Want to see Meb’s training log? Have a look. A typical week might show a morning with six one-mile repeats, another morning with a 12-mile run on the edge of the threshold, another with three five-kilometer repeats, and still another with a morning at the Shitbox with a series of 400s and 800s that turn his legs into butter. In the afternoons there are shakeout runs for 30 or 60 or 80 minutes.
Larsen and Vigil have no loyalties to anything other than doing all they can to make Americans better at running far fast. But everyone who visits the Sierras learns fairly quickly that the secrets of Mammoth aren’t really secrets at all. They are science—sleep high to increase red blood cell production, then wake up and run your tail off with the group—always think about the group. Stack up a combination of long runs, speed workouts, and medium-length jaunts at the precipice of total exhaustion. Don’t worry about the time on the watch, focus on effort, intensity, on a total commitment to the task at hand, which is to run, eat, sleep, and then do it all over again.
Larsen’s quest is about something else, too, the larger concept of making every mile and every minute count as much as it can, which is something that can help anyone in both running and in life. Because if you do that up high, where it is hardest, then, when you come off the mountain, you feel the power and you begin to imagine doing everything that once felt like a dream.
* * *
—
As the calendar flips to 2002, Meb begins to think hard about the marathon, too. He has made steady progress in the 10,000. He wonders though if he possesses the speed to run with the best of the best at that distance. At Stanford the previous May, when he was breaking the American record in the 10,000, he passed the Kenyan Kipkosgei on the final lap. As he edged past with about 200 meters to go, Kipkosgei glanced over at Meb and said, “Not so fast young man.” Then he surged and left Meb to settle for fourth place and his American record. Meb has never officially broken four minutes for a mile.
Meb has shaved 40 seconds from his own personal best and set the U.S. mark, but Haile Gebrselassie’s world record is another 50 seconds faster. Meb’s fastest 10,000 time is 27:13. Haile’s is 26:23. Matching that would mean speeding up his pace by more than eight seconds every mile for 6.2 miles. Championship races, like those at the Olympics and the biennial World Championships, are run at a slower pace, and there is a premium on a runner’s closing speed and the final quarter mile. In a tactical 10,000-meter race, Meb can close in about 60 seconds, but to win the race he probably has to close in 55 seconds. That may be more speed than Meb has in his legs. As the old saying goes, sometimes you really can’t put in what God left out. He may have to leave the 10,000 to the runners who are just a little bit faster if he ever hopes to make an international podium.
He tells himself there are three iconic distances in track and field—the 100 meters, the mile, and the marathon, especially at the Olympic Games, where the men’s 100, raced on the first Saturday night of the meet, and the men’s marathon, usually the last event of the Games, serve as bookends to the competition. There are no Olympic Games or World Championships in 2002. Larsen has been nudging him in this direction ever since the American record in the 10,000. With that record he’s got his spot in the Nike stable locked up for the foreseeable future. For Larsen, life and running are always about what’s next. He tells Meb he can make the jump to the marathon with little change to his regimen other than a weekly long run of more than 20 miles. It’s the logical moment to try something new.
In addition to adding new races to their portfolios, Deena and Meb decide to put down roots in Mammoth. Deena and her future husband, the former 1,500-runner Andrew Kastor, who is now her physiotherapist, buy a house, and in April Meb does, too.
He is twenty-seven years old. He has never lived without a roommate. He has avoided paying rent for much of his adult life. A classic immigrant child, he has banked much of his disposable income and sets his sights on a $492,500 three-bedroom house at 141 Mammoth Knolls Drive in Mammoth Lakes. His older brother, Fitsum, tells him he’s nuts. Why in the world would he want to plunk down that kind of money for a house in the woods. Meb says he was born in a village and that is where his heart is. He doesn’t need the noise and traffic of the city. Give him books to read, trails to run, a television to watch, and altitude to fill his arteries with red blood cells and he’s good. He is comfortable in the quiet. Larsen, who has made himself financially comfortable through real estate investments in San Diego and Brentwood, tells Meb, if you don’t buy the house, I will. That’s all Meb needs to hear. The mountain creek with the 45-degree water to soak his legs is about a mile from his back door.
With the top male and female American distance runners now turning their focus to the marathon and living within a mile of each other, the focus of Team Running USA falls into a marathoner’s rhythm. It is not for the faint of heart or legs. It means 10–140 miles per week, run over twelve sessions. Hence the need for all those baths and massages and muscle rolling and napping and eating right.
It will start with a dozen miles on Monday morning at 8,000 or 9,000 feet, and a weight session in the afternoon focusing on core strength and explosive power from the legs. Tuesday morning is for intervals. The elevation depends on how they are feeling. Wake up ready for a challenge, how about some two-mile repeats at 9,000 feet? If that seems like too much to some, then maybe a group hops in a car and drives down to 5,000 feet for eight one-mile repeats with a couple minutes to recover between each one. There’s a three-mile warm-up and a three-mile cool-down before and after each interval session. Tuesday afternoon brings another five to seven miles at a conversational pace and a long weight session at the gym.
Wednesday is a progressive tempo run day, anywhere from 15 to 20 miles with occasional surges built in, followed by a venture to the gym in the afternoon. Those who still have life in their legs head out for a bike ride in the twilight. Thursday is easy day—10 miles in the morning at 7,000–9,000 feet, not a killer pace, maybe 5:45–6:00 minutes per mile for the men, 6:00–6:15 for the women. Then another half-hour run in the afternoon, with more fun to be had at the gym. Friday is hard-core tempo day. Three-mile warm-up, then, depending on how much time remains before the next race, 5–15 miles at marathon pace or faster at roughly 7,000 feet. That has Meb leading the men down to a sub-4:40 pace and Deena taking the women to the neighborhood of five-minute miles. There’s a three-mile cool-down to finish things off—for the morning. The afternoon brings another 4–7 miles of easy running.
Saturday means another 10 miles at a relaxed pace in the morning and a 30-minute jaunt in the afternoon. Nothing too heavy because Sunday is the day to go long—somewhere between 20 and 28 miles that may start in the 6:30- or 7:00-pace range but are a minute or more faster than that at the end.
Just as they do on Green Church Road, Bob and Joe figure out how to group the runners in pods of two or three, depending on their speed, staggering the start times so they are finishing in clumps at the end, racing one another to the finish. Bob also loads up his Jeep or the saddlebags on his bike with fluids and food and gets in the right spots so the team can drink and get a snack every three miles just like they would in a race.
At night there are the dinners, a movable feast of carbohydrates and protein, of rice and potatoes, salad and deep-colored vegetables, grilled meat and fish and chicken, whatever can healthfully fill the team with the three and four and five thousand daily calories. Meb especially loves his himbasha, the thick Eritrean bread his mother makes and sends to the mountains or to wherever he is racing. One night the dinner’s at Meb’s home, where he rents bedrooms to other members of the team. Then it moves to Deena’s, then to Joe’s place, then on to any of the other ski condos where runners are piled in.
* * *
—
There are jaunts down the mountain for any number of races. Cross country championships, national track meets, and distance races of any and every length,
from five kilometers to half marathons. This is not so easy. It means a five-hour drive to Los Angeles or San Diego and then long flights to races across the country.
No matter. Deena has a big moment in Jacksonville in the spring, when she crushes the American record on the 15K by 57 seconds. In the fall of 2002, she takes a shot at the Chicago Marathon in October and Meb signs up for the New York race in November. They do not go all that well. In Chicago, Deena stays with the leaders for the first 10 miles, but by the halfway mark Great Britain’s Paula Radcliffe makes it clear that this is her day. She passes 13.1 in 69 minutes and cruises to a best-ever 2:17 finish. Deena trudges to a sixth-place finish in 2:26 on the flat-as-a-pan Chicago course. It’s nothing to sneeze at but it puts Deena nearly two miles back of where she eventually needs to be. All part of a process, Joe Vigil thinks. We’ll get there.
In New York three weeks later, Meb makes the classic rookie mistake. He surges with the leaders after the 16-mile mark as they come off the Queensboro Bridge and head up First Avenue, through the roaring throngs. Bob told him not to do this. Three miles later he’s overheated, the ice water he tosses over his head feels like it freezes his brain. Then he starts going backwards, giving up places and precious seconds. He finishes in 2:12:35. That puts him a mile back of the winner, 35 seconds outside the Olympic qualifying standard, and cuts his appearance fee of $30,000 in half since he doesn’t break 2:12. At the finish line, he shakes his head at Larsen. The top-ranked American in the 5,000 and the 10,000 tells his coach he’s never doing this again.
Larsen nods and tries to deliver maximum empathy. Inside, he’s close to laughter. He knows Meb is full of shit. The kid said the same thing to him when he ran his first college 10,000 at UCLA. He knows how addictive that feeling of flying up First Avenue with the leaders can be. He has no doubt Meb will rest up and recover and be back at this.
Meb spends two months visiting his relatives in Eritrea. When he returns to California in January, he tells Bob he’s going to run Boston in April.
* * *
—
There are times in a coach’s career when it is just as important to know when to tell someone not to run as it is to tell him how to run. Bob takes his measure of his runner and the calendar and tells Meb this year’s version of Boston may not be his moment. During the past twelve months he has racked up national championships at 12K, 10K, 8K, seven miles, and 5K. The New York Marathon is the lone bleak mark on his record. Bob fears that if he sends Meb into a world-class field on a tricky course in Boston, with its deceptively easy first 15 miles and brutal second half, Meb could get so chewed up by the race and the competition that he may wave off the idea of being a marathoner.
Boston is always a crapshoot. A cool day with a wind from the west and it’s a course that can produce world-best times. But a warm, early-spring morning, or a storm blowing in from Boston Harbor, and those 26.2 miles from Hopkinton to Kenmore Square can become an absolute bear. Meb might even miss what was then the Olympic cut-off time of 2:12. Also, a rough winter in Mammoth with a race in Boston looming in April could force Meb down to sea level, and at this point he needs every minute in the mountains he can find. Bob tells Meb to aim for Chicago in October, a flat race without the klieg lights of Boston and Heartbreak Hill. It will also give him a solid four months to recover for the 2004 Olympic Trials marathon the following February. Meb has been listening to Bob for a while now. He doesn’t stop here.
For Deena though, there is no time like the present. Nearly thirty, she is two years older than Meb, heading toward marriage, and then, before too long, likely motherhood. She has come out of Chicago unscathed. She didn’t head to Africa for two months, and with the blessings of her coaches she signs on for the London Marathon in April. Like Chicago, it’s another flat, cool course, perfect for someone still learning her way through the distance.
She does not disappoint. It is once again Paula Radcliffe’s day. She sets the world record, pacing herself off a handful of elite men and searing London with a time of 2:15:25. No one is close to her. But Deena finishes third and there is so much to like about her performance, so much to prove once again that Joe and Bob are on to something up there in the eastern Sierras. Deena’s time of 2:21:05 breaks Joan Benoit’s American record, which has stood for seventeen years. It also lowers her own personal best time by five minutes, or about a mile better than she ran just six months before in Chicago.
And yet, it is not just the time but the way she has achieved the time—and a spot on the podium—that has Joe and Bob feeling very good about their little experiment. For the first half of the race, Constantina Dita of Romania and Susan Chepkemei of Kenya fight to keep up with Radcliffe. Deena, meanwhile, pays little attention to the leaders. She has made a plan for the race, and decides to race the plan, clicking off 5:25 miles all morning long. In the final miles, Dita and Chepkemei come back to Deena and Catherine Ndereba, who finishes second, a little more than a minute ahead of Deena. It’s the sort of race someone has the smarts and the confidence and the lungs to run after she has a half-dozen marathons under her belt. Deena has just two.
Six months later, when Meb gets his chance to make his coaches look smart on the streets of Chicago, he does. With national championships at 8K, 15K, and 20K already won, his marathon goal is simply to get under 2:12 so he can nearly guarantee a spot at the Olympics if he finishes in the top three at the trials. He resists the temptation to push early and fly with the leaders, and he beats his debut time from New York by two and a half minutes, finishing in 2:10:03, inches away from sub-2:10, the unofficial line between very fast and world-class. When it’s over, he cools off by doing something he never could have imagined eleven months before in New York—he goes for a short run.
Southern California, Fall 2003
There are moments when this train ride from Los Angeles to San Diego is as pleasant as modern transportation can be. It’s an easy, three-hour glide down the coast. The tracks hug the shoreline for the last hour and a half, from San Clemente down into San Diego. Grab a seat on the west windows of the train and let your mind wander as you gaze at the big blue sea.
This is not one of those moments for Sue Larsen. It’s not clear when exactly this train ride shifts from reverie to misery. One moment there is the sea and the sun out the windows as she makes the journey from her home in Brentwood to another one they have purchased on Mission Bay in San Diego. The next, everything goes black. The train is making an emergency stop. Sue Larsen is being rushed to the closest hospital.
It’s the second time this fall Sue Larsen has passed out. The first time, doctors quizzed her about her days leading up to it and got the usual rundown of activities—up by 5:30, gardening, tennis, some housework, more gardening, checking in with her grown children. Not much in the way of fluids. Dehydration, she was told. This episode will prompt a new battery of tests. When they are over, the diagnosis she receives will be far less benign. Twelve years ago, when she was forty-eight years old, Sue underwent a mastectomy to treat the aggressive cancer doctors found in her left breast. Now the cancer has returned. It’s all through her abdomen, in five organs. Treating it requires some of the most potent chemotherapy modern science has created. Doctors tell Sue Larsen that they might be able to buy her three years.
For thirty-three years, Sue Larsen has been the consummate coach’s wife. While Bob worked to recruit and develop athletes virtually every day of the week from early in the morning until into the evening, driving vans to meets and races, providing meals and premium care for other people’s children, Sue Larsen took care of theirs—a son, Erik, and a daughter, Michel, feeding and raising and driving them to school and all manner of sports and other activities. When game time arrived, Bob would swoop in at the last moment, just before the tip-off or the kickoff or the sound of the starter’s pistol.
Sue was also there for the other kids, too—all the Grossmont Griffins and UCLA Bruins. Her lemonade
became famous among dozens of Toads and Griffins and Bruins. Long after Sue began providing the post-race training pancakes and lemonade to those Toads at the old house in the East County near Grossmont, or driving out to the beach to pick them up in the van after a 15-mile hard run, Larsen’s Bruins would run three miles to the base of the Brentwood hills. Then they climbed two miles and 1,000 feet up the mountain to the Larsen home. There, they could break for some lemonade, or on a weekend have some pancakes. These were her kids as much as they were Bob’s. So was every other man or woman who wore UCLA’s light blue and yellow. Whether Bob was in town or not, Sue tried not to miss many hoops games at Pauley Pavilion or a football game at the Rose Bowl.
Now she is facing round after round of chemotherapy for the rest of her life. That essentially means an endless case of stomach flu and a slew of other nasty side effects. The timing is awful, though isn’t it always? The Olympic Trials marathons are just a few months off. The Athens Games are less than a year away. Bob is scheduled to spend many weeks during the next year at Mammoth, getting Meb and Deena ready for the biggest of stages.
Don’t worry, he tells her, I can have Joe handle things in the mountains. I will stay down here and take care of you.
Sue Larsen will hear none of it. You need to be in the mountains, she says.
Bob does end up making certain adjustments. During some weeks of heavy treatment, he will make it up to Mammoth just in time for a key workout. He will rise at 3 a.m., be on the road by 3:30 and make it to the Looney Bean by 8:30 to greet Meb and Deena and the rest of the team. There are some days when they are staying in San Diego when Larsen will rise early, drive three hours to Westwood to make an early morning track workout for a middle distance runner he is working with, then hop back in the car to get to Mammoth in time for a mid-afternoon session.
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