Marathon Man

by Bill Rodgers

  It hadn’t occurred to me to hold back my energy in the early stages; that I didn’t have to be right up there with the leaders from the start. I was a cross-country and track runner; I was used to racing up at the front, you know? Usually I could do that. That’s how I ran Silver Lake. Like a cross-country race. And it had worked. But it was forty degrees cooler out. My body could handle it. This hit me like a ton of bricks.

  I thought about all the summers I took off from running when I was younger because I had rather have been at the beach. Because I disliked training in the hot sun. It didn’t agree with my pale Irish blood. “Train over the summer,” Amby used to tell me, but I never listened. Here, withered up on the couch, I wished I had.

  The marathon had humbled me. I was so devastated by how poorly I had raced that I began to question whether I could ever succeed at such a long distance, and against such high-level competition. I tried to resume my training, but it was hard. I felt angry and confused. Over the next several weeks, my running was sporadic. By the end of the month, I had stopped running completely.

  I had quit running before. Was I about to do it again?

  TEN

  Boston, You’re My Home

  APRIL 21, 1975

  NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Once I blew past Drayton, I never again bothered to look behind me to see where he was. My eyes were fixed straight ahead. I had made my move and it was a clear break. I had gotten away. Maybe he thought I was going to kill myself at that pace and come crashing back to earth on the hills. As a matter of fact, I know that’s what he thought. My good friend Tom Fleming believed the same thing. There was no way I could last the distance.

  You have to understand: Nobody today tries to run away with the Boston Marathon as early as I had that April day in 1975. It doesn’t happen. There are too many good runners these days. Everybody’s more careful. They aren’t breaking away until at least mile 19 or 20—that’s where the race starts getting more competitive and emotional. The crowds are bigger, the runners are more tired, but the fitter ones will go for it. By that I mean they will throw in a surge. Change up the pace for a hundred yards, or three hundred yards, and test the strength of the competition.

  Even my own brother, my most loyal supporter, thought I had lost my marbles.

  Charlie pulled up to me on the press bus, stuck his head out, and shouted: “Billy, slow down! Are you nuts?”

  The verdict was still out on that one. With that said, this was my third time running the Boston Marathon. I felt I knew how much more I could handle. This was Drayton’s first Boston. He may have been worrying about the hills up ahead. I trained on those hills. I felt I would be ready for them when the time came. I could see from Charlie’s pained expression that he was not nearly as sure about this.

  I understood the look of concern on Charlie’s face. He had watched me succumb to the merciless nature of the marathon for two straight years. He had seen his little bro suffer the agony of trying to run on legs that felt as if they were filled with cement, and the heartbreak of ending up a twisted wreck on the side of the road. But this was a different kind of day. Finally, I was running a marathon where I felt strong, relaxed, in command. It was a huge lift to be gliding along without a trace of fatigue. The doors felt wide open. I could run as fast as I wanted to.

  I was sailing along, easily in front. I had tens of thousands of people roaring me on with every stride. They spurred me on to keep a pace that would have broken most runners. Every inch along the course was lined with people going nuts, and I was knocking out sub-five-minute miles as I flowed between the rowdy hordes. It was like a Fenway Park crowd during the seventh game of the World Series, only spread out along a twenty-six-mile country road. Their deafening screams of support drowned out the sound of my footsteps and any doubts in my mind. That intensity was pushing me into places I had never dared go before as a runner.

  I felt like it was my crowd. They were on my side, particularly when I broke away from Drayton. And in a strange way, I was on their side. For instance, I didn’t know that Tommy Leonard, the man who always had a big smile and a cool drink waiting for me at the Eliot Lounge halfway through my long training runs, was having a hard time miles behind me on the course that day. Recalled Tommy: “Billy’s fighting to prove how good he is and I’m way back in the pack. I’m ready to drop out and just then I hear the crowd roar—Billy’s just pulled into the lead. I’m telling you, he gave off mystical vibrations. I got so high I ran my best marathon ever. Three hours and seventeen minutes.”

  I liked this feeling of breaking away early and running on my own. In later races, I would break free from the pack, but never as early as I did on this day. Usually, I would take off around sixteen or seventeen miles. That’s where I always made my move in New York City. I would start racing hard over the Queensboro Bridge, come off the expanse, and keep surging hard for another mile or two. I hoped to drop the field with this burst. Sometimes I did.

  Everything was going well as I turned the corner onto Commonwealth Ave. For all us runners, whether you think about it or not, if you’re still running good at eighteen miles, you’re going to have a solid race. But if you’ve struggled to get to that point, the last six miles are going to be hell.

  I hit the first of the three hills on Commonwealth Ave., which a lot of people say is like the first punch in the runner’s face, but I was thinking, This is not that tough a hill. I was running steady with my eyes focused like a laser on the lead vehicle just ahead of me on the road. It became the center of my universe; everything outside of my narrow field of vision faded from existence.

  My parents always told me, “Bill, you can’t go through life with blinders on.” And they were right. But if running straight ahead, free from the worries of the past or the consequences of the future, was a great liability in my life, it was a great gift as my smooth strides ate up the miles to downtown Boston.

  Was it coincidence that my habit of focusing on what was directly in front of me, and nothing else, gave me the power to run 26.2 miles like few others in the world could? After all, I’ve never been able to look too far down the road, not like my brother, Charlie. I think this is typical of somebody with ADHD. Since I was a boy, I had lived a life that was spur of the moment. There were times, plenty of times, I paid the price for not thinking beyond the now. Sometimes I was so focused on what was directly in front of me, I missed the brick wall up ahead. But the same rules that applied to life didn’t apply to running a marathon—if you were strong and fit enough, there were no brick walls ahead to fear and thus no need to put on the brakes. If you were strong and fit enough, there was only an open road for you to soar down. That’s what it felt like running alone in the lead—like I was soaring and there was nothing to stand in my way.

  By the time I rounded the sharp corner at the Newton Fire Station, located around mile 18 and just before the first of the four dreaded Newton Hills, I was struck with a horrible realization: I had blown it. I had run too fast over the first three quarters of the race, and now I was going to get wiped out on the demanding hills. I flashed back to the disaster I had experienced last year—and the year before that—on the final ascent into the city. The leg cramps. The dehydration. Was this going to be an instant replay?

  I didn’t know how hard I had pushed it, getting away from Drayton, but I knew I’d been flying like a bat out of hell up to this point. In fact, I was running thirty-eight seconds under Ron Hill’s course record pace.

  If I was a racecar driver, at that moment I could look at the gauge and see if I was, indeed, running at an unsustainable pace, or what’s called “redlining.” But my only gauge was my brain; it was the only thing that could tell me right then if I was working too hard at eighteen miles or still running within myself. What if Charlie had been right? What if I had let my compulsion to take on Drayton eclipse my rational thinking, leading me to make a panic move that was about to send me on a suicide mission through the hills?

  The first of
the Newton Hills suddenly rose before me. This was it. My moment of truth.

  TWO YEARS EARLIER

  NATICK, MASSACHUSETTS

  I got licked in my first marathon. It didn’t take long to recuperate from the acute dehydration; recovering from the deep wounds to my self-esteem would be an entirely different story. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the marathon. Maybe I couldn’t handle the competition at Boston. Maybe I had just fooled myself into thinking I could be a great distance runner.

  I didn’t want to believe that, of course. I knew I had to get right back in the cockpit. So the day after the marathon, I ran three miles at dusk. I was also checking to see if I’d incurred any injuries. The body felt okay, all things considered. But the body wasn’t the issue.

  After what had happened to me, I was gun-shy about running in the heat again. You need to recover completely from this chest cold, I told myself. It’s 82 degrees out. Rest today. You’ll begin training tomorrow. I was breaking Amby’s number one rule: Never make excuses to get out of training.

  I woke up the next day and broke the promise I had made to myself to get back on the road. Instead, I opened up my log entry and wrote: “Rested. No running. Running scares me.” What did I do instead? Probably hung around the house, watching TV, eating Oreos and drinking Pepsi.

  Friday. For a third straight day, I didn’t train. Saturday. I finally forced myself to go on a fifteen-mile run in the park. I felt weak. When will I finally be rid of this demonic chest cold? I thought Sunday. I did another fifteen-mile run. I wrote in my log: “Getting hot out!! In the middle 80’s! I find it very hard to run. No vim and vigor.”

  I was losing the willpower to put in the heavy mileage. As a marathon runner, if you’re not getting stronger every day, you’re getting weaker. This is day-in-day out business. I was in a dangerous place because once you stop putting in the work, you’re done.

  I’d heard stories about guys taking antidepressants and it making it easier for them to train. I’m the first to admit that training alone can be tough. Sometimes the hardest part is the boredom. Other times it’s the pressure you put on yourself. I remember this kid named Gerry Lindgren who broke all kinds of records in high school. He was the best in the country for his age. I still consider him one of the finest distance runners in American history. But Lindgren pushed himself hard in college, running more miles than his young frame could handle. Part of it was that he loved to run, but he was also feeling the pressure to live up to expectations. In his mind, he had to keep breaking records, defeating tougher challengers, winning bigger races. It all became too much. He started developing ulcers and he never returned to the level he had attained in high school. He burned out before he ever came close to reaching his physical peak, which would have been in his twenties. I always wonder how great Lindgren could have been had he not fallen victim to fear and anxiety. In my heart, I believe he could have been a gold medal champion like Frank Shorter.

  I was lucky that unlike Lindgren I never had to live up to past greatness. I could progress at my own pace. I never thought of myself as anything but a novice, exploring a new and challenging event. Still, the marathon had knocked me down. My miles per week kept dropping—seventy-seven for the second week in April, which dropped down the next week to fifty-four miles, then the next week to twenty-two miles. Then finally, in May, I stopped running altogether. You know all those good feelings I talked about getting from running—the tranquility, the peace of mind, the lifting of the spirit? I suddenly found them missing.

  Running scares me, I thought. But that wasn’t true. It was running in the heat that scared me. If I could train in warmer weather then I could acclimate myself to the heat, I thought to myself. Isn’t that why Frank Shorter had moved from England to Florida? Same with Jeff Galloway? Hadn’t they formed some postcollegiate running club down there? But Florida was too hot. I needed somewhere with warm, moderate temperatures. That night, I told Ellen that I thought we should move to California. Just like that. Let’s go to California. Her response? Okay. Let’s do it.

  Maybe she was as excited as I was to make a fresh start. I think she was. It’s not like we had a long, deep discussion about the implications of what it would mean for us to just pick up and move to the other side of the country. It’s not like either of us had been to California before. What I knew about the place came from movies and TV shows. As a matter of fact, neither of us had ever been outside New England. Here was our chance to see the world that lay beyond Brookline.

  We were winging it completely; a classic young person’s exploration. We had no plan for our new lives in California. All we had were a few maps I’d found before we embarked. All I knew was that I wanted to live somewhere in Northern California. I carried a foggy notion—maybe one I’d come across in Track & Field News—about that region being home to a small running scene since the 1960s. Good training weather. I didn’t feel I had an alternative. If I was going to conquer the marathon, first I needed to conquer the heat. That’s what I told myself, anyway. What I really had to do was get back my passion for running. I needed to get back my verve.

  Ellen quit her job at the hospital. I don’t think it was a big deal. She never indicated she was leaving any long-term friends or career aspirations. I think she was excited and, of course, it helped that she got her parents on board. She was a classic only child. Very close to her mom and dad. They were kind and supportive parents and I got along well with them. Her mom was a strict Catholic, which meant that Ellen and I couldn’t live together even though, of course, we did. When her parents came to Boston to visit her, I would hide out at a friend’s place until they were gone. Those were the times we lived in.

  Her parents must have been worried about Ellen getting safely to her destination 2,500 miles away so they bought us a Dodge Van. She and I loaded up the van with everything we owned in this world, which wasn’t much, grabbed our pet cat, and drove off.

  Driving through the country with the windows open, I shook my head in disbelief at the beauty of the vast, rolling stretches of the Great Plains. At night, we slept inside the van in our sleeping bags. Once in a while we stopped at a motel to wash up and so Ellen could call home. We were roughing it. Was it romantic? In the sense that two young, adventurous souls driving across the country is romantic, yes. It was that whole Jack Kerouac thing. On the Road, right? But it wasn’t romantic like a honeymoon. Maybe it was like our honeymoon.

  When we reached the Rockies, I was still staring out upon the vast landscape with a dumbstruck grin on my face. We stopped at Yosemite, walked under the giant redwood trees, and looked upon the unspoiled beauty with amazement. We stood at the brink of the Grand Canyon and gazed speechlessly into its sublime depths. I thought to myself, How can a country of such natural beauty be home to such ugly divisions?

  Somewhere along the journey we settled on a final destination—San Jose, California. We might as well have thrown a dart at the state map.

  As we drove through San Jose, I felt like a deer that had accidentally wandered into the center of bustling downtown; the sight of cars and people everywhere spooked me. This isn’t good, I thought. This won’t work out. We had no contacts, no job leads, and very little money between us.

  California is vast and we felt like a little speck of dust. I went there because I felt I needed a warm-weather place to train, but it didn’t take long to realize that wasn’t enough. I know Ellen felt the same way—her heart belonged back home. After only a couple of days, we came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to head back east.

  On the drive back, we stopped in Wyoming; I went fishing in a stream and caught a trout. I would’ve loved to cook the fish but, of course, we hadn’t thought to bring any camping gear. Our next stop was Lake Tahoe. We parked at a campsite in time to see the radiant sunset over the magnificent lake, which was massive in size and startlingly clear. It’s hard to put into words the stunning beauty of the landscape. As somebody who grew up in New England, the awesome vastness of t
he mountains took my breath away.

  In the middle of the night, I was getting out of the van to use the bathroom and our cat went flying out the door. She wanted out in the worse way. We searched everywhere for her, but it was pitch black and Tahoe is a big area. We were heartsick. We thought we had lost her for good. We felt stupid. Plain stupid. If Ellen and I were going to have our first moment of strife, this would have been a good time. I was a big proponent of avoiding conflict. So was Ellen. In fact, I can’t recall either of us ever yelling at the other. We just weren’t like that. For better or worse.

  A couple of hours later, we were lying in the van when we heard a faint meowing outside. The cat had found its way back on its own, no worse for wear.

  As we continued our journey through the country, I tried to think of another warm-weather training locale where we could live. Then a lightbulb went on in my head. Virginia! It’s a beautiful place with green valleys and rolling hills. It just sounded nice. We arrived in Virginia, but I remember we didn’t stay long. I think we both sensed we were putting off the inevitable. Ellen missed her family back in Worcester, and I missed mine. We both kind of looked at each other—let’s go home.

  When we loaded up the van and left for California, I was thinking this was about my running, but it ended up being about more than that. Ellen and I had gone on this great adventure into the wider world—a trip through Mother Nature’s land that was both powerful and enlightening. I got to appreciate the soaring beauty of the West. If there was something else our trip showed me, it was that you should be where you’re happy. I was happy in New England with my family and friends. In the end, I said to myself, I ran there before, I guess I can run there again.