Marathon Man

by Bill Rodgers

  With our “us against the world” mentality, we were bound to develop a tighter unity than most clubs. I remember, that winter, running through Natick with Bobby Hodge, Vin Fleming, and Kirk Pfrangle. There was a rule: no stopping to go to the bathroom. If you did jump into the woods to get some privacy, the rest of the guys would take off at a sub-six-minute pace. I’d have to kick up some serious dirt to catch back up to them.

  Sometimes while we were running as a pack up a particularly tough hill, we would pysch ourselves up by naming it for someone in the club. For example, we had a “Dickie Mahoney Hill,” which he trained on near his house. We got the idea from the Kenyan runner John Ngeno, who was famous for his epic battles against Steve Prefontaine while a student at Washington State University. Ngeno would train daily on this brutal hill near the Pullman campus, which became known and feared as Ngeno’s Hill. We admired Kenyan runners like Ngeno and Kip Keino, Olympic gold medalist in 1968 and 1972, for having the will to push their bodies to the extreme, doing painful hill repeats, and so to have a hill named after you was a great honor in our club.

  I remember one time we were out on a run near Boston College. Leading the pack that day was a guy named Ken Mueller. He was an old warhorse from the BAA who had conducted field endurance training while serving in the army in the 1950s. He’s gone now, but back then he logged as many as two hundred miles a week and ran the Boston Marathon nineteen times. He was a trail runner like Amby and Johnny Kelley and he knew all the trails around that area. Anyway, we got caught in one of these classic Boston snowstorms, where you can hardly see your hand in front of your face.

  We were running along both sides of the road and there was this guy driving behind us, honking away, and yelling viciously at us out his car window. We got pissed at him. It was, like, Share the road buddy. We surrounded his car. We weren’t going to let him go. Things got a little heated. We started throwing snowballs at his car. We finally let him go, still slinging a few choice words at him as he drove off. It was the classic Boston feistiness that we all had. Later that night, we would laugh about our snowball assault over drinks at the Eliot Lounge.

  Besides that incident and perhaps a few others, I didn’t aggressively defend my lifestyle. That’s just not who I am. I would rather quietly go my way and let them go theirs and hope they don’t run me over next time around the block.

  It did seem like crazy things always happened on our training runs. One time, there was a group of about ten of us doing a twenty-miler. As we were passing through Natick, we came up on this big mansion set back from the road. I spotted a big Great Dane in the yard, about sixty feet away. Next thing we know, the Great Dane was galloping toward our group with his teeth showing and foam dripping from his jowls. The pack of us started running for our lives. For some reason, he singled out Alberto Salazar, nicknamed “the Rookie” because he was seven years younger than the rest of us. As Alberto recalls in his book: “Snarling, snapping, slobbering, the beast comes close in on me. I’m frozen. I can’t move. But just as the dog is about to spring—it’s just like the movies—he yelps in pain and slinks away. I look over, and there’s Bill. Among his eccentricities was the fact that he always ran carrying this heavy key ring—I never realized why until that moment (although, being Bill, he might not have realized why he carried it either). He had chucked the key ring at the dog and scared him away. We continued our run. Bill Rodgers had saved my life.”

  We soon became more than an athletic club, a tight-knit group of runners and their wives that would hang out socially. Practically every weekend, we would all pile in a couple of cars and drive down together to a local road race. While we were serious when it came to the competition, there was plenty of partying going on before and after the race. We had our big annual events like the Falmouth Road Race, which Tommy Leonard made sure every year morphed into a colossal summer blowout party.

  I remember one New Year’s Eve Tommy had been celebrating pretty hard and he told everybody to meet up the next day at the Eliot Lounge. We all showed up and ran twenty-five miles to Sharpless Jones’s house on the South Shore. None of us planned to kick off the year on a little fun run, almost the distance of a marathon; it was a quirky, lighthearted “let’s do it” kind of thing, like most other club happenings. A huge celebration commenced at the home of Sharpless Jones with big vats of chili and kegs of beer. He owned a running shoe outlet in Hanover, Massachusetts. I don’t think Coach Squires ever found out about our New Year’s Day workout.

  On a summer day, a group of us would be in the middle of a long run, dripping with sweat, when we would jump into the Eliot and say hello to Tommy. He would greet us with a big grin and quickly serve us cool drinks on the house. A few minutes hanging around Tommy is all it took to feel happy and refreshed and ready to go back out there and conquer the world.

  There was a great feeling that took hold during the first years of the running boom. Maybe it was the newness of it all, and the sense that something was happening here, that the sport was growing and our community of good friends was growing with it. Whenever you passed a runner on the street in those days, you would wave and they would wave back. Today, people often run with earphones and tune out the world around them, including other runners. If you wave to a woman you don’t know in the park, she might not take this as a sign of solidarity. She may even take offense. Yes, I know time marches on, and you can still see amazing connections being made between runners, especially on the fund-raising side. But I’ll never forget the unique bond shared among all runners back in the seventies, and how this great camaraderie became a powerful force for change.

  Although I ran faithfully with the GBTC on Tuesday and Friday nights, officially I was still a member of the BAA. As much as I loved Jock Semple, I felt that my loyalty should go to the guys I was training with. Sev was elected to go down with me to tell Jock that I would run for the GBTC. We went down to his little training clinic in the back of the Boston Garden. We were scared out of our minds. Sev didn’t know Jock that well but I had seen him in action—tearing some guy’s head off on the phone or grabbing some clown by the scruff of his neck and running him off his marathon course.

  I knew it was Jock’s dream to see a member of the historic club win the race, something that had only occurred one time in history, when Young Johnny Kelley captured the laurel wreath in 1957. Jock, being one of these classy guys said, “Billy, those are ya training partners. You should run with them.” He didn’t give me any grief at all.

  Amby Burfoot once told me he wished that a club like the GBTC had been around after he’d graduated from college. Instead, he went back to little old Mystic, Connecticut. His mentor, Johnny Kelley, was there, but on the downside of his running career, and so Amby had to continue to train on his own. Meanwhile, I now had five or six Ambys to push me on workouts. Being able to count on a group of guys to go on long training runs with me during the week, or put in speed work on the track with me at night, was a huge factor in my physical conditioning for the marathon. My teammates spurred me to train even harder; they motivated me to give it my all during workouts.

  With months of speed work under my belt, I prepared for my next big test: the World Cross-Country Championship trials in Gainesville, Florida, which would determine who would make up the U.S. squad at the championships in Morocco.

  FOURTEEN

  Duel in Morocco

  APRIL 21, 1975

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  By the time I passed Coolidge Corner, I was over a minute ahead of Ron the Hill’s course record, not that I had a clue I was running that fast. Nor was I aware that Jerome Drayton had dropped out on Heartbreak, close to where I had stopped to tie my Prefontaine shoes. I was now running within the city limits of Boston. Less than two miles to go.

  While I remember going up a slight upgrade near Fenway Park, I didn’t see the famous giant Citgo sign. It’s almost impossible to miss, but that’s how single-minded I was at the task at hand. I was getting closer to the fini
sh with every step. I took off my gardening gloves and ran with them in my hands. I was just going for it.

  With less than two miles to the finish line, I finally began to think I might win if my legs didn’t cramp on me. I knew I’d get across that line. I told myself that if my legs went on me with one hundred yards to go, I would crawl across the finish.

  Turning onto Hereford Street, I skimmed around the corner like a leaf driven by the wind. You could see the focus in my eyes as I sprinted through the narrow gap between thousands of screaming, rowdy spectators, urging me on to victory. The fans were frenetic. They felt the intensity of the race. They pushed me on, no question about it.

  The onlookers were swept up in the drama, and brought alive with excitement at the first sight of the runners approaching, especially the leader. Boston loves a winner. They love the feeling of witnessing a great performance, and will become mesmerized watching as an athlete performs the unimaginable with equal measures guts and grace. They know the rich history of the event, and they will pass on the stories of triumph and tragedy to their children. They appreciate the nature and cost of the battle being waged by the men passing mere inches in front of them. And if you emerge the victor, they will put you on a mantel, as they did with Johnny “the Elder” Kelley, who competed at Boston a record sixty-one times, and for whom a bronze statue is erected at the foot of Heartbreak Hill. “One time I met a woman at a dinner,” recalled Kelley. “She said, ‘I’ve always wanted to meet you.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘I live in Natick and I got married on Patriots’ Day. My husband wouldn’t come inside the church to marry me until you went by in the marathon.”

  The same cheering crowds that had lifted up hometown boys like Johnny “the Elder” Kelley and Young Johnny Kelley decades earlier were now doing the same for me as I ran past them with BOSTON written across my chest.

  With about a mile to go, I remember thinking to myself, I ran my first five-minute mile in high school. Can I do one now? Of course, this one would be after running twenty-five miles.

  I went straight up Hereford and tearing for the finish area at the Prudential Mall. With a burst of speed, I entered Kenmore Square. The thick crowds spilled onto the streets and sidewalks, leaving me the narrowest path to slice my way through. I glanced over and saw the Prometheus Unbound statue. I thought back to that night, five years earlier, when Jason and I raced across the imaginary finish line in the middle of the night, drunk and laughing and smelling of cigarettes.

  Here I was, running that same stretch of road, a sea of people flanking me, shouting “Boston, Boston!” in unison with every step I took toward the finish line. The spectators a little farther along the course heard the noise and picked up the chant. “Boston! Boston!” I’d like to think that the woman who’d shouted, “Go, Jerome!” was somewhere in the midst of the crowd, her voice being drowned out by the beautiful roar from all directions.

  “Boston! Boston!”

  ONE MONTH EARLIER

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Three years ago, I’d stopped running completely. I’d been working as a lowly hospital orderly, pushing bodies to the morgue, hanging out at bars with Jason, drinking and smoking and trying to meet a girl. Suddenly, I was now the best road racer in New England. Some guys might have been content with that sort of rapid rise. Not me. I was on a mission to win the Boston Marathon.

  Step one was to quit smoking. I did that by tossing my last pack of Winstons in the garbage. Next was to build up my base. I did that by running thousands of laps around Jamaica Pond. The next step was to test myself on the local road-racing circuit. By 1974, I was dominating the competition. That told me something. Then came San Blas. My first international competition. I had hung with Lasse Virén. That told me something. Then I took on the great Marty Liquori at Falmouth and blew him out of the water. While that win gave me a big lift, I felt that I should beat him, a miler, over a longer distance. What I needed now, before I knew I was ready to achieve the ultimate prize, was a true test of my mettle. I couldn’t have asked for a tougher challenge than the third annual World Cross-Country Championships held in Rabat, Morocco.

  It’s hard to appreciate the magnitude of the World Cross-Country Championships today, but forty years ago it was the ultimate showdown for long-distance runners—on par with the Olympics. What made it the greatest—and toughest—single running event on the planet was that it assembled the world’s best track and field athletes in the same place at the same time to compete at one distance—twelve kilometers. Everybody from the world’s best miler to the world’s best marathoner showed up to compete.

  Our team of seven American runners, led by 1972 Olympic champion Frank Shorter, would be taking on teams of champions from around the globe. The awesome collection of talent included future 1976 Olympic fifteen hundred-meter gold medalist and world record holder John Walker from New Zealand, future two-time Olympic champion Waldemar Cierpinski of East Germany, 1972 Olympic ten-thousand-meter fourth-place finisher Mariano Haro from Spain, 1972 Olympic bronze medalist Ian Stewart of Great Britain, and 1974 Boston Marathon champion Neil Cusack from Ireland, who had beaten me a few weeks earlier in the 20K.

  My claim to fame was that I had won a bunch of road races around New England; suddenly I was about to go head to head with the greatest collection of champions from around the world. Up for grabs was no less than this title: greatest distance runner in the world. I should have been petrified, but I wasn’t. I was excited to see what I could do.

  The U.S. trials were held in Gainesville, Florida. I had gone down with Scott Graham and a bunch of other friends from the Greater Boston Track Club. Someone in our group had a friend who lived in Gainesville and agreed to put us up. We ended up sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags; it was one of those deals.

  When I arrived in Florida, I was still battling a nasty cold. My first day there I went for a forty-minute run at a slow pace. I felt dizzy and weak. I took some cold medicine but nothing helped. The day before the race I ran five miles over the 15K course and practiced some hurdles, which I had never done before in my life. That night, I felt gloomy about my chances, noting in my journal: “Felt spacey and I’m still sick. Depressed about the race tomorrow but praise the Lord I luck out.” I was nervous.

  The trials at Gainesville would decide who earned a berth at the World Cross-Country Championships, but the event was huge for another reason—for the first time ever, I would be facing off against Frank Shorter. I couldn’t imagine this reality back in August of 1972 when I was sitting on a couch in my dingy apartment, eating junk food, watching Shorter obliterate the field in the Olympic marathon to become a running legend.

  I remember Shorter arriving at the trials in a nice sports car. He was definitely the big gun. I would also be going against my former college teammate Jeff Galloway, who smoked me on the track when he was a senior and I was a freshman. I was always thankful to Jeff for finding time to help me with my homework and, along with Amby, showing me that long-distance running could be a blast. I would also be competing against my mentor, Amby.

  The race itself was in a huge cow pasture—totally insane. It was a beautiful day. They had these big steeplechase hurdles. I didn’t know how to hurdle at all. I was totally finessing it. I ran solid, despite feeling under the weather. Somehow I managed to tie Gary Tuttle for third place. Of course, Frank Shorter was victorious. He beat me by thirty seconds. The important thing was that I had punched my ticket to the big race in Morocco. As for Amby, he had the worst race of his life and finished far behind me.

  I remember how excited I was to receive my U.S. team uniform in the mail. I relished the chance to proudly represent my country after being labeled unpatriotic for my opposition to the Vietnam War. Of course, I felt that I was doing my patriotic duty by refusing to fight in a war that did not represent either American values or national interests. At the same time, I understood that many people didn’t see it that way. I was excited to be an ambassador and to shine brightly for the
red, white, and blue.

  By the time I left on a plane for Morocco with my U.S. teammates, I had fully recovered from my cold. I was sitting on the plane with Shorter and Galloway when I mentioned that I was in dire need of a new pair of shoes for the Boston Marathon. Shorter said he knew someone at Nike. Who could have imagined that “someone at Nike” would mean running superstar Steve Prefontaine? Not me.

  We arrived in Morocco a couple days before the race and checked into a hotel. At some point, I left the hotel and went down to this little old market and bought a rug—a memento from the trip. When I got back to the hotel, I made a surprising discovery: I didn’t have any racing shoes. I’d forgotten to bring them. I went to Gary Tuttle, who I had hung out with a little at the trials, and asked him if he had any extra shoes. He loaned me a pair of beautiful Asics spikes that, as luck would have it, fit me great.

  Race day was perfect for running—sunny, dry, 70 degrees. I was so wired—wired out of my mind. I had been pushing myself for months, building my speed under Squires, building my strength on long runs with my teammates. I was putting in eight-mile runs at a 5:10 pace, two hundred-mile training weeks. I was ready to go for it.

  Early on, Frank and I ran shoulder to shoulder but just as he started falling back I made a break for the front. I kept passing runners until I was in the lead. I was moving! The hurdles? I felt like I could jump over anything. I could not be stopped. Man, that feeling. I did hit it good: what they call a sweet spot; I hit the ball just right. It was an audacious thing for a total unknown like me to break from the pack. I just felt on.

  I have a picture of me going over this hurdle in the lead with two other runners—Ian Stewart of Scotland and Mariano Haro of Spain. I held off the two challengers until the final one hundred meters when they both outkicked me.

  It was a breakthrough feeling when I crossed the finish line in third to claim the bronze medal. I’d just run the race of my life. I’d never run a race like that, ever before. Nobody had given me a chance against the world’s best—I didn’t even think I had a shot at a medal—but an unstoppable feeling came over me during the race and I flew. I had no idea what the hell was going on, but I suddenly went from being fourth in the trials to third in the world and the second American man to ever medal at the World XCs.