Marathon Man (8 page)

When I staggered across the finish line, my ears were stinging red, my lips cracked, my legs cramping badly. What was Amby thinking? I was not a natural long-distance runner. I couldn't compete against these serious road racers. It would be five years before I tried racing that far again.

Of course, I had made a mess of things. First, I should have dressed in layers, and worn lightweight clothing and a winter hat and mittens. Of course, this was 1968, outdoor sportswear such as Gore-Tex didn't exist. That stuck with me, the need for better equipment in our sports. What's more, I'd gone out fast and hard, like it was another high school cross-country race. I ran the way I'd always run; it had worked for me in the past. I had always won my races before. I was still too young and foolish to heed Amby's lessons: Build your strength in training, strategize before each race, go in with a plan, pace yourself during the race, read your opponents, feel out their weaknesses, know when to attack and when to hold back, and move with steady, relentless focus. Basically, race smart.

Unlike most of the students who went to Wesleyan, I hadn't been at the top of my class in high school. I wasn't a natural scholar like my dad. Nor was I anything like Amby, who not only dominated on the track, but also thrived academically. I remember once walking by Amby's desk and seeing a psychology paper marked with an A. I had never gotten an A. I was struggling to maintain a C average. I took religion, Russian literature, German literature. I loved reading, so those were enjoyable subjects for me. For a little while, I started majoring in economics. But math scared me. I struggled with statistics. Then I became interested in sociology. I enjoyed that. It gave me something to sink my teeth into. But I only ever got by.

I used to think I wanted to become a lawyer because my mother's father had been a prominent judge in Hartford. He was this feisty Irishman who'd graduated from law school in 1906. If you were Jewish or Irish, good luck getting into the world of law. But he did. He was definitely not part of the establishment; he was an independent thinker of the New England variety. They called him the “human dynamo.” He used to take stairs two at a time. That was just his mentality. Of course, I also used to take stairs two at a time.

I remember he had a heart attack and Charlie and I went to visit him in the hospital. He was flittering around the room like a butterfly trapped in Tupperware, and shouting, “Get me out of this place!” I understood his panic and frustration at being restrained from motion. As a boy, I spent many days struggling like crazy to get loose, flapping my wings frantically to fly off.

I know I inherited my feistiness from my mother, who got it from her father. She was a nurse's aide at Newington Hospital and an Irish Catholic of the highest order—she had me in December of '47. Charlie was born exactly twelve months before and my sister, Martha, showed up thirteen months after. Our mother was a tiny bundle of wound-up energy. Back then, she was a proud five feet and one quarter inches. Today, she's down to four feet, ten inches and eighty-five pounds and you know what? She still has more energy than most twenty year olds.

In addition to giving me the gift of a nonstop motor, my mother also passed on to me her profound sense of empathy for the sick and less fortunate. My cousin Paul had cerebral palsy and I remember feeling sympathetic toward him. I'd ask myself, What if that was me? What if I couldn't run through the woods chasing after squirrels with my friends?

For some reason, I always gravitated toward people like Paul. I found those who were off to the side more interesting than those in the mainstream. I remember one guy in high school named Arthur. He was very bright but severely disabled. He couldn't join the track team with us, that's for sure. I would call him “Arturo” because we used to practice our Spanish on each other. Back in those days, there wasn't much concern for people like Arthur. But I liked him and we became best pals.

I suppose I was like my father in that way. He'd talk to anybody and everybody. I've been known to talk to winos on the street for twenty minutes and then give them a dollar bill. Charlie will be telling me, “Now, Bill, don't give him any money. He's just going to get drunk and fall down on the ground.” But I can't help get into a personal interaction with these guys. My mother wouldn't give them one second of her time, but my father would. He'd be sitting there, having a long conversation with them, like me.

My dad is a far more methodical, slower moving character than my mom, who's as easy to track as a bumblebee. He started as a professor at Hartford State Technical College and rose to the position of head of mechanical engineering. I never saw where the man worked, nor did I have a clue about the theoretical math he taught. I'd understand my dad much better as I got older, but as a kid, all I knew about him was that he worked a lot. Even in the summer, he'd write books and travel to New Mexico on research projects. My brother and I sometimes didn't understand his solemn devotion to his career. Later in life, I would meet people who were his students, including my brother-in-law. They would tell me: “Your dad was a great teacher. He changed my life.” I didn't know of this kind of thing. My dad was not a bragging kind of guy. He had strong opinions, for sure, but he shied away from talking about himself. I suppose a lot of fathers were like that back then.

While I got my rambunctious energy from my mom's side, I had a quiet persistence, which came from my father's side of the family. Our paternal history traces back to a seventeenth-century bagpiper from Crieff named Patrick Rogie. The ancestor who came over to the New World from Scotland was a Protestant minister and a medical doctor. He went out and settled in the woods of Virginia. He educated all his sons. They became good writers and readers. Many of my father's colonial ancestors attended college in the middle of nowhere. I don't think there was any braggart stuff going on back then—you did the job and that's all. Charlie and I descended from these tough, hard-working, and quiet Scottish people.

I remember my dad taking Charlie and me down to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University to show us just how far along we'd evolved as humans. But seeing the diorama of cavemen bursting into a high-speed footrace to chase down their prey, I knew my need to move was nothing new. We were meant to move. We were meant to run. We had been for thousands of years.

My father was also fascinated with flying—Charles Lindbergh, World War II airplanes, the aviation industry. He grew up building remote-control planes and sometimes he would take us out with him to fly his plane. In some ways, his thinking was very nuts and bolts, but he also had a larger worldview. He passed that on to Charlie and me—a certain sense that anything is possible, that you could do anything.

Open, friendly, easygoing, optimistic, spacey—I would say that I shared all these attributes with my father. Charlie would always say, “Dad's off in quasar land again.” I guess that I, too, was prone to getting lost in the clouds. Once, I remember playing some game out in the front yard with Charlie, Jason, and a few other neighborhood kids, and I said, “Well, I'm going to go in and use the bathroom.”

They were all waiting outside for me to return so they could resume the game. A good amount of time passed by. “Where the hell's Bill?” everybody asked. Finally, Charlie went in the house and walked upstairs, and there he found me lying on the bed, reading a book. I'd completely forgotten about the game.

My dad and mom were not too happy with all the trouble I conjured up for myself as a kid. I was lucky to have good, loving parents. They showed a lot of patience with me—and they sure needed it. Then one day Charlie, Jason, and I joined the track team. We were no longer Lost Boys running wild in the woods. We returned to school new men. We were runners. And once I found running, everything changed. Imagine pouring water on the ground. Goes all over the place, right? Pour that water into a channel and suddenly you have a stream and then a river and then a raging, powerful body of water that can't be stopped. Running was my channel and I poured myself into it full force.

While I was a productive member of the Wesleyan cross-country and track team, I didn't train nearly as hard as I did in high school. I wasn't like Amby, living by the “devote everything to your running” creed. I'd go out partying with my buddies on weekend nights and get back at around four in the morning. As I carefully crept into the dorm room, I'd know that Amby had been asleep since 9:30.

While I saw two days without classes as an excuse to party, Amby saw it as an opportunity to get in longer runs. The notion of sleeping in Sunday morning was as absurd to Amby as, well, me waking up early on God's day of rest to go on a little twenty-mile run.

Almost every weekend, Amby would go home to run with Johnny Kelley. His departure was my cue to ring up my high school buddies and tell them to drive up for the weekend. Jason and a couple other high school pals would show up with a few beers already in them and we'd have a miniparty in my dorm room. We listened to rock music on my stereo, killed some beers, maybe stopped by a mixer in the vain hope of meeting girls.

I made sure that nobody did anything in Amby's room or touched any of his stuff. I knew he would know if so much as a strand of wheat germ was out of place. Of course, Amby would return to find me on the mattress on the floor, curled up under my blanket. I don't think it was that he was mad at me for throwing my little parties or missing runs. But I could sense his frustration that I didn't do more with the gift I had.

In the eyes of Amby, I was a party boy. And I never even thought of trying to get my roomie to come out with me on the weekend. Hit a Saturday night keg party? No way. Amby detested beer and, more importantly, he had to rouse himself at 6:30 a.m. for his ritual Sunday morning 20-miler. A weekend skiing trip? Not a chance. Skiers twisted their knees and broke their ankles and risked countless other injuries. Go on a simple dinner or movie date? Not those either. Amby had no time for flirtations or anything that might muck up his marathon ambitions.

Through the open door, I'd hear Amby listening to “The Impossible Dream” from the famous Broadway musical
Man of La Mancha.
In that year, 1967, Red Sox fans adopted it as their theme song when the home team made its miracle run to the World Series. I knew that to Amby the words struck a more personal note:
To dream the impossible dream. To fight the unbeatable foe. To bear with unbearable sorrow. To run where the brave dare not go.

There was no question that winning the Boston Marathon was Amby's impossible dream. I did look at my roommate as if he were slightly mad, like the figure of Don Quixote, attacking windmills that he believed to be giants. Maybe it was because I didn't possess my own “impossible dream”—I never wanted anything with the passion that Amby possessed for conquering the Boston Marathon. He had a yearning in his blood to fulfill his quest. I didn't understand it, but it fascinated me.

On a Sunday morning in March of 1968, the Burfoot–Rodgers Running Accord was broken.

We were three weeks away from the Boston Marathon, the race Amby had been training for since the day we met, as if his life depended on it. He wanted to get in one last, hard workout before Boston. He decided that he'd run twenty-five miles that Sunday—he also decided that his training partner would be joining him, whether or not he was working off a hangover.

It was around eight in the morning. I was fast asleep on the mattress on the floor. The whole campus was sleeping. That is, except my roommate. With the stale smell of pot still wafting down our hallway, Amby sat at the edge of his bed, his coins stacked perfectly beside him on the sparse dresser. He reached down his spiderlike arms and laced up his running shoes. He'd already had a bowl of granola, around ten glasses of orange juice, and a shot of wheat germ.

Next thing you know, I felt a hand rousing me from my slumber. I wiped the sleep from my eyes and saw Amby towering over me like a gangly willow tree. He had a look on his face that I'd never seen before, and I knew what it meant—lace up your shoes, soph, because today you're running the whole route with me.

Moments later, we were running stride for stride through the empty quads, while the early morning sun crept over the treetops, and the smell of wet, thawing grass filled our nostrils. The slanting rays of the sun hit our frames as we passed between each massive stone building. I could have sworn that Amby was starting out at a faster pace than normal.

We turned on to Route 66 and ran a few miles uphill, the elms and oaks that lined the country road passing by us in a blur. We then headed into the larger Middletown area, toward the banks of the Connecticut River. I was a little groggy, a consequence of my seriously low threshold for gin and tonics, but as we got moving I felt good.

Amby veered off the main road and onto a rough-and-tumble dirt trail. Instinctively, I swung in behind him. I was up for the adventure. I followed Amby as we traversed the trail, weaving around streams and rock formations. Racing up steep hills and banks, coasting down the other side, I felt a rush of adrenaline. The emotions flooding my body were a link back to my childhood in Newington and those aimless summer days chasing around with Charlie and Jason. By the time we reached a small lake, twelve miles from campus, I had a tight hold of that wild, free-roaming spirit of my youth.

As we roared around the shimmering water on that warm spring day after a long winter, I took it all in: birds chirping, blue skies, tranquil breezes. I passed some wild apple trees, their swelling pink buds ready to burst. It was the kind of day that made you glad you were alive—warm and still and sweet.

I was so lost in the world around me I didn't realize we had covered the first thirteen miles at a 6:30-per-mile pace. Or that Amby was running with an aggression that he'd never shown before on a training run. His eyes radiated intensity as he stepped up the pace. I think he was fed up with seeing me drift effortlessly on his shoulder while he attacked the road with focus, with precision, and with perfect form.