Terry’s second form of expression is movement. His love and commitment to lead a team emerges when he is in motion, when he is running as fast as he can for as long as he can, urging his teammates to stay with him. He knows there will be moments when all this running at the edge will produce intense pain, and he will need them as badly as they need him. Then the run ends, and Terry goes quiet again. His face goes blank, almost expressionless, until he starts running once more, in the only gear he knows.
Terry’s sun-bleached blond hair flows down below his shoulders and frames a face dominated by his light blue eyes. He has the kind of eyes that make it impossible to tell exactly what thoughts burn behind them. He rarely lets on. It’s the face of a thousand surfers on San Diego’s beaches on any weekend afternoon. His shoulders stretch away from his neck like an extra-wide coat hanger. The shoulders are so wide that they make Terry look like a bit of a freak. But then he runs and it all makes sense. Maybe that width creates plenty of room for what must be a massive set of lungs, lungs that appear to be puffing up the top part of his chest. His biceps look like soda cans. He has thighs the size of small tree trunks. He is neither tall nor short, but his legs are so long it’s not exactly clear where his legs end and his torso begins. He is wiry but not scrawny, muscular but not bulky. This body is indeed meant to run, not surf. And when he does run, the running aficionados don’t take their eyes off him, because no one has ever seen anyone run quite like Terry Cotton runs.
Terry Cotton is very fast. Even very fast people think of him that way. People who train with him, people who somehow manage to beat him sometimes, the coaches who watch him from the infields, all of them think of the word “fast” as soon as they hear his name. But fast is an unsatisfying adjective in Terry’s case. Terry’s brand of speed possesses a relentless ferocity. The voices of all those coaches and competitors rise when they talk about Terry’s running. Their heads shake as if at the memory of a kind of violent act that causes those who witness it to wince.
It’s been this way ever since Terry showed up at El Cajon. He is the runner others tell stories about, his wins ever more triumphant in each retelling. There is the dual meet against Monte Vista High School when Cotton is entered in three races—the two-mile, the 800, and the mile. He takes first in the two-mile in 9:05. Then he takes first in the 800, finishing in 1:56. Then he runs the mile in 4:20. First again. When the meet finishes, Terry blows off the team bus. He grabs his bag, throws it on his back, and runs another eight miles to get home. No one knows how long that takes. Everyone assumes it’s not very long at all, because Terry Cotton only knows how to run one way.
Whether he is leading a pack through a series of quad-searing 5-minute miles, or setting out on a 20-mile run through the hills, Terry pushes to the edge from his first step. To watch Terry Cotton run is to watch someone hold his hand over a flame for too long. The instinctive reaction is to grab the daredevil’s arm and pull it to safety. This is what coaches and teammates will always want to do for Terry when they are running with him. They will try to stop him, but they have to catch him first. That won’t work most of the time. He has to be physically immobilized. Left on his own, he just goes—10 miles in the morning, another 10 in the afternoon. All the miles are as hard as he can make them. Terry runs as though he is being chased by a man with an axe.
So Bob Larsen wants to see for himself what all the fuss is about this kid. He heads to Balboa Park to watch what figures to be an unmemorable race with El Cajon and a few other high schools. Larsen positions himself about a half mile from the finish. That allows him to see a good-size chunk of the two-mile course. From the gun, Terry Cotton darts into the lead. He builds a cushion, stretching the margin more than he probably has to, Larsen thinks. It’s clear after a few hundred yards that Cotton has far more talent than the rest of the field. All the other runners look like they are fighting their way across the course. Terry just seems to be gliding over it, in that effortless, quiet way. Great runners can seem to run so fast with so little effort. His heels nearly whack him in the ass with every step. The kid is very good, Larsen thinks.
As the race enters the final stretch, Terry is leading his closest competitor by 50 yards. He is cruising to another easy win. There is one last turn and then little more than a quarter mile to go. Perhaps 600 yards, not longer. At the turn though, there is confusion. Somehow, Terry goes the wrong way, right, instead of left. He disappears into the trees. Out of sight. Just like that, the race has a new leader, some kid who moments ago was trailing Terry by nearly 75 yards. He’s run here before. He knows where the finish line is. He isn’t about to follow Terry Cotton into the woods. Poor kid, Larsen thinks, probably skipped the usual pre-race review of the course with his coach. Lesson learned.
Then Terry comes flying out of the trees. It’s as if he went in there to make things interesting, to give himself a challenge. Now the race is interesting. He’s a good 50 yards behind with a few hundred yards to go. With every step he is reeling in the leader. Larsen is pretty sure there isn’t enough race left for this to happen. Seconds later though, he is less sure of the outcome. Then the outcome becomes stunningly clear. Terry is burning through the stretch in a way Larsen has never seen. It’s a full-on sprint, nearly 10 minutes into a cross country race over a hilly course. Every other runner he knows would have kicked himself after the wrong turn and lived to fight another day. Not this kid.
By the finish, Terry has the gap he needs. Terry’s legs buckle when he breaks the tape. When Larsen gets to him, he is purple from oxygen deprivation. Agony appears to mean nothing to him. This is the kid I’ve been looking for all my life, Larsen thinks, because Terry Cotton is the perfect specimen to test every idea Larsen has about running on the edge. He can get Bob that much closer to the hidden truth. It isn’t complicated, but it is difficult. Terry Cotton lives on the edge, and he invites his teammates there nearly every day. Almost no one will go to this place alone—it’s too scary. But the group has power. Who knows where they might end up.
Sometimes the constant speed, the inability to do anything not at the edge of exhaustion, comes back to bite Terry, like in June of 1972 at the state high school championships. The meet is in Oroville, about an hour north of Sacramento, at the top of the Central Valley. Average temperatures for the month hover at 90 degrees. Cotton enters only one race. He chooses the mile. That surprises no one. Everyone knows he is among the fastest milers in the state, a threat to break the state record anytime he steps onto the track. And every distance runner with talent first wants to be a miler. The mile is the glamour distance. The pain of the race is gruesome, especially in that final lap, when the oxygen deprivation truly sets in. But then it’s over, roughly four minutes after it begins. A good runner believes he can do anything for four minutes, and he loves the symmetry of the distance. Four laps, four minutes. Other races have records. The mile has a “barrier”—four minutes—one that used to be impenetrable until Roger Bannister smashed through it, but it remains one of those magic numbers.
The qualifying race for the mile final at the championship is on a Friday, the first day of the meet. Terry is supposed to breeze through this, win his heat and save his energy for Saturday’s final. He hammers from the start, sprinting away, opening a yawning gap between him and his closest competition. He finishes in 4:10. A time 15 seconds slower would have easily gotten him into the final.
By race time Saturday afternoon, it’s nearly 90 degrees. At the gun he takes off as usual, though he holds back ever so slightly, completing his first lap in 61 seconds instead of the usual 59. At the three-quarter mark he’s still in the front but hasn’t managed to shake a chaser, Mark Schilling of Garden Grove High School. Terry does not believe this is a problem. Schilling has never run faster than 4:10. He will put Schilling away over the final quarter. At the first turn of the last lap, Terry moves, but Schilling hangs right on him. He is just three yards back in the final straight. Cotton digs for a
little more, but Schilling is still on his heels until, with 15 yards to go, Schilling finds a gear he has never found before. He finishes in 4:05.4 and beats Cotton by one tenth of a second, a half step. The time is good for a state high school record. The record, which should have been Terry Cotton’s, stands for more than two decades.
Can a blistering mile the day before a final cost someone one tenth of a second the next day? That’s one way to look at it. Terry Cotton probably thinks he should have tried to go out in 60 seconds, instead of 61.
It doesn’t take much to convince Terry Cotton to enroll at Grossmont. There is interest from UCLA and USC and Oregon, but he barely has any money. The local junior college just happens to have the best distance running team in the state. It has a very good young coach and a lucky cluster of raw talent.
Districts the size of Grossmont’s aren’t supposed to have this many sets of fast feet and big lungs within their boundaries. Terry Cotton has had some bad luck in his life. Having Bob Larsen and the Grossmont Griffins within running distance from his home is a rare stroke of good fortune.
For Larsen, Terry will serve two very important purposes. First, he can score at multiple distances—the mile, the two-mile, distance relays. He seemingly never tires. Second, he is a running version of a crash test dummy. Larsen is still trying to understand the best way to train through each of his Grossmont Griffins. He will try to rein in Cotton, to explain the value of regulating effort, of slow boils and fast boils. It doesn’t do a lot of good. So he watches Cotton and takes note of what happens to the runner whose volume is always turned up to “11,” who is all about high speed at every workout. He will see the incredible results and know Terry is headed to an outstanding career, becoming a two-time All-American. He also sees the downside, the constant tendon tweaks and pulled muscles and stress fractures that often sideline him. The precipice between that peak state and breakdown is frighteningly brittle, far more so for some runners than for others. He understands that better because Terry Cotton joins his team and hears every day from Larsen about the dangers of always running on the precipice.
And yet, there Terry Cotton goes again, leading the pack into those quad-burning 5-minute miles early at the start of another 20-mile run through the hills of eastern San Diego. Most of his teammates have no earthly idea how or why Terry does this. There is no man with an axe chasing Terry. What in the world is he running from? A few yards back of Terry—that’s generally where the pack trails when Terry is leading the way—Tom Lux thinks he might have a small clue as to why Terry always has to be running full tilt, why every day there is another race against ghosts.
Tom has known Terry since they began competing against one another in high school. They would see each other at races, nod, share a few words about a trail or a new shoe that one of them had discovered, then try to beat each other’s brains out when the starter fired his pistol. That they both ended up in Grossmont, teammates, friends, is not a coincidence. Even with Tom, Terry still reveals little, but one day, as their friendship evolves, Terry does tell him a story from his childhood.
The details are vague. It’s not clear where the story took place. Somewhere where Terry and his mother lived before they came to El Cajon. With his mother off working, he and his little brother entertain themselves. They are young, and playing in the water—a river or a canal, it isn’t clear. They are not good swimmers. Terry’s little brother falls in, and Terry can’t save him. He watches him drown.
Tom often thinks of this story when he sees Terry running the way he does. Does the agony that exists on the edge suppress the other pain? Or is it that combination of pleasure and pain that brings on the confluence of white noise and meditative existence that soothes him? Perhaps the running is sustaining. No one will ever know for sure. They just know that once Terry signs on to attend Grossmont in the summer of 1972, he can make them nearly unbeatable.
Peace and War
The truth about running cannot be found without balance. Bob Larsen knows this.
Balance between the upper body and the lower body; between the right side and the left; between the head and the shoulders; the heart and the lungs; the body and the mind; between rest and overtraining; between what is expected from the team as a whole, and what each individual needs and can provide. This last tenet may be the one Bob works hardest to achieve. He prides himself on how well he knows his runners—their tendencies, their strengths, their weaknesses, what they love and what they hate. He knows them as well as he might know his own children. So how did he not know the most important thing anyone could know about Ed Mendoza?
On August 5, 1971, Ed Mendoza won the one lottery no one wants to win. On that day, six teenagers on the Selective Service Youth Advisory Committee spent more than two hours drawing birthdays and numbers from two drums on the stage at the Commerce Department auditorium in Washington, D.C. On the 310th pick, 108 minutes into the process, a committee member drew the number 1 and the date December 4, 1952, which means everyone born on that date will be first up for the draft. That is the day Ed Mendoza was born.
Months later, Ed Mendoza sees the return address on the envelope—“Selective Service” it says—and it tells him all he needs to know about the contents of the letter. He reads those words and he thinks the only thing that a nineteen-year-old can possibly think. He thinks he is headed to the jungles of Southeast Asia and isn’t coming home.
But in one of the great feats of denial, Ed hasn’t thought about the draft in nearly a year. He hasn’t told his coach or anyone about his draft status. That’s an astonishing thing, because the draft quota for 1972, a time when the military and President Nixon have promised to draw down troop levels in Vietnam, is 100,000 men. The previous year, the quota was 140,000. Kids, and they really are just kids, with draft numbers higher than 150 didn’t get called up. The number crunchers now say no one born in 1952 with a draft number higher than 125 will be called to serve. All these numbers mean nothing to Ed Mendoza. If your draft number is 1, unless a meteor crashes into the planet, you are going to get called.
For months, Ed hasn’t spent a minute pondering these numbers. He thinks about clicking off quarter-mile repeats in 65 seconds, running four miles in 20 minutes, crushing a 10-mile run in 57 or 58 minutes, crossing the line first in the state championship race. He doesn’t think of the number that should haunt him, especially at a time when student deferments are being phased out. He has put his lottery number out of his mind. He hasn’t spoken about it to anyone. All year long, no one knows what a bad spot Mendoza is in.
Ed grew up with that legend of his father lying about his age so he wouldn’t miss action in World War II. Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. Different time. Different war. Ed has never wanted to serve as cannon fodder in what has evolved into a hopeless battle in the jungle against God knows what. So for the longest time, he chose not to think about it. He can’t do that anymore.
Ed takes the letter and heads over to see the one person he really wants to talk to about the situation—Bob Larsen. He knows there isn’t anything Bob can do about it, but Larsen is the main adult in Ed’s life at this point. He’s a running coach, yes, but he also serves as a life guru to the boys who run for him. Got a problem with school or parents or a girlfriend? Bob is the one to talk to about it. He doesn’t fix things but he is the ultimate listener. He does not judge, he observes, he listens, he simplifies.
Ed brings the letter (“Order to Report for Induction” it says at the top) to Larsen’s office at Grossmont. He can barely talk as he hands it to him. Larsen takes a look at the letter and spends a minute or two reading through. There is a date in a few weeks when Ed has to report to a building in downtown Los Angeles. He is to bring documents, proof of identity, his Social Security card, proof of marriage if he has it (he doesn’t, because he isn’t), clothes for three days. About midway down, there is a sentence that says draftees may be rejected because of a mental or physic
al condition. Ed will be subject to a full examination when he arrives, but if he has medical records showing he suffers from anything that might prevent him from serving, he should bring them. Larsen reads that sentence again, and then he reads it once more. Then he’s quiet for a bit.
Larsen considers himself a patriot. As a teenager in San Diego, he looked at all those naval officers in their white uniforms as local heroes. Bob did his six months of active duty in 1962. Then he spent many years in the reserves, training that one weekend each month. He very easily could have been called up for duty in Vietnam. His unit never got the call. He does not know why. He has friends who have died in Vietnam. One of his best friends, his fraternity brother from college, Mike Neil, the man who set him up with his wife and stood as his best man, went to Boalt Law School after he and Bob graduated from San Diego State, then enlisted in the Marines when he could have gotten started on a lucrative career.
Mike Neil served in the infantry and became a platoon commander with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment. One night during his first six months in Vietnam, he battled through hand-to-hand combat and enemy fire to take out a machine gun nest. A third of the men in his unit died that night. Neil earns the Navy Cross for his valor. By the time Neil retires, he is a brigadier general. He returned to San Diego and set up a law practice. Larsen sees him often. There are few people Larsen loves and respects more than Mike Neil.
Larsen doesn’t have much love for this war, though. It’s the summer of 1972 and the whole situation seems so bleak. He’s not going to be showing up at any protests. That’s just not who he is, but he pays attention. This war isn’t going well, and it’s not going to end well. Even worse, it’s not going to end anytime soon. It’s been more than a year since one veteran, a former Navy lieutenant from Harvard named John Kerry, sat in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Everyone saw that.
Running to the Edge Page 10