In September 1965, an incoming freshman asked permission to join the University of Oklahoma cross-country team as a walk-on. He had never run a mile for time and had won only one race, a half mile, in his single season of high school track. Unimpressed, coach J.D. Martin told him: "you can come out, but I can't give you any shoes."

Two weeks later he got shoes, and six months later, he was standing on the starting line in Kansas City with Jim Ryun, a University of Kansas freshman who was the American record holder and soon to be world record holder in the mile. As expected, the OU freshman was the first runner lapped on the 146-yard indoor track in front of 10,000 screaming Jim Ryun fans. This was the inauspicious start of Bill Blewett's improbable quest to become a sub-4-minute miler.

Over the next seven years his resolve and assiduous training took him to the threshold of his goal, matching the progression of Roger Bannister, who 11 years earlier became the first man to break 4 minutes in the mile. How did he do this? How did he learn how best to train and race? In this memoir, he explains the evolution and basis of his training for which much of the science was revealed long after his last race.

After college he coached himself, learning from many sources-the work of noted exercise physiologists, methods of prominent coaches, and experiences of world-class runners. He explains, with dashes of humor, what he did right, what he did wrong, and what he should have done, with an emphasis on the science of interval training, strength building for greater economy, how to rise from a performance plateau, how best to run doubles, and the secret of running like a deer (economically). He turned to road racing and continued his study of how best to train throughout 57 years of daily workouts before a rare disease forced him to become a fitness walker at age 75.

Fifty Years a Runner is uniquely informative and beneficial for runners of any age and ability who want to improve their training and racing.