Turn a corner and there is a car that has drifted to the wrong side of the road. Visit a doctor for dizziness or headaches, and he begins to speak about a grave illness. These aren’t inevitabilities, but they are possibilities, rising to whack us whether we expect it or not. We can think we are prepared to deal with them, but we can’t be, just like we can’t ever truly be prepared for the torn ACL, the incessant stabbing pain of high hamstring tendinitis. This is why running—and life, too, the most important part of it anyway—always has to be about what we do next.
In its most basic form, the running motion is a controlled, forward burst that ends with a fall. Each step is a leap. Gravity brings us back to earth, where our feet catch us and push us back up and forward again. Rise and fall, and rise again. Do this roughly 40,000 times and you will cross the finish line of a marathon. Success comes not by dwelling on the step that has just happened, or the subpar training session, or even the missed workout, or the disappointing race, or the extra miles that led to the busted knee, or the nagging tightness in the oblique muscle that will not relent. Those miles, those training sessions, they are gone. Over. It can all begin again in some form if we want it to, though we have to figure out how to make it so. A new day. A new run. A new opportunity. There will be terrible races and glorious ones. Miserable, injury-riddled years and years of seeming invincibility. After the thrilling ascendance of youth, life and running become a series of episodes, of ups and down, falls and rises. Really, all that matters is what we do next.
What’s that you say? The past is never dead. It’s not even past. Good writer, that William Faulkner. Probably not much of a runner.
Meb, 2004–7, Mammoth Lakes, San Diego, New York City, Boston, London
Everything is going to fall into place after Athens. Meb Keflezighi is set to become the face of American running. There are all these ugly rumors about American sprinting stars. The doping scandals never seem to end—Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin. There has never even been a whisper about Meb, though. He is also the perfect face for an increasingly multicultural America. Now he has all that and an Olympic medal and the belief in his ability to race with the fastest, strongest distance runners on the planet. Triumphs in the big races will surely follow. Until they don’t, for every reason a runner and his coach might imagine.
A little more than two months after taking the silver in Athens, Meb is dueling Hendrick Ramaala into Central Park in the New York City Marathon. At the 24-mile mark, near the Metropolitan Museum, Meb grabs his last bottle of fluid and takes a swig for the final push. That’s when Ramaala sprints 40 yards ahead, too far for Meb to catch up. So close, yet second again.
A year later, a ruptured quadriceps muscle at the summer World Championships curtails his preparations for the 2005 New York race. The injury compresses his training to eight weeks. He never registers a single 100-mile week in the lead-up to the race. Still he stays with Paul Tergat and Ramaala until the final miles, only to finish third, 26 seconds back.
In 2006, he and Larsen decided it was time to give Boston a shot. It’s the grandest stage in the sport, a race and a route that date to 1897. Healthy once again, he made a classic rookie mistake. He chases the early leader Benjamin Maiyo at a lightning-fast pace through miles 16–18, those first two hills in Newton. By the 20-mile mark, three-time winner Robert Cheruiyot had caught both Maiyo and Meb and cruises through the final 10 kilometers for the win. Meb finishes third that day, running a 2:09:56, two minutes behind the winner. He tries to feel good about being the top American at his Boston debut. Next time, he thinks.
Seven months later he heads back to New York to give the race yet another shot. He loses his luggage, gets food poisoning, and ends up having to make multiple bathroom stops along the way to a 2:22:02 finish and 20th place. There is no way to feel good about that. So much for the inevitable post-Athens run of glory.
Now it’s 2007 and time to begin preparing for the marathon trials for the 2008 Olympics. The race is scheduled for November in New York. He begins his road-racing year in Jacksonville’s 15-kilometer race, just as he had started in 2004. He wins Jacksonville easily but ends up with a nasty blister on the bottom of his left foot. In the days after the race, it only gets worse, so he goes to the hospital, where doctors cut out the blister, leaving him with a half-inch gash. Recovering from that surgery costs him three weeks of training ahead of the London Marathon in late April. It also throws off his stride. His right Achilles tendon doesn’t like the altered mechanics. After 16 miles in London, the knifelike pain at the back of his foot becomes too much to endure. He leaves the course and boards the tube to get back to his hotel.
Bob and Meb know he needs to get healthy and get ready for the Olympic Trials marathon. He can hear the whispers. Maybe Athens was a fluke, or even his peak. He was twenty-eight when he won there, entering what should be prime years for a distance runner. Yet he hasn’t won a major marathon since then. In the months after London, he tries to ignore the doubts but also use them as motivation. Bob has long known that Meb runs best when he has a chip on his shoulder, when he is a little angry at the world. Bob’s hopes rise when, at the peak of Meb’s preparations for this trial, he runs 26 miles at between 7,000 and 8,000 feet in 2:42 over hilly terrain. It’s enough to make him believe that this race in New York will be the start of something new rather than the beginning of the end.
Meb comes down with a stomach flu ten days before the race, but he is well recovered by the time the race rolls around. Bob is there, of course, but Sue Larsen is not, because she may be getting near the end. She’s basically been nauseated since 2003. She loves coming to New York, though, loves to walk the streets to the brink of exhaustion. By now, she knows where every public bathroom is on the island of Manhattan. But she’s just not well enough to make this trip.
Meb rides the bus to the starting line with his old training partner, Ryan Shay. Shay has moved on from Mammoth, but he was there from 2003 to 2005 with that early pre-Athens group. So many miles, so many meals, so many memories.
The route, specially designed for the Olympic Trials, calls for five laps around the lower five-mile loop of Central Park. It’s not the most inspiring course, but it’s spectator friendly and the Olympic Trials are the pinnacle of utilitarianism. Complete the distance. Get in the top three. Punch a ticket to the Olympics. To that end, Meb leads the way through the first dozen miles. Then his legs start cramping. He slips to second place. After 14 miles he is in third. The pain isn’t going away. He tries to push but goes backwards instead of forward. By 21 miles he’s in sixth place. He spends 13 minutes limping through the final 2,000 yards. He isn’t going to Beijing, not as a marathoner at least. He’s getting slower. Worse, not better. How can everything that worked so well three years ago—all that intense mileage so far above sea level—not work anymore?
After the finish, things go from crappy and disappointing to horrible. Meb learns that Ryan Shay collapsed five and a half miles into the race and was soon pronounced dead at Lenox Hill Hospital. An autopsy will later blame the death on an irregular heartbeat related to an enlarged heart and scarring around the muscle. Meb is inconsolable. In addition to dealing with the grief, he will spend the next several days crawling throughout his hotel room. The cramping that produced such disappointment in the race has evolved into chronic pain in his upper legs and hips.
Months of mystery will follow. Is it a sports hernia? Something more serious? Ultimately, a specialist in New York diagnoses a fractured pelvis, the result of altered mechanics and high, hard mileage. No wonder he went backwards at the trials and was reduced to crawling through his hotel room.
He’s thirty-one years old. He has been running on the edge with Bob Larsen for thirteen years. For the better part of the last six, his almost daily journeys to the threshold of exhaustion have taken their toll, as they do on every elite runner.
For the runner, more running is the go-to solution for just a
bout anything, however mistaken that thinking might be. Bob knows this better than anyone. He also knows that no matter who is the coach, elite running has more in common with Alpine skiing than almost any other sport. What makes a downhill skier great is the willingness to tempt disaster, to fly down a two-mile stretch of ice at 80 miles per hour on two long sticks of carbon fiber. Crashes and other bad things will happen. Timing and severity are the only unknowns. Also, what happens after the high-speed tumble into the crash net. Can the skier shake it off, or fight through six or eight months of rehabilitation and make his way back to the starting gate, willing to tempt death again?
Run on the edge as often and for as long as Bob and Joe asked their runners to run, and injury is essentially as inevitable as it is for the downhill skier. When the pain comes, especially on the far side of thirty, the elite runner has to ask the simplest and most complicated question of his life—what am I going to do next?
Mission Beach, California; Eugene, Oregon; Beijing, China, Spring–Summer 2008
When the words that every husband and every wife dread hearing finally come, Bob knows there is only one thing to do.
Sue has put up a whale of a fight and she does beat cancer in the most meaningful way. The final result of battles like this doesn’t get determined with the last breath. Somehow, some way, nature grabs that last breath every time. Nature is undefeated on that count. Cancer, on the other hand, gets whipped every day by everyone stricken with the disease who lives another morning the way it is supposed to be lived, like a damn good run that enthralls and exhausts, that provides the chance for wonder and illumination, and also contemplative meditation, moments that are fast and moments that are slow, hard ones and easy ones, and others filled with all the possibility that comes with devotion and love.
Sue Larsen has kept trying to show up to all those UCLA sports events. She went to Helsinki with Bob in 2005 for the World Championships. She swam and she tended to her gardens. On so many days that followed bad nights, she asked Bob to prop her up on the hill in the backyard of the Brentwood home. From there she could see the Pacific Coast. On a clear day, the view stretched all the way to Catalina.
He gave her a phone and told her she had to call him if things started to go south, if she needed his help. She pulled weeds all day.
Sue Larsen knows what all the best gardeners know about life—success is 90 percent weeding and 10 percent seeding. Sometimes Bob’s phone rang with Sue on the other end needing a hand. Mostly it didn’t. Tough woman, he would think, but he knew that already. Every so often, the neuropathy or the pain or the nausea got so intense, she needed to head to the hospital, where doctors would tend to the most crucial problem, then wait for another to crop up. The idea was to keep her strong enough to continue handling the treatments that might extend all this another few months.
There were moments when she would drift, or have to battle one infection or another, and it would seem like the end had come. Then, a few days later, she’d be strong again. She would rise out of the hospital bed, and load into the car, and head home to tend to that garden—90 percent weeding, 10 percent seeding.
Then in May, Bob hears those words. There’s nothing more we can do for her, the doctors say. It’s time to go home. So Bob and Sue and Eric and Michel decide what that means—San Diego, the house overlooking Mission Bay, where Sue can rest on a bed in front of the window and spend her last weeks watching the water and the birds and the beach where so much of the first part of her life got lived. This is where, in the first hours of July 2008, Sue Larsen dies. She is sixty-five years old.
* * *
—
Bob is a private mourner. He is not unprepared for this. He has known for five years this day would come. On the inside he aches like never before. On the outside he holds himself together by confronting the tragedy of losing his companion of more than four decades, his wife of thirty-eight years, with something bordering on steeliness. Friends can’t believe how normal and unfazed by it all he seems. They’re wrong, of course. He is the furthest thing from normal. Sue’s death is the ultimate blow. He just can’t talk about it. He decides the only way he’s going to survive is to be around people and do what he knows how to do best.
The Olympic Trials have just gotten under way in Oregon. Meb is scheduled to run in the 10,000 meters on the evening of July 4. Given the injuries Meb has been dealing with the past year, Bob knows this is the longest of long shots. Maybe if he’s there, giving his quiet, singular words of advice and encouragement trackside during those 25 laps, Meb will find his way into the top three and make his way to Beijing. Get out of bed. Get on a plane. Get to Hayward Field in Eugene. It’s all about taking the next step, and the one after that. Somehow, when Meb walks to the start line just after 9 p.m. on the Fourth of July, Bob is there.
Bob has been around Meb a whole lot more than he thought he would be during these past difficult months. Neither of them wanted it that way but Meb had no choice. When he tried to begin running again over the winter nothing felt right. The pain in his carriage returned. The fracture had failed to heal. The only training he could do was in a big pool. In water, there would be no pounding. So he relocated to San Diego, near his doctors, near Bob, and told him he planned to run each day through the water.
Bob had seen runners try to do this before. They start out full of fire, then they fade. Running in water is slow and deadly dull. You can’t go fast. Developing any kind of rhythm is impossible. It doesn’t actually feel like running at all. So after several days or weeks, the workouts dwindle, and the runner decides that he will run again and return to fitness when the injury heals. Somehow, Meb always steeled himself to deal with the boredom. He ran in that pool for two and three hours a day. He ran in deep water. He didn’t even use a flotation vest to increase his buoyancy. He just powered back and forth through the water, lap after lap as the old folks who came for water aerobics floated a few yards away. Bob stopped by when he could, stealing time from his wife’s slow fade to check in with the rest of his life, as he and his children took turns watching over Sue.
As he watched Meb plow through the pool, Bob knew the chances of any near-term payoff were extremely low, but the idea that Meb could do this, that he wanted to do this, suggested he wasn’t near done. Yes, the disappointments since Athens, the whispers of doubt that had grown into a chorus since the marathon trials about his best races being behind rather than ahead of him, were taking their toll. But he told Meb they were no different than the doubts everyone always had about the kid who lacked the speed of the fastest runners, but possessed something else. These trials might come too soon, but there will be another race.
Meb got back to the track for the final month before the trials. He even rediscovered some of his power ahead of the race.
In Oregon though, the 10,000 goes about how Bob figured it would. Meb finishes 13th, running a 28:39, nearly a minute behind the winner and almost 100 seconds slower than his American record. They meet up in the warm-down area after. The Minnesotan whose genetic disposition has always kept his emotions on an even keel, and the grown-up immigrant kid raised never to show weakness. All that falls away tonight. They hug each other and have a good long cry together. For the first time since either one can remember. What they are going to do next is anyone’s guess.
For Meb, it’s a far more complicated question than it has ever been. In 2005 he married Yordanos Asgedom, an Eritrean from Tampa he met at an annual soccer tournament that is part cultural celebration/part mating game for the country’s immigrants. They took roughly a year to get from courtship to marriage, and the following year, in 2006, they became parents. In 2008, Yordanos gave birth to a second daughter. They don’t plan on stopping there. With Meb’s body seemingly abandoning him, the question of whether he continues pursuing his chosen profession grows more loaded. It’s not merely about him anymore. Father Time is going to win this race. He always does.
Meb knows a running career at this point in life, on the wrong side of thirty, becomes a game of catch me if you can. If he does keep running, like a boxer in a ring with a relentless, bigger, and more powerful opponent, Meb will have to dance. He will bob and weave, use his smarts to avoid a knockout and last until the final bell. Even if he does everything he possibly can, everything he and Bob and the best sports medicine physicians in the world tell him he must, he still might get crushed during years when he might have been setting off on another career to support his family. But then, is there a larger, unknowable, incalculable cost in not trying?
* * *
—
A month later, even Deena reaches the crossroad. Unlike Meb, her success continued after Athens, with wins in the 2005 Chicago Marathon and in London the next year. She has proven Athens was no fluke. Chicago and London, like Berlin, are where the best come to run fast. She has almost nothing left to prove. The rest is going to be gravy.
She makes it back to the Olympics and figures the minor soreness in her right foot was just a routine ache. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Two and a half miles into the Olympic marathon in Beijing, she hears what sounds like a popsicle stick snapping. Her third metatarsal cracks. It is one of the bones that stretch nearly the length of the foot. It’s a trauma fracture. Running long and hard for years on end, even when smart people like Bob Larsen and Joe Vigil and Terrence Mahon are doing everything they can to keep you healthy, is not for the faint of heart.
Her race is over. Like Meb and Bob though, she doesn’t want to believe anything else is, though biology and her desire to become a mother make her choices a little more complicated than anything Meb or any man will ever have to confront. So what will she do next? A little more than a year after the Olympics, she will finish a disappointing sixth at the Chicago Marathon. Then in February of 2011, she gives birth to her first child, Piper. She has done the most important thing next.
Running to the Edge Page 28