Marathon Man (34 page)

We didn't have a big reception with lots of guests and a wedding cake. Neither of us had money. It wasn't like that. This was a very low-key event. My parents weren't even there. It was me and Ellen; her parents; maybe one or two other people; the priest. I can see now that it was weird that my parents weren't at my wedding. They liked Ellen. There were no problems like that. I was very much a member of the counterculture. As with most things in my life, I was winging it. It was just another day. When I got home, I went for a long run. No honeymoon. Her parents did give us a brand-new Dodge Van as gift. That was cool.

In retrospect, I don't think her mom was the sole reason we got married. I had just won the Boston Marathon. I was getting invited to big-time races around the globe, reporters were calling me up at the house, I started to get offered some money under the table. It was a heady time—I needed Ellen by my side. We needed each other. I didn't want to try and ride this massive wave on my own. I wanted to share all the new experiences I was going through with Ellen and she was excited to see I was finally going somewhere with this running thing.

We didn't think the way young people do today: Most of them plan their lives out together in advance, but we weren't like that. All we knew was that we were friends, we cared for each other, and we were both happy about the changes taking place in our lives. I knew Ellen wanted to protect me and take good care of me. She was also very low-key and friendly and easygoing, all the words most people would apply to me. We were a good match in our ability to tolerate each other's casual attitudes. Ultimately, I sensed that not everything was right in our relationship. And I think she did, too. But we were certainly in love.

The four months leading up to my trip to Holland should have been devoted solely to preparing for the marathon, but that wasn't the case. While I continued to run every day, my training fell off a little. My life was busy beyond belief and I lost some focus. I suddenly had to cope with the prospect of a new job, a new wife, a new home, a new city. I wasn't getting my normal amount of sleep.

I did feel pressure to follow up my breakthrough at Boston Marathon with another victory. I started hearing some chatter around town, in the newspapers, other runners saying that my record time at Boston was a fluke. I had been unfairly aided by a twenty-mile-per-hour tailwind and the fact that it was a downhill course. I remember after setting the American record, Ron Hill saying to me, “You may run that fast again. But then again, you may not.” At the time, I thought, Well, that's kind of like sour grapes. Who was he to tell me that I might not run any faster? I would show him and the others I wasn't some one-hit wonder. I could always run faster.

I saw no reason why I shouldn't win in Holland. I had just run the fourth-fastest marathon in history. I felt unbeatable. What gave me that incredible confidence? The mileage. I was putting in 150 miles a week and sometimes thirty miles a day. I knew that few runners could match my training intensity. Lasse Virén, Jerome Drayton, Frank Shorter—not many others. Also, Shorter wasn't going to be in Holland. Even had he been racing there, I still believed that I could and should break the tape first. After all, I had just beat him at the World Cross-Country Championships in Morocco and broken his American record. Our showdown would have to wait for now.

My trip to Holland didn't start off well. Ellen couldn't make the trip because of work so I flew to London alone. Once there, I suffered jet leg from hell. My body was lethargic and my head a bowl of thick New England clam chowder. I changed planes and boarded a smaller plane to Amsterdam, where I waited in the airport for two hours for another runner to arrive, and then we took a two-hour train ride, followed by a fifteen-minute drive to Enschede and my hotel.

All I wanted to do after my fatiguing journey was get to sleep. Instead, I tossed and turned in my unfamiliar bed. My brain and body craved rest, but something just wouldn't let me drift off. I was awake for forty straight hours. Finally, the night before the race, I managed to get some shut-eye.

I showed up to the start of the race feeling sluggish and fuzzy-headed. The hot sun scorched my long hair as I waited with the other runners for the starting gun to explode. Another hot-weather race—just what I didn't need.

Despite my skull feeling like it was filled with warm mud, I clung to the belief that as the American record holder, I had a decided advantage over my competition. I never entertained the idea of holding back a little. Never once considered running cautiously to assure a top-ten finish. My focus was on winning. So when a few of the runners broke from the pack, I went with them.

I battled it out with the leaders until around the twenty-kilometer mark, when a painful side ache struck me out of nowhere. I gritted my teeth and pushed on. A little farther up along the course, I came across Neil Cusack of Ireland, the 1974 Boston winner. He was throwing up in the middle of the road. We were both hurting, but neither of us wanted to throw in the towel. We decided to run slowly together.

As we trudged on through the countryside, the unrelenting heat worked to strip us of our remaining strength. At this stage, there was a spirit-crushing awareness that any chance of victory had vanished. But sometimes two people can carry each other along through a hard trial without exchanging a single encouraging word. Sometimes just being at each other's side is sufficient.

Around thirty kilometers, my legs felt liked cooked spaghetti. The sun was beating down on me and I was dizzy with dehydration. About six miles from the finish line the cramps became too severe to take another step. I thought I was going to hit the deck. The next thing you know, I'm lying on a stretcher on my back, being pumped with loads of fluids.

Once I started to regain my strength, I was taken to the finish area, where I learned that Ron Hill, whom I had beaten soundly at Boston, had won in a course record of 2:15. He wasn't Ron Over the Hill that day.

The thirty-six-year-old Brit in the Union Jack shorts had beat the two previous Boston Marathon winners—both much younger than him. Why didn't he end up getting dehydrated and cramps like us? I don't know. He was running smarter somehow.

I thought back to Hill's comment after my win in Boston. “You may run that fast again. But then again, you may not.” I suddenly realized. Hill was just speaking from experience. He had already learned the lesson that Holland taught me—it doesn't matter who you are, or how good you think you are, the marathon will humble you.

When you run a great marathon, like I did in Boston, and then you don't even finish your next one, that messes with your head. Majorly. I had run one great marathon, my record race in Boston. But I had a perfect day and I was in peak shape. I expected to improve from there. I didn't. I went backward. It was disappointing, frustrating.

I knew my flameout was due in part to the heat. I hadn't consumed enough sports drink. (Although there might not have been that much available along the race.) But I also knew that I had acted foolishly by rushing into a major marathon without making sure I was prepared. The marathon is serious business. The difference between excelling and bombing out is razor thin. If you're not performing at your highest potential, if you've let yourself get distracted by other issues in your life, when the time comes to race, the course will think nothing of eating you up alive. After my disaster in Holland, I swore to give every marathon my complete attention; I couldn't afford not to.

Progress in the marathon is not a steady upward curve. It's an uneven, jagged trajectory, where one minute you're on top of the world and the next you're a heartbroken wreck on the side of the road. Perhaps this is even more true for someone like me—a more aggressive runner, a more emotional runner. Sometimes you get great days in the marathon and everything comes together. Other times, things go very badly in a race, and you don't know what happened to you. I think partly it's that, in those days, I raced a little too much—three or four times a year—in the marathon, whereas today's marathoners run once or twice a year, with more of a focus and more concentrated training for fast times and for a higher-level effort. Runners like me and Tom Fleming went all over the place, hardly ever turning down an invitation to race. Shorter didn't race too much. He was careful and that got him his gold and silver medals. But I just loved to race.

Soon after returning home, I started my job as a teacher of special education at the Hale School in Everett. Special ed had just become law in Massachusetts; this was the early days of special education in America. I thought I would be working with people who were mentally challenged, the old word used was “retarded,” but I soon discovered that I would be teaching emotionally challenged kids, as well.

Working at the Hale School was a unique experience, both fun and frustrating. I had a class of five boys and one girl between the ages of ten and twelve. A couple of the kids had no interest in doing anything except lashing out. I found it hard to discipline them, maybe because I didn't have kids of my own, or because it's just not my nature to crack the whip. Mostly, I felt sorry for these kids. I tried to give them focus and incentive. I would take them outside so they could be active, and then we'd come inside and practice writing, or do some math work or reading. I remember taking a couple of them on a fishing trip once; it was kind of crazy, but it was also fun.

Later, I was lucky because I got a teacher's aide, Ms. Conley. She was a mom and had kids herself. She helped so much. She knew how to discipline the kids to a certain degree. Once in a while a kid would become aggressive with one of the other kids and even with me—physically. You had to try to deal with these kids rationally when they were being irrational. Emotionally, they were struggling.

The kids I taught were isolated from the rest of the student body. We weren't given a regular-size classroom. We were in a small book storage room or something converted to a special ed classroom. The other teachers were afraid of the emotionally disturbed kids. No one knew what special ed was really about then. This was the first time we, as a society, started to take a look at kids with more serious issues and try to still teach them subjects. Arithmetic, reading. Simple life skills. I liked being part of this new educational movement—especially after Ms. Conley arrived on the scene to lend a hand.

The first year I was there an elderly principal ran the school. She told me to think of the school as her home. She was the matriarch. If we had a meeting after school, she'd say, “Please listen up. Ladies. Mr. Rodgers.” I was the only guy in the whole school. At times I felt like an interloper.

Making matters worse, the principal, who was in her mid-seventies, couldn't wrap her mind around the concept of special education. I think she was trying to come to grips with the new realities. She ran the school strictly, putting as much emphasis on teaching appropriate behavior as she did on teaching the times tables.

I recall coming downstairs once and finding the principal talking to my students. There was a heavy religious component to her message to them—as if their behavior problems were due to a lack of religious teaching at home, rather than some type of emotional or cognitive issue. I don't know that I would have been able to explain to the principal why my kids needed special support and guidance. In the end, I was left alone to do my own thing. They figured I knew what I was doing, which I did a little.

I remember taking the kids outdoors for half an hour. We had to stay on school grounds—a small parking lot on the back side. We played basketball and four-square—that's about all we could do in the space. And still it was the happiest time of their day. They were angry at the world. Being outside, they could run around and play and blow off some steam. I would concoct games for them to play and give them incentives to win my trophies. They really got into the contests. They liked it a lot. We would come back inside for class and they were more engaged and less misbehaved. One time, I had the kids playing outside and the principal came out and yelled at me in front of them: “Mr. Rodgers, I wish you would have these kids concentrate on their school work!”

Runners have a long history of employment as teachers. It was one of the few jobs that allowed runners the time for marathon training. In theory. After college, Amby tried to balance a full-time teaching job with a career as an international-level marathoner. “I found that every September I'd be in forty-nine-minute, ten-mile shape, and every June after the school year was over, I'd be in fifty-six-minute, ten-mile shape.”

I got invited to run the Fukuoka Marathon in Japan, which serious runners like myself considered the Super Bowl of marathoning. I used to call it the Japanese Boston. Of course, this meant I'd have to miss three days of school. When I explained this to the principal, she was none too pleased. I suppose I could have told her Fukuoka was the Super Bowl of marathoning but she probably would have replied, “What's the Super Bowl?”

I'd learned about Fukuoka from Amby. Back when we were roommates at Wesleyan, he spoke of the race with reverential awe. The race, traditionally held on the first Sunday in December, was established in 1947. It begins and concludes at Heiwadai Stadium, winds through the city, and proceeds on a crescent course along Hakata Bay. Over the years, the race has taken on an almost mythical status, due largely to the superior field, the remote and idyllic rural setting, and the deep respect that the Japanese people have for the marathon and those who succeed at it. They are as knowledgeable about the sport as Boston fans are about baseball, and worship their marathon champions as if they were gods.

Since 1966, when for the first time Japanese amateur athletic officials invited a select group of top foreign marathoners to compete with as many as eighty Japanese runners, it has been considered the unofficial world championship. By then, the Japanese had established the marathon as an event that they did very well in. Not to put it in a negative way, but they were quite fanatical about those things at which they, as a culture, excelled. It's not surprising that in light of the pride that they took in producing so many top-flight marathoners, the Japanese put the most time and money into organizing their marathon and established it as the best in the world. In many years, the caliber of competition at the Olympics was less impressive than that found at Fukuoka.