About the Author

Like many--if not most--people who write for a living, Jim Whiting was a voracious reader when he was a kid. Adventure, sports, history, biography, mystery--it seemed like he always had his nose in a book. But unlike many of his contemporary colleagues, he didn't share the same zeal for writing. It never occurred to him to be a storyteller. In fact, putting his thoughts on paper for school assignments was an onerous, enormous chore. Then he had a stroke of extraordinary luck when he was a senior in high school. To fill a sudden vacancy in the English department, the school lured Miss Elizabeth Fraser out of retirement. She publicly praised his writing, and insisted that he read what he had written aloud to the class. At first he questioned her sanity as he turned red while stammering out his sentences in front of his peers. Her continued confidence in him soon wore down his doubts and he came to accept her judgment that he had talent. This sense that he had the ability to string words and sentences together in a pleasing manner helped him to graduate cum laude from Whitman College. During his Whitman career, he also became a reasonably accomplished runner, eventually winning a number of races and kindling what has not only become a lifelong passion but also served as a source of his livelihood for many years. Jim began his working life as an English teacher in an upscale Southern California school district. He was soon appointed as the advisor of the student newspaper at a new high school in the district even though he had no journalism background. His students were similarly inexperienced. Jim would literally learn a facet of newspaper publishing one night and pass it along to his kids the next day. This pedagogic method of learning on-the-fly worked. At the end of the first semester the newspaper received All-American honors, awarded by the National Scholastic Press Association to the top five percent of student newspapers nationwide. His writing career began several years later when he wrote an account of a singularly unpleasant bike excursion in France (part of which involved a near-lynch mob, but that's another story) . Time transmuted the trip into a cautionary tale that he sent to Bike World magazine. He still remembers the excitement he felt a few weeks later when he ripped open a manila envelope to find a copy of the issue that included his story. The envelope also contained a check for fifteen bucks. The amount was trifling. The notion that someone would actually cut a check for his work was terrific. He was now a professional writer.After a number of other freelance successes--the most notable of which was penning the first piece of original fiction to appear in Runner's World magazine following a run in the original Olympic Stadium in Olympia, Greece--he began a 17-year stint publishing Northwest Runner, a struggling regional running magazine at the time of his accession. Working by himself for much of his tenure, he pro

Read Next Recommendation