Marathon Man (15 page)

My mind, which tended to bounce, skip, and fly around in every direction, was now trained like a laser beam on the moment at hand. As the race wore on, I gave no heed to my inner dialogue, or the people and scenery that flanked the road—not even for a second. All my focus was on the road directly ahead of me. It was this effortless intensity and calm as I ran that separated me, not just from the casual weekend warrior, but my other competitors. Where it came from, I'm not really sure.

It would have been easy, as I glided down the road, for random thoughts to enter my head—“Jeez, did I forget to turn off the coffeepot?” Or, “I hope I can pay my rent this month”—but they didn't. Instead, with every strike of my Prefontaine shoes on the pavement, I was tuned into what was happening to my body. The average marathon runner will tune out for a time, especially when the hard miles begin taking their toll. They will disassociate from the task they are performing, taking their minds to another place, focusing on anything but the pain they are feeling.

In his book
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,
the great Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who's also an enthusiastic recreational runner, describes his method for successfully completing an ultra marathon. He talks about entering into a “metaphysical” state where he hardly knows who he is or what he's doing. He puts himself into a Zen-like trance, on the assumption it's better to transcend the physical and mental distress than to plug into it. But the worst thing you can do as a marathon racer is to deny, ignore, or repress what your body is telling you, every single moment throughout the race. Even if it's not what you want to hear.

While he's running, Murakami tells himself to think of rivers and clouds. In that moment, I tell myself to watch my form. Check my pace. Check my exertion level. Monitor the subtle in-and-outs of my breath. Listen to my body for the slightest hint of fatigue or injury.

Murakami talks about running in a cozy, homemade void. I love that feeling, going on a long run through the countryside, leaving my mind far behind. But I can't afford to think of nothing. Not there in the middle of the Boston Marathon. Not in the heat of battle against Drayton. If I want to win this race, I need total awareness.

Once the race was on, my ADHD mind somehow knew not to wander off on its own. It knew a momentary slip in concentration could do more than slow me down, or impede my performance, it could lead to a fatal mistake. It might be an early mistake, one I didn't even realize I was making at the time. Perhaps caught up in the thrill of the competition, I fall into the temptation to blast through the first few miles. If this early pace is just a tad too fast to maintain to the finish, the final miles will become a living nightmare.

Let's hope I didn't run those first few miles too fast.

I was coming up on the real nitty-gritty of the marathon. Everything else was just setting me up. This is the real challenge of the marathon—the last fifteen miles. I had run that first part carefully and it was very uplifting to feel my engine running trouble-free. I knew the center of Natick was up ahead; I had a sense of moving out of the wooded suburbs and of getting closer and closer to the bedlam of Boston. You really feel that as you run. And it's flat, so it's easy running, and you're making progress. The halfway mark was coming up, and that's a significant marker psychologically.

Drayton and I continued stride for stride into Natick Center, a wide-open downtown that captures the signature feel of a small-town New England celebration, much like Hopkinton does. We flew by an officer directing traffic in the center of the road, kids handing out cups of water, and fans crammed along the town green cupping their hands to their mouth to better project their passionate support. At that moment, I was running the marathon as if it were a cross-country race, as if time didn't matter, only position. I was running with a “go-for-the lead” attitude.

The crowds were clapping and rooting for us like Roman spectators at a gladiatorial match. Amid the throngs of cheering fans the spirit of Spartacus could be heard: “Oh, comrades! Warriors! Thracians! If we must fight, let us fight for ourselves! If we must slaughter, let us slaughter our oppressors! If we must die, let it be under the clear sky; by the bright waters; in noble, honorable battle.”

T
HREE
Y
EARS
E
ARLIER

B
OSTON,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

I was running to work one day when I spotted my Triumph as it zipped by me. I could have given chase, I suppose, but I was never a speed guy. Besides, maybe the stranger on my bike had done me a favor. I wasn't back on my feet, but at least I was
back on my feet
. Okay, so it wasn't Prometheus and a bolt of lightning.

When I wasn't working at the hospital, or sporadically running outdoors, I was spending my time with Ellen, mostly over at her place in Jamaica Plain. I was almost never at my apartment on Westland Avenue. Jason knew I had a girlfriend, which was a good thing, because otherwise he might have thought his friend had been abducted by aliens. I don't know if Jason was mad at me for dropping out of his life like I did. He knew how badly I had wanted a girlfriend, so he likely forgave me. Also, he would have known that a jittery nicotine puffer like me could use the calming influence of a good woman.

And that's exactly what Ellen brought to my world: a sense of calm. Almost instantly, I left behind those nights spent going to pubs with Jason. Quiet dinners at Ellen's replaced loud music and booze at Jack's. Her sparsely decorated living room became my new favorite hangout; most nights we curled up on the couch and watched TV. After all the aimless drifting that I had done since graduation, I felt relieved to have stumbled into a stable relationship with a girl I could be myself around.

It was August now. We were at Ellen's, sitting on her frumpy couch, watching the Olympic marathon on her tiny TV set with the rabbit ears. It was the final day of events. By then, the athletic competition had been overshadowed by the massacre of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic squad by Palestinian terrorists. After such a shocking event, played out live on TV to a world audience, the rest of the sporting contests became an afterthought. And with good reason—people had died. Still, as a former college runner, I was curious to watch the marathon.

The smart money was on the Europeans or Japanese to take gold, while the Americans were considered inferior competition. As a matter of fact, the last time an American runner had won a gold medal in the marathon was way back in 1908 and not without controversy. An Italian named Dorando Pietri had been the first to cross the finish line, but he had collapsed down the final stretch and had been assisted to the finish by British officials. Eventually the Italian was disqualified and Johnny Hayes, a New York department store clerk, was awarded the gold medal.

Frank Shorter, a former track athlete from Yale, was considered America's best shot for a medal. He was a couple of years ahead of me in college, so I never raced him head-to-head. But Amby did. In those days, he beat Shorter handily—and, in fact, was only vaguely aware that there was some kid named Frank Shorter finishing somewhere behind him. He didn't register on my radar at all. Of course, I wasn't aware that Shorter had won the ten-thousand-meter title at the 1969 NCAA track championship during his senior year at Yale. Or that he had won the U.S. National Cross-Country Championships in 1970 and again in 1971. I didn't follow the sport in those days. I was following the peanuts as they hit the ground at Jack's Bar.

Last I had heard, Frank Shorter had gone to medical school and then later decided to attend law school. At any rate, I assumed that like most college runners he'd eventually quit the sport and had found a stable way to make a living. He could do that as a lawyer. I considered that vocation myself back in college, and I was nowhere as smart as Shorter.

What I didn't know was that a friend of his named Kenny Moore, who graduated from the University of Oregon and took fourth place in Munich, had convinced him to try the marathon. Grad school gave Frank the time to run and so he decided to go for it. Kenny Moore was to Frank what Amby had been to me—the guy who saw untapped potential and encouraged him to push himself and see what he could do. Only Frank had responded to Kenny's plea, while I'd ignored Amby's.

The race started in the Olympic Stadium, and was run over an out-and-back course. Shorter had taken the lead early and was demolishing everybody by several minutes. For the last sixteen miles he was just on a leisurely tour of Munich. I remember seeing Frank emerge from the dark of the tunnel onto the stadium track. He was alone in first. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Nobody could. It was such a wonderful moment because you knew it was being beamed around the whole world, but also because of the way he ran that day—with absolute grace and ease and perfection. Nobody's ever looked fitter or better than him at an Olympic running event. It was a galvanizing moment for all runners. As a fellow American, you looked at the video and you saw the image of the perfect runner—in complete control of his game, while the rest of the world ate his dust. An absolutely sublime, dominating performance—like in 1960 when Abebe Bikila, a virtual unknown from Ethiopia, conquered the streets of Rome barefooted in world record time, becoming the first black African to win an Olympic gold medal.

Sensing a buzz in the air, ABC played up Frank's run over the next several hours. The network brought in Erich Segal—the Yale classics professor,
Love Story
author, marathon aficionado, blah, blah, blah—to provide color commentary. Toward the end of the race, Segal was going crazy, not because Frank was a quarter mile from Olympic glory, but because an imposter had entered the stadium seconds before him and was taking a victory lap. The crowd was cheering wildly for the imposter, not knowing the truth. Shorter recalls hearing the roar of the crowd as he entered the tunnel into the Olympic Stadium only to be greeted with absolute quiet when he emerged. “As I ran the final lap around the track, the crowd was silent and I'm thinking, Well, I'm an American, but give me a break.” An outraged Segal was calling the imposter all these unspeakable names on the air and yelling out to Shorter, “It's a fraud, Frank!” It made for entertaining television.

That night at Ellen's, I was just one more American watching the highlights of Frank Shorter's victory in disbelief. Only a few days earlier, everybody had experienced a very different kind of disbelief, watching the tragedy of kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes unfold. It was painful to watch such a despicable act of faceless terror. But thanks to Frank's perfect marathon run, we, as a nation, could now celebrate an act of individual achievement. It mattered that it came in the marathon, the event that perhaps more than any other symbolized one man's heroic triumph against a host of fierce challengers and in the face of daunting conditions. It was a hopeful, cathartic moment.

As fired up as I was to see a former U.S. college athlete like myself win Olympic gold, I didn't leap up out of my seat and charge out the door with the goal of competing in a marathon. But it did alter my perception. I suppose it was like how people once thought it was impossible to put a man on the moon and then one day they turn on their TV to see Neil Armstrong hopping on the lunar surface. Frank Shorter was, in that moment, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Suddenly, the possibilities for an American runner were endless. There was a way forward and it was suddenly okay to dream the impossible dream—even if you weren't Amby Burfoot.

It was early fall by now. Things were going well with Ellen and I was still spending all my time over at her place, so I decided it was time for me to leave Westland Avenue.

I arrived at the hospital, but instead of going right inside to join the other escort messengers I walked around back to the parking lot. I found Jason in the shack, listening to the local rock station and watching the clock go around.

“So Ellen and I are getting married,” I said.

“Get atta here,” said Jason. “Really?”

“Just kidding.”

“You frickin' loon.”

“I am moving in with her.”

Jason said nothing for a few seconds, then smiled. “Right on.”

Jason knew it was the logical next step. If he'd had a girlfriend, he might have done the same thing. And he had lots of friends who needed a place to live, so finding a roommate wouldn't be difficult. With that said, I could see from the look on his face that the news was a little traumatic. His best pal was going away. On some gut level, we both knew we were going in different directions.

Jason and I were developing different sets of friends. I wasn't interested in where he was going and he wasn't a good enough runner to run a hundred miles a week. I used to come back from a long run, soaked in sweat, and Jason would be sitting on the stoop of our building with a forty-ounce bottle of Black Label, hanging out with some of the other people in our building. It was nothing really that out of the ordinary. That's what young people did back then—they hung out and drank and smoked weed and listened to Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and hooked up on rooftops and alleys.

The real truth of the matter was that I was the guy that was out of the ordinary. I was the guy that was about to head off in a direction that was less than typical. I would miss Jason, all the same.

By the winter of 1971, I'd grown more involved in the push to establish a union at the hospital, which more and more resembled the personal crusade of one man—Howard. But it was, in fact, a two-man operation: Howard at the top, in charge of overall strategy, and me, who went along with Howard's plan.

I wasn't concerned about my own pay. I was in selective service so I had already struck my sweet deal with the government in which I would be their servant for two years and in return they wouldn't put me in jail. I was more concerned with the nurse's aid, toiling in subhuman conditions for slightly more than a pouch of magic beans. Meanwhile, Jason and the other parking attendants stood around, smoking pot and listening to the radio, supposedly keeping a watchful eye on the chrome-slathered boats driven by our bosses: shiny, pollution-belching monsters like the Lincoln Continental, Chrysler Imperial, and Cadillac El Dorado.