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No. 17 Vol. 9
My Life Publications • 1-800-691-7549
October 2021
Joel Pasternack Takes Over the Cross-Country Coaching Reins at DePaul Catholic High School
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By Steve Sears lready saddled with his duties as head track & field coach at DePaul Catholic High School, 71-year-old Joel Pasternack jumped to touch Heaven when he was asked to also take over the cross-country team. “It’s a new challenge,” he says excitedly. After a friend told him about the available track & field coaching position last spring, he was hired for that sport, and he is now this fall on the sideline for the cross-country team. He also has another agenda he hopes will succeed. “I’m pushing for - and I’m going to wait until things settle down - for them to bring back the indoor track program.” The COVID19 pandemic canceled the program the past two years. Pasternack, who has been a runner since he was 15-years-old back in 1965, first ran for Clifton High School, and then attended Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, a school minus a running program. However, he was in the right neighborhood. While there, he took a weekend trip to Boston University with a friend whom he had run against in high school. “It was September of 1968,” he recalls. “He took me on a 10-mile run with his team. I had never run over five miles. I thought that was the greatest thing I ever did in my life.” It would be the beginning of many memorable runs for this coach who has schooled runners
Joel Pasternack completing the 1974 Boston Marathon.
Joel Pasternack cooling down after a morning run. Photos courtesy of Joel Pasternack.
as young as age 6. After a semester at Franklin Pierce, he transferred to Monmouth University, and then chose to leave college, joining the National Guard. He still continued running, and even broke the platoon running record for the mile while wearing combat boots! After enrolling in Miami University, he reached for a higher fruit: to run in the 1971 Boston Marathon. He finished 227th out of 950 runners. “I said, ‘There’s something to this. My body has taken to this, I’m not getting injured. I’m running 60 to 70 miles a week…there’s something to this.’” Since Miami
University, like Franklin Pierce, didn’t have a cross country or track program, he enrolled in then-William Paterson College, where his best friend and famed runner, Tom Fleming, attended. He took part in additional Boston Marathons, as well as Jersey Shore and New York City marathons during the 1970s, trained for the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games, and also started selling sneakers in 1975, where he gave advice on the tools and the trade. “I started giving advice, so in a way I was starting my coaching career. And little by little I started picking up clients continued on page 8
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