It was in the winter of 2000, when Meb was tromping through the hills of the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, that Larsen first reached out to Vigil. Vigil was working with a small group of postgraduate runners in Alamosa. Larsen, who was trying to get some company for Meb, told Joe to bring his crew out to San Diego for a stint to escape the worst months of the Colorado winter. Free room and board, and plenty of high-quality trails in the area. Vigil decided to give it a shot. There, Larsen and Joe discussed the ultimate vision of the kind of team he wanted to create. Six men and six women—even though Larsen has barely coached women—based somewhere very high, maybe in Mammoth Lakes, California, elevation 8,000 feet, but within a thirty-minute drive of 5,000 feet and trails scaling to 9,000 and higher. A five-hour drive south is the Olympic Training Center, where they can live and train for free if the snow gets too relentless in the eastern Sierras in the winter, or if they need a few weeks at sea level.
Larsen had been holding camps for his UCLA runners at Mammoth for years. Maybe the owners of the ski area will help out with lodging? They might like the idea of marketing the area as a running Mecca where the elite of the elite want to be based. It’s an American version of what the Africans are doing.
Unbeknownst to Bob and Joe at the time, there’s also a collection of owners of road races in the U.S., Running USA they call themselves. They love the idea of creating an elite team and are trying to figure out how to support it. They know distance running and their livelihoods will likely collapse if the U.S. can’t produce some champions to inspire the masses. It’s been fifteen years since Salazar crashed and burned, and the country stands to lose another generation of potential greats.
Joe Vigil is seventy-one years old. He’s supposed to be edging into retirement and moving to Arizona. He’s still got a group of penniless and good-but-not-great postgraduate runners in Alamosa, including one woman, an Arkansas graduate named Deena Drossin, who is knocking on the door of elite and needs something like what Bob Larsen is talking about, in the worst way. He knows how depressing the numbers are. In 1980, there were 188 Americans who ran the marathon under 2:20. Now there are about 20 who could achieve that. In Japan, over the same time period, the numbers have grown from 59 to nearly 80. In Kenya, it was one in 1980 and more than 500 now.
If we can get the money, Vigil tells Larsen, I’m in.
* * *
—
With Meb’s Olympic race over, Larsen is free to resume his hunt for funding. Some of the smaller shoe companies are flirting with a contribution. Larsen wants the big fish, though. He wants Nike. In the final days of the Olympics, he’s got a meeting set with John Capriotti, the company’s head of track and field. The Swoosh has to support this, he figures.
He sits down with Capriotti over lunch at Nike’s hospitality center on a bright warm day of the Australian spring and lays out his plan. Capriotti rolls his eyes. Really? You actually think you can beat the Africans? Yes, Larsen says, he does.
Capriotti is about as convinced as Geoff Hollister was a quarter century before, when Larsen told him he had a pretty talented group from San Diego called the Toads that he thought just might be good enough to do some damage at the national championships. Nike was a fledgling company then, still existing month-to-month, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy every so often, hand-selling its trend-setting products. Now it is a multibillion-dollar, worldwide enterprise that owns basketball, thanks to Michael Jordan. It even has a golf division, launched to support its new flavor of the month, Tiger Woods. The Swoosh has become one of the world’s most powerful brands.
Well, Capriotti explains, if Nike were to get involved, it would expect to get a clean shirt, meaning the runners would wear a singlet with the Swoosh on it and nothing else.
That’s not what this is about, Larsen explains. This isn’t as simple as a commercial opportunity, a sponsorship to promote shoe sales. This is about reviving U.S. long distance running, the sport that is the reason Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman created Nike in the first place.
Sorry, Capriotti says. The payoff is too unlikely. We’re going to pass.
That’s fine, Larsen tells himself. This is how it always is.
* * *
—
When he meets up with Meb for a post-Olympics sit-down, the conversation quickly turns away from the lessons of the Olympic track to how much work remains and what’s next. Then Coach Bob breaks the news to his star student. We’re going to the mountains, he says. Those Africans who take all the medals in these championships, we’re going to make you into one of them.
That is exactly what Meb Keflezighi wants to hear.
Spring 2016
“Look at me,” the doctor says.
I am sitting on the edge of the table in his examination room. The bottom of my legs hang over the side. He wants me to look at him so I don’t look down at the eight-inch needle he is about to slide into the soft notch on the side of my right knee. Behind the needle is a glass tube filled with cortisone, the steroid that you really aren’t supposed to put inside your body. JFK used to have shots of cortisone every day for his back. They say it was eating away at his body by the end.
There’s an MRI that shows I have a torn meniscus. I remember feeling the rupture as I lunged for a soccer ball during an early morning game with a bunch of middle-aged hackers some months before. Then there was five days of skiing with my girls out in Utah. I ate lots of Advil because other than running, skiing is the thing I always want to do. I live to fly through powder and ride the chairlift with my growing girls. A couple of them are teenagers now, women of few words when it comes to talking to their dad, except on chairlifts, where they talk to me all I want. A few days after that trip, I followed through on my plan to run the Central Park Marathon. It’s an unfancy neighborhood race that covers five laps around the lower loop of the park. It has about 1 percent of the participants of the New York City Marathon and zero percent of the support, though such races have their own, low-key charms. My knee hasn’t stopped aching since. Now I can barely walk. I really don’t want to have surgery.
“Don’t look at the needle, look at me,” the doctor says again. He’s a sports medicine physician, a friend and a hard-core runner and triathlete. He wants me back on the roads almost as badly as I do. That’s why I go see him.
It slides through skin and tissue and I feel the pressure of the fluid being pushed out of the syringe and into the swelling mass around the meniscus. He tells me the relief will come almost instantly, that within minutes I will be able to straighten my leg as I have not been able to in weeks. That will allow me to work the muscles around the knee, build some strength back on the bike and in the pool and with some bends and squats. This is what I have to do if I want to keep running as I age. “There’s nothing wrong with you other than you’re getting older,” he says. “It’s what we do.” He pushes on the top of the syringe one more time to get the last bit of fluid out of the needle. I look down, ignoring his instructions, because I do want to see that thin, long metal buried in my leg.
“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “You’ll be back.”
Up High
Mammoth Lakes, California, Stanford, California, Winter–Spring 2001
This is not the Mammoth Lakes that Meb Keflezighi remembers from his college days. That Mammoth Lakes, the one he enjoyed in the sparkling late summer, was filled with crisp mornings, warm sunshine, and raucous dinners with his teammates.
Meb got his first taste of Mammoth as a freshman at UCLA, when Larsen hauled the cross country team there for a preseason altitude camp. He was running for maybe 20 minutes on the endless trails, the cracking blue sky and the peaks of the eastern Sierras looming above him, when he turned to a teammate and asked him what the chances might be of moving the UCLA campus to Mammoth Lakes. Not so good unfortunately. He and his teammates took turns getting lost on the Inyo Craters trail, which runs off the Mammoth
Scenic Loop, and travels through a forest filled with towering, ancient Jeffrey pines. The payoff is a series of volcanic craters, a couple of which are filled with blue-green water and look like small lakes. The views stretch for miles, from the San Joaquin Ridge to the White Mountains. He was a long way from downtown San Diego.
* * *
—
This Mammoth is cold and lonely. The calendar says it’s the tail end of the winter, but spring comes late at 8,000 feet. The mornings are more frigid than crisp. The sun isn’t all that warm. The company is limited to Bob and Philip Price, a top U.S. distance runner, but hardly a substitute for the entire UCLA distance crew. They are bunking together in a condo each night, then hitting the roads and the trails of the eastern Sierras each morning. It’s something of a trial run for Bob, and even for Joe Vigil, who is in close contact with Bob on this little venture. It’s a three-week jaunt to altitude at a time when Meb is running as well as he ever has, solidifying his place as perhaps the country’s top young distance runner.
The streak started in March, in Jacksonville, Florida, at the Gate River Run, a 15-kilometer race (9.25 miles) across the St. Johns River and through downtown Jacksonville. It’s a distance nearly every long distance runner loves—long enough to scare away the speed specialists but short enough to go nearly full tilt on their toes from the start. For the elites, it’s the first big race of the spring, a testing ground to show how well-prepared they might or might not be for the more high-profile events of the spring and summer.
When the starter’s pistol fired Meb headed to the lead. At the end, a little more than nine miles later, it wasn’t even close. Meb averages a 4:39 pace and beats Alan Culpepper by 21 seconds to win in 43:14. Rod DeHaven, the lone American to qualify for the Olympic marathon in Sydney the previous year, is 82 seconds behind, or more than a quarter mile.
Then Meb headed off to Belgium for the World Cross Country Championships, the first international measuring stick of the year. In near-freezing weather, Meb battles his way to 13th place. More importantly, he and Abdi Abdirahman, Nick Rogers, and Bob Kennedy, who at thirty-one is part of a kind of lost generation of U.S. distance runners, manage to take third place in the team competition. There are three Kenyans ahead of Meb, but there are plenty of other East Africans behind him, including Kenyans and Ethiopians. Maybe, Meb thought, I can become one of those Africans who finish at the front. And this was the moment when Bob decided to see just what Meb might be able to accomplish with a month in the mountains. When they returned from Belgium, he delivered the message—it’s time to go up high.
Sounds good, Meb said. Then, days later he’s sharing a two-bedroom ski condo with Bob and Philip Price, his old rival from Arkansas. There’s a sleeping loft that Meb starts out in, since Bob is the coach and he gets one of the bedrooms. Meb has his books, his Bible, even a chilly creek near the condo, with water at roughly 45 degrees, which is perfect for soaking his legs after a run. Still there is little else to do but sleep, eat, train, and do it all over again.
Weather permitting, they can head up to 9,000 feet and run the rugged terrain around Lookout Mountain or Bald Mountain. For intervals, there’s a dirt road near the Owens River, where the water is so clear and the sun so bright it looks like the ice-covered, granite faces of the mountains are immersed in it.
If it’s snowing too hard up high, they can pile in the cars and drive forty minutes down the mountain to Bishop, where there’s even an old gravel track 4,000 feet above sea level. Meb loves that track and the chance he gets to run on the watch and see if this life is actually working. Sometimes it seems like it is, sometimes not. Running at altitude he keeps seeing ugly times when he looks at his wrist, times that wouldn’t even qualify them for some of the top competitions.
One afternoon, it’s snowy up high and windy and miserable down in Bishop. Running fast is near impossible. The spring season is coming. The social pickings are minimal. He begins to think this might not be working at all. He longs for the warmth and comforts of the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, the warm San Diego breezes, a city, even a big town, where the social options might be a little more plentiful. Living like this, so remotely, with such a singular purpose, has never been the American way. “Do we really need to be doing this?” Meb barks at Larsen.
Yes, he says. We do. Trust me.
* * *
—
Meb and Bob stay in Mammoth until the end of April, when Bob decides it’s time for a tactical strike. There’s an international meet at Stanford the first week in May. The word around the circuit is that Bob Kennedy is eyeing the 10,000 at Stanford for an assault on the U.S. record, set in 1986 by a Minnesotan named Mark Nenow. It’s one of those records that annoy the hell out of Larsen when he thinks about the crappy state of long distance running in the U.S. Nenow’s mark of 27:20.56 is nearly a minute slower than the world record at the time. The world was already past that American best time in 1984, two years before Nenow set his mark.
How was it possible for the world to have gotten more than a minute faster since then but for Americans to have stagnated? Now, Kennedy, whose U.S. records in the 3,000 and the 5,000 had been set in the mid-1990s, was figuring an American record in the 10,000 would serve as the capstone to a career. As the top U.S. distance runner of the post-Salazar generation, he’s got a fancy six-figure Nike deal and a sneaker named for him. The “Zoom,” it’s called.
Meb is still running under his $30,000 deal from Nike, with penalties in the not-very-fine print if his performance slips. Whenever Meb sees John Capriotti from Nike, he asks him what it’s going to take to get a six-figure deal. “Cap,” as everyone knows him, always has the same answer. Start with an American record, he says, then we can talk.
All April in Mammoth, Meb was fairly certain that the U.S. record in the 10,000 isn’t attainable, not by him, at least. He’s never gone faster than 27:53 at that distance. Whether he’s doing threshold runs along the rolling roadways, or intervals around an old cinder track, the numbers aren’t promising much in the way of success. He is sluggish. His legs feel heavy. His lungs struggle to grasp the air that flowed so easily in and, seemingly, all the way out to his fingers and his toes. Larsen tries to remind him he is high above the sea now, running at 4,000 to 8,000 feet. It’s a world away from Jacksonville and Brussels. It’s supposed to feel crappy, he says.
This is where the biggest challenge of training at altitude comes into play. Running is all about confidence, especially early in a professional career, when you are still trying to figure out who you are as a runner and a person, if you have the courage and the willingness to endure as much pain as you assume all those other guys on the start line are willing to. A developing runner’s memory is also dangerously short. In the mountains, it can be hard for Meb to remember what it feels like to run fast when he is feeling sluggish and running slower, to believe he will be fast again. It’s no different from the mental strain of an injury, trying to remember what it once felt like to run free and without pain.
Meb also knows that if Kennedy is aiming at this race to break the U.S. record, the field is going to be stacked. Nike will insert rabbits and pacesetters into the field to help him hit his splits. These runners will set the right pace for Kennedy to follow, then drop back and out long before the finish line. Plus, there will be a handful of other U.S. elites there (Abdirahman, Alan Culpepper, Nick Rogers) in addition to a collection of top African runners who are going to win the actual race.
That’s why this is your time, Larsen tells him. Kennedy has the weight of an entire Nike-managed production on his shoulders. All you have to do, he says, is show up and run fast.
The week before the race they head down the mountain and stay at UCLA for some last-minute prep work. This is the first time Meb has been on an all-weather track at sea level in more than a month. He isn’t running on an old cinder track, or on dirt or gravel trails, or on the rolling roads, an
d he certainly isn’t a mile and a half above sea level in the crisp thin air of the mountains. He’s running on the track of UCLA’s Drake Stadium, in the moist spring of Los Angeles, and he’s flying. On Tuesday and Thursday before the race he does mile repeats that just a week before he struggled to finish in four and a half minutes. Now his times are closer to 4:15. On the other days he works on his speed, ripping off 300-meter near-sprints in 41 seconds. All of it feels easy. Bob doesn’t have to say anything. The numbers say it all. Finally, four weeks after first venturing to Mammoth, Meb gets it. He’s as fast as he has ever been.
The night of the race, the field is everything Meb thought it would be. Three of Kenya’s best are there—Abraham Chebii, Ben Maiyo, and Luke Kipkosgei. Japan’s best distance runner, Toshinari Takaoka, has also made the trip, and the best of America is there, too. In addition to Kennedy, Culpepper, Abdi, and Meb, there are also those pacesetters to keep Kennedy on track for a time below 27:20.
As he walks to the start line, Meb realizes no one is even thinking about him, or how or where he has been spending the past six weeks. He knows this is exactly the way any runner would want it, to be the one they never see coming until it’s too late. There is a part of him though that burns with rage. He, after all, was the U.S. 10,000 champion the year before. Shouldn’t Nike be setting up something like this for him? Isn’t he the one who should have a personal shoe and a six-figure salary?
Watching from the side of the track, Bob knows exactly what is going through Meb’s head. Meb has been trying to prove to people he is more than simply a spindly refugee from Eritrea for years. It’s part of what makes him so fast, so willing to invite the pain that comes with the journey to the edge. That’s why this night is going to be his night. It’s why Bob told him to come here in the first place.
Running to the Edge Page 23