Larsen sees more than the numbers though. What he sees is the Terry he first saw at that high school race five years before, the kid who blazed back after the wrong turn. His form is gentle and fluid and fierce all at once. At the end of the race, he looks as though he’s got six more miles in him. He’s Arizona’s top runner by a long way. Everyone wonders what has been going on with Terry to produce this burst of success. The answer is fairly straightforward. The answer is his new teammate, Thom Hunt—one last piece of Larsen’s seven-piece puzzle, one last guy who is never happier than when he is running to the edge, and is moving frighteningly fast when he gets there.
* * *
—
Thom Hunt does not remember a time when he didn’t run or hang around people who do. Or when he wasn’t the fastest kid around. Or when he didn’t win nearly every race against kids his own age. Thom’s father ran at San Diego State in the 1950s. He set the school record in the mile there, then helped his teammate Bill Gookin start the San Diego Track Club. After college, he became a gym teacher and a coach. When he isn’t coaching, he’s working as a race official at local meets.
As a young child Thom tags along with his father to the meets. He’s the coach’s kid, the little guy helping the adults check runners into their races. He loves all the different colors of singlets, a whole rainbow out there speeding around an oval in a colorful blur. By middle school, he’s going out for the occasional run with his father around their neighborhood in San Carlos, a quick jog from Bob Larsen’s haunt at Grossmont College. He’s jumping into junior races. If there isn’t anyone too much older than Thom, he is always first to the finish—by a lot. He’s perfectly fine at other sports, a decent little baseball player. But there is no doubt what his sport will be when he enters high school. He’s going to run track, and he’s going to be a star.
By his sophomore year he’s beating Kirk Pfeffer, who is two years older than he is, in cross country races and the mile. When he is a junior he gets connected with two Swedish transplants in their twenties who are training to go low in the Boston Marathon. Thom, this kid with spiky hair and sinewy arms and big eyes, joins them for their long runs of 18–20 miles at race pace. Thom stays with them step-for-step.
In his senior year, he wins the Mt. SAC Invitational cross country race. That helps get him a spot on the U.S. national cross country team that wins the world championship. It includes a kid from Wayland, Massachusetts, named Alberto Salazar. Nothing, though, matches the night at the Jack in the Box Indoor Games in San Diego, when he gets put in the race with the senior men to take a shot at the national indoor high school mile record. With 12,000 people cheering him on, he shatters it, running a 4:02 on the boards. No one touches the mark for twenty-five years. All this is happening in Bob Larsen’s backyard. Larsen tells Hunt he’d love to have him run for Grossmont but someone at his level probably doesn’t need any seasoning in junior college. He also doesn’t live in the district. So Thom Hunt heads to Tucson to be a Wildcat, just like Ed Mendoza and Terry Cotton did.
Thom makes the adjustment to running and living in the desert just fine. He wakes up a little earlier to get the morning run out of the way before the sun begins to roast. Other than that, he’s got no complaints. He’s religious about getting his two daily runs in. Nothing is going to get in the way of that. Then, just weeks after he starts as a Wildcat, his stepfather dies. Thom is worried about his mother. He doesn’t want her to be alone. The family owns a travel trailer, so Thom tells his mother to drive the trailer down to Tucson. He finds parking and a utilities hook-up spot for $75 a month, and he moves out of the dorm and into the trailer.
When Terry Cotton hears about this, it gets him thinking. Terry is a fifth-year senior. He has financial aid to help with tuition, but he still doesn’t have two extra nickels to rub together. He’s just broken up with his girlfriend and needs a place to live. A rent-free existence would come in very handy. Thom doesn’t know exactly what to think when Terry asks to stay with him and his mom so Terry and his own broken family can save some bucks. Terry tells Thom not to worry about space. He’s going to sleep outside. No one will know he’s there. Within days, Terry has rigged a setup attached to the outside of the trailer that includes an awning, drawers, and cupboards. He needs nothing else, though there is an added perk in the deal for him.
Thom Hunt did not blast that indoor mile record or become a world junior cross country champion by accident. He did it by being perhaps the most disciplined young runner in the country. He knew what the guys up at Grossmont were doing. Hard, long threshold runs combined with some speed work as big races approached. In high school, he arranged his schedule so he could have first period off each morning. That gave him time to bang out six miles on the route that led out from his high school and around Lake Murray before each school day. That way, when his high school coach made him do all those intervals like every other high school coach did back in those days, Hunt could follow the orders knowing he’d gotten his long runs in already.
Nothing changes when he begins at Arizona. He is all about doubles. Each morning when he exits the trailer to head out for a run, Terry Cotton wakes up, too, crawls out of his makeshift living space, and goes with him. Terry knows that Hunt may be five years his junior, but he is very, very fast and he trains like a beast. For the first time in his life, Terry is on a true regimen. Hard distance in the morning. Speed in the afternoon. With Thom on his shoulder, setting the pace, he doesn’t feel the need to turn every session into a death race. He goes hard, twice every day, with Thom. That’s enough. And he doesn’t get hurt, and he wins darn near every race he enters for Arizona—by a lot.
Bob Larsen gets brought up to speed on all this after Terry’s breathtaking win at Balboa Park. Then he can’t help but start to count again. Dave Harper and Tom Lux, and a steadily improving Dale Fleet make three. Terry Cotton gets him to four. Thom Hunt grew up in the shadow of Grossmont and is a San Diegan through and through. He did the occasional run with the Toads in high school. Bringing him on gets Larsen to five. He’s got some good prospects at Grossmont this season, but if he’s going to take another run at the cross country national championships, he’s going to do it with seven of his biggest and best guns or he isn’t going to do it at all. He’s got two more slots. Two more calls to make.
* * *
—
Kirk Pfeffer has a ritual. At some point every day, sometimes on the way to class, sometimes on his way to track practice, sometimes during practice, he likes to take a glance at his hero. Frank Shorter is never hard to find. He trains at 11:30 each morning and at 3:30 every afternoon. Right there in Boulder. In good weather he’s out on the streets or in the trails under the Flatirons, or on the outdoor track at the university. In bad weather he’s on one of the highest indoor tracks in the country. The 1972 Olympic marathon champion is out there, effortlessly clicking through his road miles, or churning out his half-mile intervals. He is the apotheosis of efficiency. If running is a small but growing cult religion, Shorter is its prophet, especially now that Pre is gone. Shorter is why Pfeffer is here in Boulder.
After two years of running for Bob Larsen at Grossmont, he had the times to write his own ticket at a major college program. Pfeffer wanted Boulder for one reason—Shorter had settled there. Shorter had grown addicted to the cool, dry weather and the mile-high altitude, ideal for training. If it was good enough for Shorter, it was good enough for Pfeffer. Since showing up in August not a day has passed when he felt like he made the wrong decision, even if Colorado’s coach is an old-school interval guy, and Kirk is all about those thresholds on the roads. Kirk trains often on his own. In early mornings. At night when he is antsy. It makes no difference. He’s even got the wavy brown hair and the Shorter mustache. Boulder is his spot, has been since he first landed here.
Then in mid-October, Bob Larsen calls and asks Kirk if he wants to be a part of the Toads team going to the AAU Cross Country N
ational Championships in Philadelphia the next month. Pfeffer doesn’t take a minute to think. Of course he does. Once a Toad always a Toad, he tells Larsen. That’s exactly what Larsen wants to hear. Also, Larsen has been reading up on some of the early studies about altitude training. He’s beginning to believe that it can make a pretty big difference. Hearing Kirk say he’s ready to sign on makes him even surer that this really might be the year of the Toad. Kirk was a demon running at sea level. Train him a mile above sea level, and perhaps there’s no telling how far and fast he can go.
When Kirk arrives at track practice a few days after his chat with Larsen, he is told that Colorado athletic director Eddie Crowder needs to have a word with him. Pfeffer has no earthly idea why Crowder might be interested in him. Crowder spent eleven years as the football coach in Boulder. Like most athletic directors with football roots, that’s mainly what he cares about. He’s got nothing against the track guys. It’s just not his thing. He has a chiseled jaw and chin. He wears square, wire-rimmed glasses and has hair only on the sides of his head. Colorado athletics is his domain, the place where everyone listens to him.
When Kirk sees Crowder, the athletic director wants to know what’s with this rumor that Pfeffer plans to run in the Cross Country National Championships with some team from San Diego named the Frogs or the Toads or something. Yes, the Toads, Pfeffer says. He explains that the name of the club is the Jamul Toads. It’s a Mexican-Indian word for bad water, he explains. The Toads part, well that’s kind of an ironic joke, because no one who is not a member of the Jamul Toads takes this group seriously, which can play to their advantage at races, and nothing else would live in the bad water but a toad. That’s who we are, he says.
Crowder doesn’t do irony, and he doesn’t care about any of this. He can’t understand why Pfeffer doesn’t know that when runners at the University of Colorado compete outside the NCAA they run with the Colorado Track Club. This, of course, has been explained to Pfeffer many times of late, mainly by members of the aforementioned CTC, who have caught wind of his plan to run for the Toads. The CTC is the two-time defending national champion. Shorter runs with them on occasion, though they are mostly Colorado alums and anyone else they can grab from the big mountains in the West. The athletic director poses a question: Is the club that is occasionally joined by the only American with an Olympic gold and silver medal in the marathon somehow not good enough for Kirk Pfeffer?
Pfeffer explains this has nothing to do with any dissatisfaction with CTC. CTC is a fine club that he would be proud to run with if he were not a Toad. But he’s been training with his pals from San Diego for going on four years. They have made him the runner he is today, and he wants to run this race as part of their team. Crowder takes this all in, considers it, then strongly encourages Pfeffer to consider running for the CTC. Pfeffer tells him the recruitment is flattering, but he is a Toad. Then Crowder decides to up the ante. Let me explain this to you, he says. If you run for a club based outside the state of Colorado you will cease to be a member of the track team at the University of Colorado.
Kirk Pfeffer is not prone to anger. He is the pensive, artistic sort, machinelike when he runs, meditative almost. There is no screaming confrontation with Crowder, no doors are slammed. He simply gets up and leaves. The national championships are still several weeks away. He has plenty to think about, and plenty of time to think, which is one of the benefits of being a long distance runner. He will think, but his mind won’t change. The Toads turned him into a junior college champion, an object of desire for the track team in Boulder. This is what running is to Pfeffer. It’s San Diego. It’s the Toads, no matter what some former football coach in Boulder tells him. His mind is made up. He will spend the weekend before Thanksgiving running for the University of Colorado Buffaloes in the NCAA cross country championships. The following weekend he will join Larsen and the Toads at the AAU National Championships in Philadelphia, where he will try to run the tar out of his friends on the Colorado Track Club. It’s not clear what will happen after that. He will find somewhere to run. He always does.
* * *
—
Now Larsen has one last call to make. He needs to reach Ed in Tucson. He has no idea how this will go. He asked Thom and Terry if they had seen him much in the months since the Olympics. They have not. When runners don’t see other runners, it’s never a good sign.
When Larsen finally reaches Ed, he tells him of his plan—to take another shot, a real serious shot, at nationals this year. Ed is all in. Couldn’t be more excited in fact. The Olympics are behind him. He’s ready for the next challenge. This is how runners are. A race ends, usually not the way they want it to. It hurts for a time, though often not for very long. It’s not like stick and ball sports, where a blown throw or a double-fault haunts a career. Running is elemental. You show up on the start line, and either your best that day is better than everyone else’s or it isn’t. You run to win, always, but often don’t finish first. When it’s over, time moves on, to the next race on the calendar.
Larsen then has one other question. Ed being Ed, he has to ask it. Ed had that base of endurance through the Games, and if the Toads are to have a shot, Ed’s training needs to be there. Thom and Terry have barely seen him on the roads. Ed, he says, have you been running at all?
In fact, he has. About eight miles a day, on his own, no set schedule as he gets used to the teaching life and being a real person. Not crazy hard, but hard enough to feel good and easy enough to stay healthy until the time comes to step it up and get ready for the next race. He has nothing on his calendar because he hasn’t decided what distance he wants to focus on. Now he has a target. Six weeks hence in Philadelphia. Thresholds and repeats until then, he tells Coach Bob. Not on the streets where the stress fractures can return, but on the grass beside the roads and in the local parks.
Good for him, Larsen thinks. His Olympian is on board. He can count to seven. This just might be the year.
* * *
—
With roughly six weeks to prepare for nationals, Larsen knows he has a team to be reckoned with. He knows how to put them in the best possible position to succeed in Philadelphia. He does not know where the hell he’s going to get the money to get them there. He’s got to get airfare, food, and two nights lodging in Philadelphia for eight. It’s going to run a couple thousand dollars at least. He doesn’t have that kind of money. He’s got to find someone who does.
Larsen’s first thought is that shoe company up in Oregon—Nike. Their roots are in distance running. Nike founder Phil Knight ran cross country at Oregon, then started his business selling running shoes from Japan out of his trunk. They believe in the sport as a way of life and a form of self-expression. He even knows Geoff Hollister, Nike’s chief promoter. If Nike truly believes that distance running represents that underdog spirit of rebellion, that the spirit of Pre that espouses this sport is at its roots the ultimate countercultural activity, then there isn’t a group that better embodies that than the Toads.
Larsen knows Hollister from his occasional trips to Oregon to check in with the coaches there, Bill Bowerman and Bill Dellinger, for clinics that are helping to make him as smart a coach as he can possibly be. Ahead of the 1972 U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, they handed Larsen the stopwatch and had him oversee Prefontaine’s workouts in the days leading up to the event because he was too busy organizing the meet. Hollister ran at Oregon through the mid-1960s.
In 1968, at a campus Dairy Queen, he took up Phil Knight’s offer to start selling and marketing those Japanese running shoes, back when Nike was Blue Ribbon Sports. That made Hollister Nike employee number three. In 1972 he was charged with getting the waffle-soled Nikes on as many runners as possible at those U.S. Olympic Trials and all the other big races. Larsen can see where all this is going. The shoe companies like Nike are going to create their own clubs and take over the sport. They will understand that the best way to sell
shoes isn’t to explain the technical attributes of those shoes but to get them on the feet of the best runners in the world. If money to finance the sport flows from that, so be it. It’s got to come from somewhere.
Knowing Hollister’s zeal and his missionary-like belief in his product, Larsen calls him in the fall of 1976 to tell him about the Toads. They train like beasts, he says. They are going to Philadelphia and they are going to be tough to beat. He thinks they can win.
Who’s on the team, Hollister wants to know. Larsen runs down the roster. It’s a local crew from San Diego. Hollister knows Ed Mendoza from the Olympics. A few of the others are vaguely familiar to him. He knows Lux from Tom’s time at Oregon. He wasn’t any great shakes there, though. Overall Hollister isn’t impressed. Colorado, Florida, Boston, Oregon, New York Athletic Club, that’s where the quality is right now, he says. Not San Diego.
I’m going to pass, he says. “You have to understand Bob,” he adds, “Colorado knows how to peak.”
Bob Larsen hears those words and he can’t help but smile. Hollister has left him empty-handed financially but he has given him something far more valuable.
“Colorado knows how to peak.”
It’s the perfect line. He’s getting fired up just playing it back, over and over in his head. Time and again over the next six weeks the Toads will hear what Geoff Hollister and, by extension, everyone else in the running world thinks of their quixotic little venture.
Running to the Edge Page 17