Echoes: Contemplations of a Mature Runner by Michael Beisty (Book)

Retired from full-time employment in January 2020. Currently engaged in freelance writing as a pastime. Mature aged distance runner.

A collection of 30 articles/pieces.It provides a range of information that involves story-telling, factual research, reflection mixed with nostalgia, and the effect of aging on distance running performance. It's flavour is more about entertaining the reader, being topical, while attempting to deliver underlying messages and some limited social narrative. It's not meant to be a collection of scientific research essays.

The collection is eclectic. Each piece is very different and tends to stand on its own. While often centering on the master's experience the articles have broader application to the general running population, men and women.

Residing in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, I am retired from employment. My passions are distance running and writing, so what better than combine the two?

As a younger competitor, I’d describe myself as a good class club runner who failed to reach his potential. I ran track, road and cross country, but my best performances were in the 10km to half marathon range on the road. My first distance running career ended aged 32. I started running again at 47 years of age. However, I didn’t race for two years, gradually transitioning to a competitive level in my fifties, and performing consistently at a national standard into my sixties.

I like the storytelling aspect of writing. In my pastime as a freelance writer, I enjoy the challenge of wordsmithing, exercising a degree of poetic license, and putting words in a form that excites the reader or touches their sensibilities. While I mainly write about distance running, I am a member of the Hunter Writer’s Centre, located in Newcastle, an organisation that supports writers of all abilities in the development of their craft. This connection with established authors has been useful for me in exploring the opportunities to write in other genres.

From the author:

I enjoy writing about distance running and the ageing process, because it’s something that I am experiencing right now, and expect to experience for a long time to come. I also enjoy the nostalgia of distance running, recalling the experiences of past racers that can tend to be discounted by today’s generation. As a kid in the 1970s, I loved reading about the racers of the 1920s and 1930s. Similarly, as a mature aged writer, I enjoy writing about the distance running experiences of fifty years ago.

During the past three years, I have turned my hand to what I’d describe as a pseudo-journalistic style, when writing feature articles for Runner’s Tribe about distance running and racing in NSW and Australia during the 1970s and 1980s.

Overall, I’d describe my writing style and tone as informal. I like to have a conversation with the reader. Echoes has been many years in the making as a pet project of mine, a result of my attempts to build a respectable portfolio, initially through writing a regular column for the Australian print magazine Run for Your Life, using the strapline of Masters Musings. I continue to develop, and experiment with, my writing style.