Marathon Man (9 page)

After we finished the loop, we started on the twelve miles back to campus. Amby asked if I was doing okay. I told him I felt great. In fact, I felt exuberant. I'd never thought of running this far and fast before. Suddenly I was doing it.

We were moving at a good clip now over a constant stretch of rolling hills, flying by old stone walls and ridges dotted with family farms. Amby kept running faster and faster, trying to drop me the whole way. He upped the pace to six-minute miles. But to Amby's disbelief, I wasn't fading.

Around Mile 18 I surged ahead of Amby for a moment. Amby's jaw nearly scraped the ground. After all, he had been training about 120 miles a week; I was putting in maybe forty. He had completed numerous twenty-five-mile runs; I had almost never gone beyond ten miles. Amby had done a full year on the New England road racing circuit from Cape Cod to northern New Hampshire without ever losing a race. He was the best long-distance road racer in New England and here I was, this part-time runner who'd run a couple of five-mile road races, challenging him every step of the way.

We hit Mile 23 and Amby and I were running elbow to elbow. I felt great. I always ran on emotion and at that point the adrenaline was pumping. Amby was a methodical runner; he relied on patience and experience. I didn't know what I was doing!

Amby picked up the pace again.

It couldn't be happening, but there it was—I was still there, floating easily alongside Amby. This was more than he could take.

With two miles to go, Amby, without so much as a glance in my direction, said, “Hey, Bill, I'm gonna pick it up now.” I was welcome to tag along if I wanted. All at once, Amby kicked into another gear, one I'm not sure that even he knew he possessed. He ran those last two miles as hard as he could go—as if it were the end of the Boston Marathon. I sped up just enough to stay even with him.

Amby was moving now at a five-minute-mile pace, and I was determined to match him stride for stride. All of a sudden, a cramp shot up my leg like a bolt of lightning. Just like that, my muscles waved the white flag. I was instantly reduced to a hobble. I watched Amby disappear down the road, leaving me in the dust.

Perhaps Amby had wanted to simulate the big race coming up, which is why he ran those final two miles back to campus with all his might. Or maybe my roommate needed to teach me one last lesson. He had to show me that I had a natural gift for distance running, a gift that he himself had been denied. But that unlike me, he was willing to put in the long, hard miles, to endure the pain, to make the sacrifices, to test the limits of his heart. For this reason, he was on the road to becoming a marathon champion, while I was on the road to nowhere. His story would be one of hard-thought victory. Mine would forever be one of squandered talent.

 

THREE

Blown off Course

A
PRIL 21, 1975

A
SHLAND,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

Perhaps the only thing more difficult than winning the Boston Marathon is describing the journey—what you see at this or that mile. It's like asking a Kentucky Derby jockey to describe everything he sees outside the rails while he's racing around the track. “The only time you can be with God is in the immediate moment,” a pastor once told legendary jockey Pat Day. “You can't be with him five minutes ago, or five minutes from now. Only now, this instant.” I would add: The only time you can run your best race is in the immediate moment. The trick is staying in that present state of mind over two hours and 26.2 miles. Few succeed.

No doubt I passed by thousands of spectators, historic clock towers, railroad stations, storefronts, factories, homes, farms, but my eyes zeroed in on something far more crucial. The man running silently in my shadow.

I couldn't read his eyes—he wore dark sunglasses that hid them. I couldn't read his face—he wore a mask of emotionless stone. Even his thin, black mustache was inscrutable. All I knew was that he was a Canadian. He wore a giant maple leaf on his singlet. After the race, I would learn his name: Jerome Drayton. To this day he is Canada's greatest marathon runner—incredibly, he still holds the national marathon record he set thirty-eight years ago.

I glanced over my shoulder again. Drayton was no longer shadowing me. While I sensed I hadn't heard the last of the cryptic man in shades, my immediate concern was the man pulling even with me. I instantly recognized him: Britain's greatest marathoner, Ron Hill. The 1969 European champion. The 1970 Commonwealth champion. The man who zapped me in the San Blas Half Marathon in Puerto Rico. The man who hasn't missed a day of running since December 20, 1964. That kind of personal commitment is what his fellow British runner Roger Bannister meant when he spoke of “the challenge of the human spirit.”

In 1970, the people of his tiny hometown of Accrington, England, passed around a collection cup and raised enough money to send Hill to Boston to compete. Running in a 40-degree downpour and nasty headwind, Hill won the race in a course record time of 2:10:30, becoming only the second man ever to break the 2:10 barrier. “I had no idea what time I was running—I didn't have a watch and the mile markers were weird, like the one that said ‘4¾ miles to go.' I couldn't believe it when I found I'd run a 2:10 personal best. For winning, I got a medal and a bowl of beef stew.” That's right. No prize money at Boston. To be fair, it was delicious stew.

I greeted Hill's arrival with silence. Our shoulders were practically rubbing, but I let my ground-devouring strides do my talking. He was hard to miss as he ran. He was shorter than the other racers with his stout legs, coal black hair, handlebar mustache, and cheeky shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack, which he had designed himself. It irked me that he owned the course record. I felt an American should hold the course record. It irked me that foreign runners had dominated the event since the 1930s and the days of American champions like Clarence DeMar, Les Pawson, Tarzan Brown, and John “the Elder” Kelley. (In the previous three decades, a mere trio of Americans—my roommate Amby Burfoot in 1968, his coach Young Johnny Kelley in 1957, and fellow conscientious objector Jon Anderson in 1973—had captured the ultimate prize in marathoning.)

As we approached Framingham, the crowds continued to dwindle and for miles we passed only a small number of spectators on the road. It was quiet and calm now. Side by side, Ron Hill and I swung past Bracketts Pond and followed the course as it snaked uphill through the mostly wooded area. The way Hill was matching me stride for stride, I felt compelled to respond to the challenge. The adrenaline was flowing and I had plenty of fight. I refused to shrink in the awe-inspiring presence of the course-record holder. I was thinking feisty. There's “Ron the Hill.” I told myself. As in “thirty-six years old and over the hill.” He's had a legendary career but his best days have come and gone. This is my time.

In many ways, I ran best when I was right next to somebody. My competitive instincts kicked in and I went into another mode of being. “When he wasn't running, Bill seemed like the gentlest—and spaciest—guy in the world,” Alberto Salazar once said. “But once he laced up the training flats, the starling turned into a swooping bird of prey. Bill just soared on a breathtaking, light-footed stride.”

Sometimes, in the thick of the battle, I overreacted to the competition and let my primitive brain run riot. In other words, I raced stupid. Too much from the gut. But reacting emotionally to a situation is a part of who I've always been, ever since I was a scrawny runt, battling Charlie and Jason to catch elusive butterflies in the fields, or a little later, running my heart out through the forest trails as a member of my high school cross-country team. At times it's gotten me into trouble—big trouble—but other times my feistiness proved to be a great weapon. In order to win the race, sometimes you have to go a little berserk.

I can't tell you the exact time in a marathon race to succumb to that animalistic nature—to lose
a bit
of control and fight with fury. But I promise you, it's not after the first mile, or the second, or the fifth, or even the tenth. There's too many tough miles left to withstand such an early release of aggression. Even squandering a little of your energy reserves early on can spell doom later when the race toughens up, when it takes every bit of energy you can muster to outlast your opponent. How about Mile 16? Maybe you can lay the hammer down with a surge of speed and break away from the competition. Just maybe. You still have ten more miles to go, so you'd better know you have the strength and stamina to finish strong. It's easy to confuse bravery with foolhardiness. With that said, if your goal is to win the race, and not just finish it, then at some point you need to trust your talent and your instincts and go for it. Three miles into the race, running stride for stride with Hill, I told myself to be patient: You'll know when the time is right to make your move. It's not now.

I attacked the upgrade going from Ashland into Framingham. If you're feeling bad here, something has gone horribly wrong for you. You did not run smart, you went out way too fast, or whatever you ate the night before isn't agreeing with you. Regardless, you're probably not going to finish. You're definitely not going to win. I know because this is what happened to me my first time. Ran too fast. I was in too much of a hurry. I had no clue what I was doing. That's a bad way to run a marathon. It's a bad way to go through life.

Hill and I remained shoulder to shoulder as we sped along the road to Framingham, about five miles into the race. With a stiff wind at our back, neither of us was willing to yield to the other. We flew past a nondescript stretch of the course that, eight years earlier, had been the scene of a brief but historic confrontation. Back then, women weren't allowed to run in the marathon. Twenty-year-old college junior Katherine Switzer showed up and registered as K. Switzer, fooling the race officials, who assumed she was a guy. Karl or Kevin perhaps?

Once Jock Semple got wind of the interloper on his course, he jumped on the press bus and took off in a rage. Jock spotted Switzer. He couldn't believe that somebody would have the gall to engage in subterfuge to get a number. He felt tricked. He thought she was another prankster in the vein of Johnny “Cigar” Connors, out to make a mockery of his serious athletic event. What Jock didn't understand was that Katherine Switzer was a serious athlete, who had been training hard with a coach for the past year.

A crimson-faced Semple leaped off the press bus, chased after Switzer, and tried to rip the bib off her gray sweatshirt. “Get the hell out of my race and give me that number!” bellowed Jock. Her hulking boyfriend, Tom Miller, a collegiate hammer thrower who was running beside her, threw a body block that sent the sixty-four-year-old flying through the air. The photographers on the press bus captured the altercation and the next day the pictures of this crazy little Scotsman attacking a woman runner were featured in major media outlets around the world.

Overnight, Switzer was held up as a defiant hero. When she crossed the line in four hours and twenty minutes, she didn't just become the first woman to officially finish the marathon, she had broken down a major barrier for all female athletes. It was a big moment for women's sports. Unfortunately, poor Jock was portrayed as some women-hating Neanderthal. To his credit, after the incident, Jock took steps to make amends. After Switzer ran Boston in 1972, the year that woman were finally welcomed to run, he congratulated her with a kiss in front of the cameras. The pair formed an unlikely friendship that endured until Jock's passing in 1988. On his deathbed, he laughed and told Switzer, “Oh, I made you famous.”

It's a pity that Jock Semple is mostly remembered for trying to pull Switzer off the course that day in 1967. He was one of the race's top competitors during the 1930s, and, as
Runner's World
put it, “a one-man volunteer staff (with Will Cloney as race director) for decades during a period when no one else cared much about the marathon.” Simply put, nobody did more to preserve the heart and soul of the Boston race than Jock.

Just past the five-mile mark, the mysterious Canadian Drayton opened a small gap on the lead group, which included me, Ron Hill, Tom Fleming, Mario Cuevas, Steve Hoag, Richard Mabuza from Swaziland, and Peter Fredriksson of Sweden. I love marathoning when this happens. A small group of leaders jockeying and rejockeying for position, watching and waiting to see who is going to make their move. The eight of us were within arm's reach of one another as the course led us through a small residential area. I felt the wind in my hair as our powerful strides devoured the road under us. I knew we were moving fast. Did I know we were twenty-four seconds behind Hill's all-course record? How could I?

S
EVEN
Y
EARS
E
ARLIER

W
ESLEYAN
U
NIVERSITY,
M
IDDLETOWN,
C
ONNECTICUT

It was the spring of 1968. I was hoping to survive my final exams, a major challenge under normal circumstances, extratricky amid the noisy chaos of radical political protests happening right outside my classroom window. That March, seventy-five students and faculty marched on North College to protest the visit by a representative of Dow Chemical, which produced napalm for our fighting forces in Vietnam. Then, in May, several people gathered for a ceremony honoring 170 Wesleyan students who'd refused to go to war.

I supported the student demonstrations, but I found it hard to throw myself into the cause while dealing with the busy demands of running my dual meets, working at the cafeteria, and floundering academically, all the while being filled with a jumpy, impending sense of dread. My nonconfrontational demeanor did not equal complacency. Every day, I watched images on the news of hostile campus uprisings, engulfing schools like Columbia, where students seized five university buildings and barricaded themselves in for six days. My reaction was: Could I be excused to go chase butterflies in the field with my brother, please?