Larsen is done counting. The Toads are at 45. Colorado, the only other team with a shot at this, isn’t done yet. That takes another 10 seconds and 5 places. Too little too late.
Larsen doesn’t move. He stays away as he sees his Toads gather with the rest of the runners in a clump behind the finish line. They are gazing at each other, gasping for air after completing as tough a cross country course as there is. He can read their lips and see they are trading times and finishing spots. They have spent the past half hour running to the edge. They have no idea what they have just pulled off. It’s likely only Bob and maybe Colorado’s coach know what has just happened. He likes it that way. Everyone else will know everything soon enough. For this moment, the victory is his alone.
After a few more minutes, when everyone has made it through the chute, he wanders over to his boys. There are only two words left to say. “You won,” he tells them.
At first they don’t believe him, but as they look at each other and look at Larsen, they realize there is no way coach would be pulling their legs on this one. The hugs and hand-slaps and whooping and hollering begin. Ed, always a little removed from the situation, takes a second to look around. He notices the other runners beginning to look at them. It’s not with the usual expressions of respectful envy (“all credit to them, we’ll get them next time”) that runners who lose usually gaze at runners who win. Everyone seems to be asking everyone else some version of, who are these guys, where are they from, what are they called? These guys, with the funny little frog on their singlet, they actually won? And who are they again?
The Toads, yes, the Toads. They run, each one, for reasons that are their own. They run like few others have ever run before. For most of them, this will be the best day of their running lives, the day they become, after all those miles on the edge, the best collection of runners around, the ones everyone should follow.
Bob Larsen believes he will not be some small character in a narrative that is a closely held secret anymore. The secret is out. He should become a phenomenon of the running boom that is about to explode. He knows better than just about anyone how to run far fast. You practice running as far and as fast as you can. And then you try running farther, faster to that place where every next step becomes an act of faith, a conquering of fear. You share it with others, with brothers and sisters who understand that to take the next step is to believe that even though it hurts, the only way to ease the pain is to run faster, to push. Like the yogis say, the only way out is through.
But Bob Larsen does not become a phenomenon. He does not become anything more than well known to those who know him well. For the next eight years, as America produces two of the best distance runners in the world, a few road warriors at the top follow the Larsen way, running to the edge, over and over. And then, somehow, everyone decides not to do this anymore. The running cognoscenti start to believe there is a better, easier way. The results of all this will break Bob Larsen’s heart, burn him even, in a way that nothing before has. Surely others would understand what he had done, what the Toads had done, how they ran and why it worked.
No, not yet at least. As far as that rebellious world where the oddballs of running chase great speed and life’s truths over great distances was concerned, Bob Larsen was headed back to the edge of the unknown, that odd, almost obscure place where there is just one advantage—no one ever sees you coming. Maybe this will all be for the best.
* There is little doubt that Frank Shorter deserved to win the gold medal in Montreal in 1976. He was beaten in the final miles by the East German runner Waldemar Cierpinski. The East Germans are now known to have operated a vast performance-enhancing drug operation from 1968 to 1988. Files related to the operation became public after the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Cierpinski’s name is listed in those files, though he has never acknowledged that he cheated to win.
TWO
Can We Be Fast Again?
Spring 1993, Drake Stadium, UCLA
These are the days Bob Larsen loves most, when the high school kids descend on the powder blue track at his college. The chance to run in the footsteps of legends just a few years older inspires them to run as they have never run before. They take on the best competition around, and Bob Larsen, now one of the esteemed minds in running, sits in a corner of the stands under his Panama hat and watches the past and the future blaze in front of his eyes all at once.
He watches these fifteen- and sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys, still finding their stride. There are plenty of girls now, too, thanks to Title IX. They are just beginning to grow into their bodies, to realize who they can one day be. As he watches, his mind drifts back to Monte Vista High School, three decades ago. He is telling that first collection of misfit toys that if they want to run far fast they have to practice running far fast. They even listened to him back then, when they weren’t pausing in the middle of training to take a rock to the head of a rattlesnake along the trail.
Then, inevitably, he watches the best of this new generation accelerate into a back straightaway on the red rubber of the UCLA track, or explode out of a starting block and pull away from the group. Instantly, Bob’s focus shifts to the years ahead, when the kid breaking away, the one taking off like he’s got batteries in his shoes, has put in so many more miles and has learned how to race and how to win. The stopwatch tells part of the story. Numbers can explain only so much, though. They say almost nothing about heart and character and aura, the stuff that separates the talented runner from the champion, the stuff that allows Bob Larsen to see into the future. In this way, Bob lives his life through a series of races. He has never wanted it any other way.
* * *
—
For the past fourteen years, no one has done this better than Coach Bob. In 1979, after he won eight consecutive state championships at Grossmont, the phone calls from the big four-year schools became too difficult to ignore. The opportunity for which he had been waiting two decades finally arose. Back in high school, those nagging, senior year injuries made Larsen miss his chance to convince track coaches at UCLA he was worthy. Twenty-two years later, the college of Jackie Robinson and John Wooden wants him to take over a once great program.
The opportunity to coach at UCLA is everything Coach Bob hasn’t done. Since he started down this road in the early 1960s, he has always led the life of the scrappy underdog. He knows there is nothing better in sports than winning when you are not supposed to, when everyone says you can’t. It’s like coming from the back of the pack when no one expects it. He would not trade what he has forged for anything. But he has always wondered what he might be able to pull off if he had everything a coach could ever desire—a school with world-class facilities, top-notch academics, a reputation in athletics no other school can match. With the wind at his back, how far can he go?
As it turns out, very far. He has done just about everything there is to do. He arrives at UCLA men’s track and field program in 1979. Eight years later, in 1987, he wins his first NCAA championship. The next year he and his assistants, John Smith and Art Venegas, coach what is considered one of history’s greatest college teams, in any sport. Those teams won the national meet by 53 points in 1987 and 41 in 1988. Those are bloodbath-level beatdowns.
His UCLA runners are among the fastest people on the planet. So many of them now have Olympic medals. Steve Lewis, one of his star quarter-milers, was all of nineteen when he captured the gold medal in the 400 meters in Seoul in 1988. Danny Everett took the bronze in that race and won a gold alongside him a few days later in the 4x400 relay. Michael Marsh, a sprinter, won the gold medal in 1992 in the 200 and a gold in the 4x100 relay. Kevin Young took the gold in the 400-meter hurdles in 1992, when Steve Lewis took the silver in the 400. Young’s world record, 46.78, still stands.
In 1976 Coach Bob watched the Olympics from a television set in San Diego. He had just a single horse in the field, Ed Mendoza. Ed had that off-da
y and failed to make the final of his event. Now he watches whole bunches of his guys ascend to the top step of the Olympic podium every four years.
It’s different though. The Olympic champions Coach Bob helps develop are not the sort of men who put his name on the map during that Bicentennial fall nearly two decades before. They are nothing like those anonymous Toads who, after that perfect day in Philadelphia, created all that chatter among what was then the fringe set of distance fiends. What are those guys doing out there in San Diego, everyone asked?
The answers were fairly straightforward—run long and hard, run on the edge, then wake up the next day and do it again, and again, and again. Find your threshold, and stay there.
They needed a new vocabulary for this. That small but quickly expanding collection of elite runners began to talk about “thresholds” and “tempo runs” or simply “running on the edge.” It didn’t matter to Bob Larsen what they called it, only that, finally, the world had come around to his way of thinking, his understanding that running fast over a great distance was really not so different than sprinting a short distance. Keep the legs churning, the feet under the body, the knees driving forward. The speed comes from reducing contact time and getting that foot back in the air as quickly as possible. Just like on that beach in Mexico at Christmas in 1963. And after months of long, hard threshold runs, don’t forget about sharpening the speed in the final weeks, because in the end nearly every race becomes a sprint to the finish.
Shorter practiced a version of this by himself when he was at his best in the early 1970s. He’d head out on a cool Boulder morning and run three six-mile loops around his neighborhood. The first loop was an easy 5:30 pace. The next one at 5:00. Then Shorter would turn on the jets and reel off six 4:30s to finish up the morning. Few knew what Shorter was up to. He ran alone. No one else could keep up.
As Shorter faded, Bill Rodgers took over in the late 1970s as the world’s top marathoner. Boston Billy, with that loping stride and floppy blond hair under his trademark painter’s cap, captured his three Boston Marathon wins and four more in New York until another guy from Massachusetts, Alberto Salazar, took his place.
Both Salazar and Rodgers learned from Bill Squires, who’d been a miler at Notre Dame, then returned to The Hub to teach and coach at Boston State College. Squires often liked to ply his trade over cheap beers and other fine spirits in Boston bars. Two nights each week he oversaw the Greater Boston Track Club’s training sessions at the indoor track at Tufts University. In the mid-1970s, Squires caught on to what Larsen had been teaching for a decade—that magic mix of speed and distance, running long and hard and hard for long. That beat the tar out of all comers, produced the champions, and helped to accelerate the running boom that turned every other lawyer and banker and schoolteacher into a wannabe Boston Billy.
For Bob Larsen, this all felt like a kind of dream. The fringe sport he loves hits the big time, in large part because the best Americans train the way he’s been telling everyone they should for the better part of twenty years. Now he’s the guy behind the lectern and on the dais at the coaching clinics and seminars. He passes out copies of workouts and training logs and explains the elementary physiology behind the theory so they can understand why this works. Few are skeptical. People believe results. When the guys capturing all the state championships and the Americans winning the biggest races are training the same way, that’s about all anyone needs to know. Coach Bob and his ways have traction.
He knows his work is hardly done, but when he moves up the coast to Westwood and shifts his focus to a different sort of runner, he doesn’t worry about his country losing its perch atop the distance world, even if most of the boys he brings in to wear those iconic light-blue-and-yellow UCLA singlets aren’t the hippie gazelles and mountain goats he gathered around San Diego.
They are true stars, thoroughbreds in every sense. Coach Bob still cares about the gazelles and the mountain goats, but the move to UCLA forces a shift in focus, from endurance to speed. His job is to bring track and field national championships to Westwood. He has twelve scholarships to give out in total for track and cross-country runners. No one wins national championships with distance runners, who can score only in one or two events. Coaches win national championships with quarter-milers, those crazily versatile, freakishly athletic specimens who can drop down from the 400 to the 200 or stretch to the 800 when the team needs them to. They hog points in relays. Some of them can even pull off near-record long jumps and triple jumps with little practice.
Bob also likes to nab a thrower or two, a guy like John Godina, a house-sized boy from Wyoming who can throw a discus like a Frisbee and put a shot like a baseball. Occasionally Bob’s got a half scholarship or some money for free books to give to a distance guy. There isn’t much more than that. This is how the game is played. He also knows the best distance guys don’t want to come to Westwood to train anyway. The neighborhood is beautiful but filled with concrete and cars. The closest trails are miles away. The gazelles and the mountain goats want to go train with Dellinger up in Oregon or at a place that’s got some altitude, like Wyoming, or northern Arizona, in Flagstaff. Bob Larsen’s path to glory at UCLA is with the thoroughbreds. Coach Bob follows it. He barely gives it a second thought.
* * *
—
The mountain goats have their charm, though. Coach Bob still loves to keep his eye on the up-and-coming distance kids. He loves to take in the occasional race, even if he isn’t evaluating any prospects, like this two-miler he is settling in for in the stands at Drake Stadium. These races are almost entirely for pleasure, events that hark back to his roots, those first days of running on the farm in Minnesota, those warm summer evenings in San Diego years ago, when his body, limp with exhaustion from a day at the gas station, would magically come to life. The glory may live with the speed demons, but the long race is where Bob Larsen’s soul endures.
That’s what he’s thinking as he watches this small kid with a funny name duel for the lead as the race approaches its final laps. He’s got a smooth stride. He arches his back a little too far. The kid with the odd name is pushing hard, forcing his only competition to pick up the pace a little sooner than he wants to. What’s his name? “Kefleggy?” Something like that. Larsen thinks he’s going to fade. He’s working too hard too early.
Then, with two laps to go, the kid with the funny name takes off. Larsen can’t figure out how, because he swears this kid doesn’t look like he’s moving very quickly at all. He’s rumbling around the track more than running, but he’s got a motor. There is only one other kid in the race with a shot at winning. He stays on the shoulder of the kid with the funny name, and yet it’s that kid, the one with the funny name, who is dictating the terms of this race.
Coach Bob is pretty sure he knows why. The kid with the funny name understands who he is. He knows what he has, and what he lacks—which is to say, top-class speed. And yet he knows what he has to do to have a shot at winning. Son of a gun, Coach Bob thinks, sitting there in his Panama hat, am I watching the second coming of Ed Mendoza? Just like that he is back in San Diego in the early 1970s, watching those gazelles and mountain goats and dreaming of what they can achieve.
He wasn’t wrong back then. Those boys-who-would-be-Toads had gotten him his first national championship. A couple of them had gone on to individual glory, too. After 1976, Ed won four more marathons in Arizona and California. Then in Boston in 1983 he ran a 2:10 and finished fourth, just a minute back of the winner, on a warmish day.
Kirk Pfeffer should have won the New York City Marathon in 1979. Kirk was living in Boulder after graduating from college. He had no plans to run the New York race that year. The Friday before New York he did two 10-mile runs and never felt better. He woke up the next morning and called the New York race director, Fred Lebow. Kirk told Lebow who he was and that he wanted to race. Lebow told Kirk he knew who he was. Pfeffer had won the Enschede
Marathon in the Netherlands that August. He ran a solid 2:11:50 that day. Lebow paid attention to these things. He told Kirk to head to the airport; a ticket would be waiting for him.
Pfeffer got to his hotel around midnight. He grabbed a few hours of sleep, then woke at dawn to head to the starting line on Staten Island. At the gun he took off, feeding off the energy of the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lining the streets for the 26-mile block party that few knew existed a few years before. Seventeen miles in, he ran alone up First Avenue. The drunk yuppies screamed for the Colorado hippie and wondered where the hell the three-time winner Bill Rodgers might be. Sure enough, Boston Billy was lurking, waiting to pounce during those final miles in the hills of Central Park. As Pfeffer inevitably slowed, Rodgers zipped past him in a blur and won by 87 seconds. Pfeffer would set the world record in the half marathon six weeks later, but he never stopped kicking himself for going out too fast in New York that day.
Bob Larsen had made those guys. They always said their wins belonged to him, as well. Could he do that again?
As the kid with the funny name comes around the final turn, Larsen can see that he isn’t going to win. Larsen doesn’t care. The little kid is maybe five and a half feet tall but he’s got a chest like a fire hydrant. More importantly, he races the way Coach Bob loves. None of this sitting and kicking crap. He pushes the pace, daring the field to go with him. Stay with me if you can. With the right training, would anyone be able to?
It’s kind of a stupid thought. Larsen knows this. While he’s been up in Westwood, winning collegiate championships and honing those thoroughbred world champions, American distance running has all but collapsed. The supremacy of the 1970s and early 1980s has given way to foreign champions. So many of them are Africans, for whom the sport is a national religion. Americans barely register on the world stage at any distance longer than 800 meters. Everyone just assumes those rising Kenyans and Ethiopians have some sort of unique genetic advantage.
Running to the Edge Page 19