Great Strides

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, April 28, 2008

When Benjamin Cheever set his sights on the Boston Marathon, an elite event requiring a qualification time of under three hours in another accredited marathon, he finished the New York Marathon in 2:59:33. “My father celebrated my acceptance by taking the whole family to spend the eve of the Boston Marathon at the Ritz Carlton,” Cheever writes in his recently published Strides: Running Through History With an Unlikely Athlete (Rodale Books).

The year was 1979. After conquering the notoriously hilly Boston course in 3:02:02, an exuberant Cheever returned to an empty hotel room. The phone rang and rang: first the Associated Press, then UPI, asking to speak to John. Benjamin writes, “I drew a bath. My father came into the hotel room and then into the bathroom. ‘You finished the marathon?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘And you won the Pulitzer Prize.’”

The novelist son of John Cheever may have some big shoes to fill, but he’s certainly fleeter of foot. Though the elder Cheever was an ardent walker and bicyclist—“We share an interest in rudimentary forms of transportation,” he once told his son—he never ran 26.2 miles with a number pinned to his chest. After their shared win in Boston, John Cheever wrote to a friend, “Ben came in gallantly under three hours which is considered winning and when I returned to the hotel he was sitting in the bathtub, holding in his teeth a wire from the Pulitzer Prize Committee.”

“He’d chopped three minutes off my time,” Cheever notes with amusement. (He’d also added the telegram between the teeth; the Pulitzer winner couldn’t resist a good fictional detail.)

Running and writing might seem like entirely different endeavors, one making extreme demands on the body and one on the mind, but Cheever sees them as kindred pursuits. “Writing and long-distance running both respond to stamina and application,” he asserts. “If you write two hours a day for ten years, you’re a writer.” And if you log 1,500 miles a year, as Cheever has done for over three decades, you’re definitely a runner. With Strides, he has brought these two passions together. The result is a joy to read.