George’s Last Lap

By Bob Cullinane

I met George Sheehan when he was dying. At least that’s how he put it. “You ever see a dying man?” he asked when I called to schedule an interview. “It’s not a pretty sight.” He was right. When I spotted him slumped in a big orange chair in the outpatient ward at Riverview Hospital in Red Bank, he looked nothing like an athlete. Nothing like a world-class runner. Nothing like the soul of the sport he pioneered.

He was undergoing a blood transfusion, and his eyes were red-rimmed and droopy. His arms were pocked with sores, and his shoulders poked through his sweater like the ends of a wooden hanger. I walked over and he lifted his head. The look of pity on my face was hard to shake, and he knew it. “Well,” he grumbled after an uneasy pause, “who’d you expect? Sharon Stone?”

It was the first day of my brief friendship with George Sheehan, the writer, lecturer, and “philosopher-king of running,” as Bill Clinton once called him. Sheehan was known internationally as a leader of the seventies fitness movement and intimately to runners as the voice of the middle-of-the-packers. While Ken Cooper and Jim Fixx told us how to exercise, Sheehan told us why. He spoke of struggle and pain. He wrote of the heroes within us and the courage we unleashed while running. He told us that we were no less than Greek gods when we laced our sneakers and that man’s biggest challenge could be discovered—and met—in a five mile race.


-- "The runner need not break four minutes in the mile or four hours in the marathon. It is only necessary that he runs and runs and sometime suffers. Then one day he will wake up and discover that somewhere along the way he has begun to see order and law and love and Truth that makes men free." --


Sheehan wrote that in Running & Being, his second book and 1978 best-seller. It has just been re-published by his family because, as his son Michael told me, “this stuff should not be lost. There is a whole new generation of runners who haven’t read my father, and they should.”

When I interviewed George on that August morning in 1993, neither of us could know he would be dead in three months. And I could not know just how much our time together would mean to me. “Cullinane,” the voice boomed over the phone after the article appeared. “You made me sound like Woody Allen.”

“George?” I said.

“Don’t worry.” He said with a cough. “I like Woody Allen.”

“Good,” I said. “Me too.”

“Hey, Cullinane. I really like the photo of me too. Think I could get a copy?”

Two days later, I was at the door of his beachfront home in Ocean Grove, a huge former hotel where he and his wife, Mary Jane, raised their twelve children. Through the sheer curtain, I saw him working his way down the stairs one step at a time, taking several minutes to reach the door. “Got it?” he asked, and I handed him the manila envelope. “Gonna frame it. Makes me look like Julius Caesar.”

“Woody Allen and Julius Caesar,” I said. “Quite a combination.”

“Yeah,” he said. “A wisecracking dictator. That’s exactly what I am.”

A week later, the phone rang and it was George again. “Cullinane,” he rasped.

“Hi, George. How are you?”

“Not a good question to ask a dying man,” he said.

“Sorry,” I answered, “I didn’t mean it like…”

“You like Italian food?” he interrupted.

Thinking it was a dinner invitation, I said, “Yeah, I love it.”

“What about jazz? You like that?”

Where the heck was he going with this? “Uh, sure. I like jazz.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “But it’s not like musicals. That’s the only music that survives. The songs from musicals are the only ones we commit to memory.”

This, I would learn, was not the rambling of an old man. This was just George, a man with a vast, active mind, always looking to stay a few steps ahead.

“I got a letter here you might be interested in,” he said. “From a guy in Togo who reads my columns. Togo! Imagine that! C’mon over.” I was invited in this time. The living room was filled with books and the warm, yellow shafts of afternoon sun.

“Thank God for the morphine,” he said as he led me in. “I don’t know why every cancer patient doesn’t get it.” He showed me the letter, but it was clear there was more on his mind. “Y’know,” he said, “this battle between me and cancer…I’m gonna lose. I gotta lose. In the meantime, I need to work on my own salvation.”

He sat in a chair, his knob by shoulders again poking through. “Think about it, Cullinane,” he growled, his blue eyes narrowing. “Someday you’ll wake up with your disease, and then everything that was on the back burner will move up. Things you never thought you’d have to face.”

“Like?”

“Like owning up. Like making up for all the trouble you’ve caused.” He paused a moment. “Well, it’s not like I have a lot to worry about. Hell, I haven’t caused that much trouble.” For the next 45 minutes or so, we talked about baseball, running shoes, God, foreign cars, and family. “If there’s anything you learn when you’re dying, it’s that you have to tell your family how much you love them,” he said. “Do it now and avoid the rush.”

This, I understood, was as much about me as him. Talking about himself came easy, but offering advice was not his game. So he had to disguise it, to hold it up to the light and hope I would see.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Do you like to run alone or with a group?”

“Alone, mostly.”

“Me too,” he said. “So someday we’ll have to run together. We’ll see who talks first.” When I left that day, we stood at the door and he put his hand on my shoulder. It was unexpected and tender. “Y’know, Cullinane,” he said, setting me up for the punch line, “I’m surprised I find you interesting.”

A few weeks later, I ran the Belmar 5, a popular, end-of-summer race. After finishing, I walked over to the tents to get water and a bagel. “Hey, Cullinane,” I heard. “How’d you do?” It was George, standing in the shade of a tent, surrounded by friends and admirers. He looked bright and cheery under his white cap.

“Not bad for me,” I answered. “Thirty-four (minutes).”

“C’mere,” he called. “I want you to meet the guy who beat you.”

The guy was Frank Shorter, an Olympic gold medalist and one of America’s top runners at any distance. We exchanged race stories, with George listening like a patient kid. “Ever run with George?” Shorter asked me at one point. “No,” I said. “I heard he likes to talk when he runs, and I can’t stand all that chatter.”

George took the bait. “You wait, Cullinane,” he said. “I’m saving all my best lines for our run together.”

Over the next two months, George and I talked a half-dozen times on the phone. Some conversations were brief, like the time he called about a story I’d written. “Good article,” he said without identifying himself, and then—click!—he hung up. Other times he felt like talking, often interrupting himself with, “I hope you’re taking notes, Cullinane. You’re gonna want to remember this when I’m gone.”

I asked if I could stop at the house, but he said he couldn’t take the stairs anymore” and, anyway, I don’t want you coming up to my sanctuary.” Fact was, George was closing in on death and, like running, he preferred doing it alone.

George Sheehan died on November 1, 1993. At his funeral mass, I stood in the back of a packed church and listened to his children, all twelve of them, make him proud with their words. Afterward, I drove home, changed into my running clothes, and walked to the boardwalk. The sky was gray and the ocean was calm. On Ocean Avenue, I could see his house—big, empty, and, I imagined, still holding that warm afternoon sun.

I went for a run, as I have a hundred times before and a hundred times since. I run to escape and to discover. To immerse myself in thought or to sink into the mindless joy of my own body. And since that November day, I run to listen. Sometimes he talks, sometimes he doesn’t. But I’m always listening.


Copyright © 1999 by Bob Cullinane.
Bob is a writer for the Asbury Park Press.
Re-printed courtesy of New Jersey Monthly Magazine (May, 1999)