Marathon Man

by Bill Rodgers

  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 w
aiting 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?

  SEVEN YEARS EARLIER

  WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

  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?

  It was going to take a miracle for me to squeeze through with passing grades. Amby, meanwhile, had finished his term papers two weeks before they were due. He’d scheduled every minute of his final two weeks of training before Boston and wasn’t going to let anything interfere with it. Not classes, not campus uprisings, not a giant meteor hurdling right for Earth. When everybody else would be hiding in underground bomb shelters, Amby would be galloping along his twenty-mile loop.

  On April 20, 1968, Ambrose Burfoot crossed the finish line to win the Boston Marathon. My twenty-one-year-old roommate had just become the youngest champion of the oldest and greatest marathon in the world. He had single-handedly carried forth the mythic New England running legacy of Clarence DeMar, Tarzan Brown, Les Pawson, John “the Elder” Kelley, and, most touchingly, his mentor and friend Young Johnny Kelley.

  Sixty-year-old Johnny Kelley didn’t just run the race that year; midway through the race he was still up with Amby and the other lead group. He was still fighting like a champion, even when he shouldn’t have been. He finally faded the last half of the race. I’ve always suspected that the reason Johnny Kelley ran so hard that day was that he wanted to get to the finish line as fast as possible to congratulate Amby. Sure enough, Kelley came through the plaza, crossed the finish line, and made a beeline to Amby. And even though he was several inches shorter than his pupil, he gave him a big hug. “I know how happy you are, Amby,” Kelley said. “But you can’t be any happier than I am. I think I finished fifteenth, but it doesn’t matter. I think the only reason I kept going was so I could be here to exult with you.”

  While Amby was in the midst of becoming the first American in eleven years to earn the title Boston Marathon champion, I was two hours away at a dual track meet in Middletown, Connecticut. Amby had felt guilty about missing the race—he didn’t want to let down the team—but Coach Swanson, who had watched, as we all had, Amby train like no man alive, reassured him that it was okay. I liked Coach Swanson for that.

  How could I have missed seeing Amby win the Boston Marathon? You have to understand, the event wasn’t even televised at that time. I had no idea what the race looked liked, how the city transformed into this huge parade, or how the city’s inhabitants, from the banker down to the street sweeper, were swept up in the excitement of hosting the most famous and prestigious marathon in the world.

  I didn’t get the mystical attraction it held to runners from all over the world—Europe, Japan, Africa, South America. I didn’t get how hordes of people, unable to control themselves, would rush onto the course behind the lead runner when he made his final push to glory. I didn’t get why the race meant so much to so many. Nobody on our team did. I just knew that 26.2 miles was a very long way to run.

  For some odd reason, the city didn’t rejoice in Amby’s victory the way they should have. The media did not sing his praises, give him a clever nickname, hold him up as a beacon of hope. They should have, but they didn’t. Of course, nobody could refute his groundbreaking accomplishment—the first home-grown talent to win at Boston in over a decade! A twenty-two-year-old student! And yet it didn’t give birth to a running boom. The universe, as usual, was working on its own internal timetable.

  Back at Wesleyan, there was no giant banner awaiting Amby like some conquering hero, no big party thrown in his honor. I don’t even remember him showing me his medal. Amby wasn’t like that. Life went back to normal, although I think perhaps Amby stopped playing “The Impossible Dream.”

  After Amby graduated, I was no match for the social stimuli of college: the parties, the discos, that girl sitting across from me in the library. Another mental distraction for me was our country’s escalation in Vietnam. The war had become this strange theater from which no American who owned a television could escape. It was the first war to be televised, which meant nightly news reports that took you to the battlefield. But although I could see what was going on with my eyes, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. As Emile de Antonio put it: “Every day we saw dead Americans, dead Vietnamese, bombings, all kinds of rather interesting things, but never one program on why; never one program on the history of it; never one program attempting to place it in context.”

  I tried very hard to put it in context, consuming all the information I could on the war, poring through newspaper articles, engaging in political debates with classmates on the way to and from class. I gathered that the basis of the government’s decision to take us deeper into war was to stop the spread of communism in Asia. I didn’t buy into that theory.

  By my junior year, our team had lost its backbone—Jeff and Amby. I guess it was my turn to step up and be the leader, but that was never me. Charlie was the leader; I, along with Jason, had always been a good follower. I was still the fastest two-miler on the team, but for the first time since I was a sophomore in high school, my times got slower instead of faster. I’m the kind of person who, if there’s somebody to aim high with, I can do it. I looked for others to lead the way for me, like Coach O’Rourke or Amby. I didn’t have the motivation to excel on my own. I wasn’t self-directed in that way. Without Amby around to drag me out of bed for a morning run, I slumped.

  With another lazy summer looming on the horizon, I could hear Amby’s refrain, “Train over the summer, Bill. Keep up your fitness. It will pay off big time when you return in the fall.” In years past, I ignored his advice. But I truly felt the urge to lift myself out of this rut. So, for the first time in my life, I trained over the summer. I was back home in Newington, running five miles every day in the bright, hot sun. I’d come bounding up the front porch after a long run, dripping buckets of sweat, and Charlie would be looking at me with a warm, puzzled smile. He recognized a certain toughness in me that I’m not sure he saw in himself. But I knew from watching Amby what it took to be a distance runner—you’ve got to be one tough dog.

  I started to get my fitness back. I set a new goal for my senior year: run the two mile in under nine minutes. I’d never hit this mark before so that put a charge in me. I continued to struggle academically, which only fed my desire to succeed on the track. At least then I’d have one reason to feel good about myself. Same as in high school, really.

  I was also motivated by a challenge to my position as the best two-miler on the team. A freshman arrived at Wesleyan that fall—a Frenchman whose name escapes me. He ran a 9:05 in high school, so he was a really strong runner. I was determined to put this young hotshot in his place just as Amby had been with me.

  As I worked toward my goal in the two
mile, I continued to throw in longer runs. I was averaging seventy-five miles per week. I felt good about that. Sure, Amby averaged around 130 miles a week his senior year, almost double my amount, but he was training for the Boston Marathon. The thought never crossed my mind to enter a race longer than five miles. Five miles felt long!

  In December of 1969, I had one last chance to break nine minutes in the two mile—at the final indoor race of the season at the Coast Guard Academy. It didn’t look good. In spite of all the work I had put in, my fastest time in the two mile up to that point was 9:24. Taking that big of a chunk off my PR would not be easy.

  I lined up beside the young Frenchman. I got off to a great start and took an early lead over the field. From there, I maintained my torrid pace. We came up on the second mile and that’s when the Frenchman made his move. We were running neck and neck. I kept pushing the pace, but he hung right on my side. We came up on the final stretch and I knew it was time to pounce. With a final powerful kick, I surged ahead of the Frenchman and held him off as I sprinted across the finish line.

  My winning time was announced: 8:58. I had broken nine minutes! That’s the way our sport is. You train and train, and sometimes you don’t feel like you’re making any progress, and then suddenly you do. You rest a little and suddenly, whoa, you’re up at another level. The body always responds, but sometimes it takes a while. It takes you by surprise. And that’s what happened to me that day. I was psyched.

  A couple of weeks after setting my PR at the Coast Guard Academy, my draft number came up. I can’t recall what it was; Jason remembers his was 151. But our numbers bought us both six months. Around the same time, the Supreme Court had ruled that people could apply for conscientious objector status, not just on the basis of their religious beliefs, but due to their moral objections, as well. That decision opened the door for a lot of young people who were against the war to apply to become a CO—Charlie, Jason, and I jumped on that bus.