The Keflezighis live near downtown San Diego, not far from where Bob Larsen grew up. They’ve been here for five years. He doesn’t know all that much about them, just that Meb was born in a country called Eritrea and somehow landed in the U.S. in seventh grade. He’s been winning lots of races ever since. Since Larsen first saw him run at Drake Stadium in the spring of his junior year, he’s had a whale of a cross country season. He ran a course record 15:04 for 3.1 miles at San Diego’s Morley Field to win the section championship, and a 15:02 in Fresno to take the state title. He finished second in the national championships, running a 14:53 on the same Morley Field course where he’d run that 15:04 a few weeks before. Larsen walks into the cramped, spotless Keflezighi home, and he realizes the times and the titles are just a tiny sliver of what the Keflezighis are all about.
First, there are a lot of them. Meb is one of nine children, and there is another on the way. They have been in the U.S. since 1987. Before that, they lived in Italy, the country Meb’s father, Russom, had fled to during the thirty-year war between Eritrea and Ethiopia. The story of that escape has become a family legend. In 1981, Russom learned that Ethiopian troops considered him an enemy and wanted to kill him. He trekked 225 miles on foot, dodging Ethiopian soldiers, bandits, and hyenas along the way to safety in Sudan. From there, he caught a boat to Italy, where he lived for four years until he saved up enough money to send for his family. In 1987, the Keflezighis received permission to move to the U.S. They arrived with a few suitcases of clothes and a few hundred dollars. No one spoke much English. In Eritrean, their son Mebrahtom’s name means, “Let there be light.”
On one of his first days of school, Meb runs a mile in a little more than five minutes. His gym teacher called a local track coach to tell him he had a kid who is going to go to the Olympics one day. Thirteen years later, Meb will prove him right.
The Keflezighi household was hardly a sports haven though. Each day the children came home from school and sat for hours at the kitchen table studying English. A family from Mission Hills, the Van Camps, befriended Meb at a track meet early in high school. Several days each week, Meb traveled to their house after school for tutoring sessions. The work did not come easily. English is Meb’s third language, after all, but his grades and his running times were strong enough to attract interest from Harvard and Princeton and now Bob Larsen from UCLA.
Larsen and Peterson show Meb a video about UCLA. They talk about John Wooden and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Meb, as well as his little brother, Merhawi, known as “Hawi,” are pretty much hooked. Larsen is, too. He has come here planning to offer Meb a half scholarship. He changes his mind. The Keflezighis represent the country at its best—the land of opportunity coming to life as it can when citizens offer to help, as they often do. After meeting the Keflezighis and hearing their story, he decides to offer Meb a full ride.
As he leaves the Keflezighi home that day, Bob Larsen knows he has done the right thing. He also is beginning to dream, to think about something far bigger than UCLA and NCAA championships. He knows Meb is plenty fast, but there is something about his dedication. There is this intangible fiber that has set Bob Larsen’s mind racing. Maybe, he thinks, we can do something truly special with this kid. Who cares if all those foreigners, all those East Africans, have essentially taken over. Maybe, one day, this kid with the funny name, Meb Keflezighi, can make America fast again.
* This world record was actually removed two years later. After a re-measurement of the course using stricter regulations that accounted for elite runners who know how to take the shortest route on every turn, the New York City Marathon was determined to be 148 meters short of the world standard. Salazar was not pleased.
New York City, November 2013
The one woman I have thought about leaving my wife for was an eighty-one-year-old former Minnesota farm girl named Joy Johnson.
Joy, the most aptly named person I have ever met, had sturdy, pointed shoulders, smooth, tan skin that resembled soft leather, and a leggy, slim-waisted figure women fifty years her junior would kill for. She rose with a burst in the darkness of 4 a.m. at her 1950s, four-bedroom ranch house on a quiet street in south San Jose. She read her Bible for an hour, then set out into the eucalyptus- and citrus-tree-scented air on her predawn run, her running mantra from the Book of Isaiah buzzing through her head. “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
How Joy loved to run. And how she loved to race. Never mind that she didn’t start to run until she was in her fifties and didn’t run her first marathon until she was sixty-one.
In 2007 she won the eighty–eighty-four age group at the New York Marathon, but she finished in seven hours and 15 minutes. That was far too slow she decided. So she cranked up her training. She ran 50 to 55 miles each week instead of 30 to 35. She ran hills and bleachers at the local high school football field, and she worked to build up her core strength at a running camp in Minnesota.
The following October she ran the Twin Cities Marathon in six hours, six minutes, and 48 seconds, more than an hour faster than her time in New York the previous year.
Like any aging runner, Johnson faced enormous obstacles. Aging affects every system the body uses in long distance running. An elderly heart doesn’t pump as fast or as hard, so oxygen—the body’s gasoline—doesn’t circulate as efficiently. An average sixty-year-old pumps 20 percent less oxygenated blood than a twenty-year-old. Like all human tissue, the lungs become stiffer and less expansive. Muscles atrophy at an increasing rate and ligaments and tendons grow brittle making injuries far more likely. Muscle strength generally peaks at thirty. After seventy, it declines 30 percent per decade. Knowing that, Joy never skimped on the strength training at the running camp Dick Beardsley (remember him, second in the Duel in the Sun) put on in Minnesota. He pushed her through a series of stomach crunches, push-ups, and hovers (holding the body in a push-up position) that helped her avoid becoming hunched as her body tired. Into her mid-eighties she ran eleven races each year, including three marathons, the 12-kilometer Bay to Breakers race through San Francisco, and the 13.1-mile Securian Frozen Half Marathon in St. Paul each January. “Cold as the dickens but it’s so much fun,” she told me one morning when we ran together. “I want to die running,” she said.
On November 4, 2013, my girl completed the New York Marathon for the 25th time, even though she tripped at mile 16 and suffered cuts to her face. She was still bleeding when she crossed the finish line in the dark nearly eight hours after she started. She got bandaged up in the medical tent but didn’t bother going to a hospital for further examination. She woke the next morning and followed the ritual that had become a part of her New York Marathon routine—she went to stand outside the Today show studios with her medal to say hello to Al Roker. As usual, Roker found her and shared a few words. She felt tired after that venture and went back to her hotel room to lie down. She fell asleep and never woke up. She was eighty-six years old.
I cried in the middle of the Wall Street Journal newsroom when I learned of her death. Then I sat down at my computer and wrote her obituary while wiping tears off my face.
A friend and fellow runner wandered over to console me as I typed. “She lived for eighty-six years, completed a marathon, and went to sleep,” he said. “That’s about as good a death as anyone could ever get.”
Maybe he was right.
Higher
Sydney, Australia, September 2000
Bob Larsen is knocking on doors.
Everyone else has come to the Australian capital to watch or participate in the Olympic Games. He has come to do a little of that, too. His star pupil, Meb Keflezighi, is here to run in the 10,000 meters. Bob and Meb both know he has little chance of winning. That’s fine with them. He’s just twenty-four years old, a year out of college. His time will come. Bob
just needs to figure out how to prepare him the right way. That’s why he’s knocking on the doors of sponsors and benefactors of the sport he can find here, 7,000 miles across the Pacific. Bob Larsen has an idea. He needs money to make it happen.
The money is not for him. Bob is just fine on that front. He retired from UCLA in the spring as one of the most successful and respected college track and field coaches. With nearly forty years of service to the state of California, he has a healthy pension and plenty of money socked away for retirement. He also got into California real estate at the right time, investing in opportunities throughout the state in addition to owning a home in Brentwood. But now that he no longer has to win championships for UCLA he has a mission. He needs to figure out how to make the U.S. competitive in distance running again, for Meb’s benefit, and for his own.
He has been pondering this problem since he convinced Meb to come to UCLA back in 1993 and through those four years when Meb was beginning to develop into a grown-up runner and competing as a Bruin. Finding a solution has become more urgent the past two years, ever since Meb graduated and decided to try to make a go at life as a professional runner. In the professional game, if you don’t win you don’t eat.
For Larsen, it is both personal and public. He was there at the creation of the distance running boom, then he was part of the glory years in the 1970s. Distance running is like the music of his youth, an essential part of who he is that will never go away. He is going to be named the distance coach for the U.S. team at the 2004 Olympics. That means he is on the clock, and there is a ridiculous amount of work to do between now and then if his team is going to deliver something approaching a respectable performance. Here in Sydney, the U.S. has just one man in the marathon. He qualified into the team’s automatic spot. Rod DeHaven, the U.S. qualifier, won the U.S. Trials, but he failed to run faster than 2:12:00. So his spot in the race is essentially charity.
There are plenty of folks, most of the running cognoscenti in fact, who believe Larsen’s mission is not possible. There are no U.S. men or women ranked in the top 10 in the 800 meters, the 1,500, the 3,000-meter steeplechase, the 5,000, the 10,000, or the marathon. Even Meb, Larsen’s great prodigy, is far off the pace of his top competitors. The night before the 10,000 final, Meb’s father tells him that it is God’s will for him to win the race. Meb and Bob appreciate the sentiment, but the 10,000-meter champions of the era, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia and Paul Tergat of Kenya, can complete the distance in 26.5 minutes. Meb has just figured out how to break 28 minutes. Whether Meb’s father likes it or not, God’s will is going to have to wait.
Larsen believes God has enough on his plate at the moment without worrying about the fate of American distance running. Larsen, on the other hand, has been obsessing about this problem nonstop in recent months after years of having it gnaw away near the back of his mind. It’s what this kid deserves, he thinks. It’s what this country’s distance runners deserve—those quirky souls who were once the envy of the world. And who cares what the running aristocracy thinks. There was a time when no one thought much of Monte Vista High, or the Grossmont Griffins, or a bunch of Toads.
* * *
—
Larsen didn’t know exactly what to expect of Meb when he arrived at UCLA. He sized Meb up as a very good 5,000 guy with good range, a runner who could drop down to the mile when needed or jump up to the 10,000. There were bumps the first couple years. At Meb’s first NCAA championships, he figured he could compete for the title in the 5,000. He hung with the leaders, thinking he had gained enough speed since high school to compete with the big boys. With two laps to go, he fired his engines and closed in 1:57 for the final half mile. The leaders closed in 1:53. That meant he was a good 30 meters behind the best college runners at that distance.
Part of Meb’s problem was figuring out how to manage the all-you-can-eat buffet at the UCLA cafeteria. Growing up poor in a family that would ultimately include his nine brothers and sisters, training every afternoon, he got used to ending meals a shade on the hungry side. At UCLA he packed in pancakes and waffles and a bagel at breakfast, pizza, a sandwich and soup at lunch, pasta and more pizza at dinner, which he finished off with Klondike bars. His 5'5" frame carried 135 pounds. Other runners his size weighed 10 pounds less.
Then sophomore year, he got seriously pissed when he told an academic advisor he wanted to major in communication studies. She told him it was a difficult major that only elite people should pursue. He heard what any student of African descent might hear—thinly veiled racism. At training, he began to get frustrated with the terrain of busy, traffic-clogged Westwood. He had to drive if he wanted to get to the trails in the hills above Malibu. He didn’t like carrying the team of distance runners who weren’t his equal. He approached the assistant coach, Eric Peterson, with the idea of transferring to Arkansas, the reigning track and field power of the day. Meb believed he would find a better group to train with there. He wasn’t wrong.
Peterson absorbed the suggestion and responded with a question. “Who does Haile train with?” he asked. He was talking about Haile Gebrselassie, the king of distance running. The question carried a message. If he reached his potential, he was going to get to the point that every great runner reaches, when there is no one fast enough or strong enough to keep up. He could be that good and be a trailblazer at UCLA, Peterson said. And so Meb stayed.
He ran in the morning before class with a single teammate and in the afternoons with the rest of the squad. He cruised up the grassy island in the middle of San Vicente Boulevard to dodge the traffic in Westwood. He trekked up to Malibu, or to the beach in Santa Monica. That spring, he won the 5,000 at the conference championship and believed so strongly he had a shot at the national championship that he visualized the race every day for a week before the meet. Then he came out flat and faded to ninth. The disappointment carried a lesson—trust your training, do not overthink a race to the point of exhaustion. “The hay is in the barn” becomes something of a pre-race mantra for him.
A year later he is the most determined, most prepared collegiate runner in the country. Ahead of the NCAAs, he attempts a six-by-800 workout. It includes one minute rest between each half mile. The idea is to start out hard, and to somehow make each successive interval faster than the last one. This is what the watch says—2:04, 2:02, 2:00, 1:58, 1:56, 1:53. In the 10,000 at the championships, he pushes the pace from the moment the gun fires. He wins by nine seconds.
Four days later, just before the 5,000, Larsen spotted him stretching in a downpour. Everyone else was hunting for cover. Meb smiled at his coach. He doesn’t even seem to know it’s raining, Larsen thinks. In the race, Meb hung with the lead pack until there were three laps left. Then it was time to go. He won by two seconds to become the first NCAA double-champion in the 5,000 and the 10,000 since 1985. For the first time Meb thought, maybe I can make a living doing this.
In the summer, a stress fracture in his foot hobbled him, so he got a late start to the cross country season. He and Larsen crafted a training plan that had him peaking at the national championships in November. Worry about nothing else, Larsen told him. At the Pac-10 championships, he was leading with Bernard Lagat of Washington State, but developed a stitch in his side. He thought of what Larsen had told him. Keep your eyes on the big prize. He let Lagat go, knowing a conference championship was not the goal. Two weeks later, at the cross-country nationals in South Carolina, he led a pack at the front that included five future Olympians through the first two miles in 9:08. At the four-mile mark he told his friendly rival Lagat it was time to go. Lagat couldn’t manage it, so Meb went alone and won by seven seconds.
The spring championships didn’t go as well. Meb was flat early in the 10,000 and decided against pushing the pace like he usually did. With 600 meters to go, three Stanford runners jumped him and blew him away. Food poisoning felled him ahead of the 5,000. It’s fine, Larsen told him. He still had one of
the great college running accomplishments on his résumé—he’d been just the third NCAA runner to win the 5,000, 10,000, and cross country championships in the same calendar year. He won the indoor 5,000 national championship that year, too. More importantly, he had embraced the idea of being a trailblazer.
With his four years of college eligibility gone, it was time for Meb to figure out how to be a professional runner. He and Coach Bob decided the path of least resistance was to take advantage of his five-year scholarship and its free room and board so he could stay in Westwood and train with Larsen. Larsen even sold him his first car—a 1973 Ford LTD. It was about as big as a small aircraft, but at $50 the price was right.
He solicited all the shoe companies and got a $30,000 sponsorship deal with Nike that included some nasty reduction clauses. If he didn’t perform, the salary dropped. It’s the best he can do. Welcome to the cruel and uncoddled world of pro sports. There was also a wakeup call that summer, when he ran the 10,000 at the Goodwill Games in New York. He got lapped. Welcome to the senior circuit, son. Then, with his scholarship complete, he had to find yet another way to fend for himself, so he moved to the United States Olympic Committee’s Training Center in Chula Vista, about fifteen miles south of downtown San Diego. It was a spartan life. A shared room and a basic daily routine of eat, train, sleep, repeat. There is good food though and Meb also had a part-time job at the welcome center of the complex to make a little cash.
Larsen, who was finishing his last year at UCLA, drove down a couple times a week to oversee Meb’s training. It sort of works.
Running to the Edge Page 21