Eyeing the Long Haul : Jack Thomas Exercises His Drive to Stay in Peak Shape and Health

Jack Thomas, a screenwriter turned probation officer turned author of fiction about troubled kids, has little time for writing these days. Instead of sitting at his desk in his rustic hideaway above Malibu Lake, Thomas, 64, is more likely to be working out at the gym, golfing or running on the trails and roads of the Santa Monica Mountains. He runs every day, averaging 3,000 miles per year. The high point of his week is a 10-mile round-trip run from his house to Castro Peak, an elevation gain of 2,000 feet.

My normal daily routine is to get up, run my six to eight miles--the weekend 13 to 16--then work for a couple of hours, if I can find time. In the afternoon, I take a nap for about an hour. Then I get up and I go to the gym and I work out there. Five days a week, I hit a large bucket of balls at the driving range, and three days a week, I do 160 to 200 pushups all at once. Then I do 20 to 25 chin-ups and 20 pullups--or “struggle-ups” by that time. I just barely have time to wash the dishes and do the rest of the things in life.

I first started this running thing in 1967, when I was writing a series of books for Bantam Books, primarily dealing with juvenile delinquents. I was spending so many hours a day sitting at the typewriter that I was getting sciatica, headaches, hemorrhoids, you know, all the sitter’s diseases, so I decided to start running four miles every other day.

Then one day I went out and I did 10 miles. That’s when I got hooked on distance running. Before that I was sort of a normal, sane individual. I don’t remember the exact point where I decided I was going to do a marathon, but this was like ‘68, ‘69, and [celebrity runner Jim] Fixx was around in those days and everybody was running. I think my fourth marathon was only about five months from my first one, and I got down to 3:01. My last marathon was three hours, three minutes and one second, and I did it in about 1983 down in Orange County.

When I was really getting into all this long-distance stuff, I heard there was a lady cop down the street who used to get up at 4 in the morning and with a flashlight run up to Castro Peak before she went to work. She’s the one responsible for getting me started going up to Castro Peak. I’ve done that just about every Wednesday for 15 years or so. The route I take to Castro Peak is a fire road; it’s called Bulldog Motorway, and it’s generally a switchback trail. On the way up, you pass a waterfall this time of year, and you cross a little stream.

Usually on the way up the hill, you’re so tired that you’re just thinking of getting to the top. On the way down, you’re just coasting; if nobody’s with me I sing or I recite poetry. My favorite is to sing musical comedies. Sometimes I’ll come upon some hikers and sort of surprise them; I’ll be singing at the top of my voice.

Also, I’ve always liked Shakespeare soliloquies and I know two or three of those that I learned in high school that I can recite. I started going through Shakespeare’s quotations that I could adapt to the discipline of running and keeping in shape. He says, “Delays have dangerous ends.” If you’re going to get in a health program, you can’t put it off, you’ve just got to do it.

Another Shakespeare quote that is apropos to running says, “Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?” He’s got dozens and dozens of little zingers that I find amusing and entertaining.

I was thinking about the fountain of youth in regards to exercise. You always envision it to be a little brook someplace with trees around it and you walk down and you take a sip, and you have eternal youth. Well, my idea is that there is a fountain of youth, but they put it on a hill, you see, and you have to walk up the hill to get the water. And the other thing is, you can’t just take one sip, you have to go up every day to get a sip, you’ve got to keep going up and back and up and back. Well, you don’t find youth; what you do is you hold off age a little bit.