Marathon Man

by Bill Rodgers

  That was rock bottom.

  Early the next morning, I rolled out of the bed. I threw on some gray sweatpants, dug out my old sneakers, and put them on. After lacing up my shoes, I walked out the front door, down the paint-chipped steps of the Victorian house, and over to Arlington Avenue.

  I paused a moment on the side of the road and stared out at the horizon. All at once, I started running down the road. I moved at a slow, steady pace. I could hear my breath as I glided over the hardtop. I passed by the grass front yards and storeowners unlocking their front doors and people washing off their sidewalks. By then, I’d lost track of how many days I’d gone without running outdoors. Had it really been four years since I soared through the countryside with Amby? Had it really been that long since my running shoes had been caked in mud?

  As I blasted down the road, I could feel the blood slowly returning to my veins. I was running again. My muscles were loosening with each step. I sailed along, giddy as a newborn pup.

  I had no idea how long I’d been running by the time I saw Peter Bent Brigham Hospital come into view. I passed Jason on my way up the front entrance. He didn’t react surprised at the sight of me arriving to work on foot. He just glanced over at me as I passed him in my ragged sweatpants with my hair sweaty and looking unkempt. He gave me a small nod and grin.

  I was still about to walk inside the hospital to carry out another day at my dead-end job, but the seeds of change had been planted inside me. Small events were pushing me to take action. Each one was propelling me closer to the keys to my salvation, which looked a lot like waffle-soled training flats. And yet, I still wasn’t ready to commit myself. Something was still holding me back.

  SIX

  The Writing on the Hospital Wall

  APRIL 21, 1975

  NATICK CENTER, MASSACHUSETTS

  As we ran toward downtown Natick, a foot apart from each other, I did know this: Drayton could duke it out. How did I know this? He was built right. What does that mean? He was thin but strong. Real strong-looking. I could hear the easy rise and fall of his breathing. I knew that under his maple leaf singlet his heart was not thumping against his chest but, as Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “beating calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence.” On top of that, he was running sub-five-minute miles like it was a piece of cake. Not too many people in the world can do that. Not in 1975. Not if you haven’t trained your whole life at high altitude. At that pace, you’re cracking 2:11. That’s roaring.

  At no point did Drayton talk to me. That was fine. I liked that. It told me he was a serious runner. That’s what I want. I didn’t care that other runners found Drayton aloof and standoffish. I liked that Drayton was a different breed of cat. In a way, you want the challenge of going toe-to-toe with a guy like Drayton—fit and sharp, cunning and ruthless—because it heightened your own senses and got your blood going. It forced you to react and think at a faster rate than you normally would, and demanded your body and mind adapt to the challenge thrust before you.

  I liked Tom Fleming, too, but he was the exact opposite of Drayton. He liked to mix it up with other runners—he could be brash and talkative on the course. I didn’t mind that, either, because I knew Tom was a serious runner. I knew the miles he put in. I knew the punishment he inflicted on his body in training. I knew that he didn’t lack for want. Unfortunately for Tom, sometimes his outsize personality got the best of him. It cost him. He used up too much energy. He’d go out too hard in these big races. He wouldn’t be able to finish strong.

  The more experienced marathoners will take advantage of a day like this—cool with a tailwind. It’s only the inexperienced runners that don’t. Or the runners who have no competitive fire. They’re running the same course, but they’re not running the same race. They’re solving crossword puzzles in their head or thinking about their grandma or talking to people along the way or visually embracing spectators. They’re in a world of heartwarming delight where smiling children hand out orange slices to runners, where friendly faces show up in all directions, where a sea of people move alongside them in runner solidarity.

  In my world, I was running beside Jerome Drayton and he was as light and cheery as the Terminator—his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, reinforcing the sense that he was a cold-blooded killer. But Drayton didn’t intimidate me. Not for a moment. I had to deal with him but, at the same time, he had to deal with me. And I was determined to stand my ground. You have to be like this. You can’t let anybody throw you off. You have to be feisty. Respect your opponent, as I respected Drayton, but never fear them. This is a duel. I’m there to beat him. He’s there to beat me. I can’t think of anything more fun.

  Now we were ten miles into the race, passing along the shores of Lake Cochituate, where Tarzan Brown, the orphaned Narragansett Indian who’d won the race in 1936 and 1939, suddenly waved on the other runners, jumped the guard rail, and plunged into the cool waters during a scorching hot race day. I breezed past the spot where Tarzan took his famous dip, without breaking stride. The first time the brash youth had entered the race in 1935, he threw his shoes into the crowd and ran the last thirteen miles barefoot. As I battled Drayton through the midreaches of the race, my Prefontaine racing shoes flicked swiftly over the road. My feet felt great in my new shoes. I could skip going barefoot like Tarzan.

  Ten miles into the race, I felt my confidence rising. I was making headway and my body was telling me it was all systems go. If you’re working real hard ten miles into the marathon, then it doesn’t bode well for the next sixteen. It’s not as if you’re going to make a miraculous recovery and suddenly feel great. We’ve all seen that pitcher who struggles in the early innings and almost gets stronger as the game goes on. Not in the marathon. This is the great weakening of your physical and psychological strength. That’s the challenge. Most people are just trying to run the distance. “Can I finish the twenty-six miles?” Some people set limits like four or five hours. It’s hard to get it down to the 2:10 to 2:15 range, but that’s what people like Drayton and Fleming and myself were trying to do. Not so we could set a personal record, but because we knew that’s how fast we’d need to run to win the race.

  My mind, which tended to bounce, skip, and fly around in every direction, was now trained like a laser beam on the moment at hand. As the race wore on, I gave no heed to my inner dialogue, or the people and scenery that flanked the road—not even for a second. All my focus was on the road directly ahead of me. It was this effortless intensity and calm as I ran that separated me, not just from the casual weekend warrior, but my other competitors. Where it came from, I’m not really sure.

  It would have been easy, as I glided down the road, for random thoughts to enter my head—“Jeez, did I forget to turn off the coffeepot?” Or, “I hope I can pay my rent this month”—but they didn’t. Instead, with every strike of my Prefontaine shoes on the pavement, I was tuned into what was happening to my body. The average marathon runner will tune out for a time, especially when the hard miles begin taking their toll. They will disassociate from the task they are performing, taking their minds to another place, focusing on anything but the pain they are feeling.

  In his book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the great Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who’s also an enthusiastic recreational runner, describes his method for successfully completing an ultra marathon. He talks about entering into a “metaphysical” state where he hardly knows who he is or what he’s doing. He puts himself into a Zen-like trance, on the assumption it’s better to transcend the physical and mental distress than to plug into it. But the worst thing you can do as a marathon racer is to deny, ignore, or repress what your body is telling you, every single moment throughout the race. Even if it’s not what you want to hear.

  While he’s running, Murakami tells himself to think of rivers and clouds. In that moment, I tell myself to watch my form. Check my pace. Check my exertion level. Monitor the subtle in-and-outs of my breath. Listen to my body for the slightest hin
t of fatigue or injury.

  Murakami talks about running in a cozy, homemade void. I love that feeling, going on a long run through the countryside, leaving my mind far behind. But I can’t afford to think of nothing. Not there in the middle of the Boston Marathon. Not in the heat of battle against Drayton. If I want to win this race, I need total awareness.

  Once the race was on, my ADHD mind somehow knew not to wander off on its own. It knew a momentary slip in concentration could do more than slow me down, or impede my performance, it could lead to a fatal mistake. It might be an early mistake, one I didn’t even realize I was making at the time. Perhaps caught up in the thrill of the competition, I fall into the temptation to blast through the first few miles. If this early pace is just a tad too fast to maintain to the finish, the final miles will become a living nightmare.

  Let’s hope I didn’t run those first few miles too fast.

  I was coming up on the real nitty-gritty of the marathon. Everything else was just setting me up. This is the real challenge of the marathon—the last fifteen miles. I had run that first part carefully and it was very uplifting to feel my engine running trouble-free. I knew the center of Natick was up ahead; I had a sense of moving out of the wooded suburbs and of getting closer and closer to the bedlam of Boston. You really feel that as you run. And it’s flat, so it’s easy running, and you’re making progress. The halfway mark was coming up, and that’s a significant marker psychologically.

  Drayton and I continued stride for stride into Natick Center, a wide-open downtown that captures the signature feel of a small-town New England celebration, much like Hopkinton does. We flew by an officer directing traffic in the center of the road, kids handing out cups of water, and fans crammed along the town green cupping their hands to their mouth to better project their passionate support. At that moment, I was running the marathon as if it were a cross-country race, as if time didn’t matter, only position. I was running with a “go-for-the lead” attitude.

  The crowds were clapping and rooting for us like Roman spectators at a gladiatorial match. Amid the throngs of cheering fans the spirit of Spartacus could be heard: “Oh, comrades! Warriors! Thracians! If we must fight, let us fight for ourselves! If we must slaughter, let us slaughter our oppressors! If we must die, let it be under the clear sky; by the bright waters; in noble, honorable battle.”

  THREE YEARS EARLIER

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  I was running to work one day when I spotted my Triumph as it zipped by me. I could have given chase, I suppose, but I was never a speed guy. Besides, maybe the stranger on my bike had done me a favor. I wasn’t back on my feet, but at least I was back on my feet. Okay, so it wasn’t Prometheus and a bolt of lightning.

  When I wasn’t working at the hospital, or sporadically running outdoors, I was spending my time with Ellen, mostly over at her place in Jamaica Plain. I was almost never at my apartment on Westland Avenue. Jason knew I had a girlfriend, which was a good thing, because otherwise he might have thought his friend had been abducted by aliens. I don’t know if Jason was mad at me for dropping out of his life like I did. He knew how badly I had wanted a girlfriend, so he likely forgave me. Also, he would have known that a jittery nicotine puffer like me could use the calming influence of a good woman.

  And that’s exactly what Ellen brought to my world: a sense of calm. Almost instantly, I left behind those nights spent going to pubs with Jason. Quiet dinners at Ellen’s replaced loud music and booze at Jack’s. Her sparsely decorated living room became my new favorite hangout; most nights we curled up on the couch and watched TV. After all the aimless drifting that I had done since graduation, I felt relieved to have stumbled into a stable relationship with a girl I could be myself around.

  It was August now. We were at Ellen’s, sitting on her frumpy couch, watching the Olympic marathon on her tiny TV set with the rabbit ears. It was the final day of events. By then, the athletic competition had been overshadowed by the massacre of eleven members of the Israeli Olympic squad by Palestinian terrorists. After such a shocking event, played out live on TV to a world audience, the rest of the sporting contests became an afterthought. And with good reason—people had died. Still, as a former college runner, I was curious to watch the marathon.

  The smart money was on the Europeans or Japanese to take gold, while the Americans were considered inferior competition. As a matter of fact, the last time an American runner had won a gold medal in the marathon was way back in 1908 and not without controversy. An Italian named Dorando Pietri had been the first to cross the finish line, but he had collapsed down the final stretch and had been assisted to the finish by British officials. Eventually the Italian was disqualified and Johnny Hayes, a New York department store clerk, was awarded the gold medal.

  Frank Shorter, a former track athlete from Yale, was considered America’s best shot for a medal. He was a couple of years ahead of me in college, so I never raced him head-to-head. But Amby did. In those days, he beat Shorter handily—and, in fact, was only vaguely aware that there was some kid named Frank Shorter finishing somewhere behind him. He didn’t register on my radar at all. Of course, I wasn’t aware that Shorter had won the ten-thousand-meter title at the 1969 NCAA track championship during his senior year at Yale. Or that he had won the U.S. National Cross-Country Championships in 1970 and again in 1971. I didn’t follow the sport in those days. I was following the peanuts as they hit the ground at Jack’s Bar.

  Last I had heard, Frank Shorter had gone to medical school and then later decided to attend law school. At any rate, I assumed that like most college runners he’d eventually quit the sport and had found a stable way to make a living. He could do that as a lawyer. I considered that vocation myself back in college, and I was nowhere as smart as Shorter.

  What I didn’t know was that a friend of his named Kenny Moore, who graduated from the University of Oregon and took fourth place in Munich, had convinced him to try the marathon. Grad school gave Frank the time to run and so he decided to go for it. Kenny Moore was to Frank what Amby had been to me—the guy who saw untapped potential and encouraged him to push himself and see what he could do. Only Frank had responded to Kenny’s plea, while I’d ignored Amby’s.

  The race started in the Olympic Stadium, and was run over an out-and-back course. Shorter had taken the lead early and was demolishing everybody by several minutes. For the last sixteen miles he was just on a leisurely tour of Munich. I remember seeing Frank emerge from the dark of the tunnel onto the stadium track. He was alone in first. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Nobody could. It was such a wonderful moment because you knew it was being beamed around the whole world, but also because of the way he ran that day—with absolute grace and ease and perfection. Nobody’s ever looked fitter or better than him at an Olympic running event. It was a galvanizing moment for all runners. As a fellow American, you looked at the video and you saw the image of the perfect runner—in complete control of his game, while the rest of the world ate his dust. An absolutely sublime, dominating performance—like in 1960 when Abebe Bikila, a virtual unknown from Ethiopia, conquered the streets of Rome barefooted in world record time, becoming the first black African to win an Olympic gold medal.

  Sensing a buzz in the air, ABC played up Frank’s run over the next several hours. The network brought in Erich Segal—the Yale classics professor, Love Story author, marathon aficionado, blah, blah, blah—to provide color commentary. Toward the end of the race, Segal was going crazy, not because Frank was a quarter mile from Olympic glory, but because an imposter had entered the stadium seconds before him and was taking a victory lap. The crowd was cheering wildly for the imposter, not knowing the truth. Shorter recalls hearing the roar of the crowd as he entered the tunnel into the Olympic Stadium only to be greeted with absolute quiet when he emerged. “As I ran the final lap around the track, the crowd was silent and I’m thinking, Well, I’m an American, but give me a break.” An outraged Segal was calling the imposter all these
unspeakable names on the air and yelling out to Shorter, “It’s a fraud, Frank!” It made for entertaining television.

  That night at Ellen’s, I was just one more American watching the highlights of Frank Shorter’s victory in disbelief. Only a few days earlier, everybody had experienced a very different kind of disbelief, watching the tragedy of kidnapped and murdered Israeli athletes unfold. It was painful to watch such a despicable act of faceless terror. But thanks to Frank’s perfect marathon run, we, as a nation, could now celebrate an act of individual achievement. It mattered that it came in the marathon, the event that perhaps more than any other symbolized one man’s heroic triumph against a host of fierce challengers and in the face of daunting conditions. It was a hopeful, cathartic moment.

  As fired up as I was to see a former U.S. college athlete like myself win Olympic gold, I didn’t leap up out of my seat and charge out the door with the goal of competing in a marathon. But it did alter my perception. I suppose it was like how people once thought it was impossible to put a man on the moon and then one day they turn on their TV to see Neil Armstrong hopping on the lunar surface. Frank Shorter was, in that moment, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. Suddenly, the possibilities for an American runner were endless. There was a way forward and it was suddenly okay to dream the impossible dream—even if you weren’t Amby Burfoot.

  It was early fall by now. Things were going well with Ellen and I was still spending all my time over at her place, so I decided it was time for me to leave Westland Avenue.

  I arrived at the hospital, but instead of going right inside to join the other escort messengers I walked around back to the parking lot. I found Jason in the shack, listening to the local rock station and watching the clock go around.