that day. I was oblivious to biometrics, unaware of the need to monitor my heart rate, my blood oxygen level, and other parameters, as distance runners now do, Garmin as a company still thirteen years away from being created. I ignored diet and hydration, despite running in the oppressive heat and humidity of a Lewisburg summer, Furnace Road aptly named. I ran in state-of-the-art Nikes that were sandals compared with what's worn now. My training that summer was as prehistoric as my logs.
Except for high mileage. It turns out hundred mile weeks have a history in this sport that persists to this day.
High mileage was the American distance running culture of the time, as those of us who ran then surely recall. The more miles, the better. The culture was a confluence of many influences, including the training philosophies of legendary coaches like New Zealand's Arthur Lydiard and Australia's Percy Cerutty, both of whom coached some of the world's greatest distance runners of the mid-twentieth century, from 1964 Olympic gold medalist Peter Snell of New Zealand to 1960 Olympic gold medalist Herb Elliott of Australia. But in the United States, the culture arose largely as a consequence of the extraordinary evolution and success of American distance running great Frank Shorter, a 4:30 high school miler in 1965, who went on to win the NCAA six-mile title at Yale in 1969, national titles in the three mile and six mile in 1970 and 1971, and then the 1972 Olympic marathon, the race that ignited American distance running. Shorter and his Florida Track Club teammates Jack Bacheler and Jeff Galloway were known in the 1970's for high mileage, hundred-sixty mile weeks not unusual. That training philosophy endures. Conner Mantz, who last year set the American record in the marathon at 2:04:43, regularly runs hundred-twenty mile weeks, for instance.
But when I emailed my log from the summer of 1976, I did so for a reason that transcended training philosophies. I did so because what resonated most from this earnest request by a senior Bucknell distance runner to a senior Bucknell distance runner, half a century apart, was the past touching the present, the past informing the present, the past sheltering the present, the past inspiring the present. I did so because of the tradition of Bucknell distance running, a home for us all, past and present alike. I'd like to believe Art Gulden, in launching the tradition in 1970, was perhaps suggesting as much in his July 26, 1974 letter, writing "If you want to talk--just call collect anytime at my house." He was telling us he'd always be there, touching, informing, sheltering, inspiring, sustaining the tradition as home. As alumni, we're there for the team now, as he was there for the team then.
--Robert Braile '77
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