Marathon Man

by Bill Rodgers

  “Attaboy, Dick,” I shouted to him as I roared past him.

  My little pat on the back gave him the lift he needed. Traum said after the race: “I was blown away that he knew who I was. It had to be one of the most exciting moments of my life.” Traum went on to complete his first marathon in seven hours, fifty-one minutes, beating his goal by nine minutes. Maybe it’s true, as Alberto Salazar said, that we all start out the marathon as cowards. But Dick Traum is all the proof you need that all of us who finish the marathon finish as heroes.

  I crossed over the Willis Avenue Bridge, which carried traffic over the Harlem River into the Bronx. Coming off the swing bridge, I had reached the twenty-mile point, a spot that would later be dubbed by runners as “the wall.” But if this was a wall, I’d smashed through it without a scratch. I was sailing.

  I expected to see crowds of spectators cheering for me as I descended off the bridge leading into the Bronx, but the area was oddly vacant. I took no more than a few steps into the fifth borough when I suddenly came upon a light pole where the faint blue line on the road seemed to come to an abrupt end. Do I make a sharp U-turn and head back into Manhattan? Or do I keep running into what the New York Times called “the nation’s most infamous symbol of urban blight, a bombed-out relic and a synonym for hopelessness and decay”? I made the call. I swung around the pole and started back over the bridge.

  Going back over the Willis Avenue Bridge, the olive-colored river merging with the misty sky, I spotted a runner approaching me from the other direction. It was Shorter. He gave me a nod and a little smile. “Way to go, Billy,” he said. The moment didn’t last more than a second but, looking back, it was a symbolic moment in American marathon running, the passing of the torch from one champion to the next. Shorter had reigned for the first five years of the decade; I would reign over the final five years.

  A lot of people started slowing down after twenty-one miles, but I was floating along like a feather as I made my final assault through Harlem down Fifth Avenue. The crowds in Harlem kept me running hard with their boisterous cheers of support. I entered Central Park feeling on top of the world.

  The exhilaration I felt running that final stretch though the park, sandwiched between screaming throngs of New Yorkers from every walk of life, young and old, urging me on to victory, was indescribable. I braced for the daunting hills at the north end that were part of the old New York course. A guy riding his bike kept telling me the hills were just up ahead. But they never materialized (for all I know, the bicyclist had just escaped from Bellevue) and I just kept coasting along, free and easy.

  The crowd was screaming like crazy as I squeezed between them. I felt like I was running a cross-country race in high school, except instead of dodging bushes and rocks I was navigating around people, potholes, cars, bicyclists, you name it.

  The scene was utter chaos as I approached the finish line. It made for great dramatic theater. Of course, at that stage, all that I was thinking about was getting to the finish line, wherever the heck it might be.

  Crowds pressed in all around me. Cops were trying to hold back the frenetic crowd and keep stray vehicles from running me over. I was veering in and out of the insanity when suddenly the lead vehicle stopped short.

  At the last second, I weaved around it and shot through the narrowest of openings between the car and the wall of yelling spectators. I broke through the tape. A roar of cheers ripped through the crowd.

  In spite of all the wild obstacles I had to navigate along the 26.2 miles of urban frontier, I had crossed the finish line in 2:10:10, beating runner-up Shorter by more than three minutes. I was sweaty, exhausted, and my ears were ringing. I was in heaven.

  In the winner’s circle, Mayor Beame handed me a Tiffany sterling silver tray and then crowned me with a handmade laurel wreath. As he pushed the wreath down on my head, the wire tips used to hold it together pierced my skull. “Ouch,” I exclaimed.

  That 1975 Boston Marathon will always be my favorite because it was the breakthrough I had worked so hard to achieve, but New York might have been the best marathon I’ve ever run. I broke the course record. I set the fastest marathon time in the world for that year. I ran the eighth fastest marathon in history. I was only fourteen seconds from breaking my own American marathon record, which I had set in Boston in 1975.

  After three attempts, I had finally beaten the great Frank Shorter in a marathon. (Shorter hadn’t run Boston during his marathon peak because the BAA, in their infinite wisdom, refused to pay the champ’s airfare and travel expenses. He wouldn’t run Boston until 1978, when he was getting past his prime.) Even after my failure in Montréal, I believed I was good enough to beat the Olympic champion. Few others did. But everything came together that day in New York. I had shown people that Boston hadn’t been a fluke. It’s hard to put the emotions into words. I felt redeemed.

  After the awards ceremony, I returned to the spot where I’d parked my 1973 Volkswagen Beetle and discovered it was no longer there. Apparently, I had parked illegally, and it had been towed away. Fred Lebow didn’t want my great day to end on a sour note, so he took up a collection of $100 so I could retrieve my car from the impound lot. I was grateful to Lebow for his help. It wasn’t until many years later that I found out he had given the money to me out of his own pocket.

  After beating Frank Shorter in a head-to-head competition, I was no longer able to masquerade as the underdog or the marathon runner on his way up. I was now the man to beat.

  I asked myself, How am I going to live up to the expectations that my triumphs in Boston and New York have created while holding down a full-time teaching job? I’d seen how my job had impacted my training for the Olympics. Running on top of snowbanks at the crack of dawn was not the best way to train.

  One morning, the elderly principal called me into her office.

  “Mr. Rodgers, I’m afraid we can no longer allow you to run on your lunch hour.”

  “But I have permission.”

  “And that permission is now revoked,” she said sharply.

  I let out a frustrated sigh.

  “It’s time you decide what’s more important to you, Mr. Rodgers,” she said in a lecturing tone. “Your avocation or your vocation.”

  I looked straight ahead at the crotchety old lady demanding that I choose between my job and running—the thing that brought me the most pleasure in life, the thing that I lived and breathed.

  I liked teaching. I really did. But I didn’t want to be a part-time amateur anymore—I wanted to be a full-time professional. I was done messing around as a marathoner. I made up my mind. I said, “I’m going to go for this.”

  The question was, how?

  TWENTY

  More Than a Shoe Store

  After my victory in New York, I felt the doors swing wide open. I knew I had a shot to compete at the highest level. I also knew my window of opportunity to become one of the top marathoners in the world was small. I had to strike while the iron was hot, make my mark while I was at my physical peak. I’d worked years to build up to the kind of shape I was in. I was determined to win as many marathons and road races around the world as I could. But I knew there was only one way I could do this: find a job that allowed me a more flexible schedule to train than teaching had. I needed a plan.

  Tommy Leonard and others suggested I open up an athletic store around Boston College, which by then had become a big running area for the many students living in the vicinity. I called up Charlie, who was still living in Connecticut, working as a drug counselor, and said, “I’m opening a running store at Cleveland Circle, right along the Boston Marathon course. Want to be manager?”

  Charlie’s initial response was skepticism. Were there really enough runners to support that kind of business? I explained to him that runners in Boston were no longer a tiny group rustling on the edges of society, getting pelted with empty beer cans by passing motorists. From the banks of the Charles River to the brick sidewalks of Harvard Square, people were
running through the streets in their Nike and New Balance shoes with their iron-waffled soles. They were humming the theme to Rocky. I told Charlie, “I think we can make it work.”

  The phone went silent. Then I heard my brother’s voice. “Oh, what the hell. Let’s do it.”

  Ellen and I pooled the money from our teaching jobs and the under-the-table income I’d made from appearance fees. Together, we invested forty thousand dollars to get the store off the ground. Running friends like Bob Sevene helped build the store in the basement of a former laundromat with saws and hammers and two-by-fours.

  In November of 1977, the Bill Rodgers Running Center was open for business. I remember we did one hundred and twenty-seven dollars our first day. We thought that was great. My easygoing, bushy-bearded brother presided over a tiny staff of enthusiastic runners, who roamed the aisles proselytizing about the joys of running.

  Charlie and I brought Jason in to be our assistant manager. I remember after I moved out of our place in Waltham, Jason ended up dropping further out of society and delving deeper into psychedelic drugs. He was still drifting while I had found my purpose with the marathon. The store gave him a way to return to the fold. He rediscovered his passion for running, which Coach O’Rourke instilled in us in middle school. He got up to the point where he was running seventy miles a week. He started running after work every day, which he continued to do for the next thirty-five years. He was like Charlie and me in that he knew he was lucky to have gotten into running, and he wanted to help others to discover the sport. The Three Musketeers were back!

  Between long training runs back and forth from the store, I’d go into the store and help customers find shoes and give them advice. I made sure we sold only top-of-the-line running gear—Asics, Nike, New Balance. No junk shoes allowed.

  With that said, I was convinced that it could be more than just a shoe store. That’s why I called it a running center. I wanted it to be a source of information for runners. We provided beginners with an extensive collection of resources. I also ran coaching clinics for kids and adult joggers. I would talk about how to avoid injury, pick the right shoe, and the proper way to train for a marathon. We even brought in a nutritionist and podiatrist to give lectures.

  Charlie, Jason, Ellen, and myself were a team—a funny kind of team. We weren’t your typical store. We were an off-the-wall store. We didn’t know what we were doing at first. None of us had a lick of retail experience. What it came down to in the end was that we all loved running. We all felt that the sport should have a much wider audience. It should be better understood. More people should join us on the roads, not just hardball types, but everyone. Dentists, firemen, daughters, and grandmothers. We had an eager welcome, open-door policy.

  Every day, more and more people gravitated to our store. It soon became this vibrant hub of activity for Boston runners, and a central place where they could hang out or meet up for long runs. Word of our fantastic local running community spread and, one by one, great runners from around the world started moving to Boston to train with us.

  Greg Meyer was one such person. I had gotten to know Greg at the World Cross-Country Championships in 1978—we were teammates and we passed the time together playing poker. He was just a young Turk out of the University of Michigan, unsure about where to go next in his life. “Why don’t you move to Boston and join the GBTC?” I told him. “I’ll give you a job at our store.”

  Greg took me up on my offer and he was suddenly part of our tight crew. He became good friends with all of us. If I couldn’t go to a race, I’d tell them to invite Greg. I wanted to support the young guys on their quest, just as Amby had done for me.

  In our heyday, we were the golden bloom of running stores in the country. We had twenty guys working in the store. One day, I saw this sixteen-year-old kid sitting quietly in the corner, reading running magazines all day long. So Charlie and I finally walked up to him and asked, “What are you doing? You’ve been here all day.” With his Texas drawl, he told us his name was Dave Dial and that he was a runner. That’s why he’d come to Boston. His mother and father had put him on an airplane and he’d flown here by himself. Charlie and I basically adopted the kid for a while. He ended up working for us at our store for years. Over time, the staff became so close to one another that the store felt like a family.

  Another great part of opening the store was that I could sneak out twice a day—fourteen miles in the morning and another ten miles in the afternoon. I rarely ran through the streets of Boston alone. I could always count on a group of my Greater Boston brothers—Bobby Hodge, Dickie, Sev, Scott-ha, Vin-ho, the Rookie—to follow me through the hills around Boston College or the bike paths along the Charles River.

  We used to churn through the streets in packs sometimes as large as thirty people. Greg Meyer recalls the sudden outpouring of support that Bostonians showed us, their local boys in running shorts, as we raced by: “Heads would literally pop out of manhole covers and yell, ‘Kick their asses, Billy!’”

  As was customary, we’d stop partway through our long run at the Eliot Lounge, where “startled businessmen looked up from their martinis” to see a motley bunch of sweat-drenched young men clamor onto barstools. Tommy Leonard would instantly respond to the uproar, quickly pouring us sea breezes and uncorking raunchy one-liners. After a quick drink and some boisterous conversation, I would lead the jumble of bodies out the door and we would continue on our long run.

  Following a hard workout, there might be another reconvening at the Eliot Lounge, a place that some claim inspired the show Cheers. Just switch running for baseball and Tommy Leonard for Sam Malone.

  As always, Tommy would make sure to keep the beer flowing for the club—and for himself. I stuck with a gin and tonic or a blue whale. I never indulged too heavily, unlike some of the working-class heroes who frequented the bar. I always made sure to try and get ten hours of sleep.

  I was conscious of the fact that other guys in the club pushed themselves further on training runs because I was there. They would tell themselves, If he can run a 2:09 marathon, and I’m hanging with him in our daily workouts, that means I’m not far behind. Everybody felt they had an open shot—Hodge, Graham, Mahoney, Fleming. Of course, it worked both ways. I had a pack of hungry runners pushing me on long runs. I couldn’t give somebody the self-satisfaction of having whipped my butt in practice. If one of them did, I’d have to hear about it for the next couple of days.

  On a regular basis we’d jog a mile to the Boston College track to work out with Coach Squires. Workouts would get competitive from time to time. Somebody would want to go hard the last four hundred meters. The runners with good, fast twitch muscle fibers would sprint across first. Guys like Alberto and I were in the back getting stomped.

  People would beat me on the track and, therefore, assume that they could beat me in the marathon. Once they made that effort at New York or Boston, and got to a point at fifteen or eighteen miles, they discovered I was a different kind of animal on the roads than they’d encountered during practice. My philosophy was always, You can win the workout. All I care about is winning the race.

  In the end, we were just a bunch of neighborhood guys, but we were going out and winning races. A lot of runners, not just folks in the Boston area but all across the country, had the sense that “if a guy like Billy can win, a regular guy just like me, then I can too.” And they were right—a lot of Americans were succeeding on the roads and on the track, like no time before or after. Randy Thomas won the Ohme-Hochi 30K in Japan. Bobby Hodge won the Mount Washington Road Race four straight years. Alberto Salazar won the New York City Marathon back to back. We were all having our own successes, athletically and financially. But at the same time, we still remained friends and saluted one another and the club and Billy Squires. The feeling was, “We worked for this together.”

  On April 16, 1978, I held off a hard-charging Jeff Wells by two seconds to win my second Boston Marathon. But what made that day even sweeter was watc
hing with joy as two more of my Greater Boston teammates, Jack Fultz and Randy Thomas, finished in the top five. The next year, I broke my own course record in a time of 2:09:27. But what really shocked everybody was that four of us from the GBTC finished in the top ten. Bobby Hodge took third, Randy Thomas came in eighth, and Dickie Mahoney, a full-time mailman, placed tenth. As Scott Douglas wrote in Running Times: “If you scored the race as a team event, Greater Boston, a seat-of-the-pants club with a minimal budget, would have beaten all other countries, including the rest of the Americans.”

  I look back at our achievement and feel pride, but also gratitude that I got to be part of a group of running brothers who felt the same spark of electricity, and limitless possibility, shoot through their veins that shot through mine. The marathon may be run alone, but nobody makes it in the long run without close friends to lean on.

  The team model of the GBTC—which led to astounding results for U.S. distance runners in the late 1970s and early ’80s—was all but given up by the 1990s. At the 2000 U.S. Olympic marathon trials, we only had one woman and one man qualify to compete in the Sydney games, which is pitiful. The same year, only twenty American men had run a sub-2:20 marathon, compared to 267 in 1983. After hitting this low point, the people over at U.S. Track and Field finally did what they were supposed to do—they created a high-altitude track and field training facility in Mammoth, California. That’s where our current crop of high-level marathoners train.

  While American athletes train more in groups now, the sense of unity and shared conviction is nothing like in the days of the Greater Boston Track Club. If you want to see the tight club mentality of the seventies running boom, you need to travel to Kenya and Ethiopia. It’s no surprise they now dominate the distance events. Meanwhile, this common spirit of enthusiasm and devotion to the cause, and to one another, is missing among our best distance runners. We need to change this if we are to recapture an era of American marathon success, when athletes like Frank Shorter, Alberto Salazar, Greg Meyer, and myself came out of our running clubs to triumph at Boston and around the world.