Marathon Man (26 page)

Unfortunately, once the 1973 edition of the Manchester Road Race began, I did not duplicate my success from eight years earlier. It was a perfect day to run, but I got a side ache in the first mile and my strides felt off the rest of the way. My lungs hurt during and after the race. I was disappointed to finish fifth. I was happy, however, that if I couldn't get the win, Amby did. Nobody wanted victory at Manchester more than he, and his win added to his amazing consecutive win streak, which peaked at seven in 1977. After the race, I surmised what went wrong: I was getting over a head cold and should have rested in the days before the race. In my mind, days off weren't an option.

A little side note about the race: I remember a group of women runners protesting their exclusion by the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which barred men and women from competing together. We all need a place to put our aspirations, and I had found mine in road racing. I got a rush from competing. It gave me an incredible feeling of accomplishment and drove me to put forth even greater effort in my training. I didn't like the fact that others were denied the same rewards.

The small group of women lined up at the starting line behind us, and ran the course anyway, even if their times weren't recorded. It worked. The next year they were officially allowed to race. What does this show? The crusty, male-only institutions of the sport were finding it harder and harder to stem the tide of enthusiasm for running that Frank Shorter's Olympic marathon victory had put in motion. The passage of Title IX, in 1972, which opened the door for young women athletes to continue their passion in college and beyond, also energized more women to compete in long-distance races. At the same time, trailblazers like Jacqueline Hansen, the 1973 Boston Marathon champion, and Miki Gorman, who in the mid-1970s became the first and only woman to win the New York City and Boston Marathons twice, were helping women to be taken seriously. The doors were slowly opening for more people to get involved in running. As far as I was concerned, the doors needed to be blown to pieces.

Most people couldn't understand why I used to ride my beat-up car up and down the East Coast to races. They couldn't fathom why I was running 120 miles a week to win a toaster or a jar of honey. But I felt more alive being part of the New England road racing scene, even as basic and limited as it was. I'd finally connected with people who shared the same passion. We could feel the excitement in the air. We were part of a sport that was taking off.

I built my world around running. It became everything to me. This is the ultimate energy-lifting, morale-boosting activity. Sure, there are days where my body felt like blah, or I stunk it up in a race, but, on the whole, running raised my spirits. It allowed me to quiet my mind and go inward, where I gained insights into myself and the world. Very powerful stuff!

Up until that point in my life, I'd found it hard to follow through on anything, even when opportunity was right in front of me. I had all the energy and none of the drive. Now I was following through on my running, training twice a day, every day. I even ran on New Year's Eve. It was only an easy four-mile run on the hills, but it showed my resolve and commitment to conquer the Boston Marathon in the spring. I wrote a final entry in my training log: “Yea & Hurrah! 73 was a good year! 3 toots and a whistle for 74!!”

It was March of 1974. In the year since wilting in the heat at Boston, I had competed in over fifteen road races around New England—and won most of them. But here's what you have to understand: It was great to win races; I got cool prizes and my confidence was boosted. I made new friends. But more importantly, I saw each race as a small part of an evolutionary journey toward a higher goal. I used each road race as another step toward the Boston Marathon on April 15.

Training sessions can give you some idea of whether you're ready to compete in a heavyweight battle like Boston, but tune-up races are where you discover where you really stand. Are you fit enough? Are you tough enough? Are you mentally strong enough? Can you handle that little injury that pops up on mile 12? Can you handle it when some foreign champion starts pushing the pace on mile 20? Can you hang with him when he's clocking nothing but sub-five-minute miles? Because if you can't do all that, you don't stand a chance of winning. Keep your eye on the big race, I told myself. On the race that counts.

Confidence is everything in the marathon. You can't run scared or you'll be eaten alive by the competition. Winning road races built me up. My victory at the National Championship in Gloucester gave me a huge psychological lift. I had defeated some very good runners there. Then I got a call from the local New England representative of the AAU and he suggested that I run at San Blas, Puerto Rico, and represent the United States. The thought of competing in my first international race sent shivers down my spine.

I remember that trip very well. On the plane ride down, I was reacquainted with my deathly fear of flying. Once I arrived in San Blas, I met up with my teammate Tom Fleming. Brash and outgoing, he spoke in a rapid-fire Jersey accent. He liked to make good-natured wisecracks. The gaudy uniforms of another country, for instance, would certainly draw a sharp one-liner. But while Tom was loose and cavalier off the course, he was a ferocious competitor on it. He was one of those guys who trained, trained, trained.

Tom and I stayed in a little guesthouse on the edge of town, surrounded by goats and chickens and fields of corn. Today, runners would be put up in luxury hotels. The simple accommodations offered a beauty all their own.

I remember Tom and me waking up at four in the morning to roosters crowing. We walked down the dusty street and stopped at a little café for breakfast. We used our per diem to get these very greasy eggs with bacon cooked in with them. They were delicious. Later, I met up with my old friend John Vitale, an old college rival from the University of Connecticut. We embarked on a five-mile run through the steep, narrow streets of the village. Afterward, Tom and I went for a boat trip and I stole a live sea creature—an urchin. Later, I attended a festival named after St. Blaise, the patron saint of throat sufferers. At the festival, we enjoyed singing, dancing, and carnival rides. In the evening, we attended a Spanish Rotary dinner. Here, I met some of the foreign runners, including Lasse Virén of Finland, Ron Hill and Don Faircloth of Great Britain, and Henry Rono of Kenya. Virén, who had recently won Olympic gold in the ten thousand- and five thousand-meter events at the 1972 Munich games, was the best distance runner in the world. I also bumped into Amby Burfoot. Once again, I was following in his footsteps.

On Friday, I went out and ran most of the mountainous course, about ten miles in the heat. Looking back, I was crazy to exert my effort like that two days before the race. I was also finding it hard to adjust from the winter air of Boston to the warmth and humidity of Puerto Rico. Practically overnight, I went from running through a blizzard to running in sweltering heat. I never considered that the sudden shift in conditions would have such a strong effect on me. Another lesson learned.

Back at the guesthouse, Tommy was telling me about his experience training in Finland.

“You hear what I'm saying, Bill?”

“What's that?”

“I'm talking about the Finish runners,” said Tommy. “They're training full-time.”

“How do they do that?” I asked.

“How do you think?” said Tom. “The government sets these guys up with some job that doesn't even exist.”

“Lasse Virén?”

“Lasse Virén is supposedly a policeman. He's about as much a policeman as you and I are.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Virén isn't out their fighting crime on the mean streets of Finland. He's training for the Olympics. He's running a hundred fifty miles a week.”

“One hundred fifty miles. Are you serious?”

“He doesn't have to hold down some crappy job like us. He can train to his heart's content. Day or night.”

“If Virén's running one hundred fifty miles a week…”

“We should be doing one hundred sixty,” interjected Tommy. “We're waking up at the crack of dawn. Slipping and sliding all over the road in the pitch dark. Freezing our butts off. What are the Finns and Russians doing?”

“What?”

“They're here! In Puerto Rico! Or some other warm-weather climate. They've been sent down here by their countries. Set up with training facilities. All their expenses have been taken care of. All they have to concentrate on is getting fitter and stronger.”

“We need that kind of support.”

“From who? The AAU? It's a joke. Joe Namath makes four hundred thousand dollars. We can't make a penny. He's got endorsement deals. What do we have?

“Zilch.”

“A tiny per diem and a jersey with our name on it. Good luck, pal. Even the land Virén built his house on was given to him by the Finnish people. I'm telling you, he's treated like a rock star in his homeland. We're treated like freak show oddities.”

“Lasse Virén. The Big V.”

“Is that your nickname for him?”

“You like it?” I asked.

“The Big V is going down!”

I laughed. “I'm not too sure about that.”

You couldn't find two guys with more different personalities. Tom was clearly a bull in a China closet, or whatever the expression was. He probably felt the marathon should have been a fifty-two-miler, rather than a twenty-six-miler. Tom was one of those guys whom the energy just emanated from whenever he came into the room; wherever he was, you felt the electrons zapping out from him. As for me, Amby used to joke that he wasn't sure if I was awake or asleep most of the time. But on some level, runners are runners. From that trip on, we became lifelong friends.

The race started at four in the afternoon. It was about 85 degrees with high humidity. We were bused out to the starting line, a dusty road in the middle of the hilly countryside. We were way out in the middle of nowhere. Tom had run this race before, so he was less overwhelmed than me. It was exciting to be there, wearing the American uniforms, representing the United States.

San Blas was a wild and sometimes harrowing race that ran through narrow streets and mountain passes and then back again. Thousands of screaming fans flanked the tight, winding lanes, cheering us on. As we raced down the steep descent into the town, I could see the church spires at the finish line far in the distance. All the way down this long, long hill, we heard the roars of the thick crowds that lined the course. It reminded me of Boston, minus the Red Sox caps and pasty drunks.

San Blas was the most grueling race I'd ever run. I went out trying to compete with the Finns. I stayed with them for about seven miles, but then they started to pull away. The pounding on the rough and bumpy terrain caused bad blisters to form on the soles of my feet. I also got painful side aches in the heat. I estimated that the blisters and side aches had cost me at least a minute. I faded. A few runners started to pass me on the course. The Finns took the top three spots. Tom was the top American finisher, in fifth place. I hung on for seventh place, the next highest American.

An hour later I was lying in bed with a wet washcloth on my head, thinking about the lessons I'd learned racing for the first time against a bunch of international long-distance assassins. One: I needed to put in more miles. Big V miles. Two: A full-time marathoner has a major advantage over a part-time one. It was only a matter of time before the city of Boston made me an honorary policeman. Or not.

After all the official postrace celebrations and award ceremonies, Tom and I partied with the other runners at a local bar. Hours earlier we were trying to decimate one another along sharp-curved mountain roads, baking to death, and now we were enjoying ourselves with beer and cocktails, telling jokes and sharing laughter. The rum and Cokes flowed all night, which helped bridge the language gap between our respective countries. Ron Hill was dancing around, wearing a big grin on his sunburned British face. I spotted Lasse Virén take a big swig of rum from the bottle. There was a real macho “I can party as hard as you can” attitude to this sport. No fistfights, but a certain intensity lay beneath the raucous times. Maybe because a certain intensity was required as a distance runner—you trained hard, you raced hard, you celebrated hard.

 

TWELVE

Racing for Blenders

A
PRIL 21, 1975

N
EWTON
H
ILLS,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

The runners who ran Boston many times—Tarzan Brown and John “the Elder” Kelley, and Young Johnny Kelley and Amby Burfoot and Tom Fleming and Alberto Salazar and Joan Benoit Samuelson—understood how the intensity of the race grows throughout the course, climaxing along Heartbreak Hill, six miles from the finish. The crowds that lined the six hundred-meter ascent cheered so loudly when the leaders approached you could hear them a mile and a half away. The crowd really let loose a wall of sound as runners crested the top of the torturous hill. This is where you get down into the nitty-gritty. The race is usually down to two or three runners. It was here in 1979 where I really had to duke it out with Toshihiko Seko of Japan, who was running his first Boston Marathon. “If you didn't have Heartbreak Hill,” he would later say, “you would have an easy course here.” True, and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

But in 1975 I was four years away from my duel with Seko on Heartbreak Hill. Right then, I didn't have another runner pushing me. I only had the sense of going for it, and wild-eyed Jock cheering me on with his Scottish accent that you couldn't understand. Here was the father figure to Young Johnny Kelley rooting me on, himself a top competitor forty years earlier. He wasn't just some bureaucrat or a number pusher. Today, there are more race officials and coaches who really know the marathon, but in those days it was different. Few people understood the marathon. Jock did. He knew the punishment runners put themselves through to run the race—the cramps, the blisters, the dehydration—and the significance of conquering the ultimate test of stamina and endurance. It's crazy that Jock had fired up his protégé Johnny Kelley around this same spot along the course in 1957 on his way to victory, and that the same encouraging voice had lifted my roommate Amby Burfoot over Heartbreak Hill in 1968, and now his booming voice was bolstering my courage through the most critical part of the journey.