Marathon Man (4 page)

Charlie walked with me to the starting line. The scene bordered on total chaos. There were no race officials, no volunteers to help corral the eager spectators. No ropes to hold anybody back. Just a feisty, bald, seventy-one-year-old barking out orders in a thick Scottish accent. This was Jock Semple. Longtime unofficial caretaker of the Boston Marathon. He alone arranged all two thousand racers, like some crazed conductor.

Jock spotted me and wildly signaled for me to come over. A serious long-distance runner himself in the 1930s, he was a tough, irascible Scot who saw it as his personal mission in life to preserve the tradition of the Boston Marathon. Jock had the final say on all matters pertaining to the event. He had no patience for anybody who didn't have the utmost respect for the race and its runners. To Semple, the Boston Marathon was a serious athletic contest for noble and daring men—and men only—willing to sacrifice body and soul to achieve excellence. Jokesters like Johnny “Cigar” Connors, who in 1935 ran the first couple of miles while toking on two cigars at the same time, and in 1937 crossed the finish line in pink panties, causing Jock to blow his smokestack. I was fortunate that Jock took a shine to me and gave me such a low number—#14, to denote my 1974 finish—ensuring that I was up front with the top runners.

Just before Jock whisked me to the front, I looked back at Charlie. For the first time, I saw a little fear register on his face. Maybe he was worried that the gloves, which I'd never worn before in a race, would irritate me. Or perhaps he was frightened that my feet would slide right out of my running shoes in midstride, revealing Prefontaine's gift to be a curse. Or maybe it was worse than that. Did he fear that I wouldn't finish? Was he thinking how I'd run out too fast in my first Boston Marathon and wilted on Heartbreak Hill? Or how I'd burst away too early last year and flamed out again on the brutal incline? I'm sure he wished he could tie a rope around my waist; that way he could hold me back when he felt I was running too fast a pace. He was not alone. Everybody in my life, all of whom were rooting hard for me today—Charlie, Ellen, Coach Squires, my GBTC teammates—wished at times they possessed a device with the power to settle me down. My parents sure could have used a device like that when I was a kid. Then again, knowing me, I would have found a way to break free. My brother knew this better than anyone. I always found a way to break free.

As I established my position at the starting line, I thought about my brother and how he might be competing alongside me if it weren't for his asthma. When he was a kid, his chest would tighten on long runs. Charlie also liked to point out that he got the short legs and long torso while I got the long legs and short torso. But I don't know about all that. I did know that I was glad to have a big brother like Charlie. I knew he would do anything for me, but there was nothing he could do for me at this point. He gave me the gloves and now my hands were warm. That might not seem like much help—not when it comes to competing in a marathon against a bunch of world-class runners looking to skin you alive on the roads—but for some reason, Charlie's small gesture of support meant the world to me. I didn't know if I could win, but I was not going down without one hell of a fight.

Jock Semple was the only person who thought I could win, or at least, the only person who dared state this opinion to the press. The reporters chalked it up to the wistful longings of an old man. After all, everybody knew it was Jock's dream to have a local runner win the Boston Marathon, which hadn't happened since Arthur Roth's victory way back in 1916. When the press scribes asked my GBTC coach, Bill Squires, about my chances for victory he'd told them: “Don't pick him. He's too inexperienced. A year from now, he'll blossom into the marathoner he should be, but not this soon against this field.”

Jock's wishful thinking aside, there was no reason for the reporters to focus any attention on me—some kid who'd won a few local road races. Instead, the media trumpeted the course record holder, Ron Hill, the only British man to ever win the race. At age thirty-six, Hill was on the downside of his career, but he felt in his heart he had one last great Boston Marathon in him. Before the race, he told reporters that if he got a tailwind—watch out—he was going after his own record. He was talking about breaking 2:10. Coach Squires has set a goal for me of 2:15. I knew this would be a stretch. Last fall, I tried to break Tom Fleming's course record of 2:21:54 at the New York City Marathon and ended up finishing in fifth with a time of 2:35:59. A short time later, I did win the Philadelphia Marathon in the low 2:20s. And just a month ago, I had won the bronze medal at the World Cross-Country Championships, an international competition on par with the Olympics. Everybody from the world's best milers to the best marathoners competed in this single winner-take-all event. Claiming third against the best runners across the globe gave me a ton of confidence. I felt like if I had a great race that 2:16, maybe 2:15, was possible. At this stage in my career, hitting under 2:20 would be a huge accomplishment.

Tom caught my eye a few runners to my left. He wore a look of fierce intensity. Nobody wanted to win at Boston more than Tom or punished himself more training for it. The heavy mileage had paid off as Tom looked fit and strong. In his mind, nobody could beat him. All the top marathon runners felt this way. They were right to have felt this way. You need to have some cockiness to think you can pull off a win of this magnitude. But the truth is, no long-distance runner is invincible, no matter how good they think they are. The marathon will humble even the fittest competitor. It's what makes this race so exciting. It's as unpredictable as the weather in New England. And that's a good thing—at least if you're a spectator.

Pent-up energy wafted through the air as the runners waited to explode out of the gate like hostile wolves. At every marathon the runners were quiet and tense at the start line, but the feeling here was amplified. The reason was right before our eyes: a narrow stretch of country road, no more than fifty feet across, enough room for twenty runners at best, that dropped off the earth. Well, it only looked like it dropped off the earth. In truth it was just a steep, harrowing decline, roughly thirteen stories down.

I stood in the ready position, boxed in on all sides by runners, crouched and tense-faced in their racing bibs and short shorts. The pack drew in a collective breath. You could hear a pin drop as we all waited for the sound of the gun to pierce the silence. The excitement rushing through me threatened to spoil into nausea. This was it. We were like a huge time bomb about to explode.
Bang!

The moment the gun fired I felt the soles of my Boston '73s hit the pavement. In twenty-six miles and 385 yards from now my life would be changed forever. Here I go.

E
IGHT
Y
EARS
E
ARLIER

W
ESLEYAN
U
NIVERSITY,
M
IDDLETOWN,
C
ONNECTICUT

When I entered Wesleyan University in the fall of 1966, the farthest I'd ever run was twelve miles and that was on a lark. I usually never did more than two or three miles in high school. One day, in late spring of my senior year of high school, I was out on a training run with the other members of the cross-country team, which included my big brother, Charlie, and best friend, Jason. I spotted a sign for the next town, six miles away. Without giving it any thought, I took off for it. Once I arrived there, I turned right around and ran back home. I didn't think anything of my long-distance dash. I wasn't looking for attention. I did it just to see if I could do it, and because I loved the feeling of floating along when I ran. Lo and behold, one of the reporters at the local newspaper caught wind of my accomplishment and all of a sudden it was in the paper: “Local Boy Runs 12 Miles!” That's how bizarre it was back in the early sixties to run long distances. Run twelve miles and people start checking behind the barbershop for your Klingon spaceship. Back then, doctors warned that you could drop dead from running that far. They theorized that we all have a certain number of miles in us—if you used them up too soon, you would die. Too much activity was bad for your heart; meanwhile, cigarettes were good for you. Seriously, this is what doctors were telling people in those days.

In my freshman year, I was a member of the varsity track and cross-country team. Wesleyan was a small New England liberal arts college—far from some track and field powerhouse like the University of Oregon. In fact, our freshman cross-country team had to default a couple of dual meets after failing to field five men. At Wesleyan, the focus was squarely on academics.

Although I won most of my dual-meet races my first year, there were half a dozen guys on the team who were faster than me. Still, nobody came close to touching our two standouts—Amby Burfoot, a junior from Groton, Connecticut, and Jeff Galloway, a senior from Atlanta, Georgia. I first met Amby Burfoot when I was a high school senior in Newington, Connecticut. It was a chance encounter. His younger brother was my main competitor in the Connecticut high school cross-country championships, and Amby came down from college to cheer him on.

I remember it was a beautiful fall day to race. From the start, I ran with a carefree abandon but I was also going for the win. Around the halfway mark, I broke away from the rest of the pack. Amby stood at the edge of the route, which ran along the fairways of a local golf course, and waited for the runners to come racing by. He suddenly saw me approaching, a good fifty yards ahead of the rest of the field. As I powered ahead down the rain-soaked path, I was too focused to hear Amby yelling from the side of the course: “Come on, Gary! You can catch him! Rodgers is fading!”

Amby's impression of me before the race was that I was this spacey blond-haired runt with a goofy running stride. Therefore, he was left stupefied as he watched me pull away from his brother, Gary, and the other top high school runners in the state, to finish first. I didn't know it at the time, but my convincing win is not what peaked Amby's curiosity, it was the way I floated along the course, almost with a vacant look in my eyes. To Amby, I wasn't so much running as gliding over the grass. Amby came up to me after the race and tried to sell me on coming to Wesleyan to run for the track team. And that's what I did.

While the rest of us on the team was gearing up for our next dual meet against some similarly small, academically minded liberal arts college like Trinity and Williams, Amby was pursuing a far greater and more daunting mission—to win the Boston Marathon—which no college student had ever done. Amby devoted his entire life to this one solitary goal. He was committed with a capital C and refused to let anything interfere with his strict training regimen, which stood in stark contrast to the relaxed and informal running program the others of us on the team followed. Amby would practice with us every afternoon, but he'd also take extra runs on his own, usually twice a day, one early in the morning, one after practice. He averaged up to fifteen miles a day; twenty on weekend days when he didn't have classes. He also would go out for a twenty-five-mile training run every Sunday, a ridiculous distance as far as I was concerned. For the week, he ran anywhere between 120 to 150 miles. In 1968, you were more likely to come across Bigfoot than somebody putting in over a hundred miles of road work each week, let alone a college student. I'd never known anybody to work that hard for anything, least of all me.

I was amazed by Amby's drive and maturity. I was in awe that he knew what he wanted out of life, and that he was determined to go to any lengths, physically and mentally, to get it. Amby was always trying to get other runners on the team to join him on his daily training runs along the outskirts of campus. He wanted the company. Few people ever agreed to go with him. I loved the feeling of running outdoors, I had since I was a kid, and Amby's single-minded quest to conquer the marathon intrigued me so that I agreed to start going with him on his training runs.

If the Boston Marathon was Amby's Mecca, the place he could find running nirvana, then his local church was the trails that crisscrossed the periphery of the Wesleyan campus. Generally, we would go between seven to ten miles once a day.

Within minutes of leaving campus, we were moving side by side through the stunning countryside. Amby kept a nice, steady pace that was a delight to follow, whether we were climbing hills or cruising along flat, wooded trails. Amby would lead me over every type of terrain imaginable. We'd run loops around lakes. We'd go along cliffs. We'd climb up over rocks. Our runs felt like unchartered adventures.

Amby would take me out in every kind of weather. I discovered the exhilaration of running over snow. I got to know the beauty of running through spring showers. He was also responsible for completely changing the way I viewed running. My coach in high school was Frank O'Rourke, a tough, no-nonsense Irish Catholic whose infamous junkyard bark easily carried from one end of Newington to the other. Beneath his old-school bluster, however, he was a kind and paternal man who cared deeply for his players.

Coach O'Rourke, a former high school half-mile state champion, made it his mission in the fall of 1964 to turn our scraggly team of misfits and perennial losers into a powerhouse on the track. He had his work cut out for him. For one, none of us had any formal training. We had no clue about pacing. We ran full-out. And then the moment we crossed the finish line, we'd all collapse on the ground in a heap. Guys would get sick and throw up.

I recall him saying something to my parents when I joined the track team. He said to them, “Don't expect too much.” I think Coach meant that I didn't really have a lot of genetic fast-twitch muscle fibers, i.e. I was scrawny. Or he might have just thought I was just too spacey, disorganized, and cheerful a kid to excel at sports.