INTERVIEW 6
The Relentless Pioneer
No word describes Sally Edwards as a runner, an ultrarunner, a businesswoman, a triathlete, an event organizer, and a sports educator better than “pioneer.” Born in 1947, she grew up a tomboy in a world of limited sports opportunities for women, and helped to lead the way for women’s athletics. As an athlete she’s done 100 marathons (including 10 in one year), won the Western States 100 in 1980, done 16 Ironmans and finished in the Top 5 of the Hawaii Ironman five times, including second in 1981. She’s also won the 100-mile Iditashoe Snowshoe Race, the Race Across America Relay division, and participated in adventure races around the world, such as the Eco-Challenge. She’s been as prolific as a businesswoman, having founded 6 companies, including Fleet Feet Sports in 1976—one of the first athletic-shoe retailers—plus the triathlon-specific Fleet Feet Triathlete, Yuba snowshoes, and Heart Zones, which markets heart-rate training programs. On top of that, she’s also written 22 books about triathlon and heart-rate training, and is the national spokesperson for the Danskin series of women-only sprint triathlons. A Triathlon Hall of Fame inductee in 1999, Edwards sat down for her Run for Life interview on November 6, 2007.
Although I’m only 60, I grew up in a world not so different from 100 years ago. We had to wear dresses to school. We couldn’t play a lot of activities on the playground because of the dress requirements. We wore these stupid shoes. There were really no athletic shoes at all to wear to participate in sports for women. All the shoes were for men.
I grew up in a little town of 1,000 people, Loomis, California, 30 miles northeast of Sacramento. My dad, a World War II naval hero, a pilot, retired there when I was 13. Before that we moved every couple of years. Our last duty assignment was Athens, Greece. The traveling was great. Before Greece, we were stationed in Nebraska, we had horses and cows and chickens—great for a city kid. We also lived in Fairfax, Virginia, and Coronado Island, San Diego Bay. I was the youngest of four kids born in five years. It was post-World War II, and Marge just kept having babies after babies.
I was always athletic, and all I ever wanted to do was play sports. I had to be good to keep up with my three older siblings. In basketball season, we played basketball. In the other seasons, the other sports. But as for girls’ sports, there just weren’t any opportunities—this is pre-Title IX. There were no sports in high school and very few in college.
I was labeled a “tomboy.” A tomboy was a negative term at that point. It was the precursor of “athlete.” It always bothers you when you are labeled as something different. Yeah, it bothered me.
But I said screw it, I’m doing my thing. I played sports. And none of the other girls did.
There were social stigmas. There were apparel inadequacies, the lack of opportunities in teams, coaches, budgets, and resources. And you had to realize—boys didn’t like the girls who were tomboys. They wanted to go out with the cheerleaders. So you had to play two different roles: You had to cheer the boys, so I was a cheerleader, and take whatever athletic opportunities there were in high school and college.
It was weird. I was gifted with a lot of athletic talent, but there was no place to go with it. So, you’re kind of raised as a fighter—three older brothers, a system that is against you . . . . But luckily my parents were really supportive, they encouraged me. They didn’t tell me I had to be like all the other girls. When I was on a team, they’d come watch the game. In the summertime, we played summer league softball, slow-pitch. It was really fun—I’m 14 or 15 years old, I was the shortstop, and had a uniform! Girls today would laugh at that and say, what do you mean? Back then, all the resources went to boys.
There was AAU swimming. For most of that, you had to belong to a swimming pool or country club, and we lived out in the country, so we didn’t have that. There were girls’ gymnastics clubs, because that was an Olympic sport.
At least college had teams. At U. C. Berkeley, we had a volleyball team, a tennis team, a swimming team, a basketball team. I liked basketball. We had six women on a side—three on each side of a centerline. We had a fivegame season. We played teams nearby, like San Francisco State, San Jose State, U.C. Davis; all were within a radius of 100 miles at most. We had no real travel budget. Of course, we didn’t play in the big gymnasium. We played in the women’s gymnasium, which didn’t have any bleachers or anything. There were no spectators. The women’s athletic department was practically non-existent. It was appalling.
We didn’t have a women’s track-and-field team; I would have gone out for it.
THE RUNNING TEST
When I was at Berkeley in 1967 or ’68, a guy named Dr. Ken Cooper came to talk about his new book he’d just written, Aerobics. He was on a national lecture tour to talk about the benefits of aerobic training. He was in Air Force uniform, and he had just done all this testing on Air Force cadets. He was speaking to the graduate school of physical education.
I listened to him and I decided, “I’m going to take his little 12-minute Aerobics Points test.” It was the very first cardiovascular fitness test—all quantified with a bunch of research. I found it personally challenging rather than having any sort of application. He said, “go out and do this for 12 minutes and see what you score.” That’s what started me running. I went out and did the 12-minute run-walk test and scored the top of what you can score. I thought, “Well, that’s good—I thought I was pretty fit.”
I’d been jogging—and when we jogged, I mean just one or two miles. Nobody ran then or lifted weights or did base conditioning. You did your sport. If you were a basketball player, you played basketball.
Then the boyfriend challenged me. “I can outrun you in a mile.” And I said, “I don’t think so, but let’s try it.” He led the first lap. I caught him on the third and won. He was humiliated. He got in better shape, and I never beat him again. But this is when I started officially jogging.
I graduated in 1970, and volunteered to go to Vietnam for a year. I joined the American Red Cross as a volunteer. It was like all things: it was wonderful and it was absolutely horrible. I hadn’t quite finished writing my master’s thesis, so I had to finish that in Vietnam. So I went from protesting the war at U.C. Berkeley with a sign to getting on a C5-A [cargo plane] in Fairfield, California, where the troops were being transported and flown to Saigon, and putting on a little blue Red Cross worker’s outfit and being paid almost nothing. Our job was troop morale, so we traveled around with officers and would visit the enlisted troops in forward firebases and we’d put on these little recreational programs.
And it was really bad, really tough. We’d see body bags, and deal with depression and lots of those issues.
It changed me tremendously—had a huge impact. I was there in Vietnam in 1970 and ’71. We had 500,000 American troops fighting there. The big protest movement in the United States continued, and troop morale was really low. We announced a withdrawal while I was there. So everyone knew that we had lost the war and were going to come home, and there were tons of drugs. I mean, the drug problem in America is so closely attached to the Vietnam War and the use and abuse of drugs there.
I ran while I was in Vietnam. Since Dr. Cooper did say the more the better, I jogged for 30 minutes. There wasn’t anyone else out there jogging. The only safe place to run was on the military base. I always took a guy with me so I wouldn’t get harassed—because I tried running by myself at first in Vietnam and I got harassed a lot. I’d wear shorts and a T-shirt and pair of running shoes and I’d go run. And the guys—there weren’t many white American women who were there, and there were none running. Sometimes, the soldiers would know what my schedule was and would come out of their barracks, and they had a chair and would sit there watching us run 1-mile loops. I can remember we’d run 4, 5 miles a day. That’s what I got up to by 1970.
I took a year off after Vietnam and traveled around the world with my boyfriend. We went everywhere—Japan, Trans-Siberian Railroad across Russia, Eurail Pass down to Spain, over into North Africa. My boyfriend got out to Spain, over into North Africa. My boyfriend got out of Vietnam and met me in Spain. I didn’t run at all on the trip.
FLEET FEET
I came back August 30, 1972, with $300, without a job or a place to live. We got a house, and in five days, I got a job teaching at an intermediate school in Sacramento. Seventh and eighth graders weren’t my ideal, so in ’74 I took my master’s degree in exercise science and a secondary teaching credential, and got a job teaching at Monterey Peninsula College (junior college), coaching intercollegiate athletics.
I was running 5ks and 10ks myself, but I didn’t coach running; I coached women’s volleyball, women’s basketball, women’s softball, and men’s volleyball. I was the only woman on the staff with nine men, and they gave me all the things they didn’t want to coach.
I was competing all the time. I ran the Bay to Breakers Race in San Francisco when I first got back to California. It was pretty big. There were probably 5,000, 10,000 people there. It was the biggest race in the state. The only race, I think.
There were very few women out there. It was 80% male and 20% female probably, maybe 90:10. Women played tennis, but they didn’t run.
There were other big, famous races going on—like the Boston Marathon. But they weren’t around me. We didn’t have a marathon in Sacramento. When I was teaching, I ran the Lakes at the Pines 10-mile race. It was the furthest I ever ran, and I really liked it. There were 100 people in the race, and 10 women. And I won. I said, “If I can run 10 miles, then I can probably run a marathon.”
I won most of my races, because there was no competition.
I lasted at the college for two years. Teaching wasn’t my calling. At the same time, my boyfriend broke up with me after almost ten years together, and I was up to running 10 miles and really liking it.
So I went to my best friend in high school, Elizabeth Jansen, and said, “You know, we have to go to sporting goods stores to buy shoes. Let’s start a shoe store.“ There weren’t any athletic shoe stores. If you wanted athletic shoes, you can’t find them, the stores don’t have a good selection, and you don’t have experts to fit you correctly or who were athletes who know anything about sports. Elizabeth was teaching elementary school and said, “I don’t want to teach school, either. Let’s do it.”
She was a serious tennis player. Tennis was really popular in the late 1970s. So I like to run, she likes to play tennis. We came up with the name “Fleet Feet Sports,” and we opened the first retail athletic footwear store in California.
We thought, we don’t have much money, so if we lose it all, we can just go back to teaching.
In our initial 2-page business plan we wanted to get involved in the community and sponsor running events. Fleet Feet started some of the very first running events in Sacramento. Later we started the first triathlons in Sacramento.
Fleet Feet was founded in 1976. We started hosting the St. Patrick’s Day 5k, the California International Marathon, and the American River 50 Miler, the first ultramarathon in Sacramento. There was a Western States 100 miler; I ran it in ’79.
The store wasn’t an immediate success. Running wasn’t popular right away. It started to grow. Running was so small compared to what is going on today. There were no coaches, no teams, no support. At first, there were no shoes for women. Nike was one of the first companies to come out and make a running shoe for women. I know because we sold it at Fleet Feet in 1977 or ’78. The Lady Cortez was the name of it. White with nylon uppers, as opposed to Adidas, which was all leather.
When we opened the store, we started a community class on “How to Run.” It was a 6-week class put on by the Learning Exchange, which was a community education program. The new boyfriend and I taught them. They were extremely popular. We’d get 30 and 40 people to take a running class. It was huge.
In fact, he found his new girlfriend through that and married her.
People didn’t know how to run, what to do. We had community events and we’d host speakers like Joan Uloyt, a medical doctor and marathoner in San Francisco, who had just written a book called Women’s Running. Brian Maxwell was our Adidas sales rep; he then went on to found PowerBar. Runners would get jobs in the running shoe companies, and Brian was a runner from Berkeley.
Running was a tiny, little world, and we knew everybody.
We started to sponsor some of the first trips—the first group outings to go to running events. I went from 10 miles to 13 to running marathons. After I started running marathons, I started running lots of marathons. So Fleet Feet would host trips to, like, Avenue of the Giants Marathon, the Boston Marathon, and we had a little travel business, where we’d rent buses, go to travel agents to organize travel.
To this day, we have a running club in Sacramento that we helped sponsor: The Buffalo Chips. We didn’t have a lot of money, but everybody kind of worked together to make it happen.
It was really, really hard work. Yes, satisfying. And we didn’t make much money at first. The whole thing was a circle. The number of runners was low. A decade later, the same thing happened with triathlon.
We could not have made it on running shoes alone. So we sold football and soccer cleats. We became successful after I franchised it in 1979. We weren’t the only chain; there was Phidippedes, The Athletes Foot, and others later.
I didn’t know I’d love business. I found that I truly love it. I’ve started a half-dozen businesses now. A couple didn’t make it. I had a triathlon business that went broke, Try Triathlon, which made the very first triathlon apparel an all-in-one tri-suit.
UPPING THE PACE ATHLETICALLY AND COMMERCIALLY
As the boom picked up, I won a bunch of marathons and started running 50-milers. I did my first Western States 100 with a friend in 26 hours in 1979—she was slow and didn’t finish. Then I won it in 1980 in 22 hours and 15 minutes and did it a third time in 1981—came in second even though I dropped my time to 20 hours.
I had no idea running could be like it is now. But I thought triathlon would. I just got an e-mail saying that there are now 100,000 registered triathletes, that it surpassed swimming and running and cycling.
I did my first triathlon in 1978, the Davis Triathlon that Vern Scott, Dave’s dad, started. It was a run-bike-swim in that order. Then I did the Lodi Triathlon, and I won it. So then I decided to do the Ironman in 1980. There were 120 people, 30 women.
I didn’t read about it in Sports Illustrated, like many did. When you’re in the athletic shoe business and a lot of events are going on, you hear about them. People said, “Hey, you ran the Western States, well, you ought to do the Ironman.” So I went to Hawaii in 1981 and finished 2nd. I did the next five Ironmans, finishing 3rd twice and 5th twice. So I was five times in the top five. I was actually a professional athlete, because I raced on contract with Nike and Specialized then.
After that first Ironman in 1981, I wrote my first of 22 books: Triathlon: A Triple Fitness Sport. I self-published it in 1982. It was the first book written on the sport of triathlon. Everyone laughed at me. They told me, “Sally, nobody’s going to buy this book. Nobody does triathlons.”
Then we kicked off the first triathlon retail stores in America: Fleet Feet Triathlete. We still had Fleet Feet Sports. We started Try Triathlon, an apparel and event company. We started putting on triathlons. By the time I sold the company in 2003, there were 5, but they weren’t very successful. It was really hard to figure out the formula to make a triathlon store work.
But that’s okay. Part of it is I’m ahead of the curve, ahead of the wave. I’m out there pioneering—this is a classic scenario in my life. It happened with retail stores, with books, I opened a snowshoe business, then hearty with books, I opened a snowshoe business, then heart-rate monitors. I like being on that side of the curve. I’d rather be on that side of the curve than the side where the cash cow happens.
MAKING SENSE OF HEART-RATE TRAINING
I bought my first Polar heart-rate monitor in the early 1980s and absolutely fell in love with it. By 1984, I used it to train for the Olympic Trials in the Marathon. They took the 200 fastest women in America; I ran a 2:50 marathon, which qualified me, so I went off to Olympia, Washington, with Joan Benoit and the gang. I wasn’t one of the top three at the trails. I was 20 minutes behind Joan. But I wasn’t disappointed; I was 35, never in contention. The event was a celebration of the emancipation of women—the first marathon. After all, we’d been warned that our breasts would get droopy and ovaries would fall off. It was a huge celebration. And I was sponsored by Nike the whole time. ABC telecast the whole thing. They wouldn’t do that today.
I tried to qualify for the 1988 Olympic marathon. I missed by one minute. It was disappointing. A couple trials would have been great, but the quality of the women has risen.
Anyhow, I just thought a heart-rate monitor was the coolest tool in the world. “Everybody’s going to want a heart-rate monitor. This is so cool,” I said. And I was absolutely wrong.
No one knew what to do with it. I loved knowing my heart rate, but the other runners didn’t seem to like it. So I tried to make it understandable.
The basic concept is to train in zones. The methodology you use is called “heart zones training,” which I created based on time in zone and training load. Either you use your maximum heart rate or your threshold—find those out and choose one way or the other. There are three different kinds of threshold: lactic threshold, anaerobic threshold, and ventilatory threshold (shifts in ventilation—that point that you can no longer talk while you’re running). They are all so close together that in our system we just call them, “Threshold.” For consumers it makes it much easier to understand that threshold is a crossover point between aerobic and non-aerobic. It’s easier to measure ventilatory threshold than to measure oxygen with a mask or lactate by drawing blood. But all those thresholds are within a hair’s width of each other, so it doesn’t really matter how you measure a threshold—it matters that you do measure a threshold.
So now you get an anchor point—a threshold—and now you’ve got your zones. So the strategy: On different days you train in different zones to get different benefits.
Say your threshold is 150 beats per minute. We set up 5 heart rate zones based on that threshold—from easy to all-out.
The higher the zone, the less time you have to train in it. So if you want to train less, you train a shorter time in a higher zone. You can spend a lot of time in a low zone and not burn very many calories and not get much of a training effect. Or you can move it up a zone or two, and then get a whole lot of aerobic benefit and train half the time.
It is real logical, but most runners don’t understand the concept. What you’re doing is getting yourself something called “load.” There are different kinds of loads—there’s emotional loads, metabolic loads, and there’s training loads, cardiovascular loads. You give yourself a due quantity of load on your body and then you measure—you either get fit, you get positive training effect or a negative training adaptation. So, if you want to get positive, you give yourself the right amount, and give yourself more and more and more, and you get fitter and fitter and fitter. And this is how you get fit. Very, very simple to get cardiovascular fitness by using a heart-rate monitor.
The way we set it up is that you get points for time in zone. It’s simple math anyone can do. Example of a 30-minute workout:
- 5 minutes in Zone 2 = 10 points
- 20 minutes in Zone 3 = 60 points
- 5 minutes in Zone 4 = 20 points
When you add all that up, you get a number for your workout—a number that you can compare to those of other days’ workouts.
One minute in Zone 3, you get 3 points. One minute in Zone 4, you get four points. In the case of the above example, you got 90 points (10 + 60 + 20). Over time, as you get fitter, you’ll do more points per workout.
It’s easier than counting calories. It’s an exercise prescription methodology that measures how much exercise you just got. It’s the only way to quantify cardiovascular training: Time in zone multiplied by the number of the zone. Easy. No calculator needed.
It gives you a framework for using your heart-rate monitor. You say, “Today I did a workout of 100 points. Tomorrow, I want to take it up a zone, add 10 minutes—it’s worth 180 points.” Thirty minutes in Zone 3 is worth 90 points. 40 minutes in Zone 3 is worth 120 points.
If you do an hour, which is what I recommended people do, you do a lot of Zone 3 and Zone 4 time, which are your best zones, because they are high enough intensity to stimulate a cardiovascular improvement in oxygen consumption. Walking doesn’t really do it—it’s too low-intensity. That’s why a walk-run is a good idea. Because the running part gives you enough intensity to get improvement.
If you are using Threshold, then your threshold is 100%.
- Zone 3 is 70-80% of threshold
- Zone 4 is 80-90% of threshold
- Zone 5 is 90-100% of threshold
So 40 years after I met Dr. Cooper, I’ve put together my own test. Cooper was, and continues to be, such a good role model as an exercise scientist and applied physiologist. And that’s ultimately where I am now in my career: I’m an applied exercise physiologist. And I’m working now on what’s called power-based training, which uses Power Meters, using a threshold system with metabolic charts, which measure metabolism and metabolic responses. And we’re using HRMs for using zone-free methodology.
You absolutely need an hour a day to work out. You need stretching, strength training, and cardiovascular. And it takes an hour to do those things. Most of that hour will be aerobic.
FOOD AND ANTIOXIDANTS
I am not worried about oxidation and anti-oxidants. I don’t think there’s enough support for that theory. My reading of the research does not indicate free radicals are as curious a thing as Cooper has alleged they are. Cooper hasn’t convinced me of it
Besides, the problem isn’t overtraining, it’s undertraining. Oxidation is a factor. But a bigger, more significant factor is non-oxidation. If you don’t move, it’s worse for your health than if you do move. Yes, if you move you have this release of free radicals that can mutate into all kinds of other problems. Yes, that’s bad. But a worse scenario is inactivity, a sedentary lifestyle, and the disease that I call sedentaryism. Sedentaryism is the root cause of the obesity epidemic. Not the food we’re eating, not the ratio of carbohydrates to protein—carbs are bad this year, and protein is bad that year, there’s too much coffee—it’s a very complicated issue.
The root of it is when you stop moving, all . . . things ... change. Your metabolism, your emotions, your muscle mass, your mood and outlook, your brain functions all change. If we can get the human body to start moving, we start a cascade of change. And that’s what we need—to get America active. And not worry about free radicals. (laughs)
What it all boils down to is lack of activity. Activity is more important than food, although food is really important. In fact, I took the Heart Zones framework and applied it to what we call “Food Zones.” Taking foods and making them into the five different zones from “healthy foods” to “moderately accessible foods” to “practically lethal foods.” We even created a Food Zones chart.
The one question people always ask is, “Sally, I don’t know what to eat.” And I always say, “Eat the healthiest possible food you can, so you’re in the Blue Zone.” Notquite-healthy is green zone, yellow is worse, orange is bad, and red is toxic.
I put chocolate ice cream in a separate category. But it’s really in the orange zone—straight sugar, not good nutrients.
You can categorize anything in a “zone” format. Now we’ve got power zones for power meters (laughs). We even put emotions on a zone system—productive zone, safe zone, et cetera. In context, am I out-of-control emotionally, to where I’ve lost all rational thought and I’m going to flip someone off on the freeway, or am I calm and peaceful, meditative? Am I Zone 1 or Zone 5?
BEWARE RUNNER’S BACK
I have a serious disc disease. In other words, I wore out my back.
In 1997, I had done the Race Across America, an adventure race in China, and then a month later I thought I could do the Ironman. I was pretty beat up and didn’t realize it. I took 4th that year in the 45-49 age group. The next year, I specifically trained for the Ironman and I lost by five minutes; I took 2nd . And then my back started to hurt.
It got worse and worse and I went to see a surgeon. He showed me the X-rays. I had no disc in my L5 S1 (lumbar 5, sacral 1), which is the last disc in your back, the bottom one. He said, “Not so many people exercise so much that they wear out their back. That’s really unusual.”
Actually, this particular joint has brought a lot of runners down. It’s a huge problem for runners because that’s where all the compression happens. One way to avoid it is not to run on asphalt. Pay attention to your technique. Run in higher zones for less time. Cross-train more.
You get this, and you’re stuck. Get a heavy dosage of steroidal anti-something medication. Pretty much I haven’t been able to race because I can’t train hard. I can train. I run twice a week now, but not at high intensity. So my speed is poor. If I go for more than an hour, my back just kills me—so I don’t. I’d rather run the rest of my life if I have to run slow, than not be able to run at all.
Ironically, having to run slow has helped other women. I did triathlon through the mid-nineties, did the first Eco-Challenge, got into adventure racing, then got involved with the Danskin women’s triathlon series.
The president of Danskin called me and said “I want to do this. Will you be the spokesperson?” At first, I was not convinced that women’s triathlons could be successful. And then, after our first race, I decided it could. We had 2 races the first year and 5 the next, 6 the next, and now we’re up to 8. After Year 3, I got a torn Achilles tendon doing another event, so I volunteered to finish last. That worked well, so for the last 15 years, I’ve finished every event last. It’s the best place in the race, of course. The woman with me has the toughest time of all.
For me, the Danskin series has grown into one of the two crown jewels of the sport, along with the Ironman. This event has substantially changed 20,000 women’s lives. And when you change a woman’s life, you change her family, because she is quite often the head of the household. Other women’s series have not had the endurance of the Danskin. I attribute to Danskin the reason that almost 50% of the field in all triathlons is now women, excluding the Ironman.
I never got married. Never wanted to. I never wanted to have kids. I came from a culture of Berkeley in the sixties. It was free love. It was follow your heart. And it was do good things for society and volunteer your time; that’s why I went to Vietnam. I wanted to do volunteer work.
I have no regrets. So I ran a business, wrote books, and raced professionally. It’s been a great life so far.