Marathon Man (24 page)

The next surprising result came four days later when I won the twenty-sixth annual Haverhill 10.3-mile road race. Winning a couple of races spurred me on to train harder. By mid-August, I was meeting my goal of running at least one hundred miles a week. The heat and humidity were brutal, but nothing was going to slow this comeback now. When I got a side ache going up a hill, I kept pushing on.

On the first Sunday in September, I showed up to Brockton High School to run a one-hour race on the track only to discover I'd gotten the day wrong. This would knock me off my training schedule. I was angry. “Dog dung!” I wrote in my running log. “Only 6-day running week!” I should have run seven.

At the same time I was getting my fitness back, an amazing thing happened. After a year of looking for work, I was hired as an attendant at the Fernald School in Belmont, Massachusetts, the country's oldest state institution for mentally challenged people. When I first got to Fernald, I handled basic duties around the building, like mopping floors, making beds, and tending to the patients.

The first time on ward duty was intimidating. While the people I was looking after were grown men, they acted like little children, throwing yelling tantrums, banging on their heads, tossing their food on the floor. Right away, I was faced with making a choice: reject them or help them. I realized my natural instinct was to try and make things better for them.

But not everything I learned about myself on the job was positive. I had to recognize my own failings of compassion. There were times when petty resentment overcame true understanding. I once let a guy lie in his soiled bed for a day because I was sure he had done it on purpose. My supervisor made me ashamed; it wasn't my job to punish them, for any reason.

After only sixty days on the job, I was placed in charge of my own ward. It was my responsibility to look after seven moderately mentally challenged men, ranging in age from eighteen to fifty-five. My job was to try to teach them basic living skills, like using utensils, brushing their teeth, and folding their clothes.

I found my new job to be hard but satisfying. For one thing, I enjoyed working one-on-one with the patients, which I couldn't do in my drudge job at Brigham. Every day I worked with them, I seemed to learn a new lesson about life. For instance, they did not measure happiness by the people in their lives, which was nobody, or the things they owned, which was nothing. Instead, they found incredible joy in the smallest thing.

I'll never forget one patient named Joe. I discovered he loved Tootsie Rolls. Tootsie Roll Joe made me think about the simple thing in life that made me happy—running. That incredible sensation of moving freely outside with the wind at your back was something Tootsie Roll Joe would never know. All these years I had taken for granted that I was a runner, it's what I did, it's what I was good at. But maybe it needed to be more than that. Maybe I was supposed to do more with this talent I was given than just be a fairly successful local road racer.

Over time, I became very attached to Joe and other men in my ward. Sometimes I'd take five or six of them out of the building and onto the grounds. I did this even though it was frowned upon, but I didn't care. I thought it was good for them to get outside. I thought back to my mom and how she cared for so many people, working for years as a nurse's aid at Newington Hospital. It didn't surprise me that my brother, who worked at a drug treatment center, and I would follow in her footsteps. She showed us that taking care of others had great value while making lots of money should never be our priority.

But this was a real challenge, trying to care for people with no control of their lives. One day, a thirty-something-year-old patient in my ward disappeared for a few days. When they found him, he had removed all of his teeth. After that, he would call out, “My teeth, my teeth.” While some of the patients, like him, were clearly too mentally disabled to get through to, I felt if I tried hard enough maybe I could reach a couple of them.

One of the men I hoped I could reach was named Gene. He was an autistic young man who stared at the walls all day, speaking in monosyllables. One night, I brought him outside into the courtyard. I was hoping to spark something inside him or maybe just connect on some level. I pointed up to the bright orb in the night sky. “Gene, moon,” I said. He didn't respond. Night after night, I took Gene outside and repeated the same action for him. “Gene, moon,” I said, directing his eyes high up into the night sky.

I knew that Gene would likely never improve enough to leave the institution. Being aware of this sad reality forced me to see that I was fortunate to come and go as I pleased.

I tried not to dwell on the grim circumstances of how these people ended up in this place, but I couldn't help but think about how their families had left them off here and, in some cases, wiped their hands clean of them. What if I had been born mentally challenged? Would my parents have swept me out of sight as if I never existed in the first place? Would I be one of the forgotten people here, abandoned by society, living in filthy confinement, fed meals not fit for human consumption? Would I be gazing all day at the wall, dead to the world, while Charlie and Jason rode freely down the highway on their motorcycles? Or Amby dashed through the woods behind Johnny Kelley? I wanted to believe that such a thing could never have happened, but the fact that it was happening to these people meant that it could happen to anybody.

Never again would I see going out and training hard for miles as a chore but as a privilege. I thought back to how I had felt humiliated after dropping out of the Boston Marathon; now I saw that I was lucky to even be out there, giving it my all, no matter the final outcome. And instead of feeling demoralized, I should have felt blessed that the very next day I could put on my sneakers, head down to the park, and run freely around the pond. What had I really lost? A race. That's all. Nothing was stopping me from going back out and trying again. Nothing but my own fears and insecurities. What did I really have to fear? Failure? How about the fact that I had the chance to fail or succeed on my own. I had the opportunity to try. That's something the people who ended up in this institution would never get in their whole life. The people here never had a chance. I remember one kid in my ward who was blind and severely mentally challenged. He couldn't go out and go do a simple thing like go for a run. His life was so limited. My life didn't seem limited to me at all. I knew my talent for running long distances came with lots of fun; maybe it also came with the responsibility to use it to its fullest.

One night, as I stood alone in the courtyard with Gene, the answer was as clear as the stars that twinkled high above our heads. Gene slowly lifted his arm and pointed his finger into the sky. “Moon,” he said.

Now, six months later, I was reinvigorated in my personal quest to succeed at the Boston Marathon. My schedule at Fernald was perfect in that I was able to get in a long run in the morning before work, and another long run at night after work. I enjoyed splitting my time between running countless loops around Jamaica Pond—building up my mileage base—and supervising my ward of seven patients at Fernald School. I was happy to be back where family and friends were, to have finally put that disastrous marathon behind me, and to have the stability of an actual paycheck. I was living the best kind of life for a runner—simple.

It was going on three years now that I had been training by myself. Not always a bad thing. I set my own schedule. I got to run around Jamaica Pond when I wanted, as many times as I wanted, and at the pace of my choosing. I didn't have to worry about some workout partner canceling, showing up late, or flaking out altogether. But it could be tough at times to be fighting the good fight all alone.

Well, this was all about to change.

 

ELEVEN

San Blas

A
PRIL 21, 1975

N
EWTON
H
ILLS,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

I had reached the Newton Hills, which I've called the most significant stretch of course in the racing world. The Fukuoka course in Japan had some major spots, but to me, nothing identified the challenge and beauty of marathoning more than this section of the Boston Marathon. When I said that I was thinking about Johnny Kelley and Tarzan Brown battling through the hills in 1936 with Brown shockingly surging past Kelley on the final climb, “breaking his heart.” Boston wouldn't be Boston without the hills.

I charged up the first ascent in the Killer Chain. I was about to discover whether or not I had run smart up until now. Had I done a good job of pacing myself and reserved enough energy for the tough inclines looming before me? Or had I failed to keep my stride in check over the first eighteen miles, started out too fast, overextended my muscles, underhydrated my body?

Twice before, I had run out of gas on the steeps. Twice before, I had dropped out on the side of the road. Twice before, I had run with reckless abandon, thumbing my nose at the heat. Twice before, Mother Nature got the last laugh. Twice before, I thought I had the training under my belt to finish strong. Twice before, I was dead wrong.

Here's the thing: Both times I didn't realize I was in trouble until it was too late. All the little mistakes you make—not just during the early part of the race, but sometimes before ever walking out the door (you didn't eat a big enough breakfast), or the night before (nerves kept you from getting much sleep), or weeks earlier (you decided to taper down your training miles too early; you didn't prepare for running in the heat; you brushed off that minor discomfort in your big toe)—accumulate out of sight into one giant ball of hurt.

It's only when you are at your most vulnerable, when your body is running low on fuel, perhaps at mile twenty, just where Heartbreak Hill begins, this giant ball of hurt strikes as hard and as swift as a meteor. (As Olympic marathoner John Farrington once said: “Marathoning is like cutting yourself unexpectedly. You dip into the pain so gradually that the damage is done before you are aware of it. Unfortunately, when awareness comes, it is excruciating.”) Suddenly, three miles from the finish line, your body is wracked with cramps, your legs are locked up, and you're mumbling to yourself,
can I make it to the finish line?

I climbed the second of the Newton Hills—it felt much like the first hill, just closer to the finish line. As I churned along with nineteen miles already on my legs, the ever-enlarging crowds pressed into the road. A sub five-minute pace won't set any NASCAR records, but I was moving.

For a long time, my eyes bore down on the back of the lead vehicle, always ten feet ahead of me. If I was a stalking tiger, the big heavy vehicle was my prey. Sometimes I would challenge myself to catch it. I nearly did a few times. That's a powerful feeling—to almost be outrunning the lead vehicle.

As I ran along the course, the only thing scarcer than water stations was crowd control. There was absolutely nothing to keep back the boisterous masses, which included a good number of people that had been drinking since the crack of dawn. Had I not been running with such single-minded purpose, the precariousness of my situation might have dawned on me. How little it would it take for a crazed fan to step into my path, wallop me in the midsection, and deny me victory.

Think it couldn't happen? In 1905, Fred Lorz had to leap past a horse at mile 20 and then hurdle over a bike at the finish line, catching his foot and crashing through the tape for victory. In 1922, leader Clarence DeMar jumped out of the way of a car that had accidentally veered onto the course. In a burst of rage, he sent his fist through the open window, but his punch missed the driver and hit the passenger beside him. Fearing payback, he looked over his shoulder as he continued on to the first of his seven championships. In 1978, as Jack Fultz sped down the hill onto Commonwealth Avenue, he was pinned between a big bus and the thick crowds pressing into the road. In 1981, Patti Catalano was working her way through congested Cleveland Circle when she was sideswiped by a police horse. A year later, during Dick Beardsley's famous Duel in the Sun against “the Rookie” Alberto Salazar, a drunken spectator ran out and slugged him in the gut, knocking the wind out of him. Further along the route, Beardsley managed to tear himself away from another blitzed fan who'd taken hold of his shirt only to be nearly run over by the press bus.

Despite the history of bizarre confrontations, I ran toward the next mile, sweeping over the ground with long smooth strides, oblivious to any potential threats. As I charged straight into the teeth of the impassioned hordes of spectators, I was too zeroed in on winning the race to feel any fear. Besides, I didn't feel like I was snaking through an angry mob on the verge of stoning me. More like a conquering knight returning home to his people.

The feeling in those days was that any country had a shot at winning—and that question mark created great excitement. Would it be a runner from Italy, Spain, Finland, Colombia, Japan, Korea, Great Britain? Seeing me in the lead—a hometown kid—elicited a powerful emotional response from the crowd. As the miles wore on, their support for me was a tangible thing that hung in the air. Their cheers continually charged me up like a battery, inspiring me to push even harder, to succeed even more.

I think this is true for everyone who runs Boston. The crowd's support lifts them up. You have to remember: These aren't your average running fans. They are as loyal as they come, showing up year after year, rain or shine. They know the marathon, they understand its tradition, they admire the runners, and they sure know how to party. It's like loving the Red Sox. They've been around a hundred years, and so has the Boston Marathon. It's a lifetime relationship.

As I ran sweat flew off the back of my long blond hair. I felt the rush of air on my face. My feet hardly touched the pockmarked road. I knew the big hill was still ahead. There's always a certain amount of anxiety as you approach Heartbreak. I don't care who it is. You've run twenty miles by then—even the Kenyans have got to be feeling that. But I had a great advantage. I had run the course before, I had trained on it for months, and I had the ideal conditions to run. The wind was just blowing me along.