Salem, Oregon's
Running & Walking Club Site
Home of
Willamette Valley Road Runners (WVRR)
www.WVRoadrunners.org.

Eb
by Eb Engelmann

I was born in Berlin, Germany on December 16, 1941—nine days after Pearl Harbor and seven days after the USA declared war on the Axis powers. My mother, then just eighteen, had been widowed over five months earlier when my father was killed, July 9, 1941, on his twentieth birthday, while serving in the German Army in Russia. These circumstances would profoundly affect my entire life. I entered the US in December, 1948, at Ellis Island in New York. My mother had married an American career soldier some months earlier in Germany. I became an American citizen, derived through my mother’s acquired citizenship in 1952.

I first formally "ran" in my senior year in high school at the Ankara American High School in Ankara, Turkey. We had one track meet against two small Turkish teachers colleges for which we prepared about six weeks. That was our season. I ran the 1500 meters and threw the shot, neither particularly well, though my 1500 time of 4:32 was not bad—for someone who was already a smoker. I also did a lot of running in basketball and soccer, the latter which we played (very badly) in Turkey. I entered the US Army after graduation in 1959, and for the next three years I ran about three miles a day six days a week, first in the 82^nd Airborne Division in North Carolina and then in the 8^th Airborne Brigade in Mainz, Germany.

Once out of the Army in 1962, I attended school full time, worked—also mostly full time, and degenerated to sloth physically. I did, however, get to officiate track at Hayward Field while a UO graduate student from 1968-73 (the Steve Prefontaine and Mac Wilkins era), except for the time I spent in Taiwan, all of 1971 and summer 1972. I ran a bit in Taiwan while there as an independent doctoral student, all but living on a bicycle (one speed) and doing dissertation field research in the northeast corner of the island. But upon my return to the US, to teaching, and to family responsibilities, I also returned to sloth. Finally, on July 9, 1979, having long since quit smoking and departed school, and now weighing 182 pounds and sporting a 35 inch waist, I returned in desperation to running. (Initially a buddy and I would walk to McCullough Stadium in our sweats, take off our sweats upon arriving, run four laps on the track, don our sweats, and walk back to the Sparks Center. We could not bear to be seen almost naked and "running" on the streets.) Except for unavoidable injury time off, I have been running ever since! I am now running both for my life and for the profound satisfaction running gives me.

Once I started running as a true adult (then 37 years old), I quickly discovered that I liked running—genuinely liked it! Never mind the weight loss, though that was nice, I liked running for its own intrinsic values. I liked the goal setting and achievement, the intimate contact with the weather, seasons, and landscapes, the physical exertion, the motion, and the pulse, sweat, and rhythm of it—and the competition and camaraderie, as well as the solitude. I even liked the fatigue, pain, and sometimes the agony of it, at least to a point. They reaffirmed the joy and the pain of living, competing, and persevering. I became "a runner." Eventually running also became an outlet and palliative for life’s frustrations and shortcomings—a sort of private elixir bestowing its rewards upon unstinting practitioners. Being a compulsive record keeper, I know that I have now run over 51,000 miles since that July day in’79, and done 647 races, including 128 ultras and 61 marathons—ten of them race walking. In 1994 I even did a six-day run in which I covered 373.6 miles, finishing fifth in an international field of 24 runners. I run and walk on treadmills, tracks, roads, and trails, but preferably on trails in fields and forests, on the beach, and in the mountains. And I have become a devout adherent of "adventure" runs where you select the course and define your own standards of performance.

I have also done about fifty triathlons and duathlons, mostly in the 1980’s. I bicycle (including over thirty years of year-round commuting to work on a bike and over fifteen mostly week-long tours) and I walk, hike, climb, snowshoe, beach comb, camp, canoe, fish, crab, clam, and so on. But I always come back to running as my first love--for its elegance and simplicity, for its flexibility and adaptability, for its efficiency and effectiveness as a form of exercise, and for the occasional highs and frequent satisfaction it still gives me. I earnestly hope to run until I die.