Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  “Why?”

  “You see, Flanagan, a trotter’s delicate, like a piece of bone china. It can’t trot fast over rough country – sometimes it can’t even trot at all. The sulky it pulls is pretty delicate too, really made for a smooth dirt track, not for rough ground. So you must contract to run some of the race over country.”

  “But who’ll run the distance relay for us? You and Stock?”

  “No. I’m too long in the tooth for that sort of running,” said Doc, shaking his head. “I could run around four minutes thirty for a mile at best, and that was way back in 1904. No, we need speed here. Now Thurleigh ran the fifteen hundred and five thousand in the 1928 Olympics. He’s got the pace for this sort of operation. I’d have him.”

  “And Stock?”

  Doc shook his head again.

  “We’ve no idea what his speed is like over short distances. And if you’ll forgive the pun, Flanagan, it’s a question of horses for courses. Anyhow, I don’t see the Germans letting their golden boy put himself in this kind of a three-ring circus on a rest day. You can try them, though. He looks a handy athlete.”

  “And if Stock isn’t available?”

  “Morgan,” said Doc. “Mike will run till he drops. And he may have to.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not for the moment,” said Doc. “But let’s get someone impartial, some federal judge, someone like that to act as arbiter. No contract could possibly cover all the possibilities in a race like this.”

  “Would Clarence Darrow be all right?” asked Willard, grinning.

  Doc smiled. “If he’s available, he’ll serve.” He looked up as Hugh McPhail entered the caravan.

  “Hugh, Mr Flanagan’s got us fixed up with a couple of races against a horse,” he said, expressionless.

  “A horse?” exploded Hugh.

  “Calm down,” said Doc, laughing. “It’s not a proper racehorse, just a trotter. The first race is over a hundred yards, and you look to be our best man. Do you reckon you can handle it?”

  Hugh shook his head doubtfully.

  “What speed can this horse run?”

  “About thirty miles an hour,” said Flanagan.

  “My top speed over a hundred yards is about twenty-five miles an hour,” said Hugh, sitting down. “Though God knows what I could run now, with over a thousand miles in my legs.”

  He bit his lip. “The real question is how quickly a horse and rider can get to top speed. My guess is that I can take them the first sixty yards. The crunch comes in the last forty yards, when the horse is still accelerating and I’m slowing up.”

  “But it’s possible?” begged Flanagan.

  Hugh did not answer. “What odds are you getting?” he asked finally.

  “Four grand at twelve to one,” said Flanagan. “And you all get twenty-five per cent of the action.”

  “Then it’s possible,” said Hugh, smiling. “Just you have Dixie twenty yards from the finish, holding a white handkerchief.”

  Flanagan looked at Doc. “Just like the pigeon,” he said.

  Hugh looked at them both uncertainly.

  “Just a private joke,” said Flanagan, smiling again.

  AMERICANA DATELINE MONDAY 4 MAY 1931

  A leading English journal once conducted a short-story competition, requiring entrants to complete a story in which the hero, up to his neck in rising water, gas seeping into the room from above, lies bound and gagged. The journal’s editor received thousands of entries, some running into volumes, but the winning entry consisted of just one line: “with a bound he was free”.

  That line might well have been coined specifically for Mr Charles C. Flanagan. In the past month, the towns ahead of him have been pulling out of the Trans-America as if its runners had the bubonic plague. His tents have been sabotaged, his runners have wallowed through floods in Nevada and snow in the Rockies. This week, his catering staff threatened to resign yet somehow, I know not how, Flanagan persuaded them to stay with him to New York. So, with a bound, Mr Flanagan has extricated himself and he and his pilgrims now make their way to St Louis and a series of races with, of all things, a horse.

  One of the likely competitors in this man versus beast contest is a certain Lord Peter Thurleigh, who has shown an aristocratic back to most competitors for the past thousand miles or so. Lord Peter’s fortunes have, however, taken a distinct turn for the worse in the last few days. Just outside Hays, Kansas, Lord Peter received the following cable from England. It read: “Shares collapse. All money gone. Run for your life. Father.”

  The true significance of this cryptic letter became clearer the following day, when my investigations revealed that the Thurleigh family fortunes had indeed vanished in a stock exchange collapse, yet another victim of the times we live in. Lord Peter Thurleigh is indeed running for his life. It may take quite a bound to set him free.

  CARL C. LIEBNITZ

  18

  Doc in Trouble

  Suddenly, one morning in 1920, in a dingy hotel room in Carson City, Nevada, Doc had realized that, were he to grow a beard, it would be grey. At forty-three he was not old, but he was aging; and even the daily running, though it gave him a physical capacity far beyond a man half his age, could not stop the clock. Soon after, his hair had started to thin rapidly, and by his late forties he had been almost completely bald.

  For some years later Doc had made a pathetic attempt to wrap the remaining hairs on the left side of his head in a wet flap across his bald pate, but after a while he gave up, instead contenting himself with the rest of his body’s continuing efficiency.

  It is never easy for an athlete, uniquely sensitive to his physical capacities, to accept the gradual fade into middle-age. In many ways the athlete is far more aware of this decline than the ordinary man, for the stopwatch is neutral and merciless. Thus it was with Doc Cole. By forty-six he could no longer run twelve miles within the hour; by the age of forty-eight even running ten miles in fifty minutes had become difficult. He saw that his running was slowly slipping away from him, despite a mind and a will that were as sharp and determined as they had been when he had met the challenges of Dorando and Longboat twenty years before.

  It therefore seemed to Doc that his one talent was going to vanish into the mists of sporting legend, to be classed with the feats of the fell-runners of England or the speedy Ute Indian, Candiras de Foya, who had run nine seconds for a hundred yards in 1901. Doc Cole would simply become a footnote in a Ripley “Believe It or Not” ragbag of sports history, unfit even to be mentioned in the same breath as a Nurmi or a Kohlemainen.

  Doc scraped the last of the soap from his chin and peered into the broken mirror suspended on the side of the tent. The sun surely made you look younger even if you were as bald as a coot, he thought.

  He doused his face with cold water and dried off with a rough towel. Still half an hour behind Stock, he was now half an hour ahead of Hugh McPhail and Morgan, with Eskola, Mullins and Son closing in fast, and Capaldi every day a danger. The fact that he and the others had an agreement made no difference to Doc, for the money meant nothing to him. If his life was to possess any meaning then he must get into New York first. After all, what else was there? A thousand carnivals, a hundred thousand bottles of Chickamauga remedy sold – that could hardly add up to a life. But winning the Trans-America, the greatest test of an endurance athlete – that would be something.

  Doc had over the years devised a variety of techniques to take his mind off the fatigue and boredom of running. First there was the “physical” method. In this he went through a detailed inventory of his body’s movements, checking their efficiency as a mechanic might check the parts of a car.

  Wrists: relaxed, thumbs up, fingers lightly pinched. That would take him through a few more minutes. Head: still, relaxed, sitting on a vertical spine. That would take him a few yards further. Jaw: loose, lower lip relaxed, would take him further yet. Then to his feet. He would check on their alignment as they hit the ground: there had to be
the minimum splay, and a solid heel-first landing on each stride.

  Thus Doc would reduce the monotony of the miles, the dull pain of the flat dirt-road daily spinning endlessly into the distance. The checklist method had the added advantage of refining and making more efficient his running technique; even a fraction of a per cent improvement in each stride meant a lot when he was taking over eighty thousand strides a day.

  Inventory complete, Doc would go back over it again and again before he moved on to another device, the “inner method”. He had learnt it from Fu Li, an old Chinaman with whom he had travelled the carnivals in the 1912–20 period. Fu Li, though no athlete, had shown an immediate sympathy for Doc’s desire to run, even when there was no longer professional competition. “In running,” he said, “every day you conquer yourself anew.” Fu Li’s method was to have Doc move inside, to forget both technical detail and fatigue. “Think of your body as a still, hollow tube, through which air passes endlessly. Move back into that stillness, into that peace.” And so Doc would move away from the pain, the road, the crowds of well-wishers, his rivals, into just such a cool inner world.

  Sometimes, however, these methods simply would not work, and Doc found that chatting with other runners or taking note of the surrounding geography was the only way to pass the boredom and leaden fatigue of the miles. Thus on each stage he plucked from his past experience some device, some trick, some mechanism of the mind that would drag his body towards the next checkpoint.

  But it was going well. All the experience of the past was enabling him at fifty-four years of age to run stride for stride with a tireless young German. Daily he checked his inventory and found it complete: all parts in working order.

  It came so suddenly, the pain, that Doc recognized it immediately: the old enemy, those few millimeters of tendon tissue that had so often in the past denied him victory. And there it was again, in the same old place, at the bottom of his right calf, in the Achilles tendon. It was not yet desperately sore but it was undoubtedly a warning. Luckily, it came at the end of a stage, just as they were closing in on Salina, Kansas, about four hundred miles east of Denver, at the end of the day’s second section of twenty-three miles.

  Hugh felt the break in his companion’s rhythm, sensed that Doc was slowing down, and looked to his left.

  “Nothing,” said Doc. “You go on ahead.”

  Hugh paused for a moment, but Doc pushed him on, putting the flat of his hand to Hugh’s shoulder-blades. The cars of local sightseers blew dust into the runners’ eyes as they padded towards Salina, and a couple of hundred yards ahead they could hear the inevitable Whiffenpoof song. Hugh moved through the field over the last couple of miles to finish in sixth place, with Doc six places behind him.

  Hugh noted that Doc was limping slightly as he finished.

  “How are you?” he asked anxiously.

  “Just been visited by an old friend,” said Doc, scowling. He peeled off his tattered shoes, bending down to gently pinch the top of his right ankle. “Bum Achilles. Beat me in Baghdad in 1910, again in Rome in 1912. It’s no big surprise. I’ve been waiting for it – it was bound to come at these distances, on these surfaces, running day in, day out.”

  They walked together towards the main tent, now both in their bare feet. When they reached the tent Doc fished deep in his knapsack and pulled out a pair of worn leather boots. “Here’s the answer to the problem,” he said. “Boots.”

  He pulled them on over his leathery brown feet and started gingerly to walk around the tent.

  “The next two days I walk and run in these,” he said, pulling his sweat-sodden vest over his head. “The high heel keeps tension off the Achilles; rests it up good.”

  “Walk?” said Hugh. “But you’ll lose hours!”

  Doc bared his teeth and bit his lip. “Perhaps. I reckon I can walk at a steady five miles an hour. If now and then I run a little maybe I can bring that up a little. In two days that means a loss of about one and a half hours on Stock.”

  Doc unlaced the boots and replaced them carefully in his knapsack.

  “I’ve no choice, Hugh,” he said. “If I keep running on this Achilles in sneakers I’ll end up in hospital by Topeka. Two days’ rest, plus . . . this.” He broke off to pull out a bottle of Chickamauga remedy, carefully poured some of the fluid into his left hand and kneaded it gently into his right Achilles tendon. “Whatever else it does, one thing Chickamauga sure as hell is good for is tendon injuries. Meantime you’ll have to carry the flag for us for the next couple of days, hang in with Stock, and hold off all those outlaws closing in from the back.”

  He smiled ruefully and continued to knead the Chickamauga into his ankle. He was in deep trouble, and no one knew it better than he. Now almost an hour behind Stock, even at best he would be two and a half hours, almost thirteen miles, behind by the end of the next two days. By that time Capaldi, Morgan, Eskola and Bouin, already close, would be an hour or more ahead of him.

  And that was at the very best. If the Achilles tendon took another couple of days more to mend then by the end of the week he would be four hours behind Stock. Until now Doc had run easily, but such a deficit would mean daily stints on the edge of exhaustion for the next half of the race to catch up. Doc grinned painfully as he lay back on his bunk, head cupped in his hands, the sweat of the day’s run glistening on his lean little body.

  If it had to be done, if he had to walk the tight-rope all the way to New York, then so be it. He had trained for thirty years for the Trans-America and no Achilles tendon was going to stop him now.

  Next morning Doc watched Hugh and the leaders stream off far in front of him at a steady six and a half miles an hour. Ahead of him were at least seven hundred runners, their feet throwing up clouds of dust from the dry Kansas field on which they had camped. He was alone, plodding in thick, heavy boots, for the first time in the bottom half of the field, amongst the stragglers, the trotters and walkers, eating their dust on the soft dirt ribbon of road towards Abilene.

  As the runners slowly unravelled themselves Doc saw Kate Sheridan only twenty yards ahead look back and pick him out.

  “Want some company, Doc?” asked Kate, dropping her pace to run beside him.

  “Glad of it,” said Doc gratefully. “But won’t I slow you up?”

  Kate shook her head. “I’m down to about five miles an hour for the next couple of hours anyway,” she said. “The curse. I’ll pick up tomorrow. I can do with the company.”

  She glanced down at his heavy brown boots but said nothing. Doc realized that she had noticed his footwear and pointed down at his feet.

  “An old Doc Cole remedy,” he said, smiling. “For the ancient Achilles.”

  Kate nodded. “Are you hurt bad?”

  Doc shook his head.

  “Nothing I can’t handle,” he said. “An old enemy. I’ve beaten it before. I’ll do it again. Just you watch me.”

  He tapped his sweating scalp. “One thing I’ve learnt,” he said, “is to listen to my body. All that Achilles of mine is asking for is a couple of days rest. Then I’ll be up there with Stock and the others, burning up the road to Kansas City. Just you mark my words, lady.”

  Doc walked the next six miles in silence. He had no idea if his leg would heal in time. If it did not then the Trans-America would be irretrievably lost, here on the flat fields of Kansas, the easiest running ground of the race. He was glad that Kate had remained equally quiet, for there was nothing she could say to comfort him. He would just have to pray that, after all these years, his body would not let him down.

  Even in boots Doc, who had race-walked many times, could just make a steady five miles an hour, and Kate trotted easily beside him.

  Even after five miles, he knew it. He had been right. The tendon, only slightly inflamed, responded well to the raised heel and the walking pace, and at the second feeding-station at ten miles he stopped to cool his foot in a rocky stream by the roadside. Cold running water had always eased it in the past. He enjoye
d the feeling of the icy water lapping over his feet as he sat on a rock beside Kate and noted that at least a score of runners had also stopped to cool themselves.

  He cupped some water in his hands and lapped it like a dog, pouring the residue over his head. He scowled. Only ten miles run, and already the leaders were over three miles ahead, and going away from him. He had dropped a couple of places on aggregate time and the lead he had established on everyone but Stock was melting away.

  He looked up at the morning sun and shielded his eyes. The sun was his friend. It would slow down even Stock to well inside six and a half miles an hour and lessen the effect of his enforced walk.

  Thank God, the Trans-America was slowing down in the hot plain of Kansas. If only he could keep the deficit down . . .

  It was the strange, twisted paradox of super-fitness. The fitter you were, the closer you were to injury, the closer to tearing or inflaming that microscopic area of tissue that would stop you as surely as any bullet. Thus, from being a running machine, capable of churning out nine-minute miles an hour, day after day, he was now a near-cripple.

  Doc felt a deep sick feeling in his stomach. One hundred thousand miles of running, a heart pumping at a steady thirty-three beats a minute, a body made for travelling long distances. But all of it counted for nothing here on a hot, dusty dirt road to Abilene, plodding along at a miserable five miles an hour.

  Yet beneath the sick-heart feeling Doc knew that thirty years of running had prepared him for just this crisis, not the moment of triumph but a challenge even greater than the covering of three thousand miles across America. For it was the manner in which he faced failure which was going to be his sternest test.

  He had, of course, failed before. In 1908, in the blinding heat of the London Olympics, he had succumbed to hypothermia at twenty miles and had ground to a halt. Afterwards, when he had travelled north immediately following the Games, to compete in professional fell races, though there had been failure there had been no dishonour. At rural games at Grasmere and Burnsall Doc had faced specialist fell-runners, iron-legged shepherds, who, hands on knees, had chugged remorselessly up crippling crags, and, on the way down, leaped like stags through the bracken in massive bounds towards the finish. Those fell races had produced local muscular agonies which he had not previously experienced and which he was not to face again till twenty-odd years later in the Rockies. But he had faced the fells of the Lake District, and if he had not exactly conquered them certainly it had been an honourable draw.