Marathon Man (10 page)

It was going to take a miracle for me to squeeze through with passing grades. Amby, meanwhile, had finished his term papers two weeks before they were due. He'd scheduled every minute of his final two weeks of training before Boston and wasn't going to let anything interfere with it. Not classes, not campus uprisings, not a giant meteor hurdling right for Earth. When everybody else would be hiding in underground bomb shelters, Amby would be galloping along his twenty-mile loop.

On April 20, 1968, Ambrose Burfoot crossed the finish line to win the Boston Marathon. My twenty-one-year-old roommate had just become the youngest champion of the oldest and greatest marathon in the world. He had single-handedly carried forth the mythic New England running legacy of Clarence DeMar, Tarzan Brown, Les Pawson, John “the Elder” Kelley, and, most touchingly, his mentor and friend Young Johnny Kelley.

Sixty-year-old Johnny Kelley didn't just run the race that year; midway through the race he was still up with Amby and the other lead group. He was still fighting like a champion, even when he shouldn't have been. He finally faded the last half of the race. I've always suspected that the reason Johnny Kelley ran so hard that day was that he wanted to get to the finish line as fast as possible to congratulate Amby. Sure enough, Kelley came through the plaza, crossed the finish line, and made a beeline to Amby. And even though he was several inches shorter than his pupil, he gave him a big hug. “I know how happy you are, Amby,” Kelley said. “But you can't be any happier than I am. I think I finished fifteenth, but it doesn't matter. I think the only reason I kept going was so I could be here to exult with you.”

While Amby was in the midst of becoming the first American in eleven years to earn the title Boston Marathon champion, I was two hours away at a dual track meet in Middletown, Connecticut. Amby had felt guilty about missing the race—he didn't want to let down the team—but Coach Swanson, who had watched, as we all had, Amby train like no man alive, reassured him that it was okay. I liked Coach Swanson for that.

How could I have missed seeing Amby win the Boston Marathon? You have to understand, the event wasn't even televised at that time. I had no idea what the race looked liked, how the city transformed into this huge parade, or how the city's inhabitants, from the banker down to the street sweeper, were swept up in the excitement of hosting the most famous and prestigious marathon in the world.

I didn't get the mystical attraction it held to runners from all over the world—Europe, Japan, Africa, South America. I didn't get how hordes of people, unable to control themselves, would rush onto the course behind the lead runner when he made his final push to glory. I didn't get why the race meant so much to so many. Nobody on our team did. I just knew that 26.2 miles was a very long way to run.

For some odd reason, the city didn't rejoice in Amby's victory the way they should have. The media did not sing his praises, give him a clever nickname, hold him up as a beacon of hope. They should have, but they didn't. Of course, nobody could refute his groundbreaking accomplishment—the first home-grown talent to win at Boston in over a decade! A twenty-two-year-old student! And yet it didn't give birth to a running boom. The universe, as usual, was working on its own internal timetable.

Back at Wesleyan, there was no giant banner awaiting Amby like some conquering hero, no big party thrown in his honor. I don't even remember him showing me his medal. Amby wasn't like that. Life went back to normal, although I think perhaps Amby stopped playing “The Impossible Dream.”

After Amby graduated, I was no match for the social stimuli of college: the parties, the discos, that girl sitting across from me in the library. Another mental distraction for me was our country's escalation in Vietnam. The war had become this strange theater from which no American who owned a television could escape. It was the first war to be televised, which meant nightly news reports that took you to the battlefield. But although I could see what was going on with my eyes, I couldn't wrap my mind around it. As Emile de Antonio put it: “Every day we saw dead Americans, dead Vietnamese, bombings, all kinds of rather interesting things, but never one program on why; never one program on the history of it; never one program attempting to place it in context.”

I tried very hard to put it in context, consuming all the information I could on the war, poring through newspaper articles, engaging in political debates with classmates on the way to and from class. I gathered that the basis of the government's decision to take us deeper into war was to stop the spread of communism in Asia. I didn't buy into that theory.

By my junior year, our team had lost its backbone—Jeff and Amby. I guess it was my turn to step up and be the leader, but that was never me. Charlie was the leader; I, along with Jason, had always been a good follower. I was still the fastest two-miler on the team, but for the first time since I was a sophomore in high school, my times got slower instead of faster. I'm the kind of person who, if there's somebody to aim high with, I can do it. I looked for others to lead the way for me, like Coach O'Rourke or Amby. I didn't have the motivation to excel on my own. I wasn't self-directed in that way. Without Amby around to drag me out of bed for a morning run, I slumped.

With another lazy summer looming on the horizon, I could hear Amby's refrain, “Train over the summer, Bill. Keep up your fitness. It will pay off big time when you return in the fall.” In years past, I ignored his advice. But I truly felt the urge to lift myself out of this rut. So, for the first time in my life, I trained over the summer. I was back home in Newington, running five miles every day in the bright, hot sun. I'd come bounding up the front porch after a long run, dripping buckets of sweat, and Charlie would be looking at me with a warm, puzzled smile. He recognized a certain toughness in me that I'm not sure he saw in himself. But I knew from watching Amby what it took to be a distance runner—you've got to be one tough dog.

I started to get my fitness back. I set a new goal for my senior year: run the two mile in under nine minutes. I'd never hit this mark before so that put a charge in me. I continued to struggle academically, which only fed my desire to succeed on the track. At least then I'd have one reason to feel good about myself. Same as in high school, really.

I was also motivated by a challenge to my position as the best two-miler on the team. A freshman arrived at Wesleyan that fall—a Frenchman whose name escapes me. He ran a 9:05 in high school, so he was a really strong runner. I was determined to put this young hotshot in his place just as Amby had been with me.

As I worked toward my goal in the two mile, I continued to throw in longer runs. I was averaging seventy-five miles per week. I felt good about that. Sure, Amby averaged around 130 miles a week his senior year, almost double my amount, but he was training for the Boston Marathon. The thought never crossed my mind to enter a race longer than five miles. Five miles felt long!

In December of 1969, I had one last chance to break nine minutes in the two mile—at the final indoor race of the season at the Coast Guard Academy. It didn't look good. In spite of all the work I had put in, my fastest time in the two mile up to that point was 9:24. Taking that big of a chunk off my PR would not be easy.

I lined up beside the young Frenchman. I got off to a great start and took an early lead over the field. From there, I maintained my torrid pace. We came up on the second mile and that's when the Frenchman made his move. We were running neck and neck. I kept pushing the pace, but he hung right on my side. We came up on the final stretch and I knew it was time to pounce. With a final powerful kick, I surged ahead of the Frenchman and held him off as I sprinted across the finish line.

My winning time was announced: 8:58. I had broken nine minutes! That's the way our sport is. You train and train, and sometimes you don't feel like you're making any progress, and then suddenly you do. You rest a little and suddenly, whoa, you're up at another level. The body always responds, but sometimes it takes a while. It takes you by surprise. And that's what happened to me that day. I was psyched.

A couple of weeks after setting my PR at the Coast Guard Academy, my draft number came up. I can't recall what it was; Jason remembers his was 151. But our numbers bought us both six months. Around the same time, the Supreme Court had ruled that people could apply for conscientious objector status, not just on the basis of their religious beliefs, but due to their moral objections, as well. That decision opened the door for a lot of young people who were against the war to apply to become a CO—Charlie, Jason, and I jumped on that bus.

The application process was very involved. You had to show your objection was based on your religious and moral beliefs and not because you were afraid to fight. You had to get letters of support, testifying to your character, and your parents didn't count. Jason recalls getting a bunch of hawks to vouch for his sincerity. Amby and Charlie each wrote a letter on my behalf. So did Coach O'Rourke. I owed them a debt of gratitude.

Amby had also filed for conscientious objector status in the spring of his senior year. Prior to going in for his draft board review, he worried they were going to grill him on his religious and moral beliefs. Amby went in and the first thing he said to them was, “Okay, yeah, I'm a conscientious objector, but, by the way, the
red, white, and blue
Olympic marathon trials are this summer and I would like to compete in those and so maybe you could give me four or five months off to go for the gold.” And then they could come after him. They said yes to that. By the time he got back from his dismal failure in the marathon trials, Amby had secured a draft-exempt position as an elementary school teacher in Groton, Connecticut.

I knew that no matter how the draft board decided in my case, I wasn't going to Vietnam. I'd heard lots of antiwar activist were heading to Canada. For some strange reason, I thought about going to New Zealand. Don't ask me why New Zealand. The idea that in six months I might no longer be in America was tough to handle. I didn't want to go. I decided I wouldn't. I'd either be granted objector status or go to prison, like Muhammad Ali did. No matter what, I wasn't going to do something that I thought was hurting the country. It was tough because a lot of people felt the exact opposite. Some of them were my friends.

It was a very tricky time to come out against the war; one day I was a regular, all-American kid from the suburbs and suddenly I was a commie-loving draft dodger. An outsider in my own country. The splitting apart of the nation I felt occurring within myself.

All of a sudden, running didn't have any meaning to me. I had reached my goal—I had broken the nine-minute barrier in the two mile. What else was there? I had never been a great talent; I was a solid runner at a Division III school. What avenues were there for a track and cross-country runner after college anyway? The answer was none. Nobody took marathon running seriously. At Wesleyan, a school of seven thousand, there was one: Amby Burfoot. And he knew, as well as I did, that there was no way to make a living as a long-distance runner.

Graduation was coming up and I had no idea where I was headed. So I retired from running. I was done. A footnote in my life. Something I told people I did back in college.

I didn't resent Amby for being the athlete I'd never be; I didn't have his drive. I was okay with that. It was another fact of life. The Charles River would always flow into Massachusetts Bay; no matter how much I ate, my frame would always be more Woody Allen than Steve McQueen; Triumph motorcycles would always be cool and catching butterflies would always be hard; and life would always have a way of working out the way it's supposed to work out. Most of the time, anyway.

That spring, a student strike turned the Wesleyan campus upside down, just as similar strikes were doing all over the country. More than four hundred American colleges were shut down as a result of these student uprisings. On May 4, National Guard troops shot four unarmed students at Kent State. Hundreds of thousands of people converged in front of the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument. The protest had gone national. And it wasn't just four million students who had started to question our country's leaders. Now, mainstream America started to say, “Wait a second. What's going on here?” This question was being asked all over the country. Although I was moved by the injustices, I didn't belong to any movement. I didn't fit in with my peers who repudiated and raged anymore than I did with those who embraced free love and psychedelic drugs. (Oddly enough, sometimes they were one in the same.) This I believed: People got hurt in war. The opposite was true of running. In running you got healed.

I went into the preinduction physical and passed all the tests. Some people tried to fake their physicals. You'd hear all kinds of stories about people losing weight or getting sick or something. Amby told me about this easygoing, long-haired California runner named Bob Deines, who finished sixth in Boston in 1968. He was very much against the war. He scheduled his preinduction physical a few days after running a marathon and when they came in and saw this beat-down, skeletal figure crawl in on his wobbly last leg, they determined him unfit for service. I wasn't going to do that. I just believed what I believed in. That was that.

In late winter of 1971, Charlie, Jason, and I were granted conscientious objector status. We now had to find a job to fulfill our two-year alternative service requirement. That meant we were limited to work “deemed to make a meaningful contribution to the maintenance of the national health, safety, and interest.”

Before starting our job search, Jason and I decided to take a trip to Key West, Florida. Jason was a big fan of Ernest Hemingway and so we spent a lot of time drinking his favorite drink, the daiquiri, at his favorite watering hole, Sloppy Joe's. We rented a couple of poles and fished off the end of the pier. It was heaven.