Yes, the name should stay, they all agree. The Jamul Toads are born. Who knows if anything will come of it.
* * *
—
The crew that gathers on Saturday and Sunday mornings in Larsen’s front yard is larger now. Larsen’s wife, Sue, has to increase her lemonade production. She’s glad to do it.
The pack heads out nice and easy. Larsen still leads the first few miles. He is thirty-four years old and he’s never stopped running the warm-up miles with his crew. He can keep up a pretty decent clip, but everyone has to stay behind him. Rules are rules. Then, three or four or five miles in, depending on the day, he releases the reins. The boys are off, beating the path through the next six or eight or 10 miles, taking turns at the front. They fight not to get dropped, make cars stop, pedestrians part, and beachgoers gawk when they are tearing across the sand.
They go as Larsen has told them how to go, hard and then harder. They know that the longer they stay together, the more likely it is that they will stay out there on the threshold where the magic happens. It’s the same message when they show up at the Grossmont track for workouts during the week. Get loose, and then go, and keep going, and bring your fellow Toads with you to the edge.
They plan their debut for the Balboa 8 on August 17. They want to get it right, especially the singlet. That takes some fast work by Kirk Pfeffer, who it turns out is a pretty good artist in addition to being a unicorn of a distance runner. Larsen has to make two trips to Los Angeles to get the right paint for the silk-screening, but once he has it and Kirk has the design finalized, the singlet that emerges from the Pfeffer garage nails it. The snarkiest of toads is in mid-stride, wearing the yellow singlet of the Jamul Toads. He’s got two dimples. He is barefoot.
When the Balboa 8 rolls around, the toad is the perfect mascot for chasing down Danny Morris of the Marine Corps team in the final miles of the race. Dale and Dave spot Morris a 20-yard lead at the halfway mark. They pass the midpoint of the eight-mile race in 20:45, seven seconds behind Morris. As they come up the steep incline known as Powderpuff Hill near the six-mile mark though, Dale is on Morris’s shoulder. In a flash he is by him. Dale wins by a commanding 16 seconds with a time of 40:36.5. His time breaks Billy Mills’s course record, and he bettered Larsen’s own winning time from 1958 by almost three and a half minutes. Fleet is the first runner ever to go under 41 minutes on the course. Dave Harper is third. Toads account for nine of the first 12 spots. It’s not a bad start.
It’s good enough to convince Dale the timing is right to take off a semester. He’ll get back to Washington State at some point to finish his degree, but right now he’s going to work at a golf club and run with Dave—five miles in the morning, 10 miles in the evenings after they knock off.
The Toads are back at it in late September at the Aztec Invitational, an open meet that draws teams and runners from across the Southwest. Ed is there, but he’s with his mates from Arizona and has to run for them. Larsen brings Dale and Dave, plus Terry Cotton and a few others from his Grossmont team. Ed sets the pace from the start of the six-mile race. He’s got runners on his tail through the first four miles, when the race disappears onto a bridle trail near the freeway.
By the time Ed is off the trail with a mile to go, he’s 200 yards ahead and cruising to a 37-second win in a course-record time of 29:19. Ed is barely breathing hard at the end. Dave runs well enough to take eighth place, and Terry takes 16th, even though it’s the first race he’s run in months. Nagging leg injuries sidelined him for much of the summer. Arizona wins the meet with 83 points. Larsen’s Toads finish with 111. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math. Put Ed Mendoza in a Toad singlet and allow the Toads to use his score, and the guys with the funny amphibious name would have finished on top.
Larsen leaves the race greedy. He has been in charge of the Jamul Toads for a month. By coincidence, the AAU has scheduled the national championships for late November near San Francisco. Driving distance. Maybe there is some magic in that singlet with the snarky toad.
* * *
—
After a few more decent showings, Larsen tells the Toads they are going to the big dance. He’s got Kirk Pfeffer in his stable now and the kid is as mad for running as anyone he’s ever coached. Pfeffer is desperate to go over 120 miles a week—hard. “That’s what Shorter does,” Kirk tells Coach Bob. Larsen tries to explain that Shorter is a twenty-seven-year-old man with big-boy muscles. Pfeffer is an eighteen-year-old kid still developing the strength to protect his joints from injury. He tells Kirk he can run eight miles in the morning and eight in the afternoon. That includes his warm-ups and cool-downs. Sometimes Kirk even listens. Kirk’s big problem is college races end after 4 miles and 20 minutes, when Kirk still has so much left in the tank. To Larsen’s thinking, maybe the national championship distance of 6.2 miles will allow Kirk to capitalize on the endurance that makes him exceptional. (By January he will hold the junior world record in the marathon, after he runs 2:17:44 at Mission Bay as an eighteen-year-old, some 45 minutes faster than his first shot at the distance.)
Larsen doesn’t care that the field is going to include some of the world’s great collegiate and post-college distance runners. Frank Shorter will be there. So will Kenya’s John Ngeno, the Washington State runner, whose epic battles with Oregon’s Pre were can’t-miss events in the Northwest.* Ireland’s Neil Cusack, that year’s Boston Marathon champion, England’s Nick Rose, the soon-to-be NCAA champion, and Colombia’s Domingo Tibaduiza, a 1972 Olympian, are also showing up. Rose caused a stir at the NCAA championships in 1973, leading for the first four miles, sending a message to Prefontaine that he had no intention of handing him the race. Pre would have to work if he wanted to win this one. Of course Pre took the lead with a mile and a half to go and cruised to a six-second win. An injury will keep Prefontaine away from the nationals, but everyone else will be there. Larsen believes his Toads are ready.
* * *
—
The first signal that things might not go as planned comes in mid-November. Tom Lux calls Larsen to tell him that he’s going to be running for the Oregon Track Club rather than the Toads. Oregon? Really? Why? Bob asks. Nothing against Oregon coach Bill Bowerman and the rest of the Ducks, current and former, who mostly account for the OTC, but what about the Toads, Larsen asks? Tom says he’s pretty sure the Toads don’t have any money to cover his travel expenses and Oregon does. Larsen tells him he’s right. Phil Knight, the former Oregon runner and Nike founder, is based 110 miles up I-5 from Eugene, where Knight had a solid career running for Bowerman in the late 1950s. That might help explain the OTC’s largesse.
Undaunted, Larsen plows ahead. On the morning of November 29, Larsen and eight Toads pile into his Volkswagen bus and Larry Stone’s 1965 Plymouth Valiant, a four-door, steel boat nicknamed “Betsy.” Betsy has a hood that stretches farther than the entire length of some sports cars. Ed Mendoza, flying in from Arizona, is spared the journey. So are Dale and Dave and two other teammates, George Pullen and Tom Smith. They have other commitments and will fly up later in the day.
The second signal of trouble ahead comes on the roads. Betsy isn’t quite the force she once was. Her lights and power are on the edge of failure throughout the trip north. Larsen’s VW stays close in case of a breakdown. There are stops to try to figure out why Betsy isn’t cruising like she usually does. Then the mystery, and the caravan, rolls on unsolved. There is a race to be run. Trouble is, an arrival after dark messes with Larsen’s pre-race plan. He had wanted to go over the winding, up-and-down course through the green foothills above the Crystal Springs Reservoir. Those hills provide the scenic landscape for drivers cruising up the Junipero Serra Freeway to San Francisco. They will wreak plenty of havoc with the country’s best distance runners, who will race on four-foot-wide trails and try not to end up tripping and losing their teeth to tree roots.
The fourteen Toads, including Coach Bob
, pile into two nearby motel rooms. Ed Mendoza, fresh off his ninth-place, All-America finish at the NCAAs, rolls in late. Ngeno and Rose, who just went 1-2 at NCAAs, are no joke he reports.
“A” guys get the beds. “B” guys hit the floor with their sleeping bags. There are attempts at sleep, but seven to a room does not exactly lend itself to peaceful, pre-race slumber. There are no discussions about strategy, or the usual “what-if” talks of Plans A and B and C. The journey here has sapped the group, including Larsen. The best plan seems to be to run hard, stay cool, and try to be there at the end.
When the Toads arrive at the start, all they see is the open field that leads up over the first, gopher-hole-covered hill of the race. They think they know the drill with a course like this. Get out fast over that quarter-mile incline, but not too fast. No one wins a distance race in the first mile, but plenty have lost them there by heading out too quickly, especially against a field unlike any they have ever faced. They don’t notice the 200-yard descent that follows, leading into a tight path into the woods. They aren’t the only ones. When the gun sounds, Ngeno and Cusack sprint to the front. Too many others do not.
Less than two minutes into the race, the middle of the pack reaches a standstill for several seconds as the course funnels onto the trail, like three car lanes merging into one on the freeway. Even Shorter gets stuck about 100 runners back. It’s a mess of congestion all the way to the end. Ed fights his way up to seventh place by the time he crosses the finish line. He’s four spots ahead of Shorter, which feels good. No other Toad finishes higher than 58th though. Two of Larsen’s college boys, Breen and Gary Close, finish ahead of Dave Harper. Kirk Pfeffer, a Grossmont freshman, finishes six spots ahead of Dale Fleet. Maybe sleeping on the floor wasn’t so bad after all.
Wandering around the finish area, the Toads are humbled. They know they were ill-prepared and in over their heads, many of them still boys, or very close to it, racing against men. They have done the work. They believe, and Larsen knows, they are as fit as anyone. There is a difference between running and racing, though. Anyone can run, and many, with the right training, can run fast. But racing, competing at this level, is something else.
Arriving the night before, heading into a race without knowing how to beat the field to the key spot, that is not competing. “Plan the race, and race the plan” is the mantra of every experienced runner. Even if every so often the competition forces you to abandon your plan, to cover an opponent’s move, there has to be a plan.
As the final scores go up, Larsen sees the numbers that tell a story he already knows. The Toads finish eighth, with 215 points. Ahead of the Toads are all those fancy clubs he wanted to knock off. Colorado, New York, Philadelphia, Florida, Oregon. Maybe this was a dim idea, he thinks. Those clubs pull guys from all over the country. He’s pulling kids from an eight-mile radius in California’s third city. At the end of the day, they were largely inexperienced kids racing against men. All the threshold runs in the world might not be able to overcome that. But Larsen is not giving up. He and the Toads might need nothing more than time and more racing. He will be able to think this all through more clearly when he gets home later and gets some rest. That will happen soon enough.
Then, just when it doesn’t seem like things can get much worse, Betsy breaks down on the way home, turning what should be a nine-hour adventure into a thirty-two-hour journey from hell.
When Bob Larsen finally climbs into bed, it’s just before 2 a.m. Monday. He is reminded that in elite sports, sometimes, but only rarely, everything comes together in a moment of pure symmetry. The results are a kind of magic and alchemy. Even in something seemingly as basic as running fast, there is science, but there is also art, and there is fortune. Strokes of luck and cosmic timing are often required for the perfect moment. Winging it and hope are not substitutes for planning for success. Now he knows. This wasn’t the right moment for the Toads. He will search for one.
* The rumor was Ngeno and the rest of the African runners Chaplin recruited to WSU were actually significantly older than American college students, giving them a clear advantage since the leg musculature required for elite distance running generally takes roughly a decade to develop.
Hamptons Marathon, the Last 13.1, September 2015
Finally, I have company.
I passed someone in the 14th mile, after I hit my split at the halfway mark and made the turn past Lazy Point to begin the trek home. I’ve come back along Cranberry Hole Road, where I pass people running an hour slower than me. They still have miles to cover that I have already tread. We trade nods as we pass. We’re in the same race, but not really competitors any more than I am against whoever is at the front. For most of us, and especially for me, there is only one rival—the relentless digits of a ticking clock.
It’s been nothing but the silent swooshing of my own feet across the pavement for a while now, but then there are steady steps coming behind me. I peek over my shoulder. I do the quick marathoner’s size-up—much younger than me, taller than me, longer legs than mine. He’s also been smart enough to pin his number to his shorts and go shirtless on what’s becoming a warmish day. He’s ripped, too. Use him, I tell myself. When he gets up to my shoulder I ease into his pace. Not more than 100 yards pass before we are chatting. Where are you from? What brings you here? How many of these have you done? What time are you aiming for?
He’s twenty-two, a resident of Troy, New York, and a recent graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He’s running his first marathon. He feels strong, a whole lot stronger than I felt when I ran my first marathon at twenty-three and slogged home in 4:10.
We stay in lockstep as we approach the 16-mile mark, both of us glad for the company on a lonely quiet course. I pass the marker in 1:59, a minute ahead of the two-hour mark I wanted to hit at this distance. I tell him I am aiming for under 3:25. I explain that at my age that will get me to Boston. He asks me how old I am. I tell him forty-six.
Forty-six and still running like you are, that’s incredible, he says.
If he means this as a compliment, it doesn’t sound like one.
Shit, he says, you’re going way under 3:25. You’re going to be under 3:20.
I don’t tell him I’m not. I don’t tell him the ugliest part of the race lies ahead in the final miles, for me at least, and probably for him. It’s impossible to really know this until you have survived those last miles at least once.
What do I have to run to qualify for Boston? he asks me.
Not sure, I tell him, but fast. (Faster than you are going now, I want to say, but I don’t. Let’s just get him across the finish line.)
All right, he says, and then, in seconds, he’s 2 and 4 and 8 and 15 steps ahead. Then he’s 50 and 75 and 100 yards beyond me, until the course begins to wind onto a dirt road through the woods. But I’m pretty sure I’m going to see him again.
At the 20-mile mark I glance at my watch. It says 2:29. I wanted to be there at 2:30. This is working. If I can’t run the last 10K in 55 minutes, six sub-nine-minute miles, with enough seconds left over for the final 385 yards, I don’t deserve to be in Boston. My legs are fine, though getting slightly heavier. I have this, I think. I just need to keep my shit together and get the math right. That can be easier said than done after 20-plus miles of running. I learned that the hard way six months ago, at a small marathon in Connecticut. That day I had 26 minutes to run the last 3.2 miles. I decided I could take it easy on the first of those, then stay steady on the way in for the final two. Just run three 8:30s and you’ll be fine, I said. I hit the 26-mile mark at 3:24.30. Usain Bolt can’t run one fifth of a mile in 30 seconds. Neither can I. I missed Boston that day by 28 ticks.
And so I trudge on, counting off 21, 22, 23, and 24 essentially alone. There’s one last venture into a seaside windstorm at Louise Point, but I laugh it off and head toward the elementary school where this all started. As I look up ahead of
me in that final straight, my shirtless buddy comes into sight, laboring, his feet barely lifting off the ground during these last few hundred strides. I’m not going to catch him, but trying to get close keeps me on the clock. With 100 yards to go my watch hits 3:22. It won’t get to 3:23.
When I cross the finish, I bring my hands to my face and look at the sky. A lovely older woman hands me a medal and says congratulations as my legs stiffen and I begin to limp around. There’s no one cheering, nor should there be. I didn’t make my family trek all the way out here to indulge me in this silly quest. This triumph is mine and mine alone. You’re okay? the woman asks.
I’m going to Boston, I tell her. I’m sure she has no idea what I mean. A quarter century after I decided that yes, not only am I going to run a marathon but I am going to find a way to qualify for the biggest one of all, I am officially elite (lowercase “e,” of course).
Now I want only one thing—faster.
1976
Ed Mendoza can’t breathe.
He is in a dormitory at the University of Oregon, sharing hallways with the fastest men and women in the country. It is June of an Olympic year, which means one thing to an elite American runner: the Olympic Trials at Hayward Field in Eugene, “Track Town, USA,” as it is known. The U.S. trials are the most difficult track meet on the planet. The U.S. is so big, and there are so many fast people. Yet, for each event, there are a maximum of three spots on the Olympic team, even though in several races, especially the sprints, the fourth or fifth best American in the event would likely contend for an Olympic medal on any given day.
Complicating matters further, the U.S. trials are a do-or-die event. You can be a world record holder and a defending Olympic champion. Fail to finish in the top three at the U.S. trials, and you stay home to watch the Olympics on television with everyone else. This is what Ed Mendoza is thinking about as he lies in bed in his dorm room the night before the trials for the 10,000 meters, wheezing from an asthma attack, gasping for oxygen. If he can’t breathe, he can’t run. If he can’t run, he will not be going to the Olympics in Montreal next month.
Running to the Edge Page 15