What the hell happened? Where have all the Shorters and Rodgerses and Salazars or even the next generation of Toads gone?
After the race, Larsen sees the kid with the funny name shaking the hand of the boy who has just beaten him. He looks fresh as a daisy, not like someone who has battled for two miles as hard as he could and come up just short. Then Bob Larsen silently asks himself the only question that someone like him would ask. He is, after all, the running version of the music producer, the guy who gets paid to listen to a tune on an acoustic guitar and imagine how it might sound accompanied by drums and a bass and a horn section and all the other bells and whistles that might make it as good as it can be. This is what he hears himself ask—can we be fast again?
He doesn’t know the answer, but he thinks he does. He knows as well as anyone how fast we once were, and he’s pretty sure of one possible place where it all began to go off the rails, with that strange misunderstood tale of Alberto Salazar.
* * *
—
The son of an anti-Castro Cuban freedom fighter, Alberto Salazar runs angry. He runs as though he is chasing someone he wants to kill. He grows up just west of Boston in the 1960s and 1970s, only a few miles from the start of the Boston Marathon. Alberto starts to run because his older brother, Ricardo, his hero, is a star high school runner who later attends the Naval Academy and runs a 4:07 mile. When Alberto is fifteen, he starts hitching rides to local races and competing against adults.
Alberto Salazar knows how to run only one way— to the edge of complete exhaustion. It’s how he runs during the summer of 1977, when he rises at five in the morning and works all day surveying at his father’s construction sites. At the end of the day, his father pulls the truck over to the side of the road seven miles from home. Alberto hops out and races the truck back to the house. It’s how he has run all this summer leading up to the seven-mile Falmouth Road Race in August 1978, where he runs the first three miles in 13:43 on a hot, sticky morning and ends up in the medical tent with a temperature of 107. At a hospital, a priest administers Last Rites. He survives, but the near-death experience does not make him cautious. Quite the opposite. Peering into the abyss, he felt only the peace of his deep Catholic faith. He has no fear of what might await him on the other side.
After college, where he wins the NCAA cross country championship, he stays in Eugene, Oregon, to train and makes the 1980 Olympic team. He misses the Olympics because of the U.S. boycott, but signs on for the New York City Marathon that October at the last minute.
Most runners approach their first marathon as a learning experience. The muscles and bones have to get used to roughly two hours of pounding, and the body’s nutritional system has to figure out how to process enough fuel to survive as glycogen stores become depleted. Salazar looks at the expected field in New York and thinks something else. He thinks he is faster than anyone. He decides he can win. Never mind Boston Billy, who has won this race four years in a row. Alberto understands the marathon as twenty miles of transportation and a six-mile race. Rodgers does nearly all his training on the roads. He can’t match Alberto’s speed. Also, Alberto knows Rodgers doesn’t train as hard as he does. No one does.
In New York, he tells the media he is the man to beat. Then he runs like he means it. He stays at or near the front of the pack. During the eighteenth mile, he gets a stitch in his side. It lasts for three more miles, and when it goes away, so does he. He breaks from the field and cruises in for the victory in 2:09:41.
The win begins a run of dominance that few runners have ever experienced. The next year he has twelve weeks to prepare for New York. He wants to follow up his breakout win with a world record. He knows the record will be his when, amid a series of very long and very hard runs on wood-chip trails around Eugene, he reels off six one-mile repeats at a sub-4:30 pace. When he gets to New York, wearing a leather jacket and acting like James Dean in running shoes, he tells the media he expects to break the world record. Then he does, running the race in a then-blistering 2:08.13.*
He also delivers times that place him among the best ever in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters. The year after that he pulls off the magic double. He wins Boston in a race that will come to be known as the “Duel in the Sun,” in which he runs neck-and-neck with Dick Beardsley for the second half of the race and edges him by a few yards on an 80-degree day. Then, on a temperate October morning in New York, he tries a different strategy. Instead of hanging behind the leaders at first, he goes out fast, leading the way at the front of the first pack. About a dozen runners stay with him through the first half of the race.
They begin to trail off in the next miles, as the race makes its way over the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan. When Salazar surges after the 18-mile mark, on the Upper East Side, only one runner dares to go with him, Rodolfo Gomez of Mexico. Salazar throws down a few 4:30 miles, but Gomez stays right on his shoulder, into and then through Central Park. With a little more than a quarter mile to go, they cross a dirt path in the park. The motorcycles leading the way kick up a cloud of dust. Salazar chooses this moment to make one last push. When he emerges from the dust cloud, he has a seven-yard lead. He stretches it to 10 and then 12 yards up the final rise to the finish line. He glances back over his left shoulder in the last moments. He sees Gomez trailing behind, hopelessly. He turns back around to prepare to break the tape. He is going to win again, and the next year, and the one after that, he thinks. He is certain in two years he will rise to the top of the podium in the Olympic Games.
At this moment in 1982, American sports fans don’t really know much about distance running, but they know one name. They know Alberto Salazar. They know he is the best. His timing is perfect, too. His glory comes just as the massive wave of that first running boom in the United States is cresting. He becomes one of those athletes who singularly define the sport in which he performs, like Mark Spitz in swimming or John McEnroe in tennis. When a third-grader runs a flashy mile time, adults will ask, “Who do you think you are, Alberto Salazar?” Alberto Salazar is running. Salazar knows this, too. He has one final goal—winning an Olympic gold medal. If he does that, rather, when he does that, immortality will be his.
As he crosses the finish line in New York, there is no way he can possibly know that once he breaks this tape he will never win a big race like this again.
Just as quickly as the glory came, it starts to slip away. In the spring of 1983, he strains a groin muscle while training for a marathon in Rotterdam. He shuts out the pain, trains as hard as he ever has. He can’t do better than fifth. It’s the first marathon he enters but does not win.
He gets colds and sore throats and respiratory infections. A miserable cough and cold sends him to a last-place finish in the 10,000 at the World Championships. Bronchitis keeps him out of the Falmouth race. He finishes sixth in the Fukuoka Marathon in Japan in December 1983. More bad luck comes the following March. In New Jersey, at the World Cross Country Championships, he twists his knee and finishes seventh. Still, he doesn’t rest. There is a gold medal he needs to win. He keeps training and develops a stress fracture in his foot. Altering his stride to compensate for the balky toe and knee, he strains his right hamstring at a 10,000 in Europe.
On the day of the Olympics, when he is supposed to transform into a legend, he is never more mortal. He slogs to a fifteenth-place finish in 2:14.19. Within a year, he will lie on an operating table twice, as surgeons try to repair the tendons in his knee by scraping away scar tissue. They try to relieve pressure on his hamstring by releasing a fatty lining they are sure is constricting it. The procedures and the continuing injuries further disrupt his stride. They do nothing for the lingering and exhausting respiratory illnesses that he simply cannot shake. He tells himself he just has to wait until the 1988 Games to get that elusive medal. Yet when ’88 arrives, he won’t even make it to the U.S. Olympic Trials. On his way to running immortality, Alberto Salazar has run into a wall.
* * *
—
Bob Larsen watches all this from a distance. He doesn’t know Salazar personally, so he is as mystified as anyone about his collapse. The rise and fall of Alberto Salazar becomes the mysterious terror tale of American running. At twenty-four, he is the greatest distance runner on the planet. At twenty-six, he is washed up. The crash is so sudden and seemingly so inexplicable. Larsen assumes there must be a reason, but whatever that reason is, he is fairly certain over-aggressive training is not solely to blame. He will be fully certain of this before too long. This idea that soon takes hold, that Salazar ran himself ragged and out of a career that might have been so great for so long, Bob Larsen just doesn’t buy it. The human body he knows doesn’t work that way.
There are several reasons for Salazar’s collapse, though even Alberto won’t know many of them for another decade. He suffered from exercise-induced asthma and depression. In his thirties, he takes Prozac, and his world goes from black and white to color. He even manages to win the 1994 Comrades Marathon in South Africa, a 56-mile footrace that is a favorite among ultra-runners. In retrospect, given that Salazar suffered from these two physical ailments, it’s a wonder he won any races at all.
No one, though, knows about any of this when Salazar is crashing and burning in 1984 and 1985 and 1986, when he is disappearing from the rarefied world of elite running when he should be peaking. The best distance runners often run their fastest marathons in their late twenties and early thirties. Salazar is long done by then, unable to overcome the stress fractures in his feet and the tendinitis in his knee and the severity of the strained hamstring. These are all perfectly normal problems that anyone trying to be the fastest marathoner in the world has to face from time to time. Usually, a period of rest does wonders. Alberto Salazar never learned how to rest.
What most elite runners do know about Salazar is this—no one ever ran harder, or more intensely, than he did. In races and in training, he ran with an unrelenting ferocity. If Terry Cotton always ran as though he was being chased by a man with an axe, then Salazar ran as though he was the man holding the axe, chasing down anyone who dared to get across the finish line more quickly than he could, or even just complete a workout. He never bothered to try to hide any of this. Stay with me if you can, because I know you can’t.
So when the fastest distance runners in mid-1980s America talk about Alberto Salazar, this is what they talk about—be careful, or else you, too, might run into a wall. Perhaps, some of them come to believe, all of us are born with only so many miles in our legs. They are like the physicians of the 1950s, who believe the human heart is born with only so many ticks, rather than understanding it as a muscle that can grow stronger, or weaker, depending on how it is used. You want your running career to be finished by age twenty-five, they say? Then run yourself ragged like Alberto Salazar. Want a long and fruitful career? Ease back on the mileage and the intensity. That way you will avoid burnout and injury.
Bob Larsen knows something else—it’s the surest way to avoid winning as well.
* * *
—
The decline of Salazar coincides with the rise of the British middle distance specialist, Sebastian Coe. Coe, the son of an aristocratic English family, takes the middle distance world by storm in 1979, when he sets three world records in forty-one days to become, without a doubt, the fastest 800- and 1,500-meter runner on the planet. Handsome and learned, with a degree in economics and social history from Loughborough University, Coe is everything the mythical British gentleman athlete is supposed to be. He is the worthiest of heirs to Oxford’s Dr. Roger Bannister, the legend who broke the four-minute mile. Before his career is through, Coe will win consecutive Olympic gold (1,500) and silver (800) medals at the 1980 and 1984 Games. He will still be at the top of his game at the end of 1986.
Coe is largely coached by his father, Peter Coe, an engineer who guides his career from the time he is a schoolboy champion. In 1981, he brings aboard an American physiologist named David Martin to help. In 1991, Coe and Martin publish a book called Training Distance Runners: The Art and Science of Optimal Training by Two of the World’s Leading Experts. The book becomes something of a bible among coaches and researchers in the blossoming world of sports science because it’s supposed to contain the secret sauce that went into the creation of the greatest middle distance runner of his time.
The book—a weighty tome as big as a textbook that runs nearly 300 pages—carries a warning about the need to balance the tension between training and stress. It’s healthy advice, then and now. But Coe and Martin also advise against running at your hardest for more than 20 minutes. They suggest a top college 10,000-meter runner will do fine training at a 6:30 pace for 10 miles and topping out at 75 miles per week. The book supports “capacity training”—what in Larsen’s world are known as threshold runs—but not for longer than 5 or 6 minutes.
Then there is the so-called Rule of Specific Quantity: do the least amount of the most sensible training to bring about improvement. The idea is to err on the side of undertraining rather than overtraining. Sensible, yes, but the list of champions who win without spending any time running on the edge—where the Toads and Shorter and Rodgers and Salazar lived—is a short one.
There is also almost no mention of George Gandy, the nationally recognized athletics coach at Loughborough University, with whom Coe spent the fall and winter following his father’s high-intensity workouts. Those carried him through the heart of the competitive season. He spent the fall and winter on long, hard group runs with plenty of other top British runners. With Gandy supervising, they endured 80–100-mile weeks on hilly, challenging terrain. This work likely gave Coe a base of endurance. Without it, the high-intensity training may very well have been fruitless.
While everyone spends the 1980s reading the Coe and Martin tome, and gossiping about what felled Salazar, no one bothers paying too much attention to results. Within the results is an obvious, undeniable truth. Despite record numbers of participants, the line of great American distance runners has run dry.
Fall 1993, Between Los Angeles and San Diego
That thought—the desert that American distance running has become—courses through Bob Larsen’s mind as he heads south on the 405, on the way to the home of a seventeen-year-old immigrant from Eritrea whose name he can barely pronounce. In the passenger seat is his assistant coach, Eric Peterson. Peterson’s main purpose on this journey is to give Larsen a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down each time he tries to say “Keflezighi” correctly. “Kef-LEZZ-ghi” is what it’s supposed to be.
The numbers are depressing. No American high school boy has run the four-minute mile in a quarter century, since Marty Liquori in 1967. A young woman from Maine, Joan Benoit, blazed to the Olympic gold medal in 1984 and set world records in the marathon, but there is no one behind her. The marathon world record has dropped below 2:07. Most elite American men can’t break 2:10. They are nearly a mile behind the best of the best. The two-mile times that Larsen’s Toads were running in high school in the early 1970s would win championships in the 1990s. Prefontaine still has his name in the American distance record books, nearly twenty years after his death. How could this possibly have happened in such a massive, wealthy country where running had boomed during the past twenty years as no one could have imagined it would?
What happened? Larsen is pretty sure the explanation is pretty simple. Elite distance runners in this country simply aren’t training as hard as they used to, as hard as the Toads did back when he was spending most of his waking hours trying to figure out the best way to make people run far fast. There are other problems, too. The money in the stick-and-ball sports has exploded. They are pulling the best athletes in ways they didn’t a generation before, when no one who played sports made any real money. There are even a few million kids playing soccer now. The sport was barely a thing in the U.S. a generation ago. It is especially kin
d to slender kids with freakish endurance, kids who might have turned into terrific distance runners with the right cultivation.
Also, the shoe companies, which have largely replaced the old collection of regional running clubs, haven’t helped the situation. Americans dominate the sprints and struggle in the distance races. So the big money and sponsorships from places like Nike and adidas have flowed to the champions, the people who bring home the Olympic medals. Meanwhile, the best American distance runners are having trouble making ends meet. They are scattered across the country. They run alone.
Larsen knows he may be part of the problem, too. He’s taken his eye off the ball. While producing all those gold medalists in the speed events at UCLA, he’s barely given any thought or money to developing the next generation of distance demons. That isn’t a coincidence. He’s part of a college system that disincentivizes funding a distance runner. College coaches are paid to win track meets and championships. They have a dozen scholarships to share for the whole team, and they largely go to those versatile speed guys. Even now, on this 150-mile journey to San Diego, Larsen figures maybe he will offer a half scholarship to this kid whose name he can barely pronounce. Anything else would be a form of professional suicide.
As Larsen and Peterson approach the Keflezighi home, Larsen gets that sense of nostalgic comfort he often has when he comes to his old stomping grounds. He is back where it all began. He knows he is different now. He’s driving down in a Mercedes, but he knows what happened here in this place—where the farm boy sold newspapers and worked his way through college and got his degrees and became a teacher and coach and a father figure to all these young men—is the essence of who he is.
Running to the Edge Page 20