Marathon Man (23 page)

The first of the Newton Hills suddenly rose before me. This was it. My moment of truth.

T
WO
Y
EARS
E
ARLIER

N
ATICK,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

I got licked in my first marathon. It didn't take long to recuperate from the acute dehydration; recovering from the deep wounds to my self-esteem would be an entirely different story. Maybe I wasn't cut out for the marathon. Maybe I couldn't handle the competition at Boston. Maybe I had just fooled myself into thinking I could be a great distance runner.

I didn't want to believe that, of course. I knew I had to get right back in the cockpit. So the day after the marathon, I ran three miles at dusk. I was also checking to see if I'd incurred any injuries. The body felt okay, all things considered. But the body wasn't the issue.

After what had happened to me, I was gun-shy about running in the heat again. You need to recover completely from this chest cold, I told myself. It's 82 degrees out. Rest today. You'll begin training tomorrow. I was breaking Amby's number one rule: Never make excuses to get out of training.

I woke up the next day and broke the promise I had made to myself to get back on the road. Instead, I opened up my log entry and wrote: “Rested. No running. Running scares me.” What did I do instead? Probably hung around the house, watching TV, eating Oreos and drinking Pepsi.

Friday. For a third straight day, I didn't train. Saturday. I finally forced myself to go on a fifteen-mile run in the park. I felt weak. When will I finally be rid of this demonic chest cold? I thought Sunday. I did another fifteen-mile run. I wrote in my log: “Getting hot out!! In the middle 80's! I find it very hard to run. No vim and vigor.”

I was losing the willpower to put in the heavy mileage. As a marathon runner, if you're not getting stronger every day, you're getting weaker. This is day-in-day out business. I was in a dangerous place because once you stop putting in the work, you're done.

I'd heard stories about guys taking antidepressants and it making it easier for them to train. I'm the first to admit that training alone can be tough. Sometimes the hardest part is the boredom. Other times it's the pressure you put on yourself. I remember this kid named Gerry Lindgren who broke all kinds of records in high school. He was the best in the country for his age. I still consider him one of the finest distance runners in American history. But Lindgren pushed himself hard in college, running more miles than his young frame could handle. Part of it was that he loved to run, but he was also feeling the pressure to live up to expectations. In his mind, he had to keep breaking records, defeating tougher challengers, winning bigger races. It all became too much. He started developing ulcers and he never returned to the level he had attained in high school. He burned out before he ever came close to reaching his physical peak, which would have been in his twenties. I always wonder how great Lindgren could have been had he not fallen victim to fear and anxiety. In my heart, I believe he could have been a gold medal champion like Frank Shorter.

I was lucky that unlike Lindgren I never had to live up to past greatness. I could progress at my own pace. I never thought of myself as anything but a novice, exploring a new and challenging event. Still, the marathon had knocked me down. My miles per week kept dropping—seventy-seven for the second week in April, which dropped down the next week to fifty-four miles, then the next week to twenty-two miles. Then finally, in May, I stopped running altogether. You know all those good feelings I talked about getting from running—the tranquility, the peace of mind, the lifting of the spirit? I suddenly found them missing.

Running scares me, I thought. But that wasn't true. It was running
in the heat
that scared me. If I could train in warmer weather then I could acclimate myself to the heat, I thought to myself. Isn't that why Frank Shorter had moved from England to Florida? Same with Jeff Galloway? Hadn't they formed some postcollegiate running club down there? But Florida was too hot. I needed somewhere with warm, moderate temperatures. That night, I told Ellen that I thought we should move to California. Just like that. Let's go to California. Her response? Okay. Let's do it.

Maybe she was as excited as I was to make a fresh start. I think she was. It's not like we had a long, deep discussion about the implications of what it would mean for us to just pick up and move to the other side of the country. It's not like either of us had been to California before. What I knew about the place came from movies and TV shows. As a matter of fact, neither of us had ever been outside New England. Here was our chance to see the world that lay beyond Brookline.

We were winging it completely; a classic young person's exploration. We had no plan for our new lives in California. All we had were a few maps I'd found before we embarked. All I knew was that I wanted to live somewhere in Northern California. I carried a foggy notion—maybe one I'd come across in
Track & Field News
—about that region being home to a small running scene since the 1960s. Good training weather. I didn't feel I had an alternative. If I was going to conquer the marathon, first I needed to conquer the heat. That's what I told myself, anyway. What I really had to do was get back my passion for running. I needed to get back my verve.

Ellen quit her job at the hospital. I don't think it was a big deal. She never indicated she was leaving any long-term friends or career aspirations. I think she was excited and, of course, it helped that she got her parents on board. She was a classic only child. Very close to her mom and dad. They were kind and supportive parents and I got along well with them. Her mom was a strict Catholic, which meant that Ellen and I couldn't live together even though, of course, we did. When her parents came to Boston to visit her, I would hide out at a friend's place until they were gone. Those were the times we lived in.

Her parents must have been worried about Ellen getting safely to her destination 2,500 miles away so they bought us a Dodge Van. She and I loaded up the van with everything we owned in this world, which wasn't much, grabbed our pet cat, and drove off.

Driving through the country with the windows open, I shook my head in disbelief at the beauty of the vast, rolling stretches of the Great Plains. At night, we slept inside the van in our sleeping bags. Once in a while we stopped at a motel to wash up and so Ellen could call home. We were roughing it. Was it romantic? In the sense that two young, adventurous souls driving across the country is romantic, yes. It was that whole Jack Kerouac thing.
On the Road
, right? But it wasn't romantic like a honeymoon. Maybe it was like
our
honeymoon.

When we reached the Rockies, I was still staring out upon the vast landscape with a dumbstruck grin on my face. We stopped at Yosemite, walked under the giant redwood trees, and looked upon the unspoiled beauty with amazement. We stood at the brink of the Grand Canyon and gazed speechlessly into its sublime depths. I thought to myself, How can a country of such natural beauty be home to such ugly divisions?

Somewhere along the journey we settled on a final destination—San Jose, California. We might as well have thrown a dart at the state map.

As we drove through San Jose, I felt like a deer that had accidentally wandered into the center of bustling downtown; the sight of cars and people everywhere spooked me. This isn't good, I thought. This won't work out. We had no contacts, no job leads, and very little money between us.

California is vast and we felt like a little speck of dust. I went there because I felt I needed a warm-weather place to train, but it didn't take long to realize that wasn't enough. I know Ellen felt the same way—her heart belonged back home. After only a couple of days, we came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to head back east.

On the drive back, we stopped in Wyoming; I went fishing in a stream and caught a trout. I would've loved to cook the fish but, of course, we hadn't thought to bring any camping gear. Our next stop was Lake Tahoe. We parked at a campsite in time to see the radiant sunset over the magnificent lake, which was massive in size and startlingly clear. It's hard to put into words the stunning beauty of the landscape. As somebody who grew up in New England, the awesome vastness of the mountains took my breath away.

In the middle of the night, I was getting out of the van to use the bathroom and our cat went flying out the door. She wanted out in the worse way. We searched everywhere for her, but it was pitch black and Tahoe is a big area. We were heartsick. We thought we had lost her for good. We felt stupid. Plain stupid. If Ellen and I were going to have our first moment of strife, this would have been a good time. I was a big proponent of avoiding conflict. So was Ellen. In fact, I can't recall either of us ever yelling at the other. We just weren't like that. For better or worse.

A couple of hours later, we were lying in the van when we heard a faint meowing outside. The cat had found its way back on its own, no worse for wear.

As we continued our journey through the country, I tried to think of another warm-weather training locale where we could live. Then a lightbulb went on in my head. Virginia! It's a beautiful place with green valleys and rolling hills. It just sounded nice. We arrived in Virginia, but I remember we didn't stay long. I think we both sensed we were putting off the inevitable. Ellen missed her family back in Worcester, and I missed mine. We both kind of looked at each other—let's go home.

When we loaded up the van and left for California, I was thinking this was about my running, but it ended up being about more than that. Ellen and I had gone on this great adventure into the wider world—a trip through Mother Nature's land that was both powerful and enlightening. I got to appreciate the soaring beauty of the West. If there was something else our trip showed me, it was that you should be where you're happy. I was happy in New England with my family and friends. In the end, I said to myself, I ran there before, I guess I can run there again.

We ended up moving to Vernon, Connecticut, a suburb outside Hartford. We rented a tiny house, moved in all our stuff, and I started looking for work. I took a job working at a Carvel's ice cream shop, a little family-owned place in Vernon. A short time after I started, this loud, piggish kid came in—he was the son of the owner, I think—and began ordering me around as if he were the heir to the Prussian throne and I was one of his lowly subjects. For some reason, I didn't feel I was reaching my potential here. I remember thinking, You know, this isn't where I'm going. I'm going someplace different. I'm not staying here. I calmly put down the scooper, removed my apron, and walked out the door.

It was a strange time for me as a runner. I didn't have anything to aim for. It's not like I was aiming for New York City that fall. Also, I had suffered my first major setback. The thing was, it took me by surprise. Up to that point, I had experienced the high of constant progress. I started from scratch, doing a few miles around the YMCA track. After I moved to Jamaica Plain, I started running twice a day and over 100 miles a week. In my first race back, the Silver Lake, I placed third. I ran strong in the last tune-ups before Boston, coming in second at the New Bedford 30K and winning a twelve-mile race in Cambridge. Seeing my progress had always motivated me to push myself further. So what happens when you don't make progress? What happens when you actually take a step back?

I couldn't see that one race was just that—one race. Or that every marathon runner experiences setbacks—even the Frank Shorters of the sport. It was a horrible feeling not knowing for sure that I'd be able to prevent another disaster in the marathon. That's what I didn't understand yet about the sport: You never know.

Eventually, I set off on some short runs from our house. Hot-weather training—the boring suburban way. I knew that motivation would be in short supply as long as I was condemned to the dull monotony of the Connecticut roads. I found myself wishing I was back home, circling Jamaica Pond, the wind fanning my cheeks as my eyes took in all that surrounded me. The park had a magic quality about it that gave me the power to run for miles and miles; it brought out the free-spirited kid in me.

Somehow I always ended up going where my instincts led me.

So after driving to the other side of the country, Ellen and I ended up right back where we began: in a small apartment in Jamaica Plain. It felt right. We were close to our families, and that gave us a feeling of safety and warmth.

On August 5, after three months of empty entries in my running log, I finally put pen to paper. I set a new goal. Get back up to running one hundred miles a week. I wondered: Was this too much, too soon? I hadn't trained seriously since dropping out of Boston.

I had to get back to a steady routine. Runners need routine. They need consistency. It helped to be back running around Jamaica Pond. This is where I'd found success before. Where I went from being a smoker to a runner. Where I went from nothing to finishing third in the Silver Lake twenty-miles, only three minutes behind Amby Burfoot, Boston Marathon champion. They were all good feelings.

I took it slow the first week back. For one thing, the daily temperature hovered in the nineties. Hot as a fart, as I noted in my training log on August 9 after running down and back from Government Center. I managed a total of sixty-nine miles for the week. Not much, but a start.

Although I felt I was in poor shape, I decided, for the fun of it, I would compete in a 10K race that Tuesday in Salem, Massachusetts. Probably because my occasional training partner, Mike Burke, was running in it.

It was my first 10K ever. My first long-distance road race since the Boston Marathon. I hadn't forgotten that debacle. But something weird happened: I ran great. Really great. In fact, I could have broken the course record but, near the end of the race, I decided instead to run across the finish line holding hands with Mike to insure a tie for first. That way he could split the prize with me.