The dog knocks Meb over and goes for his throat. The scuffle lasts only seconds but in Meb’s mind it feels like he is wrestling with that shepherd forever. They tussle long enough for Meb to think while he’s trying not to get killed that his luck of avoiding injuries and mishaps the past year has just run out. He has no idea how this is going to end. The dog has near full control of the moment.
Then Terrence and Alan grab rocks and begin pelting it as they run at him. Now it’s the dog’s turn to get scared and he runs off. Alan and Terrence descend on Meb. Meb rolls over in the dirt, his legs and arms bleeding, his back and hip and knee sore and bruised. All that work, all those years and miles in the mountains suddenly seems for naught. After a minute, he rises, brushes off. He finishes the run, but he knows he is in some trouble.
For the next week and a half his knee aches when he is going up and down stairs. Fearing infections on his cut-up arms and legs, doctors tell him to stay out of the sea, and the pools, and no more ice baths either. He takes anti-inflammatory pills, like Ibuprofen, and he rubs a powder from Eritrea called tsebel on his legs. It’s a chalky substance that comes from Christian monasteries in his native country. His mother gave it to him. He knows it has no power to heal his injuries, but he rubs it over his skin because it reminds him of God’s power. It’s what his mother would tell him to do.
* * *
—
On August 21, Deena leaves Crete and heads to Athens. She sleeps well the night before the race and in the middle of the afternoon boards a van to the starting line in Marathon. When she gets there, she puts on a frozen vest. It is very, very cold, because Bob Larsen spent the day before finding the coldest freezer available in the kitchen of the Olympic Village, with the help of the kitchen worker who secures a spot for the vest. The darn vests for all the marathoners didn’t arrive until two days before the race, which sent Bob on a scramble looking for that optimal freezer. No matter. Now there may be faster runners than Deena at the start line, but no one will likely have a cooler core.
That is no small thing. When she gets to the starting area, two hours before the start, she calls her husband and tells him it’s nearly 100 degrees. He reminds her how good she is at running in the heat. “Just go slow,” he tells her. The temperature on the start line at 6 p.m. is 95 degrees. Deena isn’t thinking about the heat. She is thinking about her plan for the race, and nothing is going to stop her from racing that plan. She keeps that ice vest on until just before the blast of the starter’s pistol to stay as cool as she can. The other runners look at her like she is a bit of a freak. What is that woman wearing? Finally, when it’s time for the gun, she discards it.
A little more than 75 minutes after the gun sounds, all hell breaks loose, just like Bob and Joe figured it might. Paula Radcliffe, the world record holder and overwhelming favorite, leads the fastest group through the first 15 miles but she does not look happy about it. These are not friendly conditions for Brits, never have been, in sport or in war, and Radcliffe runs as though heavy metal music is blasting in her ears. At the 16-mile mark Mizuki Noguchi of Japan makes a move and Radcliffe can’t cover it. She waits, and then pushes again, but instead of gaining on Noguchi she gets passed by Catherine Ndereba of Kenya and Elfenesh Alemu of Ethiopia. The world’s top female marathoner is in fourth and fading fast. With four miles to go, it will all become too much for her. She will stop, then try to start again. Then she crumples to the side of the road in tears, finished for the night.
Deena has no clue about all this drama, but it won’t surprise her when she hears about it. Sensing just how deadly hot and heavy the air is, she basically blocks the rest of the field from her mind. She settles on a slow and steady pace and journeys up the endless incline from the sea to the hills above Athens. She is behind so many runners for so long her coaches don’t even bother counting. The scoreboard tells them she is in 12th place at the halfway mark.
Bob understands the strategy. She is like a golfer playing the course instead of keeping track of whether the other golfers are making pars or birdies. He is fairly certain she is overdoing it, though. At times she is a half mile and more behind the lead pack. It’s a lot of ground to make up, he thinks. And then, as the miles shrink and the night stays hot, that distance between Deena and the podium gets smaller and smaller. She isn’t going much faster, but she isn’t slowing down either. The group at the front is. One by one she passes them, gaining strength as she swallows each one. Then, finally, there are just three in front of her, though she thinks there must be four, because she knows she has not passed Radcliffe, and Radcliffe must be at the front, she thinks.
With a mile to go she draws in Alemu. As she passes the Ethiopian, she is so locked in on taking each next step she doesn’t process the meaning of the rousing cheers from the side of the road. Only when she enters Panathinaiko Stadium, site of the 1896 Games and the birth of the modern Olympics, does she hear the voice from the public address system declare that she is in third place and cruising in for the final medal. When she hears the words she bursts into tears. She cries all the way across the finish line. It’s the first U.S. medal in the marathon since Joan Benoit in 1984, and only the second at a distance of greater than 400 meters since the ’84 Games.
At a beach resort in Crete, Meb watches the end of the women’s race on television. His knee aches. His hip is sore. He has scabs on his legs and arms. But that’s not what he’s thinking about. He’s thinking this is a very, very good sign. He’s thinking that what Deena did in Mammoth worked, that when she runs well, he usually does, too.
* * *
—
One week later, on the final afternoon of the Games, it’s Meb’s turn to compete.
He’s in uncharted territory here. The only marathons he has run have been in the morning, when you wake up before dawn, have some eggs and some bread, and then head to the van to the starting line. In Athens, at the American College, he sleeps in. Like most distance runners, Meb is very good at sleeping.
At 1 p.m., he wanders down to the cafeteria for a pre-race meal. He eats pasta, bread with honey, and a banana. He has small portions. Just enough to sate his hunger. Then it’s time to gather his belongings for the race. At the last minute, he stuffs his official Team USA sweatsuit in his bag. It’s what he will have to wear during the medal ceremony if he gets to the podium. He is planning to be on the podium.
He sits with Bob on the bus to the start line. They go through the race strategy one last time. Relatively speaking, it’s not that hot. Temperatures are in the low 80s, which in theory is miserable, but under the circumstances and considering what Deena had to go through, it’s downright temperate. In this moment, it’s tempting to become greedy. When you prepare for 90 degrees and it’s close to 80, you think you can run as though it’s 50. Bob and Meb know that’s not possible, but maybe the others will make a mistake.
Meb’s knee also isn’t perfect. He even calls his brother Merhawi to tell him about the pain, that he may have to drop out. Merhawi assures him he will not. Then they are in Marathon. They have a last chat about the runners to watch. Bob reminds Meb that Stefano Baldini of Italy has won races in the summer at the World Championships and is comfortable in the heat. Meb is fixated on Tergat, the world record holder and one of his heroes. Bob, not so much. Like Radcliffe, Tergat has made his name on cool flat courses, not on courses that rise 750 feet during the middle eight miles. He also knows the pressure of being the favorite, and the power of being among the overlooked. It worked out pretty well for those Toads all those years ago. Bob thinks this is going to work out very well for Meb.
Then Bob hands Meb the ice vest. He will wear it for the better part of an hour, staying cool as he can be.
* * *
—
In the first miles of the race, Meb focuses on staying calm and within himself. Marathons are never won in the first miles, but they can be lost there. He tucks into the middle
of the lead pack, next to his teammates Alan Culpepper and Dan Browne. It’s a comfortable spot, especially since no one in the field is doing anything stupid. Alan, who is 6'1", helps him scout out the water stations as they approach, which is a big help for a guy who is 5'6", maybe. After every water stop—they come every five kilometers—he tucks right back into the pack. It’s exactly what Bob wants him to do. So when he sees Meb at the 10-mile mark, they trade a thumbs-up and he has just one word for him.
For ten years, they have been on this journey to resuscitate the sport that Bob fell in love with forever ago, in the country that turned him from a Minnesota farm boy into an Olympic coach, and helped transform Meb from a near-penniless immigrant boy who couldn’t speak English and barely knew running was a sport into an educated adult with a college degree and one of the world’s fastest men. They were on this journey before they ever knew they were on it. That scholarship Bob gave to Meb, it wasn’t like the ones for Steve Lewis and Ato Boldon, whose talents were so clearly going to take them to this stage. It was something else—an honor for a family that had come and was seemingly going so far. Then the skinny little kid who hoovered Klondike Bars became an All-American, and an NCAA champion, and then the most dedicated, mission-driven professional runner Bob had ever coached. Live with a roommate until age twenty-seven? Fine. Move as a single man to a remote ski village God knows how far from another black man? Sure thing. Tough out mile after painful mile in thin air and trust that a coach knows what he is talking about when the numbers suggest he does not? Absolutely. Try to disprove conventional wisdom that Africans can’t be beat and to overcome two decades of futility in American distance running? Yes, of course.
There are still 16 miles to go in the race. There are many runners in front of Meb who have covered this distance faster than he has. But as Meb sees his coach for the first and last time in the race, there is a simple message Bob wants to deliver.
“Perfect,” he says. And he doesn’t raise his voice. He knows he does not have to.
* * *
—
Slowly, and then very quickly, the lead pack thins. South Africa’s Hendrick Ramaala tries to push ahead before the halfway mark, but no one goes with him and soon he sags. Brazil’s Vanderlei de Lima goes 10 seconds in front midway through. Meb keeps his eyes on Tergat, who lets de Lima go, even though the Brazilian has proven he can run in the heat. With eight miles left Meb is part of an eight-man chase pack that includes Tergat and Baldini. They get word from coaches and race officials that de Lima’s lead is 46 seconds. Time to go to work, they decide, and so together they push.
Three miles later they have nearly cut de Lima’s lead in half. They can see he is tiring. His stride doesn’t have the same power that it did a few miles back. Then, to everyone’s surprise, Tergat drops away. Meb can count to three now. If this holds he’s on the medal stand. He thinks he can do better though. From the recesses of his brain, he pulls out some childhood Italian and tells Baldini the two of them can go get first and second. Baldini isn’t a teammate, but they have a common purpose—to catch the guy in front of them—and so on the run they seal a pact to help each other get where they want to go. The group is almost always stronger than the individual.
As they start to push harder, a deranged spectator with a history of interrupting sports events rushes from the crowd and tries to shove de Lima off course. He fails, thanks to the assistance of another spectator, but it’s a nail in the coffin for the gold medal hopes of the tiring Brazilian. Nearly sprinting for the lead Baldini passes de Lima with about three miles to go. Meb lets Baldini go but passes de Lima about a quarter mile later. With a mile to go Meb makes one last push to get the gold, but Baldini is too far in front. He finishes in 2:10:55, 34 seconds ahead of Meb on a night when times barely matter. This race is all about medals, and Meb has a silver, to go along with Deena’s bronze.
When Meb enters the ancient Panathinaiko Stadium in his final mile, Bob is still fighting his way through traffic and security. He doesn’t make it to see Meb cross the finish and win that first American men’s Olympic distance medal in twenty-eight years. Sue does. She is there. No matter how her treatment goes, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to go the way she and Bob want it to, in some way, she will be there, always.
For Bob, this is both entirely expected and completely unbelievable.
It feels like just days ago that eyes were rolling and heads shaking over this silly idea he had to prove that Americans could run far fast again. Everyone else thought it was complicated—all that stuff about genetics and long calf muscles and innate East African hunger. Sure, Meb was born in Africa, but he’s as American as anyone Bob knows, and Deena has no African blood. Just run like a Toad would, he thought, to the edge, again, and then again.
Now it is a hot night in Athens. The sun has dropped into the Mediterranean, but the air is still thick and hot and heavy. They meet in the tunnel and share a long embrace, and a good long laugh. In a few hours, Larsen will stand among 100,000 people in the Olympic Stadium. He will watch Meb step onto the podium and bow his head for a medal. The American flag will rise, and then, after some music and dancing and speechmaking, the flame of the Summer Games will be extinguished for another four years.
This is what he knows: There are six medals awarded in the world’s most prestigious marathon. The little running team from Mammoth Lakes that he and Joe Vigil started, this odd little experiment of theirs, has two of them.
Perfect, he thinks, or nearly so, which is just fine. Because this doesn’t feel at all like the end of something. It doesn’t feel like he has crossed some kind of finish line. It never does. It feels like the start.
Harvey Cedars, New Jersey, August 2017
“Hey, why don’t you run the Dog Day Race with me,” I suggest to my fifteen-year-old daughter.
I’m fully expecting her to dismiss me out of hand. You get used to this sort of thing when you have teenage children, even if you say something like, why don’t you help me spend this extra thousand dollars I have burning a hole in my pocket.
We are on vacation on the Jersey Shore. The town where we stay has its annual five-mile race to benefit the local fire department the next morning. I don’t usually run short races, but this year I’m thinking there might be an easy age-group award for me to grab. There is a pathetic side of my brain that loves collecting these things. So I am in. Meanwhile, my middle daughter has caught the running bug these past months. She’s gotten addicted to healthy living lately. She’s a vegan, doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks, as far as I can tell, and has inherited my compulsion to exercise every day. More often than not, that is a late-afternoon run. I’m early morning, so we don’t run together, but one day maybe, especially if I can get this running bug to stick. Running alone is getting kind of old. I’m going to need a running buddy before too long. I’ve got my eye on one.
Though I don’t tell her that’s why I’m suggesting she join the race, there is something about the way her head jerks around when I ask the question that makes me think I might have just hooked a fish here. Now I just have to reel her in. Within seconds, she is spewing self-doubt. She can’t race. She’s too slow. It will be embarrassing. What if she has to stop.
I know these are all absurd thoughts. She’s plenty fast, running anywhere between four and six miles a day at a pace between eight and nine minutes. I love how sweaty and red she is when she is done, that look of exhausted accomplishment on her face at a time in her life when this is all so new. She’s on tennis and soccer and softball teams and runs a bit in practice but it doesn’t feel anything like this.
I explain to her that a race like this isn’t really a race, but more like a group run, a celebration. I will run with her if she wants—she does not—and it’s all about the free T-shirt anyway, a sweet yellow and blue thing that she’ll have for years and get happy every time she puts it on. She says, “Fine,” in that tone where this is s
omething she really really wants to do but doesn’t want to admit it, because being too enthusiastic about something as lame as running a race with your dad, even though you aren’t running with him, would just be the worst thing ever.
Until, of course, it isn’t. Until we cut up one of her T-shirts to turn it into a racing singlet. Until she pins a number on her shirt for the first time. Until she heads across the start line at the blast of a fire horn, moving within this little mass of humanity, a part of the human race. There’s a turnaround on the course so I pass her about midway through. She’s working. It’s a hot, heavy, late-summer morning, but there’s no way she’s going to stop.
I finish about 13 minutes ahead of her, so I’m there at the finish to watch her last steps. She’s still trucking along, running strong to the end. A real official race in the books. Later, after a shower, she comes up to the kitchen for a joyous breakfast. She’s wearing the shirt. So am I.
Fall and Rise
Distance races and running itself rarely proceed according to plan. Just when the race appears to be won, when it seems like you have unlocked the secret truths, the unexpected happens. Intense heat or cold or miserable rain on the start line. Tweaked ligaments, turned ankles, stress fractures, busted hips. In this way, running, running far, and trying to do it as quickly as possible, may be most similar to life. Optimism may abound, but unexpected danger that rises with the most unsympathetic callousness is always lurking, always looking to knock back anyone who wants to tempt fate and believe too strongly that his running life is heading upward, ever upward.
Running to the Edge Page 27