“Colorado knows how to peak,” he tells the Toads with that wry smile whose meaning they all know so well. And he knows it’s lines like these, the little digs and challenges, that fire up distance runners best. The rah-rah speeches are for football. This game is too long, too taxing, too nonstop. It’s a long, slow burn, and the motivation has to work that way as well.
Coach Bob still needs some cash, though. He’s got another idea. Local team, local sponsors. He tracks down Jack Goodall, a top executive of Jack in the Box, the burger chain that began in San Diego in 1951. Goodall is a big believer in servicing your community and he’s a sports nut. He’s happy to kick in the bulk of what’s needed, he tells Larsen. Whew. Big relief.
Larsen isn’t the only one dialing for dollars though. Dale and Dave start spending late afternoons knocking on the doors of businesses up and down Mission Boulevard. They tell their story. They plead for funding. A local realtor and some car dealers agree to help out. When they get close enough, within a few hundred dollars, Larsen tells them not to worry about the rest. He’ll cover it. He’s invested plenty more than that in this bunch of Toads over the years. He has no doubt it will pay off.
* * *
—
In the final weeks before Philadelphia, Larsen tweaks the training regimen, for Dale and Dave and Tom who are training with him, and for Kirk and Ed and Tom and Terry, who are in Arizona and Colorado. He relays word to them by phone. He knows they are all plenty fit. He needs them fast. He remembers well what happened in San Francisco two years ago. That wide start line and the race to the funnel into the woods. The narrowing in Philadelphia might not be as severe, but there will be a funnel, and a sprint to the opening. That’s the nature of the sport, the only way several hundred runners cram into a narrow wooded trail.
We’re going to need to get out fast and put up low first miles, he tells them. We need speed. So in addition to those lung-searing 6- and 8- and 10-mile tears out on the roads and the trails of San Diego and Tucson and Boulder, there are quarter-mile repeats to gets the legs turning over as fast as they can. Instead of 6 or 8 800s at 2:15, there are sets of 10 and 12 400s at 60–65 seconds. Concrete times. We’re going to get out in that first mile and we’re going to be bold, he says.
* * *
—
In early November, there is a bump in the road. Terry Cotton needs emergency surgery to have his wisdom teeth removed. His cheeks swell to the size of softballs. He loads up on the painkillers, spends most of the next few days sleeping at the trailer. Ten days after the surgery, he heads up to Tempe for the regional championships. He runs with Thom. They finish seventh and eighth, good enough to qualify for nationals. Five of the six guys in front of them are Africans. They look much older than college students.
When Coach Bob hears about the wisdom teeth, he gets a little nervous. There’s a freshman at Grossmont, a newly christened Toad named Glenn Best. He’s heard about this plan to go to nationals. He wants in. He isn’t the natural talent the rest of the Toads are, he doesn’t have that last turbocharged gear, but he is strong and reliable and the senior Toads who are headed east are the guys he worshipped growing up. Larsen tells him he’s got to pay his own way. There isn’t enough money for an eighth man. And he’ll definitely be one of the guys sleeping on the floor of the hotel room. He’s a quasi-alternate. Deal, Best says. He’s headed to Philly. They all are.
* * *
—
The journey east is not easy. They leave on Thanksgiving. Ed and Tom and Dale and Dave and Kirk and Bob and Glenn come from San Diego. There are two connections, one is made, one is missed, and the journey grows to nearly twenty hours before they finally end up in the Ben Franklin Hotel off Independence Park. Thom Hunt and Terry Cotton have been there since Tuesday. They came from Denton, Texas, where Thom finished 13th at the NCAA Championships, and Terry, his gums still swollen, is five spots behind in 18th. That makes both of them All-Americans. Not too shabby.
The Africans are at the top of the leaderboard, and in several of the spots ahead of them. Henry Rono, Samson Kimobwa of Washington State. Wilson Waigwa and Joshua Kimeto of Texas–El Paso. It’s a cruel foreshadowing of what is to come, though they don’t know that yet. The Toads pile into the beds and the cots and the sleeping bags in the two rooms their budget allows and grab a few hours of sleep.
In the morning, it’s time to head out to Fairmount Park to go over the course, something they never had the chance to do the last time they were at nationals. This is when Bob realizes he’s messed up the math. He rented the biggest sedan he could find to get the Toads from the airport to the hotel and back and forth to the park. He figured four in the front and four in the back. A cross country team of seven, plus a coach. But Glenn…he’s forgotten about Glenn, his quasi-backup for Terry. They all look at the sedan and look at each other, wondering what to do. The solution becomes obvious. Glenn is low man on the totem pole. He’s going in the trunk. Larsen promises Glenn he will drive carefully. Plenty of air back there, he assures him, and it’s just a fifteen-minute ride anyway.
At Fairmont Park they jog easily over the 10,000-meter course on the part of the park known as the Belmont Plateau. Just like Larsen assumed, a broad start leads to a narrow path through the woods that hikers indulge in because of its rises and descents. The four hills are large enough to have names, with three of those names suggesting unforgivingly steep gradients—Flagpole, Parachute, Nursery, and Surekill, which doesn’t sound like the sort of hill that any runner wants to confront. There are rocks sticking up from the trail, and divots and gullies hidden beneath the foliage. It’s what they call a “billy-goat course”—lots of hops and half steps. So much more than a boring, rubberized track for speedsters. Careful where you put your foot, but we can do damage here they think. It’s cool and gray, the Northeast in late November. They aren’t in San Diego anymore. That is the point.
When they are done, they grab some food and spend most of the rest of the day bumming around the hotel, staying off their feet. There’s a venture to a cheap, nearby restaurant for dinner, a burger and pasta place that could be anywhere, and then it’s back into the hotel. Center City Philadelphia in 1976 is something of a no-man’s-land, not the place to go wandering around at night. Thom and Terry tried this earlier in the week when they went hunting for a place to go bowling, anything to ease the boredom. Within minutes they’d beaten a path back to the hotel, chased by an unruly gang that didn’t realize just who they were chasing.
There is light chatter in the rooms, the kind of razzing and ribbing that young men who have competed with and against each other for years are prone to. It feels like a reunion of sorts. The Toads are just so happy to be here, together, running as one. Larsen doesn’t bother with any pre-race manifestos. The Toads know why they are here and what they have come to do. Larsen knows at this point his job is to psyche them down, not psyche them up. They’re ready. So is he.
* * *
—
The morning breaks gray and a little on the warm side for this time of year—60 degrees. Not bad at all. They pile back into the sedan. Four in the front, four in the back, Glenn in the trunk. They wouldn’t have it any other way. As they pull into the lot at Fairmont Park and pile out, the Toads gaze around at the competition. All around them are running teams in designer-brand matching sweats. Everyone’s got some version of a Nike or adidas or New Balance racing flat. No doubt the fancier clubs got these for free.
The Toads’ eyes turn to each other. They are all wearing whatever they could cobble together from their drawers. Beneath their unmatched sweats they wear dark green and yellow striped shorts and the yellow singlet with Kirk Pfeffer’s silkscreen of that wise-ass Toad. The budget couldn’t stretch far enough for warm-up gear. That’s just fine with them. They know the first lesson of this sport—that it’s the runners in the uniforms that make the team, not the uniforms, not even the shoes.
They stretch on the dewy grass, run some warm-up sprints on the open plateau, then gather in close with Larsen for one last chat. The clouds are hanging low. It’s not so different than morning in San Diego, he tells them, before the sun burns off the early gray. Larsen tells them not to worry about reputations, to enjoy the day. Remember, head out fast, get to the narrow trail as quickly as possible. Passing won’t be easy in that part of the course. Get a position, hold it, push the pace. Make them understand you are not going anywhere. Become their problem.
The Toads head to the start. They crush toward the front, jockeying for position among these few hundred pioneers of long distance. A month has passed since the first five-borough New York Marathon, when some 2,000 runners—lunatics, in the eyes of most—bounded over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, sounding a sort of unofficial start to the mass running movement that for years has been populated by few others than the elite few hundred on this start line today and their brethren.
The Toads have collectively spent decades hammering the pavement in San Diego under the baking southern California sun, running mile after mile to escape from nasty fights between moms and stepfathers and wars that should never have been fought and lonely summers and tragic childhood loss. Together, they ran away from what made them different and toward an ideal that would make them all the same.
Then the haunting, quiet moment that all races produce finally arrives—the moment when there is nothing left to do but wait for the sound of the gun.
* * *
—
Standing on that start line with the Toads, a few feet away, as ready as anyone to win that race is a twenty-four-year-old Harvard graduate from New Mexico named Ric Rojas. He has a poofy, brown afro and a thick mustache. He wears the yellow T-shirt of the Colorado Track Club with red and white candy-stripe shorts. Rojas was born and raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he is a computer analyst at the Scientific Laboratory. He is 5'9" and 135 pounds. As a teenager he desperately wanted to play stick and ball sports but didn’t have the skills. In tenth grade he tries out for cross country. This he has the skills for. His father works at the National Laboratory, but most of the kids on the cross country team are Native Americans, who spend their weekends running through the high desert surrounding Los Alamos.
They invite him to come along. Running up and down those hills like a mountain goat, grabbing the trail with your toes, then pushing off an instant later, this is where Ric really learns how to run. He sets a New Mexico high school record for the mile, running a 4:12 at 6,000 feet. Like every fast kid at the time, he desperately wants to go to Oregon to run with Prefontaine and Bowerman. When he visits, Bowerman asks him about his grades. Ric is a straight-A student. Who else is looking at you, Bowerman asks? Harvard and Yale, Ric tells him. Go there, Bowerman says. Ric explains that he wants to run at Oregon with Pre. Bowerman says he’s sorry, but he’s not going to offer a scholarship to Oregon to a kid who can go to Harvard.
So Ric goes to Harvard, where he is far and away the best runner but basically left to train himself. His coach has him racing every weekend. By the time the big conference and regional meets roll around, he’s burned out. After graduation though, he moves back to Los Alamos and decides to get serious about running again. He’s doing 100 miles a week, repetition workouts of 5 times a mile at a 4:25 pace. He’s doing ladder workouts—400, then 800, then 1,200, then 1,600 and all the way back down. It works. He wins the Pan American Games trials marathon in 1975, running a 2:25 at altitude in Flagstaff, Arizona. He beats Shorter by 55 seconds in a 15-kilometer race in Denver. He meets some of the guys from the Colorado Track Club there. They ask him if he wants to run with them sometime, maybe be a part of the club. So once a month, Rojas makes the seven-hour drive from Los Alamos to run with the CTC crew. They have their sights on this national cross country championship that they have no intention of giving up. He’s got the race circled on his calendar, too. He cuts back his work schedule to six hours a day and hits the hills hard.
Ric Rojas is a fine runner, one of the country’s best, but on this day, in this race, running with a team that is nearly 400 miles from where he lives, with guys he has little connection to, it is very clear what his purpose is. Ric Rojas is a ringer. He is that thing that the Toads, who all grew up in homes that are in jogging distance from each other, do not have. Colorado’s rivals from the Florida Track Club and the New York Athletic Club have even more.
They are the reason Larsen wants to win this race so badly, with a group of local guys who share something more than laundry. They are far from the most talented collection here, or at any race. But they have been training a certain way, his way, running on that edge, for years. This is the moment he gets to show the world where that can get you—all the way from a farm with no running water in northern Minnesota. And he just might be able to do it with a bunch of Toads.
Get out fast, he thinks in the instant before the pistol fires. Just get out fast.
Then comes the gun.
* * *
—
It takes a millisecond for a near-disaster to strike. On his second step, Tom Lux’s planted foot gives way. He’s on his way down, halfway to a faceplant in the mud, when he feels a tug at the back of his singlet. Dale, next to him, has somehow gotten ahold of Tom. He yanks as hard as he can and gets his fellow Toad upright. Barely missing a beat, Tom is back running. A fall at the start, with 9,998 meters left, may seem like a small thing. But a tumble there is 2 or 3 seconds, and 2 or 3 seconds is 20 meters, and 20 meters is 80 runners. That doesn’t happen though, and the Toads are off, Thom Hunt leading the way to the opening, just like Larsen prayed he would.
Hunt can’t make it stick though. A mile into the race, his eighteen-year-old legs are feeling every meter of his All-American performance at the national championships one week ago. He drops back. But Kirk is right up there, and so is Cotton.
Ed, on the other hand, isn’t feeling so good. From the moment he woke up, he’s been thinking about all the great runners who are here. The last time he lined up in a race at the Olympic Games, everyone seemed so much faster, as though they had something he did not. Why will this day be different? He hasn’t been able to shake the doubts all morning. Since the gun sounded, he’s been trying to think his way through this race, trying to figure out how, on a day when he might not be at his best, when his legs haven’t felt the tension of competition since the summer, he can best help his team. He’s worked himself into a kind of trance. He’s holding himself back, waiting, but for what?
Where the hell is Ed, Larsen is thinking as they come to a clearing. He begins that instinctual counting of the colors. He sees some yellow up front, but he doesn’t see Ed, that shock of black, shoulder-length hair streaming behind the littlest guy out there. He knows he needs to see Ed. Then, there he is, maybe 50 or 60 places off the lead. It could even be 80. He’s running like his feet are sinking deep into the mud on each step while everyone else’s are flitting across the trail. This is fixable, Larsen thinks, but it has to be fixed now. Larsen is going to have to do something he’s never done before, something that normally makes Larsen different from every other coach out here today. He edges up to the trail. Ed is ten yards away and about to fly past when Larsen cuts loose, for literally the first time in his career, and maybe the last. “Ed,” he hollers, “you have got to get up there!”
The voice hits Ed like a slap across his cheeks. He knows Coach Bob is not a screamer, but he sure is screaming now, and Ed is damn sure going to listen. He gets one quick glance at Coach Bob and sees his eyes are nearly coming out of his head. Time to stop thinking, he tells himself. Time to go.
Now Ed is picking off runners by the bunch. Plenty of them are even wearing the same singlet as he is. First Dale, then Hunt, then Dave. Push, keep pushing. Be passing people, he keeps telling himself. Don’t think, just run and pass. Climb the ladder, move up.
Ric Rojas has been doing
plenty of passing himself. He was 100 spots back after the first mile, but now he’s near the front. At the Surekill hill, three and a half miles in, he makes his move and flies past a slowing Pfeffer. Pfeffer took the lead on a long downhill heading into the halfway mark, but now he’s feeling the NCAA race, too. Terry is moving up, though. He’s been fourth or fifth for the last mile or so, but now he is breaking with the pack and trying to keep Rojas in his sights. With a mile to go, Rojas is 50 yards ahead. Terry starts to think it’s over. Time to play defense and hang on to second place. But the more he stays steady, the bigger Rojas looks.
Son of a gun, he’s getting tired, and coming back to me, Cotton thinks as they come into that last stretch. He begins to hear the chatter from the crowd of onlookers and curiosity seekers gathered near the finish. Cotton gives one last furious push but Ric Rojas has just enough gas to make it over the line, in 30:23.8, 2.2 seconds ahead of Terry. It was a ballsy effort by Rojas—run away and make everyone believe you are never coming back. He fooled Terry for just long enough. Three seconds back is a Penn State alum named Jeff Bradley and nine seconds back is Kirk.
A few feet away, Bob Larsen is doing the math. Two and four makes six. Where the hell is Ed? There, there he is. Bang. Seventh, 17 seconds off the lead. The Toads are at 13 points. Larsen’s seeing so many other colors, trying to keep some semblance of a running tally in his head. Please God, show me two more yellow singlets, two more Toads. Then, there’s Dave, out-sprinting some guy from Colorado for 12th. That’s three in the top 10 and four in the top 15. And before he can even figure out that 15 and 15 makes 30, there’s Tom Lux, all big teeth and big eyes and curly, bouncing, blond hair streaming across the line a whole lot faster than anyone figured he would. Tom is 20th.
Running to the Edge Page 18