by Bill Rodgers
I started to keep a training log again so I could see my progress. Otherwise, it’s too abstract. I gradually started to build my pace, strengthen my heart, increase my endurance. My movements became more efficient. My running form looked more natural. It brought me back to my former days of running, when I’d had some success in life. In a way, it brought me back to life, back to me, the real me, the one who was happy and carefree and in love with the world and its infinite possibilities. That’s a feeling that you just can’t get wheeling dead bodies to the morgue.
The loop around the pond made for easy, idyllic running. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but John “the Elder” Kelley had run the same loop, who knows how many hundreds of times, in the 1930s as he trained to become Boston Marathon champion in 1935. Who knows how many more trips he had to make around the tiny pond over the course of ten years to reclaim glory in 1945. Perhaps no fewer than his protégé Johnny Kelley had run in the 1950s in his personal quest to carry the mantle, which he did through the fifties, winning the Boston Marathon in 1957. I don’t think Amby ever ran that loop, but in a way he did because just as a part of Kelley was in him when he ran, a part of my old college roommate was in me when I ran. That’s the way it is with runners. That’s the way it is with brothers.
Months of running the loop around Jamaica Pond gave me confidence to leave its safe confines and go out farther along the Emerald Necklace. Each time I ran, I felt that biological click go on. This never happened running around the indoor track of the YMCA. Here, in nature, all things were possible. I wondered to myself, Can I run up that hill that I see in the distance? Yeah, I think I can. I think I will. And with that, I’d veer off the path and start climbing to the crest. I was once again the Peter Pan adventurer of my youth! The fearless searcher! The wild blond rascal!
Day after day, I ran along the Emerald Necklace, slowly increasing my mileage over time. I went out seven miles one day, which meant seven miles back, and I’d think to myself, I’m going to keep going. I kept pushing myself to go farther out—nine miles, ten miles, eleven miles. Challenging myself to go farther still. I could feel my body and mind gaining strength with every mile. After a while, no distance felt impossible.
I got to the point where I was running once in the morning and once in the evening—like I’d seen Amby do. That’s a lot in a way, but I had slowly built up to it. Some sports put heavy hours in, like swimming or gymnastics. With running, you don’t. Even the top runners in the world don’t. I never ran more than two hours a day.
In many ways, Ellen and I were a perfect match. She was of a practical, down-to-earth, friendly, and quiet nature. She always made sure I left the house with everything in my pocket, no matter what kind of rush I was in. Or she’d stick a hat on my head as I was heading out for a winter run. I’d come back, cold and spent, and Ellen would cook me a nice, warm meal. She possessed an earthy gentleness that endeared her to me. We were two young, lonely free spirits in the big city, finding refuge in each other. Ellen was my first real relationship, the first girl that I could say I truly loved.
We lived a very simple, low-key existence. Our apartment had once served as part of the servants’ quarters of the building. Ellen had her job, so she was bringing home money, and the rent was almost nothing: one hundred and ten bucks a month. Our costs were low. We had no health care. We didn’t have any kids. We had a cat. Sometimes I would meet Ellen as she was getting off the trolley, coming home from work. We would pick up dinner at the market. We didn’t live too lavishly. Once in a while we’d go out to the movies. Or eat pizza over a friend’s house.
My life was very basic and regimented, almost a militarylike situation. I’d wake up in the morning, maybe grab a cup of coffee, and in no time at all, I’d be running loop after loop around the leafy pond at a six- or six-and-a-half-minute pace. I’d run once in the morning and once again in the evening. I’d sleep ten hours a night, but wake up twice. The first time, around three a.m., to eat my fourth meal of the day and go to the bathroom. I’d stand at the refrigerator, chugging quarts of soda, milk, peach nectar mixed with ginger ale. I’d shovel food into my mouth. Oreo cookies, potato chips, pickles, Hostess Twinkies, macaroni and cheese, horseradish, tartar sauce, and mayonnaise, which I’d eat straight out of the jar with a big spoon. Sometimes I wondered if the real reason I ran so many miles every day was so I could eat like that, or if I ate like that so I could run so many miles.
I felt like I was making a comeback and it lifted me up to see the progress I was making. Ellen was not a runner herself, but I think she understood that going on long runs, twice every day, was something I needed to do for my peace of mind. She did occasionally inquire how the job search was going. But she never yelled at me for training all the time. Years later, she did tell People magazine: “When we were first going together and he would leave to run, I thought, ‘He’d rather do that than be with me?’”
Ellen never told me that was how she felt. But, looking back, I can see there was an element of selfishness in following my passion for running. Maybe every quest, no matter how good and heroic it may be, starts off kind of selfishly. Ultimately, Ellen supported my reawakened interest in running and for that I was thankful. I think she recognized that I was trying to do something positive, which was to quit smoking and get into shape. It’s hard to criticize somebody for that.
Of course, most people back then had an easy time criticizing me for spending as much time as I did running. “Why do it?” they would ask. “You’re not making money at it.” I didn’t share the common viewpoint that an activity had little value if it didn’t result in some financial gain. I championed the idea of doing things just for the sake of doing them, be it running outdoors or playing a song or painting a canvas or writing a love poem. I didn’t want to live in a world where something as positive and uplifting as running in nature didn’t have value. As a matter of fact, I refused to.
The past five years in America had been full of excitement, hope, and urgency but they hadn’t allowed for many truly peaceful breaths. For some of us—those who had experienced the whirlwind of war, love, protest, purpose, revolt, joy, and madness in our early twenties—a desire to live a simple life swelled in our hearts. No more mass political movements, no more violent clashes with police, no more “fight the power.” Tend to your own garden. Like the Beatles said, let it be. For all of us hoping to recline our minds on peaceful shores, running was the perfect activity. After all, could there be a less mentally taxing activity? It’s one foot in front of the other.
For all the good feelings my running along the Emerald Necklace generated inside me, it provoked anger and ridicule from the motorist passing by me on the Jamaicaway. Once, I felt an empty beer can whiz by my head. A couple of rowdy guys in a pickup truck on their way to work. This was nothing new. Getting heckled on runs. You’d hear stuff like, “Who are you running from?” or “Where’s the fire?” or “Hey, fruitcake! Nice underwear!” Football was a real sport; running was for freaks and fairies. How could such a peaceful action—running down the road, communing with nature—ruffle the feathers of so many?
Not everybody was hostile toward runners, but the majority of people who saw me running alone through the park, in the middle of the day, did look at me suspiciously. They couldn’t help but wonder, Why are you running? Why aren’t you out looking for a job? I think they took offense at the idea of somebody escaping from their real problems. But what’s so wrong with escape? Escape can be a wonderful thing.
Of course, I don’t think my running was only about escaping from the pressures of life. For three years, I’d been drifting through the world only half alive. Everything felt like a life-and-death situation, a state of constant emergency, and in the hospital, many times it was. I liked zooming around the hospital and interacting with patients all day. But in a larger sense, it was strange to be in a perpetual state of motion and yet feel like I wasn’t going anywhere. In that way, running wasn’t an escape from life; rather, it was a
n embrace of it. As I bounded along the park trail, I wasn’t sailing around in chaos. I was charging forward with purpose.
Running through the heart of the city, I thought about my sudden change in fortune. What if I hadn’t met Ellen that night at Jack’s Bar? What if I hadn’t moved to Jamaica Plain with her? I’d always felt overwhelmed living in the center of downtown Boston. I felt much calmer living on the outskirts of the city. And of course I was a stone’s throw away from this gigantic oasis of green amid the urban landscape.
Also, how lucky was it that I ended up doing my alternative service in Boston? After all, I could easily have done it in Newington or Hartford or any number of places. But it was here in Boston that I experienced the Boston Marathon for the first time. It practically passed outside my window. What if Jason and I hadn’t driven back to Boston early that Sunday and I hadn’t witnessed the grand spectacle with my own eyes? What if I had not been caught up in the race’s mythical web?
I was suddenly given this chance to get back to running. That is, I had all the time in the world to run. Not to mention, I was now living across from the perfect running spot. I would wake up, throw on some sweats, and literally be running the dirt path along the pond five minutes later. Even though it was only 1.5 miles around the pond, I never tired of running lap after lap in the middle of nature.
From mid-October on, I was averaging one hundred miles per week around the Emerald Necklace. I had never run this much in my life, not even during my senior year of college, when I was at my peak as a runner. I never came close to achieving the weekly distances I was now.
I had entered a brand-new world as a runner; it was an exhilarating place to be. In September, I set a new high mark: 124 miles for the week. Why stop now?
I was driven, but not like most twenty-four-year-olds living in Boston. What drove them was making money and having a nice house and a good career. I was driven to run. I was this penniless athlete aiming for an ideal. It was like Plato and the perfect city, you know?
What the war had taken away from me was my motivation to run. After all, who cared about running when I might have to leave my country and family and seek refuge with the kiwi birds in New Zealand? But what the war also took from me was my freedom. Suddenly, I was required to find a job that fulfilled my alternative service duty or face prison. This life I was forced to live offered no room for a steady running routine. In that way, I lost the freedom that came from liberating myself from my troubled mind. Running was my way of stepping outside myself, of tolerating the human condition. I no longer had the chance to be a kid at play. My soul diminished. My world collapsed. I fell apart.
Once I started running around Jamaica Pond, those positive feelings came rushing back. I had been dead in places without even knowing it. I felt alive again. I felt hope. I don’t think I could have stopped running each day in the park even had I wanted to. First of all, there was the sweet rush of the runner’s high. Those endorphins raced through my brain, repairing the damage done. The war had screwed me up. The filth and noise and congestion from the city had screwed me up. Smoking and drinking had screwed me up. Taking bodies to the morgue had screwed me up. Being treated like a peon by administrators had screwed me up. Running in the park was a powerful form of recovery.
Here’s what you have to understand: For runners, progress is the root of pleasure. While progress in life can be hard to see, sometimes impossible, all I had to do was open up my ten-cent running diary and peer inside. My physical evolution was clearly laid out before my eyes—where I was when I started, where I was now. It was a way of grabbing the reins of life: I ran five miles yesterday, I ran seven miles today, and next week I will run ten miles. The more work I put in, the stronger I became. I felt good. I felt fit. Now I was really tapping into my human potential. No substance on the planet can rival a rush like that.
Now there was no turning back. The voice inside me that said I should focus on finding a job was drowned out by the much louder voice inside me that demanded that I feed my appetite to move. It told me that I had starved my soul for too long. Nursing that shrunken nub back to health was now my only concern.
The medicine that one needs to take to cure his or her shriveled soul depends on that person. Most people search their whole life looking for this medicine, sometimes in the most bizarre places. Sometimes they try to find it in another human being. But all one ever has to do is move. Moving is the medicine. Running, walking, jumping, hopping, skipping, dancing, twirling, swimming, hiking, biking—they all have the same inexplicably powerful effect on our being. I discovered the potent remedy of movement as a child. I was possessed by a frantic mind and prone to foolish behavior. Running was the shelter from the storm of chaotic emotions—impatience, hurt, loneliness, frustration. If I ever lost my true self, all I had to do was run long enough and far enough and there I’d find it.
That fall, I got a letter from selective service. It said that I’d fulfilled my obligation to the government. I was deemed a permanent conscientious objector. They’d finally let me go. At long last, I was free.
By now, I had no doubt as to my objective. I knew it before that moment but wasn’t ready to admit it to myself. The undertaking was too daunting, too dangerous, too bold. But why else had I been training so hard all those months? The truth was, I had been preparing for battle. I knew what was next. The comeback was already on.
I was going to race the Boston Marathon.
EIGHT
Battle at Silver Lake
APRIL 21, 1975
WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS
As I broke away from Drayton, I felt a mix of exhilaration and apprehension. To start racing hard at eleven miles, with fifteen miles ahead of me, I was taking a big leap into the unknown. I had reacted spontaneously to events as they unfolded. It wasn’t that different than the artist who follows his creative impulses.
Look at the way Frank Shorter suddenly made his move in Munich in 1972. I don’t know if he was planning to charge to the front at the nine-mile mark, and keep pushing the tempo with seventeen miles to go, but he did and blew away the field by over two minutes to become the first American gold medal winner in sixty-four years. Did my friend and fellow New Englander Joan Benoit Samuelson plan to surge ahead only three miles into the 1984 Olympic marathon while her competitors were playing it safe in the brutal heat, or was she just feeling feisty in that moment? She finished a minute and a half ahead of the overwhelming favorite, Grete Waitz, to take gold. They weren’t worrying about breaking down when they made their move. Neither was I when I made mine against Drayton.
I felt good making this aggressive move; I saw a little gap and I was going to drive through it like a thoroughbred horse—fearless in flight. As for Drayton, I lost him quickly after I shot to the front. He soon became out of sight, out of mind.
For the first time, I found myself alone in the lead of a major race. In the World Cross-Country Championships, I had two other guys fighting for the lead with me. But suddenly there I was running out front by myself. It was a powerful feeling to be roaring along the road with a sense of no obstacles in my way. I was on my way toward the finish. I had nothing to lose.
As I made my way through an isolated area outside of Wellesley, I ran with the same relaxed, powerful strides that I used following Amby through the winding trails around campus, or, as he’d said, “always a half-stride behind, eyes nearly closed, right arm flapping and light hair bouncing rhythmically to the cadence of the run.”
I could hear the rumble, like distant thunder, of the crowds in the distance. It could only mean one thing. The infamous Wellesley “scream tunnel” was getting close. In a moment, I would encounter thousands of Wellesley College women lining the streets, hollering their heads off, carrying signs saying, KISS ME, I’M A SENIOR or KISS ME, I’M A CHEMIST or HOW ABOUT A QUICKIE? or GIVE ME A HUG. I felt energized by the cheers of the female superfans growing closer and louder.
As I came into Wellesley at mile 11.5, the road narrowed a
nd the growing crowds squeezed in around me. I felt momentum running through downtown, past all the Wellesley College girls, standing along the edge of the road, screaming and whooping and offering kisses.
I know Tommy Leonard, the larger-than-life bartender at the Eliot Lounge, the local hangout for us runners in the Greater Boston Track Club, particularly enjoyed running through the gauntlet of out-of-control female students: “These girls, I love when they come out. They’re all good-looking chicks. I try to make dates. See you at the Eliot Lounge, but none of them show up—I’m oh for twenty-one.” In contrast, at the 1992 Boston Marathon, Kenyan runner Ibrahim Hussein put his fingers in his ears to block the deafening roar of the coeds en route to victory.
As for me, the waves of screaming female coeds had no impact on me. It’s not that the shouts of encouragement from the Wellesley women didn’t provide me with a nice lift—it definitely did—but I wasn’t there to make dates. The pope could have been there giving out blessings and I wouldn’t have stopped. Such was my drive to win the race.
As I ran alone through Wellesley, the road got narrower while the crowds got bigger. And louder. And more intense. There was increasingly less room on the road for me to squeeze through, but I loved that in a way. I reacted to the energy of the crowd and it drove me on. If you talk to anyone who’s ever run the Boston Marathon, they’ll all say that: The support from the cheering crowd gives you a huge lift. So I had that on my side when I was taking off. I’d never enjoyed the special attention of running in the lead. I was the awkward little brother at the high school dance, the wallflower, the one who was too shy to ask the girls to dance. And my parents, while patient and loving, weren’t the type to lavish praise on my brother and me—most of the time they had no clue where we’d run off. I was relishing the moment, eyes ahead, feet soaring, arms pumping, a tongue steeped in the sweetness of adulation, to quote Willy Shakespeare.