by Bill Rodgers
Running mile after mile along the tree-lined roads near campus with Amby was great. I knew I couldn’t beat him—I never thought I could—but I’d try and stay with him. By just looking at Amby, you might not think he was a strong person, but I knew from running, side by side with him, just how incredibly fit he’d become. Sure, he looked like he was running on stilts, but he had developed terrific strength in his upper body and core. There was not a single imbalance in Amby’s movements. His posture bordered on robotic. He was a machine.
The thing about Amby, he didn’t have a lot of genetic inborn speed, meaning that at a hundred meters he was nothing special, but he had built up great cardiovascular strength from all the training he did. Amby didn’t get tired. At least, I don’t remember ever seeing him get tired. Most importantly, he had built up a psychological strength. The marathon is in the mind. Just because you can run eight or ten or even twenty miles at high speed doesn’t mean you can do it over a full marathon. What the mind can conceive, the body can achieve. Maybe not in all cases—you need some natural talent to run a four-minute mile. But the marathon has a lot to do with willpower. You might not have thought it, looking at his Tin Man frame and nerdy glasses, but inside, Amby was tough as hell.
He reminded me of a modern-day Abebe Bikila, who’d begun running as a sheepherder’s son in the remote mountainous village of Jato, Ethiopia. Years later, he stunned the world when he won the 1960 Rome Olympic marathon running barefoot, becoming the first black African to win a gold medal. He then broke the world record at the Mexican games before a car accident left him in a wheelchair. Both of us completely idolized this foreign athlete who we didn’t even know. We always called him by his nickname, Abebe the Lionhearted.
Amby had the same tall, rail-thin frame as Bikila. But it was his solitary running life on campus that echoed the qualities of the Ethiopian champion—the stoic detachment, the fierce pride. Bikila’s running coach once said, “Abebe was made by Abebe, not by me or anyone else.” Over many New England seasons, I had watched as Amby had made Amby. Herein lies the true power of running: With every mile you run, with every stride you take, you do more than reshape your body—you reshape your destiny. It would be a long time before I came to understand that myself.
Amby thought I showed real promise as a runner, which is why he was a little disappointed with my lackadaisical, half-assed approach to the sport. In Amby’s world, I was a party boy. He would never chastise me, or pressure me to put forth more effort than I was willing, but he would always say things like, “You’d be a good runner if you ever became serious about it,” or “Hey, Rodgers, you still drinking a bottle of gin tonight?” I didn’t think there was anything wrong with my carefree lifestyle, or my lax attitude toward running. I was in college!
Amby was always trying to get me to go out with him on ten-to-fifteen-mile runs on the weekend. Once, during my freshman year, Amby managed to convince me to go with him on a fifteen-miler. It was my first long run (unless you count that fluky twelve-miler that made the local news). Here’s what I recall: We ran at a nice, easy pace. Amby always set a moderate pace for himself, between six and a half and seven-minute miles, and I stayed with him for over an hour, but then my legs locked up on the fifteenth and I had to walk the final mile. So this is what it felt like to go beyond myself. Interesting.
As I mentioned, Amby would wake up every Sunday morning and run twenty-five miles as part of his preparation for the Boston Marathon. Amby knew there was zero chance of dragging me out of bed early on a Sunday morning, especially not after I’d been out partying late the night before. I needed some time to recover from my hangover before even beginning to consider lacing up my running shoes. So we struck a compromise. Amby would wake up before me and run the first ten miles on his own and then I would join him for the final ten miles. Call it the Burfoot–Rodgers Running Accord.
Amby would say to me, “Bill, I’m going to be on campus at ten, so why don’t you meet me out in the middle of the football field or on the track around the football field.” I would be waiting there and, sure enough, at ten o’clock to the minute, I’d see a tall, angular figure striding stiffly toward me. Amby was like clockwork. Blew my mind.
Amby had mapped out our course just as precisely as he had mapped out everything else in his life, from the moment he woke up at 6:30 a.m. to the time his head hit the pillow at exactly 9:30 p.m. Amby’s actions were never without purpose. Even inviting me to join him on his training runs was about more than giving me a gentle nudge to grow up. Running with a partner helps you run faster and maintain focus. It also kicks boredom. In that way, I was a big help to Amby. Also, since I hadn’t already run ten miles, I was fresh and could push Amby a little bit on the last half. If he had been out there by himself, he might have started sagging.
After leaving campus, we ran three or four miles uphill along Route 66, a country road without much car traffic. We ran at a good clip, tackling some serious hills, hilly enough that there was a small ski slope nearby. On the way back we would sneak off the road and run along wooded trails for a couple of miles. I loved following Amby through the winding and rugged dirt path, the sound of our footsteps trampling leaves and small branches. I loved the challenge. I would think: Can I do this? Can I stay with him? I wasn’t afraid of pushing myself too far. It was fun.
Of course, our heads couldn’t have been in more different places. The lanky figure running next to me was focused on being the first American in a decade to win the Boston Marathon. He was aiming to compete against the world’s best marathon runners. I was aiming for my next college dual meet. His competition would be the mighty Finns, the fanatical Japanese, the world-class Mexicans; mine would be a kid named John Vitale from the University of Connecticut.
We would talk the whole way on our runs.
“How was your trip home?” I asked.
“Great. I went on some long runs through the countryside with Johnny. We ran hours through these amazing Indian trails near Mystic. After that, we went back to his place. We sat in the living room and chatted over tea and cookies. Well, actually, he talked; I listened. He’s a wild guy to listen to … one of these great old Irish storytellers. He talks about Thoreau and Vonnegut and quotes Dylan lyrics. He talks about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He talks about finding one’s own place in the universe, even if it puts you at odds with the rest of society. He’s just the best guy ever.”
As fate would have it, Amby attended the Fitch High School in Groton, Connecticut, where his track coach was Young Johnny J. Kelley, who in 1957 became the first American to win the Boston Marathon since John A. “the Elder” Kelley, no relation, in 1945. The younger Kelley was a Running God in the fifties and not just in Boston, which was his home for a while, but around the world. He ran on two American Olympic teams and won eight consecutive national marathon titles at Yonkers, New York. Many consider him the first modern American road runner.
As the years passed, however, Kelley’s great accomplishments faded in people’s memory. Meanwhile, the one-mile race had become a national obsession, thanks to running sensation Jim Ryun, who in 1964 became the first high school runner to break the four-minute mile. As for the great American marathoners of yesteryear—seven-time Boston Marathon champion Clarence DeMar, John “the Elder” Kelley, Young Johnny Kelley—by 1968 they were all but forgotten. When no American came along to duplicate their success, the marathon went from having little visibility around the country to practically none. For the next decade, the Europeans and the Japanese would dominate the Boston Marathon. It looked like an American might never win there again.
Amby’s father had died in a car accident early in his life, and in high school, Johnny Kelley became something of a second father to him. And just as John “the Elder” Kelley had taken a sixteen-year-old Johnny Kelley to his first local road race, Johnny Kelley introduced young Amby into the secret and sacred world of New England long-distance running. In Amby, he found an eager pupil to lead on
long runs through the countryside. Together, the tiny, gregarious Irish teacher and his tall, shy, Germanic student would traverse hilly pastures, splash through streams, and bound over rough old Indian trails, the locations of which were known by Kelley alone. Through his mentor, Amby became part of a tradition of rebellious New England road warriors who went back to that original long-distance racer, Paul Revere. And now he was taking the wisdom he had learned from the older runners who lived around the area—Johnny Kelley; Norm Higgins was another—and passing it down to me.
“How was your weekend?” Amby asked, the conversation moving as leisurely as our strides.
“Jason and some other friends came up to visit. We played some poker.”
“Drank some beers,” Amby added.
“Yeah, we might have had a couple,” I said with a shrug.
“Sure. Just a couple,” Amby replied with a dead-pan grin. “So, you thought about this summer?”
“What do you mean?”
“You should run five miles a day. If you do that, you’ll come back in the fall, guns blazing in cross-country.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said.
I meant it, too. It was a good idea. To my way of thinking: You do cross-country in the fall, then indoor track in the winter, and outdoor track in the spring. The summer was for goofing off with your friends. It was for relaxing, and going to the beach, to the movies, and to dances. If I was feeling particularly motivated, I might run five miles every third or fourth day. Amby subscribed to a slightly different philosophy. He’d be living and breathing running that summer.
As we ran shoulder to shoulder down the road, we could see the dorms in the distance on Foss Hill.
“I heard the girls there are having a mixer up there tonight,” I said, sarcasm dripping.
“Should we go up there now and make dates?” said Amby. “I’m sure there’s a couple of beautiful brunettes waiting for us.”
“I think I see them right now. They’re waving at us from the quad.”
This was a common joke between us—the total absence of females at our all-male school. In fact, we spent many hours on the road discussing the opposite sex. What else is there really to talk about? Unfortunately, we had a lot more experience talking about girls than actually dating them. I remember having a crush on a gal in middle school. I think she knew I had a crush on her, too. I wanted to ask her out, but never followed through. Honestly, I was a terrible social misfit. I would go to a dance and sit in the stands and watch the more aggressive jocks talk to the girls. I remember wearing a clip-on tie to my first dance and one of my pals came over, yanked it off, and threw it away.
Between Charlie and me, he had far more success with girls in high school. Charlie was into cars, which was a cool teenage activity. (I was into collecting butterflies and running—not cool at all.) He was more outgoing. He was handsome and the girls liked him. In high school, he had a girlfriend. As for me, I was trying to meet somebody but without too much success—my silly glasses and scrawny build notwithstanding. No, I wouldn’t be called a hunk by anybody’s description. I was definitely a bit of a nerd in high school and during that era, it was not good to be a nerd, in any way, shape, or form. Running retarded me even more socially. Charlie and the rest of the cross-country team used to go to his girlfriend’s to hang out when they were supposed to be out on workouts. They would do this right under Coach O’Rourke’s nose. While they were drinking soda pop and making out in closets, I was out doing the entire workout by myself. I just enjoyed the sensation that running outdoors gave me.
Here, running alongside Amby through the trails and streams beyond campus, I was once again granted that same soaring rush of freedom. The part about those runs that Amby remembers most is how differently I ran along the road than he. Amby ran with this narrow focus, like some automaton, looking straight down the road. He ran inside of himself. He focused hard on his running effort and didn’t see things in the environment around him. I was able to run with a more relaxed stride—“flowing” is the word Amby always thought of when he watched me run. I gazed all around me as I ran, whether it was at clouds drifting in the sky or birds nestling in the trees. I was always finding stuff that Amby never noticed: money on the road and things like that. I’d stop to pick up items on the side of the road, which I think drove Amby crazy. Running never felt like a chore to me; it was the opposite. Pure fun. I would run along the country road, singing the words of my favorite song to myself. “Here comes the sun, here comes the sun, and I say, it’s all right.”
Amby studied me closely, like I was some rare species of bird. For all his dedication and hard work, he was cursed to never know what it felt like to run effortlessly. He had to maintain his concentration as he ran and focus hard on every step he took. As he moved alongside me, he wondered, how was it that I could float along the road the way I did? I had no idea. I was just doing what I’d always done. I didn’t know any other way to be. Ever since I was a kid, running felt as natural to me as breathing.
When we were boys, my brother, Charlie, and I would spend entire days running wild, or as wild as possible in our quiet, leafy suburban town of Newington, Connecticut. Our best friend, Jason Kehoe, who lived down the block from us on Thornton Drive, and who we’d known since we were two years old, always joined us on our boundless adventures. We were the three amigos, the Three Musketeers, inseparable.
We hiked trails, fished ponds, and played out our childhood fantasies in the thick woods behind our house. These woods were made for pint-size cowboys, junior pirates, and intrepid explorers. I’d bound over logs, rocks, and bushes. Sometimes we’d run around with bows and arrows, hunting for turtles, frogs, and snakes. We were like the tribe of rag-taggle Lost Boys in Peter Pan. God knows how many miles we covered! I’ve heard that Kenyan children are very active. It’s normal for them to run to and from school and the market. No one walks, everyone runs. That’s the way we were. We were always moving.
I think I enjoyed running even more than my brother and the other neighborhood kids. It suited my personality. I had all this energy and wasn’t so good at directing it. I was always bouncing off the walls and hanging from the rafters. I found it difficult to sit in a classroom for eight hours each day. I preferred to be outdoors where I could burn off energy. I definitely had some form of ADHD. Today, I would have been given Ritalin. But back then, I was just a kid who couldn’t sit still. My family and friends would just sigh and say with a little grin, That’s Bill for ya. Always getting into something.
Charlie was the oldest among us, and the leader of our group. He was often cautioning Jason and me not to carry through with whatever dubious, high-flying action we were about to undertake. He might, for example, say to us, “Well, the farmer is rapidly approaching us on his tractor and he doesn’t look too happy about you eating his corn, and maybe you shouldn’t be taunting him as he bears down on us.” Charlie would sprint away while Jason and I would continue to make faces at the farmer for another thirty seconds, before getting away by the skin of our teeth.
I was a notorious teaser, Tom Sawyer style. Sometimes I pushed too far, like the time I stood on my front lawn, taunting our neighbor Gerald with goofy faces. He stood glowering back at me across the street on his lawn. At once, Gerald marched over. There was a look of murder in his eyes. He clearly intended to punch me in the face. Gerald sprang on top of me, sending us rolling on the ground. Out of nowhere, Charlie rushed over and said, “You gotta get off, man! You’re not gonna be hitting my brother!” But Gerald paid no heed, and was acting fairly crazed, so Charlie let him have it in the side of the head. Gerald got up and staggered away. That was the end of it. Although I had probably asked to be punched, it meant a lot that Charlie had come to my defense. I knew I could always count on him to make sure that no harm came to me, and it made us closer than any two brothers could be.
It seemed like I was always running afoul of some authority figure in our town. One time, the cops drove me up to my house after
busting me for setting off fireworks. Another time, store detectives chased me out of a Sears Roebuck. Charlie, Jason, me, and Gerald used to sneak into a private pond to fish and someone would always end up chasing us away. We’d also go hunting with our BB guns in Stanley Park in nearby New Britain. Obviously, we weren’t supposed to be doing that.
One time, we were having a grand time chasing after squirrels and ducks in Stanley Park. All of a sudden, we heard sirens. A police car pulled up. The four of us instantly bolted in different directions. So much for inseparable. I had a good hormonal system for moving when I needed to, and this definitely qualified. I must have set a personal record for running through whippy brush and prickers. They weren’t going to catch me. I dove into a nearby pond and hid waist-deep in the safety of the thick reeds. Poor Gerald wasn’t so lucky. He got nabbed.
As a boy, my favorite activity was chasing butterflies in the huge field near our house. It was here, dashing through the tall grass, wielding the homemade net I’d made with a pillowcase and broomstick, that I discovered my love for running. I’d spot a butterfly to add to my prized collection—perhaps a giant swallowtail or a red admiral or a luna moth—and chase after it like a bird of prey. Charlie and the other kids watched in awe at the speed with which I ran down the elusive, winged creatures. They couldn’t fathom how, long after they had collapsed in a sweaty heap, I could still be charging back and forth through the field, armed with a butterfly net, a happy grin across my face. For some reason, I alone had been given the gift of being able to chase the fluttering butterflies for hours straight without tiring. I didn’t understand it, and neither did my parents, Charlie, or anybody else close to me, but running outdoors for miles and miles felt like the most natural thing in the world to me.