Marathon Man (18 page)

Now there was no turning back. The voice inside me that said I should focus on finding a job was drowned out by the much louder voice inside me that demanded that I feed my appetite to move. It told me that I had starved my soul for too long. Nursing that shrunken nub back to health was now my only concern.

The medicine that one needs to take to cure his or her shriveled soul depends on that person. Most people search their whole life looking for this medicine, sometimes in the most bizarre places. Sometimes they try to find it in another human being. But all one ever has to do is move. Moving is the medicine. Running, walking, jumping, hopping, skipping, dancing, twirling, swimming, hiking, biking—they all have the same inexplicably powerful effect on our being. I discovered the potent remedy of movement as a child. I was possessed by a frantic mind and prone to foolish behavior. Running was the shelter from the storm of chaotic emotions—impatience, hurt, loneliness, frustration. If I ever lost my true self, all I had to do was run long enough and far enough and there I'd find it.

That fall, I got a letter from selective service. It said that I'd fulfilled my obligation to the government. I was deemed a permanent conscientious objector. They'd finally let me go. At long last, I was free.

By now, I had no doubt as to my objective. I knew it before that moment but wasn't ready to admit it to myself. The undertaking was too daunting, too dangerous, too bold. But why else had I been training so hard all those months? The truth was, I had been preparing for battle. I knew what was next. The comeback was already on.

I was going to race the Boston Marathon.

 

EIGHT

Battle at Silver Lake

A
PRIL 21, 1975

W
ELLESLEY,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

As I broke away from Drayton, I felt a mix of exhilaration and apprehension. To start racing hard at eleven miles, with fifteen miles ahead of me, I was taking a big leap into the unknown. I had reacted spontaneously to events as they unfolded. It wasn't that different than the artist who follows his creative impulses.

Look at the way Frank Shorter suddenly made his move in Munich in 1972. I don't know if he was planning to charge to the front at the nine-mile mark, and keep pushing the tempo with seventeen miles to go, but he did and blew away the field by over two minutes to become the first American gold medal winner in sixty-four years. Did my friend and fellow New Englander Joan Benoit Samuelson plan to surge ahead only three miles into the 1984 Olympic marathon while her competitors were playing it safe in the brutal heat, or was she just feeling feisty in that moment? She finished a minute and a half ahead of the overwhelming favorite, Grete Waitz, to take gold. They weren't worrying about breaking down when they made their move. Neither was I when I made mine against Drayton.

I felt good making this aggressive move; I saw a little gap and I was going to drive through it like a thoroughbred horse—fearless in flight. As for Drayton, I lost him quickly after I shot to the front. He soon became out of sight, out of mind.

For the first time, I found myself alone in the lead of a major race. In the World Cross-Country Championships, I had two other guys fighting for the lead with me. But suddenly there I was running out front by myself. It was a powerful feeling to be roaring along the road with a sense of no obstacles in my way. I was on my way toward the finish. I had nothing to lose.

As I made my way through an isolated area outside of Wellesley, I ran with the same relaxed, powerful strides that I used following Amby through the winding trails around campus, or, as he'd said, “always a half-stride behind, eyes nearly closed, right arm flapping and light hair bouncing rhythmically to the cadence of the run.”

I could hear the rumble, like distant thunder, of the crowds in the distance. It could only mean one thing. The infamous Wellesley “scream tunnel” was getting close. In a moment, I would encounter thousands of Wellesley College women lining the streets, hollering their heads off, carrying signs saying,
KISS ME, I'M A SENIOR
or
KISS ME, I'M A CHEMIST
or
HOW ABOUT A QUICKIE?
or
GIVE ME A HUG.
I felt energized by the cheers of the female superfans growing closer and louder.

As I came into Wellesley at mile 11.5, the road narrowed and the growing crowds squeezed in around me. I felt momentum running through downtown, past all the Wellesley College girls, standing along the edge of the road, screaming and whooping and offering kisses.

I know Tommy Leonard, the larger-than-life bartender at the Eliot Lounge, the local hangout for us runners in the Greater Boston Track Club, particularly enjoyed running through the gauntlet of out-of-control female students: “These girls, I love when they come out. They're all good-looking chicks. I try to make dates. See you at the Eliot Lounge, but none of them show up—I'm oh for twenty-one.” In contrast, at the 1992 Boston Marathon, Kenyan runner Ibrahim Hussein put his fingers in his ears to block the deafening roar of the coeds en route to victory.

As for me, the waves of screaming female coeds had no impact on me. It's not that the shouts of encouragement from the Wellesley women didn't provide me with a nice lift—it definitely did—but I wasn't there to make dates. The pope could have been there giving out blessings and I wouldn't have stopped. Such was my drive to win the race.

As I ran alone through Wellesley, the road got narrower while the crowds got bigger. And louder. And more intense. There was increasingly less room on the road for me to squeeze through, but I loved that in a way. I reacted to the energy of the crowd and it drove me on. If you talk to anyone who's ever run the Boston Marathon, they'll all say that: The support from the cheering crowd gives you a huge lift. So I had that on my side when I was taking off. I'd never enjoyed the special attention of running in the lead. I was the awkward little brother at the high school dance, the wallflower, the one who was too shy to ask the girls to dance. And my parents, while patient and loving, weren't the type to lavish praise on my brother and me—most of the time they had no clue where we'd run off. I was relishing the moment, eyes ahead, feet soaring, arms pumping, a tongue steeped in the sweetness of adulation, to quote Willy Shakespeare.

Moving past Wellesley campus, I headed deeper into the center of town. I sailed past the quaint brick-and-stucco–faced shops and rowdy masses, cruising over some nice subtle downgrades. Nobody called out my name. Nobody held up a sign that read
GO, BILL.
But it didn't matter that I wasn't a well-known runner. It didn't matter that I wasn't Frank Shorter. Once they spotted the Boston insignia on my chest—alerting them to the fact that a hometown kid was leading the Boston Marathon—they went crazy. I savored the sounds of their ecstatic cheers, the sense that they were on my side. Collectively, they were telling me, “You've got this.” Fats and carbohydrates were fueling my body, but it was the people lining the road that powered me forward. Emboldened by my newfound fans, my legs glided along the road, with long, quick, fluid strides. I was tearing up the miles, hurtling them behind me, putting as much distance between myself and the other runners as I could. At this stage in the race, it was all or nothing.

I didn't know it at the time—I was moving too fast, too focused—but one of the spectators I passed here was “the Rookie,” Alberto Salazar. He was standing along the road with his father, Ricardo, waiting for the lead pack to arrive.

This is how Alberto would recall in his memoir that moment. I rocketed past him: “There was skinny, spacey Bill, with his long hair flowing in back of him, the guy I'd eaten BLTs with at Friendly's ice-cream restaurants. He's wearing white tube socks that stretch up to midcalf and a pair of shoes sent out from Blue Ribbon Sports in Oregon, the forerunner of Nike. He's wearing a ratty T-shirt on which he's crayoned the letters ‘GBTC.' Despite this motley getup, Bill is wailing. He's opened a four hundred-yard lead in the most prestigious marathon on earth, and I can see very clearly that nobody's going to catch him. ‘I know that guy!' I shouted to my dad and brother. ‘I run with that guy!' But mostly I'm shouting this amazing fact to myself, and at that moment, like a bolt, it comes to me: This is the marathon; this is what Coach Squires promises is waiting for me. At that moment, I resolved—at that moment,
I knew
—that I was going to grab that destiny with both hands. I knew with every fiber of my being that I was going to become the greatest marathon runner in the world.”

All things are related in this sport, as they are in life. I didn't understand the allure of the Boston Marathon until the day I stood along the side of the famed course with Jason and witnessed the intensity and magnitude and beauty of the spectacle. I was struck with amazement seeing Jeff Galloway, my teammate from Wesleyan, and John Vitale, whom I ran against at the University of Connecticut, competing with the top runners for victory. I thought, Wait a minute, if they can do it, so can I. The same way Amby had heard the powerful calling as he watched his hero, Johnny Kelley, race by him, I had heard the powerful calling as I watched the familiar faces sweep past me. And now Alberto had heard the same calling watching me. Maybe the next great American marathon runner to hear the call, to grab that destiny with both hands, to embrace the challenge of the human spirit, is reading this story. Maybe it's you.

T
WO
Y
EARS
E
ARLIER

S
ILVER
L
AKE
D
ODGE
30
K
R
OAD
R
ACE,
H
OPKINTON,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

It was a cold February morning. I stretched my legs beside the small town green. Standing guard over me and the other runners warming up in the center of town was a bronze World War I soldier statue, a monument to the one hundred and fifteen locals who fought in that war. The dominating presence of the statue let anybody entering Hopkinton know the high regard in which the townspeople held military service. On second thought, maybe I wouldn't tout my conscientious objector status at the general store.

Downtown Hopkinton was a postcard of tranquil winter in rural New England. Hard to believe that here, in this one-horse town, the Boston Marathon, the most famous footrace in history, kicked off every April. As I scanned the center of town, I tried to picture the sudden transformation on the big day—the downtown teeming with activity, food and craft vendors spread out across the grass, runners from all over the world unloading from buses until they numbered in the thousands, then assembling themselves on the starting line. I allowed myself a moment to imagine that I was one of those runners, crouched like a tiger, ready to take off on the 26.2-mile race to Boston. A 26.2-mile quest for running immortality. Thinking about it was enough to give me goose bumps.

I watched the other racers on the green, jogging back and forth to stay warm, making last-minute preparations. Almost all of them were from New England. Guys with regular jobs. Teachers, carpenters, real-estate brokers. Lots of former college track and cross-country athletes. They would train months on end to the bewilderment, perhaps even frustration, of friends and families. They would suffer the dirty looks of motorists passing by them as they ran alone at dawn. And all week, at work, at home, doing the mundane routine of life, their minds would be consumed with the next grueling battle on the road. To be honest, they were a little on the crazy side. How else to describe guys who spent every weekend driving up to 150 miles of bad road to run a road race against a bunch of other adrenaline-junkie running mercenaries? How else to describe guys who chose to put their bodies and minds through the agony of a twenty-mile duel in below-freezing weather, no less in pursuit of some prize like a color TV or a mattress set?

As for me, I was a neophyte. I had no idea if I could survive such a daunting competition. I was winging it, even though racing twenty miles on foot in the brutal cold of winter was not something to wing. Same goes for any tough physical test—nobody says, “Everest? Yeah, I'm winging it.” I knew the incredible physical effort and mental focus it took to cover fourteen miles in a training run—and now I was going to be fighting it out with these amped-up mooses at a distance of twenty miles. Seriously, was I crazy? But I had to race Silver Lake; it was my last and only hope of gauging whether or not I was prepared to run the Boston Marathon, only two months away.

I knew what Amby would tell me: Before trying to compete in my first marathon, I needed to run at least five shorter tune-up races to get my body back into the attitude of running that hard and fast. And he'd be right. Racing is the best simulation for racing.

The men I'd be going up against were experienced road runners who'd run several tune-up races to test their mental and physical fitness. They'd done lots of hard speed work to build up their endurance. I'd done almost no hard speed work around Jamaica Pond. For one, it wasn't my nature. Secondly, it was winter. Exertion in the snow and cold is not fun. I was stupid—naïve, if you're being kind—to think I was ready to compete in a marathon, let alone a twenty-mile race in the middle of winter. I just hoped all those laps on the pond had paid off.

The race I was about to run would cover the first twenty miles of the Boston Marathon course, but that would be where the similarities ended. The roads would not be lined with thousands of people cheering, clapping, and passing out cups of water. The only spectators gathered at the kickoff of the race were a few bored townspeople, and the friends of runners who'd come to lend moral support.