Marathon Man

by Bill Rodgers

  I did feel pressure to follow up my breakthrough at Boston Marathon with another victory. I started hearing some chatter around town, in the newspapers, other runners saying that my record time at Boston was a fluke. I had been unfairly aided by a twenty-mile-per-hour tailwind and the fact that it was a downhill course. I remember after setting the American record, Ron Hill saying to me, “You may run that fast again. But then again, you may not.” At the time, I thought, Well, that’s kind of like sour grapes. Who was he to tell me that I might not run any faster? I would show him and the others I wasn’t some one-hit wonder. I could always run faster.

  I saw no reason why I shouldn’t win in Holland. I had just run the fourth-fastest marathon in history. I felt unbeatable. What gave me that incredible confidence? The mileage. I was putting in 150 miles a week and sometimes thirty miles a day. I knew that few runners could match my training intensity. Lasse Virén, Jerome Drayton, Frank Shorter—not many others. Also, Shorter wasn’t going to be in Holland. Even had he been racing there, I still believed that I could and should break the tape first. After all, I had just beat him at the World Cross-Country Championships in Morocco and broken his American record. Our showdown would have to wait for now.

  My trip to Holland didn’t start off well. Ellen couldn’t make the trip because of work so I flew to London alone. Once there, I suffered jet leg from hell. My body was lethargic and my head a bowl of thick New England clam chowder. I changed planes and boarded a smaller plane to Amsterdam, where I waited in the airport for two hours for another runner to arrive, and then we took a two-hour train ride, followed by a fifteen-minute drive to Enschede and my hotel.

  All I wanted to do after my fatiguing journey was get to sleep. Instead, I tossed and turned in my unfamiliar bed. My brain and body craved rest, but something just wouldn’t let me drift off. I was awake for forty straight hours. Finally, the night before the race, I managed to get some shut-eye.

  I showed up to the start of the race feeling sluggish and fuzzy-headed. The hot sun scorched my long hair as I waited with the other runners for the starting gun to explode. Another hot-weather race—just what I didn’t need.

  Despite my skull feeling like it was filled with warm mud, I clung to the belief that as the American record holder, I had a decided advantage over my competition. I never entertained the idea of holding back a little. Never once considered running cautiously to assure a top-ten finish. My focus was on winning. So when a few of the runners broke from the pack, I went with them.

  I battled it out with the leaders until around the twenty-kilometer mark, when a painful side ache struck me out of nowhere. I gritted my teeth and pushed on. A little farther up along the course, I came across Neil Cusack of Ireland, the 1974 Boston winner. He was throwing up in the middle of the road. We were both hurting, but neither of us wanted to throw in the towel. We decided to run slowly together.

  As we trudged on through the countryside, the unrelenting heat worked to strip us of our remaining strength. At this stage, there was a spirit-crushing awareness that any chance of victory had vanished. But sometimes two people can carry each other along through a hard trial without exchanging a single encouraging word. Sometimes just being at each other’s side is sufficient.

  Around thirty kilometers, my legs felt liked cooked spaghetti. The sun was beating down on me and I was dizzy with dehydration. About six miles from the finish line the cramps became too severe to take another step. I thought I was going to hit the deck. The next thing you know, I’m lying on a stretcher on my back, being pumped with loads of fluids.

  Once I started to regain my strength, I was taken to the finish area, where I learned that Ron Hill, whom I had beaten soundly at Boston, had won in a course record of 2:15. He wasn’t Ron Over the Hill that day.

  The thirty-six-year-old Brit in the Union Jack shorts had beat the two previous Boston Marathon winners—both much younger than him. Why didn’t he end up getting dehydrated and cramps like us? I don’t know. He was running smarter somehow.

  I thought back to Hill’s comment after my win in Boston. “You may run that fast again. But then again, you may not.” I suddenly realized. Hill was just speaking from experience. He had already learned the lesson that Holland taught me—it doesn’t matter who you are, or how good you think you are, the marathon will humble you.

  When you run a great marathon, like I did in Boston, and then you don’t even finish your next one, that messes with your head. Majorly. I had run one great marathon, my record race in Boston. But I had a perfect day and I was in peak shape. I expected to improve from there. I didn’t. I went backward. It was disappointing, frustrating.

  I knew my flameout was due in part to the heat. I hadn’t consumed enough sports drink. (Although there might not have been that much available along the race.) But I also knew that I had acted foolishly by rushing into a major marathon without making sure I was prepared. The marathon is serious business. The difference between excelling and bombing out is razor thin. If you’re not performing at your highest potential, if you’ve let yourself get distracted by other issues in your life, when the time comes to race, the course will think nothing of eating you up alive. After my disaster in Holland, I swore to give every marathon my complete attention; I couldn’t afford not to.

  Progress in the marathon is not a steady upward curve. It’s an uneven, jagged trajectory, where one minute you’re on top of the world and the next you’re a heartbroken wreck on the side of the road. Perhaps this is even more true for someone like me—a more aggressive runner, a more emotional runner. Sometimes you get great days in the marathon and everything comes together. Other times, things go very badly in a race, and you don’t know what happened to you. I think partly it’s that, in those days, I raced a little too much—three or four times a year—in the marathon, whereas today’s marathoners run once or twice a year, with more of a focus and more concentrated training for fast times and for a higher-level effort. Runners like me and Tom Fleming went all over the place, hardly ever turning down an invitation to race. Shorter didn’t race too much. He was careful and that got him his gold and silver medals. But I just loved to race.

  Soon after returning home, I started my job as a teacher of special education at the Hale School in Everett. Special ed had just become law in Massachusetts; this was the early days of special education in America. I thought I would be working with people who were mentally challenged, the old word used was “retarded,” but I soon discovered that I would be teaching emotionally challenged kids, as well.

  Working at the Hale School was a unique experience, both fun and frustrating. I had a class of five boys and one girl between the ages of ten and twelve. A couple of the kids had no interest in doing anything except lashing out. I found it hard to discipline them, maybe because I didn’t have kids of my own, or because it’s just not my nature to crack the whip. Mostly, I felt sorry for these kids. I tried to give them focus and incentive. I would take them outside so they could be active, and then we’d come inside and practice writing, or do some math work or reading. I remember taking a couple of them on a fishing trip once; it was kind of crazy, but it was also fun.

  Later, I was lucky because I got a teacher’s aide, Ms. Conley. She was a mom and had kids herself. She helped so much. She knew how to discipline the kids to a certain degree. Once in a while a kid would become aggressive with one of the other kids and even with me—physically. You had to try to deal with these kids rationally when they were being irrational. Emotionally, they were struggling.

  The kids I taught were isolated from the rest of the student body. We weren’t given a regular-size classroom. We were in a small book storage room or something converted to a special ed classroom. The other teachers were afraid of the emotionally disturbed kids. No one knew what special ed was really about then. This was the first time we, as a society, started to take a look at kids with more serious issues and try to still teach them subjects. Arithmetic, reading. Simple life skills. I lik
ed being part of this new educational movement—especially after Ms. Conley arrived on the scene to lend a hand.

  The first year I was there an elderly principal ran the school. She told me to think of the school as her home. She was the matriarch. If we had a meeting after school, she’d say, “Please listen up. Ladies. Mr. Rodgers.” I was the only guy in the whole school. At times I felt like an interloper.

  Making matters worse, the principal, who was in her mid-seventies, couldn’t wrap her mind around the concept of special education. I think she was trying to come to grips with the new realities. She ran the school strictly, putting as much emphasis on teaching appropriate behavior as she did on teaching the times tables.

  I recall coming downstairs once and finding the principal talking to my students. There was a heavy religious component to her message to them—as if their behavior problems were due to a lack of religious teaching at home, rather than some type of emotional or cognitive issue. I don’t know that I would have been able to explain to the principal why my kids needed special support and guidance. In the end, I was left alone to do my own thing. They figured I knew what I was doing, which I did a little.

  I remember taking the kids outdoors for half an hour. We had to stay on school grounds—a small parking lot on the back side. We played basketball and four-square—that’s about all we could do in the space. And still it was the happiest time of their day. They were angry at the world. Being outside, they could run around and play and blow off some steam. I would concoct games for them to play and give them incentives to win my trophies. They really got into the contests. They liked it a lot. We would come back inside for class and they were more engaged and less misbehaved. One time, I had the kids playing outside and the principal came out and yelled at me in front of them: “Mr. Rodgers, I wish you would have these kids concentrate on their school work!”

  Runners have a long history of employment as teachers. It was one of the few jobs that allowed runners the time for marathon training. In theory. After college, Amby tried to balance a full-time teaching job with a career as an international-level marathoner. “I found that every September I’d be in forty-nine-minute, ten-mile shape, and every June after the school year was over, I’d be in fifty-six-minute, ten-mile shape.”

  I got invited to run the Fukuoka Marathon in Japan, which serious runners like myself considered the Super Bowl of marathoning. I used to call it the Japanese Boston. Of course, this meant I’d have to miss three days of school. When I explained this to the principal, she was none too pleased. I suppose I could have told her Fukuoka was the Super Bowl of marathoning but she probably would have replied, “What’s the Super Bowl?”

  I’d learned about Fukuoka from Amby. Back when we were roommates at Wesleyan, he spoke of the race with reverential awe. The race, traditionally held on the first Sunday in December, was established in 1947. It begins and concludes at Heiwadai Stadium, winds through the city, and proceeds on a crescent course along Hakata Bay. Over the years, the race has taken on an almost mythical status, due largely to the superior field, the remote and idyllic rural setting, and the deep respect that the Japanese people have for the marathon and those who succeed at it. They are as knowledgeable about the sport as Boston fans are about baseball, and worship their marathon champions as if they were gods.

  Since 1966, when for the first time Japanese amateur athletic officials invited a select group of top foreign marathoners to compete with as many as eighty Japanese runners, it has been considered the unofficial world championship. By then, the Japanese had established the marathon as an event that they did very well in. Not to put it in a negative way, but they were quite fanatical about those things at which they, as a culture, excelled. It’s not surprising that in light of the pride that they took in producing so many top-flight marathoners, the Japanese put the most time and money into organizing their marathon and established it as the best in the world. In many years, the caliber of competition at the Olympics was less impressive than that found at Fukuoka.

  After he won the Boston Marathon in 1968, Amby was invited to race at Fukuoka. To him, this was a dream come true. A chance to claim the highest status in the sport against the world’s very best. Now it was my turn.

  Before leaving for Japan, New Balance offered me five hundred dollars for the year to wear and endorse their shoes. I was on my way to Japan when I stopped off at the Nike offices in Oregon. They were a tiny shoe company at the time and didn’t have much money. They offered me five hundred dollars. I told them I would think about it.

  When I got to Japan, Asics, which was the number one athletic shoe company in that country, offered me three thousand dollars for a one-year contract—six times what New Balance and Nike had offered. For a special education teacher with very little income, that sounded like a lot of money. Of course, by making the deal I left myself open for stiff sanctions by the authoritative AAU. Therefore I had to keep the contract a secret. That bothered me a little. Still, three thousand dollars—I was rich! Things were looking up.

  The moment we arrived at the airport, the press was waiting to take our picture. They put us up in the Nishitetsu Grand Hotel, a beautiful hotel in downtown Tokyo. Everywhere you went you were showered with gifts and kisses. I remember one schoolgirl presenting me a doughnut after the race. Others would gather in the hotel lobby for autographs. Back home, we were invisible. In Japan, we were rock stars.

  Because the marathon was such an honored tradition in Japan, we were treated first class. We were wined and dined. We were given a tour of a factory where traditional Hakata dolls were made, shown around ancient temples, and taken shopping. I remember picking up a Nikon camera for Charlie because I knew he was into photography.

  At the city hall the Saturday before the race, a beautiful opening ceremony took place with traditional folk dancers in kimonos. We were introduced on the stage, given bouquets of flowers by Fukuoka schoolchildren, and presented with gifts. Boston was the oldest marathon in the world, but all you got was a bowl of beef stew at the finish line.

  Also, unlike Boston, the race was carried on live national television. The race itself was run like clockwork. I was stunned at how well everything was organized. Japanese officials, dressed in clearly identifiable uniforms, ensured an orderly race from start to finish. No kamikaze starts down steep hills. No shortage of water stations. In fact, they have officials who call out your splits at every water station. I thought, Why can’t marathons in America be run like this? Why can’t all people appreciate the marathon the way the Japanese people do?

  I did not win. I came in third place. Jerome Drayton took the victory while setting a Canadian marathon record that, amazingly, still stands today. While I was a little disappointed to not win, I was thrilled to be soaking in the reverential pomp and pageantry.

  The finishing ceremony inside Heiwadai Stadium was very formal, yet moving. Government officials and members of the royal family looked on as the top finishers were presented their awards. The whole feeling of running for my country was powerful. I could feel the lure of the Olympics.

  That evening, I attended a party back at the hotel. There, I met with politicians, Princess Nichitibi, reporters, and all the athletes and coaches from around the world. We were served a lavish buffet. I remember meeting the Soviet runner Leonid Moseyev, a staunch Communist. He was one of the best in the world. In 1980, he finished fourth in the marathon at the boycotted Olympics in Moscow. I started talking with him about Russian literature and American life. Leonid wanted American jeans, so I gave him a pair and he gave me a bottle of vodka.

  Leonid and I were representing our countries; we were acutely aware of that during the cold war. But we respected each other; we respected the effort the other runner put forth on behalf of his country and himself. He’s not my enemy, I thought to myself. Maybe he’s somebody else’s enemy, but that’s for them to resolve.

  In the early 1990s, I went with a group of around fifteen American runners to the first Mosc
ow Marathon. I ran into Moseyev there, totally by chance, out of fifteen thousand runners. He was there with his son and his wife. Again, I felt like, This guy’s real. He’s just another person with a family. Later, we brought him to the Boston Marathon, he stayed with my brother, Charlie, and ran for our store. Kind of wild.

  That was another part of being a marathoner: I saw how the sport could break down national barriers. I’ve always said I think we should get all the world leaders together to go out on a run together. I know it’s a Pollyanna vision. But I don’t think it’s totally Pollyanna. On the road, people get real. They get to know one another. All the barriers fall.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Trials

  In the fall of 1976, I began my new job teaching emotionally disturbed children at the Edward Everett Hale School. Dealing with the pressures of a full-time job while at the same time getting ready for the Olympic trials proved tricky from the start. Nowadays many people wake up early to get in a run before work. You can do that—but can you make the U.S. Olympic team doing that? Meanwhile, some of my competitors, namely Frank Shorter, were training full-time. Frank was a lawyer, but not actually practicing law. He was in Colorado, training at a five thousand-foot altitude. He was preparing for the marathon under perfect conditions. My situation was less ideal.

  At first, I would wake up at six in the morning and go running in the freezing cold of winter. It was a nightmare. The snow had accumulated on the sidewalks, forcing me to run in the road with the cars. Since it was still dark out, drivers often had trouble spotting me as I ran alone down the street. The roads were narrowed by the snow drifts, piled so high it was difficult for vehicles or runners see around corners or maneuver out of the way. I think I lost a year of my life every time I went for a morning run—it was that dangerous and stressful.