For the first half of the race, Meb tucks in behind Kennedy and his coterie of pacesetters. They pass through the halfway mark in 13:35. Meb has never felt better, and he knows it’s time to do what he always does in races that go like this—push early. He zips past Kennedy and sets his sights on the Kenyans. He picks up their rhythm. With three kilometers to go, Kennedy quits, and Meb knows the night will belong to him. He stays on the heels of the Africans, and crosses the finish line in 27:13.98, seven seconds faster than the record that has stood for fifteen years. He’s also 40 seconds faster than his personal best. He doesn’t win the overall race. The Africans are still supreme. But Meb is now faster than any American has ever been at this distance, and he sure as hell is going to get that boost up to six figures from Nike.
Then, a simple and obvious question ripples through America’s elite running circles—what in the world went on up there in Mammoth Lakes?
And now it all comes together. Joe Vigil is ready to put his plans to retire on hold. The Running USA group, those race organizers that desperately want an American star to rev up interest in their races, decide to cast their lot with Bob and Joe and their concept of a team that trains together in Mammoth Lakes. Allan Steinfeld, the director of New York Road Runners, the organization that owns the New York City Marathon, says he will kick in one dollar for every American entrant into his race. They have 20,000 runners now, but the race is going to grow. The Houston Marathon organizers agree to contribute, and so do the folks from the Atlanta Track Club, who are connected with the massive Peachtree Road Race, one of the biggest in the country. They will buy the team a van.
Larsen also has gotten a call from his friend at Nike. Capriotti, who was once so skeptical, says he has reconsidered. After all, distance running is at the foundation of the company. It’s only right that Nike be a part of this, even if they can’t get a clean shirt. Plus, it’s not like the folks who are going to end up in the camp are on the cusp of winning anything, so the exposure will be minimal anyway. This is about doing the right thing, he says.
Nike’s earnings in 2000 are some $500 million. The company will pay Tiger Woods more than $10 million. Capriotti says Nike is willing to give Team Running USA about $30,000. Absurd, yes, but it’s $30,000 Bob Larsen very badly needs.
Mammoth Lakes, California, Fall 2001
Deena Drossin is hungry. She comes by her hunger honestly. It’s dinnertime in the southern Sierras, which means Drossin has already run twice today. That will build up anyone’s appetite, but as her eyes glance around the ski condo where she has come to eat, her mind somehow drifts away from the pizzas and salads and a stomach that has been growling, if only for a moment. She can’t actually believe all these people, with all this potential have come here to run together. This is not how things are usually done in her vast country. But as she looks around this ski condo that her coach, Joe Vigil, has rented here in the mountains five hours from the Los Angeles megalopolis, she sees most of the best runners in the U.S. Larsen, with Vigil’s help, has sold the elite on their concept—if we train very hard, very high, together, we will win together. Now it’s time for the two of them to put it to work.
On the men’s side, among the best ones there are Meb, Deena’s fellow Olympian from the previous summer, and Phil Price, who ran for Arkansas’ national championship teams. Nick Rogers, an Olympian in the 5,000 in Sydney, has come. There is word that Abdi Abdirahman, the Somali-born American who was also in Sydney, will be joining them in the coming months. As for the women, Deena is here, fresh off her Olympic debut, and so is the U.S. cross country champion Amy Rudolph, as well as Jen Rhines, who won three 5,000-meter championships in college in the mid-1990s and placed second to Drossin in the 10,000 at the Olympic Trials in July. Leigh Daniel has come, too. She is best known for the collegiate 10,000 final in 1999, when her shoe came off in the middle of the race—and she still won.
As the pizzas begin to emerge from the kitchen and are placed buffet style on a dining table, Vigil tells them to fill a plate and then to listen. Bob Larsen is lurking in the background, working the room with his dry Midwestern sense of humor and sarcasm. He’s letting Vigil do the talking tonight. This is Vigil’s kind of room—a dozen elite runners gathered high above sea level with a singular purpose—so why not let him have center stage. The runners load up their plates and gather round to listen to one of the country’s wise men.
“We believe in coming to the best place with the best people,” he tells them simply. They are the best America has to offer. The rest of the world may not take them all that seriously, but that is not their fault, and that is going to change. Everything they think they know about their sport is going to change.
For Deena and most of the rest of the crew here, the road to Mammoth has been a meandering one. Born in Boston and transplanted to southern California as a young girl, Deena was the kid who rarely spoke—reserved, shy, or sometimes just plain terrified of verbal human contact. No one really knows why. Maybe it’s because she is the Easterner in a world of valley girls, or the Jewish girl in a land where there aren’t too many of them, or adopted. Does the reason even matter?
Then at twelve, she begins to run. She is fast, faster than anyone around, faster than all the boys, and this is how she finds her voice. Her father notices something odd. When Deena is stationary she is silent. When she runs, or when she has just finished a race, she never shuts up. At Agoura High School, Deena grows to a sinewy 5'4", and becomes one of the fastest girls in the state. The pattern holds as she wins three consecutive state cross country titles. In class or in the school hallways, she moves in near-silence. On the track, or during practice, running on the streets and hills of the San Fernando Valley, she is a chatterbox. Her talent gives her authority, a kind of power. Everywhere else she is a kid people find easy to overlook. When she is wearing shorts and a pair of running shoes, and has just blazed over a cross country course and broken the tape, other kids and adults, even coaches, shower her with attention and ask her for advice. She dispenses it freely and with joy. The running, her God-given speed, makes her feel significant.
She decides to attend Arkansas for college. It’s the best track and field school in the country. Nestled in the Ozark Mountains in the northwest corner of the state, Fayetteville provides near-perfect training terrain. Here though, running becomes more complicated. For the first time she is very good but not great. She wins a handful of conference championships, including two in the indoor 5,000, that mind-numbing 25-lap race around a 200-meter track, but she can never quite break through and become a national champion, which is the thing she was so sure was going to happen after high school. She is as surprised as anyone that there are women who simply seem more talented than she is. When she doesn’t win, she doesn’t decide she needs to work harder. She decides that the hard work may not come with much of a payoff since she may not have the final gear that the women who are edging her out at the end of the race seem to possess.
She hangs around Fayetteville to train some after graduation. She wonders why she is doing this. The women who beat her in college will still be there, and then there are all those other women from both the U.S. and other countries that probably have more than she does. How can she possibly top them?
One afternoon, she goes to see her coach, Milan Donley, and she tells him she thinks she is done with running. It’s time to get on with the rest of her life. That’s fine, he says. She’s done plenty for him and helped his Razorbacks collect a couple more conference and national championships. He has just one question—have you done everything you possibly could have done to become the best runner you can possibly be?
He knows she hasn’t, and he knows she knows this, too. She knows she has never fully committed her body and her mind to being the best. She has never lived the ascetic, all-consuming life of a professional long distance runner, a life that usually happens in a remote area, where the air is thin and a small collectio
n of like-minded souls toil together. She also knows why. That level of commitment carries a certain risk. To do everything possible and to still come up short is to know that you really don’t have something that the people finishing in front of you have. As satisfying as it might be to know you have given something every ounce of energy you have, the satisfaction carries the most painful truth for any prodigy when it ends up falling short.
Maybe you don’t need this, Donley says, but if there is a part of you that needs to do everything you can possibly do before you give this up, then you need to call a coach in Alamosa, Colorado, named Joe Vigil.
Later that day, back in the solitude of her Fayetteville apartment, Deena taps out the numbers to call Vigil. He answers in his usual deep, gruff voice. What could he do for her? Deena talks about races, ones she hadn’t won, ones she had dreamed of winning since she first started running. She doesn’t know if she’s good enough, she says, it isn’t clear she has the innate talent she thinks she needs to compete at the highest level. But maybe, she says, she does have it, and training at altitude is what she needs to get over the hump.
Vigil listens, and then he says something no coach has ever told Deena before. You know, he says, the races don’t matter. In this sport, success is all about the principles you live by.
He tells her what life is like in Alamosa, running on southern Colorado’s high plains, living workout to workout in a city that no one would describe as cosmopolitan. He talks about his team of runners, how they train together and eat together and push and love one another. He doesn’t ever mention winning or talent. Running, he says, is about building great relationships, setting goals for personal development, then trying to reach them, about bringing people into your life and venturing out on a journey with them.
As Deena listens, she begins to think that she knows nothing about the sport and how to pursue it. It is an awakening, the moment she hears a truth she has never heard before. When she hangs up the phone, she looks around her apartment and begins to think how long it will take to pack up everything. Not long, it turns out—by the next afternoon, her Jeep is packed and she is on her way to Colorado.
There she waits tables to pay the bills and she runs, roughly a dozen times a week, usually with the men, because Vigil doesn’t have any other women in his stable. Slowly he boosts her mileage, from 70 to 80 and then 90 and 100 miles a week. Every run has a purpose, everything is measured. There are races, too, those things that Vigil says aren’t supposed to matter, until they do.
She runs only with men. The men count her as one of them until she starts winning. Then, as the wins pile up, they have one of those weird, jealous athlete moments. They tell her they don’t like her much and never did. She’s hurt, but fuck them. She’s here to stay whether they like it or not—and they get a talking-to from Vigil that gets them back on track. She becomes the national cross country champion in 1997, and sets a personal record of 15:40.83 in the 5,000 in 1998. The next year brings another national cross country championship, and in 2000 she wins the Olympic Trials in the 10,000. At the Sydney Olympics, she battles an Achilles injury and finishes a disappointing 18th.
After recovering over the winter, like Meb, she wins the 15-kilometer Gate River Run in Jacksonville. Deena goes at a 5:18 pace. She wins by 13 seconds at 49:09 over thirty-four-year-old Sylvia Mosqueda, a former national half marathon champion. She wins Frank Shorter’s Bolder Boulder 10K in June, and then the moment that changes her life happens to Deena on a summer visit to her parents in the San Fernando Valley.
She decides to set out on a morning run from Sycamore Canyon through the hills northwest of Malibu down to the ocean. It’s an astonishingly beautiful nine-mile run, through largely undisturbed park land that feels even more isolating because it is so close to the center of Los Angeles. It is a bright California morning, the kind that reinforces all those native emotions about this being the most spectacular state in all the land. When she gets to the beach, she pauses for a moment to gaze at the ocean. She leans down to pick up a clump of sand, then lets the grains sift through her fingers.
She hasn’t actually thought about how she is going to get back to her car, but as she looks back from whence she came, back to those pale green and yellow desert mountains, she knows she wants to run back. She doesn’t care that the return, away from the sea, will be basically uphill. If someone asked her at this moment if she felt like running to San Francisco, she would undoubtedly answer “yes, of course.” And so she starts the trek, rising, sometimes severely, sometimes gradually, through the hills back toward her car and home.
The whole venture is over in a little more than 100 minutes. She is faster at the end than she is at the beginning. When it’s done she’s ready to go 100 minutes more. Driving back to her parents’ house, she’s knows exactly what she is going to do when she gets there. As soon as she is at her childhood home, she puts in a call to Joe Vigil. She tells him about the run to the beach. She tells him she wants to try the marathon. He has never mentioned the distance to her because he wanted her to reach this conclusion on her own. He tells her he has been waiting to hear her say these words for two years, and that they are going to Mammoth Lakes to turn her into one of the best marathoners in the world.
This is not a decision anyone makes lightly. Being a competitive marathoner is a relatively miserable existence. The essence of training the body to run fast after 20 miles is borderline torturous. Seemingly endless miles in high remote locations. Long journeys at the threshold, even a bit of speed work to make sure the legs can come alive in the final mile if the competition requires it. Then, after intense training cycles that last anywhere from ten to sixteen weeks, race day approaches. Because the stress on the body is so intense, there are only two bites at the apple each year for elite marathoners. Come down with the sniffles, or a fever, or a queasy stomach, or tweak your calf muscle in the days leading up to the race and, well, tough darts. As for the race itself, running 26 miles at a pace that ranges from roughly 4:55 to 5:30 per mile, is a very good way to become incomparably nauseated, or worse. Sometimes, marathoners die.
Let’s do it, Deena says.
* * *
—
They gather each morning at 8:30 in town at the Looney Bean coffee shop, then head off in different directions in small groups, depending on what the day calls for. Bob has let them in on the routes Meb and Phil Price ran in the spring. Want to press? Head up to 9,000 feet and run the rugged terrain around three lakes. The intervals happen on that two-mile loop around Lake Mary. On one section, Deena figures out a way to cut out a section of the loop just so she can beat Meb occasionally and boost her confidence.
They measure their progress on an 8–10-mile run that will become their standard and a test for anyone who ever goes to train in Mammoth. It begins on Benton Crossing Road, but they eventually call it Green Church Road because there is a little green church there. The road rolls across the terrain of the high valley to a set of rocky peaks known as the Glass Mountains. The phrase “Green Church Road” becomes shorthand for a killer, 6–17-mile test of grit where everyone lays it all on the line. Larsen and Vigil send runners out in stages, depending on their speed, so toward the end of the run they can be racing one another to the finish. They take the drives down the mountain to Bishop, and the old cinder track at 4,000 feet. Deena doesn’t like it much. The “Shitbox” she calls it, since it’s riddled with holes and ruts and could be a sprained ankle waiting to happen.
Now that she’s pursuing the marathon, her regimen shifts. She moves from sets of four one-mile repeats to eight. Her threshold runs stretch beyond 10 and 12 miles. With speed no longer the ultimate necessity, she replaces 400-meter repeats with 5Ks. She goes 135 miles a week, sometimes 25 at a time. There is plenty of pain, but a strange pleasure in the pain, too.
She makes her marathon debut in New York in November. She runs the first half in 1:13:43 and the second half in 1:
13:15 to finish in 2:26:58, in seventh place. No American woman has ever run her first marathon faster.
The Road to Athens
Mammoth Lakes, 2003
Running, like most sports, is a copycat endeavor. Whatever the best are doing, that’s what nearly everyone else does.
Soon nearly everyone wants to come to the eastern Sierras, or some version of it. After 2001, the best American distance runners stream in and out of Mammoth for stretches long and short to see if the Mammoth magic can rub off on them. Abdi Abdirahman, Ryan Hall, Ryan Shay, Dan Browne, Brian Ball, Elva Dryer, and others all do stints in the mountains seeing what secret wisdom Larsen and Vigil and his protégé, Terrence Mahon, can impart. Some stay, others depart for elite running groups that pop up in the Northwest, where Nike and Salazar launch their Oregon Project. It’s a special team for Nike-sponsored athletes. The company pays for coaching and helps with lodging and food—but then they own you, controlling every facet of your health and wellness, including diet and medication, even some that push the boundaries of the world’s anti-doping laws.
After getting his promised bump to a six-figure deal with Nike, Meb sticks with Bob, of course. The Hanson brothers, runners and running store owners based in Michigan, launch a similar team in the suburbs of Detroit with the help of Brooks, the shoe company. The idea that distance runners, as individual as their sport might be, are social animals who can thrive within a team structure catches on like wildfire. It turns out no one really knew just how lonely the vast majority of distance runners in the U.S. really were, or how hard it is to get to the edge alone. The Africans in the Rift Valley have been training this way for years. How much did it help? America is about to find out.
Salazar and Nike make their proclamations about setting out to create the best team in the land. They will pursue their goals with the same sense of propriety with which Nike guards all its other research. At the other end of the spectrum are Larsen and Vigil, who are happy to share the information they have gleaned with anyone interested in learning about it.
Running to the Edge Page 24