You'd think it would be a blow, being told by e-mail after 16 or 18 or however many years it had been, that the Detroit News no longer wanted your running column. That you were, effective the moment you opened the e-mail, going to lose out on the easiest $600 or $750 a month you ever made, writing about a sport you loved?

How can that be good news? Let me tell you.

When it means no longer having to work for editors whose idea of running iswhat the water does when the washer goes bad in the faucet, who couldn't figure out what to do with a story if there wasn't a guy named Tiger or Shaq somewhere in it.

Or when it means not working anymore for editors who judge a story by racial or gender content, or age-group demographics, and not the least by what's going on between the first word and the last. Who point-blank tell you not to bother pitching stories involving white men because running stories aboutwhite men doesn't help anyone's career.

If this sounds like sour grapes so far, trust me, it isn't. I've rebounded into an actual job with Crain's Detroit Business, so the money has been more than made up for. And I've got sensible, savvy editors in my day job, these days.

No, it's a feeling of joy not having to worry about picking up the DetroitNews each week and see what they've done, what crucial facts were omitted,what errors were edited in, or, worse, that the column hadn't run at all because they needed five Red Wing sidebars to go with a game story and two columns.

I don't remember when the gig started. Time flies. Dates recede into the abyss formed by brain cells gone missing. Mike O'Hara, the News' great football writer, landed it for me. We were and are running buddies. He had done the occasional piece on running for the News, whose editors decided they had to have a column to compete with the weekly column in the Free Press.

(There's an irony there, and a warning to Doug Kurtis, who does such a nice job doing the running column for the Freep. The Gannett folks in August sold the News to some outfit in Colorado and bought the Free Press. Gannett is very much run top down, and the stuff Free Press folks have so happily avoided over the years, and which drove poor minions at the News crazy, is heading their way. Beware, Doug. And beware, Free Press marathon.)

Anyway, the News wanted a running column. Mike didn't want to do it. He suggested me, a former Freep sportswriter who had covered hockey and college football and who had done free-lance running stuff for the Freep in theearly 1980s.

Mike even told me how much to ask for: $150 a column, one column a week, which seemed preposterously high, but they readily agreed to it. Things were fine the first few years, but the column began to run haphazardly. They paid me anyway, whether it ran or not, and couldn't understand why I'd call to see what happened.

Eventually a Features Department editor asked to have the column move to his section. He was big on health and fitness and thought sports was wasting a resource. Ah, happiness. For four or five years, the column ran each Friday. Often, the editors asked for a second column on Monday.

Then, one day, alas, the Sports Department complained that it was a sportscolumn and should run in sports and they wanted it back. They got it, and proceeded to bury it, chop it and, usually, not run it. Here, in no particular order, is a partial list of screwups the likes of which will no longer cost me anger or embarrassment:

* Todd Williams, arguably the best distance runner ever to come out of Michigan, moved to Ann Arbor from Tennessee to train with Ron Warhurst for the 2000 Olympics. I sold sports on the idea of a special full-length feature, instead of doing it as a column. I did the interviews and wrote the story. Williams was here for the winter, which came and went. By the time they ran the story, he'd moved back to Tennessee. They ran the wrong picture with the story.

* I was paying my own way to New Orleans in the summer of 1998 for the U.S. track and field championships. I figured it was an easy sell for the News. I'd provide daily coverage for the sports section, they'd get good stuff without having to pay for airfare, hotels or meals. The editor said he'd get ripped by his publisher if he wasted money paying me to cover such a thing. I offered to do it for free. He said it was still too much, he didn't want that stuff in the paper every day.

* Then there was the time they asked for 18 inches on the Old Kent RiverBank 25K in Grand Rapids, which served as the U.S. championship and which also had a separate elite international field and purse. And then cut 18paragraphs down to two, in the process cutting out the names of both the U.S. and international women's winners.

* Or the time they said they didn't want anything on Crim. Too far away, they said-- that coming from Gannettites who probably couldn't locate Flint on a map, had no idea it was just a little over an hour up the freeway, and that if by some chance they ever found themselves in Flint they'd see a Detroit News box on every corner.

I got a copy of the Sunday Flint Journal, delivered it to the News publisher on Monday, and asked him in a note how such an important event in Flint could be so meaningless in Detroit, and what did he think a Flint reader would think who bought the Sunday News and couldn't find a story?

On Tuesday the sports editor called and asked if I could file something for Wednesday. For an event that happened Saturday? Sorry, Charlie, I think I'llpass.

It got so I pitched my good sports stuff to features. When I got early word that Sheila Taormina, a gold-medal swimmer in Atlanta in 1996, was training for the triathlon with an eye on Sydney in 2000, I didn't pitch it to sports, I pitched it to features, and they ran it big with great art. The sad thing, no one in sports even objected. They didn't think it was a sports story. They probably wondered why features was running such crap.

Same when Jim Ramsey came out of retirement in his 90s to run a final Freep marathon in honor of his beloved wife of 70 years, Julia, who had just died. I didn't pitch it to sports. I pitched it to features, and it ran with anincredible shot of Jim training on Belle Isle as the sun rose over the Detroit River.

His marathon a few weeks later was, and is, the best moment in Freep marathon history.

That's not to say there weren't funny/ pathetic moments outside the Sports Department. Two years ago I pitched the health and fitness section on a piece on getting ready for your first 5K, and that I'd key it around a Marathon 101 class that Running Fit taught. The News had very specific marching orders when itcame to what they wanted covered in the health and fitness section.

I, honest to God, Scout's honor, had been told by an editor there once that there was a hierarchy of importance when pitching a story about a particular person. Best was one with a black woman, next one with a black man, then a white woman. If it was keyed around a white man, forget it, it wasn't astory. They didn't want it.

So they told me they'd like the piece as long it had a black person, preferably a women. I called Running Fit owner Randy Step, who said there was a black woman in the class. I went out, took a photographer, shot photos, did the interviews, wrote the story. And got a call a few days later.

Oops, the rules had changed. Now, cover stories for the section had to include people in the 19-34 demographic, too. Did I have anyone? No, Ididn't. How old is the black woman? Early 40s. Oops, can't run the story.

I called Randy back. Turned out in the previous class there had been a young couple, of an age that qualified the story for publication. He gave me their number, I interviewed them, new photos were taken and the story eventually ran.

It gets better. A few years ago I was training the marathon fund-raising team for the American Diabetes Association and we were heading to Kona, Hawaii, to run the marathon there in late June, a day or two away from the summer solstice.

I pitched the health and fitness editor on a story keyed around this group of rookie marathoners. If they-- largely overweight, until recently, sedentary, many of them diabetics-- could survive the 140-degree surface temperature of the black lava fields of Kona, with the sun directly overhead, then the average reader could survive running in Detroit. I'd find out what our rookies had done beforehand to prepare for the heat and what they did during the race. I'd even run the event myself with a camera and shoot lots of photos of the group and the terrain.

Upon my return to Michigan, I got an e-mail. Another oops. Forgot to mention, said the editor, we're going to "mainstream" this story. Beware when Gannett editors use quotation-marked words or phrases. OK, I asked warily, what's "mainstreamed"? There had to be a black person in the group, said the editor. Was there? Uh, don't you think the time to tell me that was before I left for Kona, back when I was pitching the story? (I was sand-bagging. We had a black woman among our 24 or so fund-raisers, and, bonus, she was no younger than 19 and no older than 34.)

Just as the editor thought she'd have to kill the story, I allowed that there was in fact a black woman, and I even had a photo of her at the finish line.I wrote the story and they loved it and they even loved my photos. But, uh, there were a couple problems, said the editor. Her bosses had decided that marathon runners were too fit to be in the health and fitness section. They were really targeting unfit and unhealthy people. But not to worry, features wanted it and they'd move it there, which was cool because that meant more space.

Problem No. 2: Do any of the fund-raisers meet to run? They wanted to send out a staff photographer to shoot some portrait shots during a workout. Posed running shots and close-ups. Sure, I said. Every Sunday, in Hines Park. Uh, does the black woman run? Sure. Great, we'll send a photographer this Sunday. Uh, that's not going to work. Why? Well, she runs most Sundays, rain or shine, but she didn't come back from Kona. She's an engineer at GM and GM is sending her to Australia in the fall for a five-year assignment, and she's off in Sydney scouting out houses and apartments and buying a car.

When's she coming back? In three weeks. So, they waited three weeks, and when she got back she didn't want to run the next Sunday because she had other commitments. "There are plenty of others, right?" she asked. But none of them black, I had to sheepishly explain.

Worried about me losing out on a story and the Diabetes Association losing out on publicity, she changed her plans and ran. The photographer got his close-up, they ran the story and a shot of her drinking Gatorade, and I eventually got paid.

The story ran in August. A story to tell folks how they could prepare to run in the heat got held for the entire month of July so they could run the right shade of close-up.

So, sour grapes I'm no longer making easy money? Nope. Turned out it wasn't that easy. Life is-- especially when you get to 57-- too short. MR