Marathon Man

by Bill Rodgers

  I remember running through the field one day with my friends, the warm summer sun baking our scrawny limbs as sweat poured off us in sheets. I caught sight of Charlie zeroing in on a beautiful tiger swallowtail. I was about eighty yards away and broke into a tremendous sprint. At the last second, I swooped in with my net and snatched the fluttering creature just under Charlie’s nose. For the first time in my life, I felt that fiery, competitive spirit overwhelm me. I knew then that nothing could ever match the thrill of running as fast and as far as my feet could take me.

  As Amby and I continued to move in perfect stride along the quiet country roads on the outskirts of campus, chatting about silly stuff like girls and music, I took in the beautiful colors of the New England foliage and smiled. I couldn’t believe that training could be like this; that I could feel like I did as a kid chasing butterflies with Charlie and Jason. Happy. Free. Flowing. “Here comes the sun,” I sang to myself, soaring along the road. “Here comes the sun. And I say, it’s all right.”

  Little did I know of the storm clouds gathering in the distance.

  TWO

  The Full Twenty Miles

  APRIL 21, 1975

  ASHLAND, MASSACHUSETTS

  The spectators erupted in wild cheers as the field of two thousand runners broke from the starting line. It was like we had been shot out of a cannon—like dynamite going off. Adrenaline propelled the swarm of runners around me thundering down the straight, narrow road. In the mayhem, there was pushing and shoving and grabbing of shirts.

  I was in a full sprint now. It was like the entire race was only three hundred yards, which is insane because it’s actually a bit farther than that. I knew from my first two times here that I needed to reach the tight corner ahead of the swift-footed pack if I was to negotiate the steep turn down the hill. At the same time I was making a beeline for the corner, the crowds, with no rope to hold them back, pressed forward into the road. I weaved my way through the gauntlet of fire and managed to scramble up to the front of the ragged stampede.

  The main thing now was to keep my wits as I fended off the horde of hell-bent runners nipping at my heels. To panic would have meant certain disaster. All of a sudden, the road in front of me took a sharp ninety-degree turn. The savage yells of the spectators were still ringing in my ears as I navigated the blind turn and started down the steep hill.

  As I made my way through the crowded traffic, I watched some guy with absolutely no chance of winning go flying down the hill ahead of us. This happens at every marathon. He was somebody who wanted to be in the limelight—who wanted to be on TV. Or he was somebody who was just totally incapable of pacing himself. Every race I’ve ever run, there’s been that guy.

  I had learned from my past two experiences in the Boston Marathon to stay under control. Be the captain of my own ship. Let adrenaline and nerves take over and I’d be road kill before I reached mile one. That goes for all top runners. And there will be no use in bellyaching later to Jock Semple that the other runners nearly trampled you to death. Boston is Boston and you have to be able to handle what it throws at you.

  At that moment, this meant fighting my way through a frantic barrage of flying elbows amid the noise of pounding footsteps. Yet my mind remained calm in order to clearly see what was going on around me; that way I could avoid danger in a split second. Nimbly sidestep a competitor about to step on my foot; duck out of the way of another guy about to trip and crash into my rib cage. Run calm, stay focused, and breathe, Bill. It’s the only way to survive.

  I emerged from the dicey start, alive and kicking. Only twenty-six miles to go!

  Pace-setter Bernie Allen took the lead early in the race. I ran close behind with Tom Fleming and the other race favorites. We had shot down that first hill at a pretty high speed. This wasn’t a day for hanging back and conserving too much energy, not with an overcast sky and a cool tailwind. For a New Englander like me, hot weather meant bad news, but on a perfect day like this I knew I could push it.

  I was breezing through these early miles. I was feeling my way through the race. This is what the top marathon runners do. They are careful with it. I finally got this. It took getting beat up my first two times at Boston, and getting wrecked in the New York City Marathon the previous fall. But as I ran here through the first miles, I didn’t try to go beyond myself. I was pushing it, but at the same time I was watching it, making sure to run with the competition. I was actually staying behind the other top runners.

  I spotted Tom Fleming wailing down the road. No surprise there. Everybody knew Tom was a front runner. He liked to be out ahead, pushing the pace, challenging anyone to duke it out with him, mentally as well as physically. As I said, Tom trained hard. Now he was going to find out just how hard the rest of us had trained. He was betting it hadn’t been as hard as he.

  The lead pack started to spread out a little as we climbed the slight incline heading out of Hopkinton. Contrary to popular belief, there are more grades to Boston than just the Newton Hills. As a matter of fact, few sections of the Boston Marathon course are totally flat. Here I was, setting up exactly how I was going to run the race. Who were these runners pouring it on in front of me? Did it matter? Not to me. I didn’t care who was up there. They weren’t going to run away from me.

  As the rural road started to flatten out a bit, a small group of runners took off. I tucked in behind them. I didn’t try to break away too early. I didn’t try to take the absolute lead. Some people need to be in the lead. They need to control the pace. I don’t know why. All top runners like to be near the front. But most times the winner doesn’t take the lead. Usually, the winner comes from the pack just behind the front runners. It’s a terrible position to lead. It makes you vulnerable. You have a bulls-eye on the back of your skull. You are the hunted. Better to be the hunter. Also, you can’t draft anyone. You can’t see what’s going on behind you.

  I was not conscious about time. I was not looking at my watch constantly. I don’t even think I was wearing one. I was concentrating on my opponents, watching for signs alerting me to their state of mind. I couldn’t afford a momentary lapse in judgment; you wouldn’t believe how the outcome of such a lengthy footrace could turn on a dime, but it can. It usually does.

  We hadn’t gone out more than a mile or so and the lead pack was already turning this into a race. I was not worried. I was so psyched I could hardly stand it. It was on. The question was: How much are these other runners willing to gamble? A better question: How much am I willing to gamble? Will my past flameouts here, caused as a result of going out too fast, hold me back? Or do I go for it? My mind considered this as I kept a nice even pace behind the leader.

  I reached Ashland in the second mile. It’s not a heavily populated area so there were less people cheering me on from the roadside. At that stage of the race, I was not going that hard; rather, I was running within myself. It was not unusual in the old marathon days for runners to push themselves from the gun. Runners would run as hard as they could and then keel over at ten miles. Only a small number of people had ever run a marathon, and so people didn’t know how to train for them, or race them.

  I was right where I wanted to be, floating comfortably behind the leader. The race was unraveling well, at least better than my previous ones. I took stock of my body. I was moving smoothly, landing softly on the balls of my feet, my head bobbing ever so slightly. I consciously held my form, which was flawless, unless you counted my right arm swinging freely across my body to compensate for a slight foot imbalance. I was breathing easy and feeling good. The new shoes felt great—light as could be—and I’d like to believe Prefontaine’s gift guided my feet forward with each strike of the ground. It’s at this point I locked into a rhythm, which I would stick to for the next several miles.

  I think I might have passed by a couple of nurseries heading into Ashland. The thing is, I didn’t care too much about the scenery around me. It was a simple foot race, you know. I didn’t see the cheering spectators, or the
fields and farms, or the sporadic homes that lined the road. I saw only my competitors and the ground zipping by under my feet and the minuscule section of world lying directly ahead of me. A week later, I could care about the nurseries and look through them and buy a plant.

  As I wound my way through Ashland, I continued to evaluate my competition. Who am I racing? Who’s in the lead? Who’s this guy crowding me in the Mexican singlet? Right away, I could see he was a very good runner. Only top runners wear their national symbol on their chest, like the American flag or the maple leaf or the rising sun, or the Russians way back would have a Soviet symbol. The other guy wearing Joe’s Pizza Shop? Not as much a threat.

  No doubt the man pounding the pavement next to me—who happened to be Mario Cuevas, the top Mexican marathoner at the time—took one look at me in my handwritten BOSTON singlet, gardening gloves, and kooky headband and thought I posed as much danger to him as a puddle.

  Everything I knew about Mario Cuevas I could glean running elbow-to-elbow with him. That’s a whole lot more than you might think. The serious marathoner must be part superathlete, part Sherlock Holmes. Was Cuevas’s running style smooth or awkward? It was smooth. Was he breathing light or heavy? Light as a breeze. Was the sweat pouring off his body? It wasn’t. Did he look fit? He did. As fit as me? Well, we’d see about that.

  The lead group—which comprised about eight of us—passed through the quick-alternating ups and downs that marked our route. We continued to flex our muscles in the cool tailwind. The temptation to try to push it in these perfect conditions was almost unbearable. It was the unspoken thought going through all of our heads: I may never again in my whole career have a perfect day like this to run a marathon. What are the chances it should come on the day of the Boston Marathon! The course record is just sitting there, waiting for one of us to break it. Why shouldn’t it be my name etched forever in history? Or be spoken in the same breath as great past champions like Clarence DeMar, Tarzan Brown, Gérard Coté, John “the Elder” Kelley, and Johnny Kelley? Victory doesn’t come any sweeter than that!

  But this was also going through all our minds: Push my body too hard and too fast and it might rebel against me. Maybe not after five miles or ten miles, but the deeper and deeper you go into the race, the greater the chance you’ll suddenly find yourself drained of any more fighting energy. One mile you’re in the lead, the next mile you’re zapped like a bug in a microwave. Limping to the side of the road, crippled with cramps, doubled over in pain. That’s why there’s no sport like the marathon. It’s a little over two hours of unexpected twist and turns in the plot; a twenty-six-round fight in the ring while moving at a five-minute-mile pace.

  Believe me, there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on before the starting gun fires—and some serious self-deluding. We’re all hard-striving athletes who think we can do it. We can conquer the beast. This makes it difficult at times to hear what our intuition is trying to tell us. It’s only once we’re out on the course that the numerous pitfalls of running that hard for that long come to light. Only then do we become achingly familiar with how the race can weaken our body and tear at our spirit.

  The race is a great unveiling—an unfolding of how we feel, psychologically and physically, on that given day. And 26.2 miles is a long way to run, and no matter how well we think we’ve prepared, situations will arise along the course that weren’t in the brochure. A lot can happen to the body—and the mind—over a distance of 46,145 yards. I knew this. I also knew the race wasn’t over until I actually crossed the finish line.

  No matter how fit or strong we all thought we were, the course could pound any one of us into flaming wreckage. Maybe the heat does you in. Maybe it’s severe dehydration that forces you to stop. Maybe it’s a pulled hamstring that derails your quest. Or it could be somebody just ran better than you.

  Yet we all hold out hope that on this Patriots’ Day the stars will align for us—my body will respond to all the hard training I’ve done, Mother Nature will hear my heartfelt pleas, I’ll put together the race of my dreams. In this way, preparing for a marathon is a bit like planning for a miracle.

  The marathon is the essence of the unknown transforming into the known; there’s always as much potential for destruction as there is creativity, as much chance of misery as there is elation, as much room for heartbreak as there is for triumph. That’s the fun of racing a marathon. It’s about seeing if you can go to the very edge without going over the cliff. Can you handle twenty-six miles at the same blistering pace as the guy next to you—in this case, a lean and muscled Mexican wolf named Mario Cuevas?

  I was about to find out.

  SEVEN YEARS EARLIER

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  The year was 1968. Most people remember it for the turbulent presidential election that brought Richard Nixon to power, the shocking assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and the wave of student protests that swept across American campuses, as well as around the globe, from Paris to Prague to Mexico City.

  While these events deeply altered my reality, what I remember most about 1968 was my college roommate Amby taking me into the mysterious, unknown world of long-distance running. Amby taught me everything there was to know—from how to build up my endurance to taking care of my body. “Don’t overrace,” he would tell me. “And get a lot of sleep.” But he did more than that—he acted like a big brother, which was lucky for me, considering that for the first time in my life, I didn’t have my own big brother, Charlie, to watch out for me.

  Starting my sophomore year, Amby and I roomed together. Our dorm room was split down the middle. Amby kept his side very neat, and almost completely bare, other than textbooks, lots of running shoes, jars of vitamins, wheat germ, and Tang—all under the bed. As for me, I slept on a mattress on the floor, had a turntable stereo, a candle lamp made from a red wine bottle, and all sorts of odds and ends—press clippings, loose change, used matchboxes—floating haphazardly around.

  Personal grooming habits aside, we had both been raised in lower-middle or middle-class families and now we were at a preppy school. The other kids had a lot more material stuff than we did. We both worked at the cafeteria to help pay for our tuition. Sometimes at night in our dorm room, I would flip on my stereo and play Simon and Garfunkel. I loved the soaring harmony of that one song: “I am a rock, I am an island.” I’d call out to my roommate: “We’ve gotta be a rock, Amby! We gotta be hard! Go it alone!”

  Amby would run eight miles before coming to work at around 8:00 a.m. I would be buttering toast in the kitchen as he came through the cafeteria line. We always ate breakfast together. Amby ate like a Buddhist monk. I couldn’t do that. I was brought up eating meat and potatoes and putting butter on everything. Of course, I’ve always been an oddball when it came to food. I’d put ketchup on brownies, peanut butter on eggs, and mayonnaise on hot dogs. Amby would go to the cafeteria in the morning and pile whole grains, fruit, yogurt, and about eight glasses of fruit juice on his tray. For a six-foot-tall guy of 140 pounds, he consumed healthy food like a rhinoceros. Sitting together in the cafeteria, Amby would look over at his plate and then over at mine and shake his head in mild repulsion.

  In all the time I roomed with Amby, I never saw him put anything bad in his body, negative in his mind, or take a day off from his training regimen. He bordered on monklike in terms of how he lived. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, and he was a vegetarian. Nobody was a vegetarian in those days. But if Johnny Kelley didn’t eat meat, then neither did Amby. If Johnny Kelley ate wheat germ, then so did Amby. If Kelley believed in going on two long runs a day, an insane, even dangerous notion at the time, then it was two-a-days for Amby. You wouldn’t find Amby’s radical training regimen in any running guides because, well, there weren’t any running guides. What he was doing didn’t have a name. It was that cutting-edge.

  Amby was always trying to get me to compete in a local road race with him, but I resisted. With good reason, too. The rac
es Amby was talking about me competing in were ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty miles long. I couldn’t imagine racing that far. It was insane. But Amby thought I was a natural for longer distances. I disagreed. My goal was winning my dual meets in the two mile. That was hard enough.

  In February of my sophomore year, Amby finally convinced me to run my first long road race: a half marathon in Durham, Connecticut. I could only hold out against Amby’s positive encouragement for so long, and who knew, maybe it would be fun.

  By the time Amby and I arrived at the starting line a blizzard had swept down on us. The blowing snow felt like pinpricks on my face as I took my place at the start with the other runners. I stood there, shivering on the middle-of-nowhere country road, wearing a pair of baggy gray sweatpants and my grandpa’s red woolen Monmouth College football sweater. To complete the absurdity of my outfit, I didn’t have a hat or gloves on.

  Once the race got under way, I sprinted to the front with Amby and the lead pack. I should have run conservatively, considering that this was my first time racing over five miles, and I practically needed a Sherpa to guide me through the raging snowstorm. But I was an aggressive cross-country runner, through and through.

  I charged along the hilly back road, snow pelting my eyes. But, try as I might, I didn’t have the firepower to hang with Amby. His pace was too fast. All of sudden, I lost sight of him in the icy whiteout conditions. One by one, the more experienced runners passed me on the snowy, desolate road.

  I had no idea how many miles I had run—there were no mile markers—but I knew exactly how many water stations I’d seen. Zero. As for the plow guy who drove past me in his truck, he had no clue what I was doing running in a blizzard. To be fair, at that moment, neither did I.

  As the miles wore on, my grandpa’s letter sweater with the big M on it had become soaked through with snow and sweat and then froze. I felt the full brunt of the swirling winds—what I couldn’t feel were my fingers. My biggest worry, besides hypothermia, was running clear off the course and tumbling into some icy ditch. See, there were no volunteers on the side of the road to guide my way. No spectators to cheer me on. It was just me out there, alone and miserable, hoping to reach the finish before I froze to death.