Marathon Man (13 page)

Through Natick, Drayton and I ran, linked at the elbows, gauging each other on the fly. Do I make a move? Do I challenge him to run a faster pace? All the while knowing that it could blow up in my face. Once you lose the upper hand in a marathon, it's almost impossible to get it back.

Drayton wanted to annihilate me. He wanted to put a dagger in me. But if Drayton expected to leave me in the dust, it was not going to happen. I was too fit. Too feisty. Too fired up. I didn't care how relentless the onslaught, I refused to falter. I'd trained for this moment. I'd trained to win.

All that stuff about how running in the lead makes you vulnerable and puts you at risk is the truth. But Drayton and I shared the same mentality on this day: I'm not going to die out there in the middle of the pack. I'm not going to die running at a safe, controlled pace. No, if the course is going to kill me, it's going to kill me running in the lead, trying to take down its record.

Drayton and I went at each other through town after town: through the rolling hills of Ashland, past the old clock tower on Chestnut Street, into Framingham, past the industrial factories, past the Framingham train station and into Natick. You won't find roads like this at any other major marathon in the world. That's the beauty of Boston: As much as it's confined and restricted by its history, it's also literally confined and restricted by narrow country roads. Run the New York City Marathon or the Chicago Marathon and you'll find wide-open avenues with all kinds of room to maneuver. Boston is a tight, up-and-down pressure cooker the whole way.

We were hammering away at Hill's record, trying to beat the other one into submission. I liked this course. This was a “duke it out” course. It said,
Do you dare to run fast up this hill? Do you dare to chase me down this steep incline?
We were engaged in a bare-bones fight. A savage battle of wills. This wasn't just another marathon to me or Drayton. This was Boston. Since its first run in the spring of 1897, people have traveled far and wide, at times without a penny in their pocket, for their chance at glory. As I opened my stride and pumped my arms, I imagined Abebe Bikila, the Lion of Ethiopia, the greatest marathoner ever, pounding through these same streets.

In the tailwind, Drayton and I battled side by side in the lead, speaking not a word. The man in the dark sunglasses ran like a machine—methodical, brutal, unstoppable. His face betrayed no emotion. This was do or die. Kill or be killed. Old-fashioned gladiators dueling it out. The road literally pushed Drayton in on me, barring me from feeling, even for a second, that I was out there running alone, just running against time. No, I was running against Drayton. I could hear him breathing and I could hear his footsteps echo off the road and I thought I could even hear him wishing me to fail.

Drayton was doing everything in his power to make this happen. But he didn't know me at all. He didn't know about my breakthrough at the World Cross-Country Championships in Morocco. He didn't know how hard I'd been training, how many miles of Boston hardtop I'd covered in the past twelve months. He didn't know that I'd run 537 miles last month so I'd be ready when this time came. He saw a skinny blond hippie in a handmade T-shirt and oversize gardening gloves. He didn't see the Bikila-like lion roaring inside me.

F
OUR
Y
EARS
E
ARLIER

B
OSTON,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

For two long-haired, Frisbee-playing bikers in search of groovy times, Boston was heaven. We weren't loose and freaky enough for San Francisco, with its be-ins and radical politics and nude acid parties. After all, we were regular, middle-class kids from outside Hartford who drank cheap beer and smoked Winstons. We were happy wasting a sunny afternoon in the Boston Commons, watching the beaded hippie girls dancing barefoot, or hanging out at Jack's Bar in Cambridge, where you could get free peanuts, listen to some down-and-dirty blues band, all the while safe in the knowledge that most of the bar knew Carl Yastrzemski's batting average.

It was a summer night in Boston in 1971. Jason and I were walking home from Jack's Bar in Cambridge. A couple of Irish kids with pasty faces, long hair, and Boston accents, fresh out of college, rooming together on Westland Avenue. The scent of Jack's Bar—mostly cigarettes and peanuts—still clung to our jeans as we walked through the city late at night, cracking wise the whole way.

“Those girls at the bar were so into us.”

“Yeah, right up to the point that they left with their boyfriends.”

“Ha ha. So close, man. So close!”

We walked a good ways down Mass. Avenue until we reached Westland Avenue. Something kept us from following it down to our dumpy little apartment though. How the idea came into being, or by whom, Jason or myself, is unclear. What is certain is that a decision was made to walk our slightly inebriated selves a couple blocks up to the Prudential Plaza and run across the finish line of the Boston Marathon. It was a fluky thing to do. Like stopping to serenade a girl from outside her window.

After a short walk up the street, we reached the plaza and stopped in the shadow of the massive Prudential Building. This is where the finish line of the Boston Marathon was every year, at least back when Prudential was still a main sponsor of the race.

Our plan for running the end was poorly conceived. Nothing like the elaborate ruse pulled off by the late, great George Plimpton when he was a Harvard student in the 1940s. Long story short: Plimpton had applied to the school's exclusive journalism club and was told the price of initiation was running the Boston Marathon. On race day, Plimpton blended in among the throngs of people gathered along Beacon Street to catch a glimpse of the runners as they came down the home stretch. The moment the leader came into view, Plimpton leaped onto the course behind him, wearing running shorts and sneakers. The startled runner used a big finishing kick to hold off the lanky kid with the stiff, goofy-looking gait. Moments later, in the press tent, Plimpton fessed up. At once, the winner lunged at him, but was held back before he could take off Plimpton's head.

When Plimpton made his infamous dash, he had the advantage of an actual finish line to cross. We couldn't find any marker on the street, so we had to eyeball the spot. Fortunately, only a few months earlier we'd driven our motorcycles to the finish line area, where we found a spot along the course to watch the runners' final push to glory.

A hundred yards from our imaginary finish line, Jason and I assumed the starting stance, which was really no starting stance at all. More like two guys in street clothes with their arms dangling at their sides. This would be my first “competitive” race since the winter of my senior year at Wesleyan when I raced a sub-9:00 two mile at the Coast Guard Academy. I had just accomplished my personal mission to break the nine-minute mark and I had been elated. Everything changed after that. I quit going to track practice. Gave up running. I had good reasons. At least, they were good reasons to me.

We sprinted down Ring Road and past the huge statue of Prometheus Unbound that stood in the reflecting pool in front of the Prudential Center. I glanced over at the Greek titan who'd stolen fire from Zeus's lightning. I wish I could say a steady stream of brilliant light shot from his outstretched finger, zapped me in stride, back into life, awaking me at once to the true destiny that awaited. But it would be a lie to say that Prometheus spoke to me in that moment. That Jason and I went back to our apartment and started planning our comebacks. Or that the next day I quit my dead-end job at the hospital, stopped going to bars, stopped smoking cigarettes, and started making something of my life. We had our selective service jobs to do, and that was it. There was nothing beyond that.

I heard the sound of my feet hitting the concrete as we sprinted across the imaginary finish line, falling to the ground, laughing our heads off. Chalk the whole incident up to two former runners who'd had a few drinks at the bar. We had no plan to run the real race, not that night, not ever.

God, we laughed hard that night.

Winter arrived. As those who've ever spent a winter in Boston know, the cold can be rough. Heavy snow is also pervasive. Like most locals, I was cooped up inside all day, either stuck in the crummy confines of the hospital or the cramped rooms of my tiny apartment. If I didn't find a way to burn off some of my nervous energy, I was going to explode.

For weeks I had walked right past the YMCA on Huntington Avenue, near where I lived. One day, I decided to go inside and get a membership. I had never been inside a YMCA in my life. There was a weight room and a tiny slanted track.

I was starting over from scratch. If I had any goal at that point it was to obtain a minimal level of fitness. I wanted to see if I could run a half mile around the track. Most times I wouldn't even use the track; instead I'd get on a rowing machine. The other guys there would be lifting weights or jumping rope hard in the mirror. But all I wanted was to feel a little strength return to my body. Guess that's all I could handle at that point.

When I came into the YMCA to run a few laps, I would see a few guys training for the Boston Marathon. They would blow by me on the track. Most of the time, I slipped in and out of the Y without ever being noticed. It didn't matter that the other runners saw me as a nobody, if they saw me at all. In the world of running, I
was
a nobody.

When any of them asked me if I was also training for the marathon, I would tell them the same thing: “No. I used to be a distance runner. Not anymore.”

Run the marathon? Were they serious? I was lucky if I could make it five miles around this miserable little track without wheezing to death.

“I once roomed with a guy who won the Boston Marathon,” I told them.

I could tell from their reaction they were impressed.

“What's he doing now?” they asked.

“I don't really know. I think he's still competing. He might also be a schoolteacher down in Connecticut.”

I continued running sporadically at the YMCA, running laps around this slanted track that was so small I had to run twelve laps around to equal a mile. It was easy to lose my bearings running around the banked track, lap after lap, like a roulette ball. As I picked up my pace, I wasn't so much running as I was orbiting the track, twenty-four laps in a row, then thirty-six laps …

The other runners on the track, all training for the Boston Marathon, sprinted by me. I paid them no attention. Instead, I kept running at my slow, steady pace. I worked up to forty-eight laps. Then I climbed to sixty laps, which translated to five miles. Eventually, I was running close to a hundred laps around the tiny track, three or four times a week. On Saturdays, I'd do an extralong run to prepare me for the extralong night of drinking and smoking in the bars.

You could call my workouts at the Y an escape from the boredom of winter. But it was more than that. I needed to move. I was meant to move. Even at my lowest point as an athlete, the magnetic pull was still there. The pull was weakened in the presence of life's overwhelming burdens, but it hadn't disappeared altogether.

Even though I had improved my fitness on the track, I was still apprehensive about running outdoors. After all, doing exercise of any kind in public was highly unusual in those days. In the neighborhood where I grew up, I knew of two adults who kept themselves in great shape. Only two. Back then, you almost never saw a person going for a run or peddling a bicycle. The only people who did these things were kids. It's almost as if adults weren't allowed. If you did run in public, you felt uncomfortable. You felt strange. I know women who used to run in the woods out of shame, or fear of verbal attacks. But male or female, it was not a good time to be a runner on the road.

Month after month of the same routine—hitting the bars, smoking cigarettes, staying out late—started to take on a stale and funky odor. I was keyed up all the time, but it wasn't a good energy. It was a nervous energy. I used to rid myself of this chronic angst by running ten miles with Amby. Now I did it by smoking cigarettes. I traded one addiction (with side effects like increased physical strength, lower blood pressure, and a natural emotional high) for another addiction (decreased lung function, promotion of fatigue, and harm to every organ in your body). Nice swap.

In April, Jason and I decided to ride our bikes down to the Cape for some mindless fun in the sun. Jason had worked the summer before at the Chrysler Art Museum in Provincetown and made some friends while hanging out at the bars. These same friends now offered to put us up for the weekend. My reaction was: “Let's go. Let's ride as fast and as far as we can.”

Once we arrived, we met up with Jason's contacts—a group of scruffy, party-hard, Allman Brothers–listening, Jack and Coke–drinking guys. By then, Jason was getting more into the Grateful Dead and starting to dabble in heavier, mind-expanding drugs, which was a part of this new scene. As much as I shared Jason's carefree spirit, I could never go that route.

Jason was an original—definitely a sixties-seventies type of guy. I remember once when we were living together, he came home with some LSD. I didn't like this. It scared me. I thought it was dangerous. I was working inside the hospital. I saw the hazards of taking drugs on a daily basis. Jason was working out in the parking lot, listening to the Doors. He didn't see all the sick, beat-up people.

Jason was always telling me, “Billy, you've got to be spontaneous.” I preferred to run through a couple of million scenarios in my head. Also, my parents raised me to always think about the consequences of my action. Of course, in those days, I was thinking more about the consequences of my inaction.

I followed the wolf pack as they careened from bar to bar in search of babes for whom to buy tequila shots. For Jason and his new pals, chasing after girls was fun. For me, it was stressful. Like trying to catch a giant swallowtail butterfly without a net—in a tsunami.