New York, November 2016
Nearly 25 miles and roughly three-and-a-half hours into the New York City Marathon, I finally accepted that this just wasn’t my day.
With my legs telling me they didn’t want to run anymore on the final hill in Central Park, just past the Boathouse, I knew there was only one way I was going to get across the finish line. For the first time in a mediocre long-distance career that then spanned sixteen marathons, I was going to walk the remainder of what had turned into a pretty miserable day during the past 45 minutes.
Bonking. Hitting the wall. There are any number of names for it. Bottom line, you can’t run anymore, and there is almost nothing you can do about it. But strangely, that’s where the fun began.
No marathon can rival New York when it comes to support. The crowds heave behind the barricades for many of the 26.2 miles. With about 50,000 runners in the race—the New York Road Runners estimated a total of 51,392 finishers this year, which would be a new record for the largest marathon in history—estimates often range somewhere between one million and two million fans. I have no idea how they come to those figures, but I do know the fans are screaming at you and blasting music and holding out their hands to be slapped everywhere they can from the moment you get off the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge until the moment you reach Tavern on the Green.
It’s a massive blur of the most awesome sound. Start walking, though, and suddenly it gets incredibly personal—so personal that it almost made me think I’d been missing the point of the whole thing by trying to run as fast as I could all these years.
As soon as I started walking, the pats on the shoulder and the words of encouragement began arriving, one after another from my fellow runners as they passed me. “You’re looking good, hang in there,” or “Almost there, you’re not quitting,” many of them told me in one form or another. After a quarter mile, I lost count of how many had slowed up momentarily to make sure I got the message.
Meanwhile, over on the other side of the guardrail, fan after fan was reading my name on my shirt and yelling it out. They told me how great I looked, how close I was to the finish. Grown men and women offered me hugs. Not wanting to be rude, I took several of them up on it. It seemed like every other child under fourteen was yelling “You got this!” at me.
I felt a little bad sucking all the attention from the rest of the field, but I felt something else, too.
It had been a pretty miserable few months in the U.S. It felt like two halves of the country had been screaming insults at each other since July.
Yet on that last mile, the only thing I could hear was a chorus of encouragement and concern and support for the guy who looked like he needed the most help. It was a reminder of what we do best on a personal level.
By the time I turned back into Central Park to the strains of a band covering “Jessie’s Girl” (another benefit of walking three miles an hour—plenty of time to enjoy the music), I was practically blissful. I probably could have started running again, but I wasn’t going to trade that last 500 yards of strolling and goofing off with the crowd for anything.
Back to the Edge
New York City, November 2009
After broken pelvises and screwed-up hips and dog attacks and holes gouged in their feet, thirty-three-year-old distance runners generally call it a career. That’s what everyone was pretty sure Meb would do after the misery of 2008. All that running in pools and those massages and the rehab and the therapy looked like a fool’s errand. Sometimes, there is simply no way to account for the damage that a bad-luck injury can bring. So who the hell is this guy locked in a two-man race in the final miles of the 2009 New York City Marathon.
Maybe Meb was stubborn? Maybe he wasn’t able to let that chip slip off his shoulder? Maybe he couldn’t think of anything better to do, or a better way to make money and provide for his growing family? Or maybe he simply thought somewhere between Green Church Road and that house he has near the ski basin, the boy with the funny name who shocked the world in Athens was still lurking, doing that running version of Peter Pan, where running faster somehow allows you to hop off the aging train, at least for a little while. In fact, it’s a little bit of all of this, plus the idea that when he is out there, churning away, trying to prove to everyone that he is something more than they believe he is, he becomes the best version of himself, the true son of the man who dodged hyenas and the Ethiopian army during that very long quest for survival.
And so, after more months of rehab, and physical therapy and pool running and then getting back to the Larsen formula of repeats and the thresholds and the long runs through the mountains, Meb pulls off a win in the Houston Half Marathon in January, and then ends up at the top of the heap at the U.S. Cross Country Championships. Then he puts up a PR in London, running 2:09:21, though no one notices because London is a speed race and the time slots him into ninth place. In July he takes the seven-mile national championship in Davenport, Iowa.
Okay, fine, those are nice wins, but sure a World Marathon Major (one of the world’s top five marathons—New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Berlin) with an international field must be out of his grasp. And yet there he is in the fall of 2009 by the reservoir in Central Park, with just over two miles to go in the New York Marathon, battling Robert Cheruiyot, the four-time Boston winner.
Cheruiyot is eight inches taller than Meb. He had a running résumé three times as long. He knows how to put a perennial bridesmaid like Meb Keflezighi away at a moment like this with a $100,000 first-place check on the line. Meb sees the final water station. His mind flashes back five years, to that fateful swig that cost him the lead in the 2004 race. It’s too early to push, of course, except it isn’t—as Cheruiyot indulges in the water station, Meb pushes the pace, refusing to let this go down to the wire. Come with me if you dare. Cheruiyot cannot cover the move. Meb wins going away by 41 seconds.
He’s the first American to win this race in twenty-seven years. He’s the only living American man with an Olympic medal in the marathon other than Frank Shorter. This little running career he has crafted for himself, it’s a long way from over. Only fools would doubt him now.
Right?
Los Angeles, December 2010
For six months, Hawi Keflezighi has been waiting for the good folks at Nike in Beaverton, Oregon, to give him the word on his brother’s contract extension. Hawi has spent the past five years serving as his big brother’s agent. Like Meb, he attended UCLA. He wasn’t a runner, but he has spent enough time around his brother to know the running game as well as any elite competitor.
Hawi and Meb are like Russian nesting dolls. Hawi’s skin is slightly darker, and Meb is slightly taller than his younger brother. But around the eyes, where their high cheekbones suddenly cut into deep eye sockets, they are nearly identical. It’s always been this way. When they were young children arriving in Europe to reunite with their father for the first time in four years, he mistook one for the other. As teenagers, they run, they work, they strive, and Hawi follows Meb to Westwood. He gets a law degree there, and he gains his brother’s ultimate trust.
Since 2005, he has carved out a comfortable living for Meb. Thanks to his win in New York and the bonuses that came with it, the Nike deal reaches into the mid-six figures, though the penalties for poor performances or an off-year remain, just as they do for nearly every other runner, much to Meb’s chagrin. Meb also has sponsorships with Sony, the health supplement UCAN, PowerBar, and the New York Road Runners. In good years, when he wins or places in the top two or three at big races, he can clear six figures in prize money, too. As with any runner though, the shoe deal reigns supreme. It’s the key part of any runner’s equipment, like a golfer’s clubs or a tennis player’s rackets. With running though it’s essentially the only piece of equipment.
Meb has been with Nike since he got out of UCLA, when the company signed him to that $30,000 a year deal. It went into six fig
ures when he set the American record in the 10,000, then went up again when he captured the silver in the Olympics. Running contracts can be cruel though, even for top runners like Meb. They are filled with reduction clauses that lower payments when a runner’s performances slip. The reason doesn’t matter. Slowing down because of injuries? That’s going to cost you. Can’t run because of a balky knee or hip? That will cost you, too. Sidelined by pregnancy? Tough luck. Your salary is going down, and Meb’s surely did during the struggles of 2007 and 2008.
The win in New York brought in some $350,000 in prize money and sponsor bonuses. It was a much-needed boost for a thirty-three-year-old who, since the Athens Olympics, had gotten married and had two small children, plus another on the way. There was one problem though. Meb’s Nike contract ran for another year, through 2010. Had it been up after 2009, when Meb became the toast of New York and American running, he might have gotten a multiyear deal worth more than $1 million. Hawi had broached the subject of an extension with the higher-ups at Nike soon after the race. They smiled politely and said they looked forward to speaking with Meb in the coming months. In other words, let’s see what you do next year, then we’ll talk. He took them at their word.
In June 2010, Hawi sent a proposal to Nike. All Meb wants is another two years, Hawi told them. He plans to retire after the 2012 Olympics. Carry him through that and he is happy to be a Nike athlete for life, serving as an ambassador for the brand in retirement, when he plans to coach and continue to show up at major races for charity runs and speaking engagements. Hawi had just two significant requests: keep the deal in the low–mid six-figure range it reached in 2010 thanks to his bonus for winning the New York City Marathon, and dump the reduction clauses. Meb is a big boy, he told them, an internally driven runner. He doesn’t need a contract to motivate him. Meb also knows he likes to go for the win in races rather than hold back, so he makes some time like 2:12 that he knows won’t be good enough to win but will allow him to avoid a reduction in his payments. Give him the leeway to run to win and risk blowing up, Hawi said. Meb merely wants stability for his young family.
We’ll get back to you, the Nike folks told him.
* * *
—
Through the summer and fall there have been any number of emails and conference calls with Beaverton. The brain trust is noncommittal, but they continue to tell Hawi they are working on a counterproposal. He will have it soon. They love Meb. They want him to be a Nike athlete for life, too.
Now the calendar has ticked down to the final days of the year, the final days of Meb’s current deal. Hawi wasn’t supposed to let it come down to this. He wishes he had a do-over here. There are now only twelve days left before the current deal ends and 2011 begins. The Nike folks told him to trust them. They will do right by Meb. Even with those injury-riddled years in 2007 and 2008, he’s still the only American distance runner of his generation, of the past couple generations, to win an Olympic medal or a major marathon. That’s worth something, even at thirty-four. They get that, they tell Hawi. But they are also businessmen, and they know the longer they string Hawi along, the more leverage they gain. Meb has a young family. He isn’t going to want to be without a shoe deal, is he? So they wait, and wait some more, and tell Hawi they are working on the counteroffer.
Then six days before Christmas, as Hawi passes another tense day in his office in the city where he ran as a collegian and got his law degree and cut deals that landed Meb in a Super Bowl commercial, Hawi opens his email, and there it is. He does not like what he sees. Nike’s offer is lower, not higher. The performance reductions are there, too. Hawi picks up the phone. He dials up to Beaverton. In so many words he says, “What the fuck?”
It’s not personal they tell him. It’s just the nature of the business. Nike is trying to trim its roster of athletes. Meb, who is now thirty-four, has been deemed trim-able. It’s highly likely his best performances are behind him, not ahead, they say. Yes, it’s great that he won a silver medal in the Olympic Games, but that was six years ago. Yes, they know he won New York last year. This year, just last month they remind Hawi, he finished sixth. And this business about him wanting to run in the 2012 Olympics? He didn’t make the 2008 team. His spot on the team is hardly guaranteed. The last time they saw him in an Olympic Trials, in Oregon in 2008, he wasn’t even close.
On one level, Hawi understands the Nike logic. It’s business. He also knows Nike has its heart set on the bright, fair-haired boy of American distance running, Galen Rupp. Rupp, who is twenty-four, is a running machine from Oregon. Alberto Salazar has been training him since he was sixteen years old, a high school kid Salazar convinced to give up soccer for running. He went to Oregon, like the Nike founders Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman, and Salazar himself, and essentially launched Nike’s Oregon Project, a running team modeled on Larsen and Vigil’s Team Running USA, so Rupp would have an ideal training atmosphere. Meb had no interest in training with Alberto, or Jerry Schumacher, another Nike-sponsored distance specialist. He stayed with Bob Larsen. That didn’t help. Hawi gets all these things.
On another level, though, Hawi is burning. How could they string him along like this after a dozen years? How could they jeopardize the livelihood of someone who has been nothing but loyal to them, who worked tirelessly through painful injuries that would have ended the careers of so many other runners. What he knows, what Bob Larsen knows, what he thought Nike knew, is that Meb doesn’t run for money. He runs for love, otherwise he would have quit long ago. Like everyone else he wants to make as much money as he can, but with his athletic résumé and his education, he probably could have made more and endured far less pain doing something other than running. Now the company that has known him since UCLA is questioning that love. That is the implicit message of a performance reduction—without the threat of a pay cut, you won’t drag your ass out of bed every day and invite the pain of eight 800s at 8,000 feet.
Hawi tells the folks up in Beaverton that they need to talk about this and work something out. They tell him there is nothing to talk about. Meb has two options—yes or no. Take it or leave it.
Hawi knows his brother better than anyone. He knows exactly what he is going to want to do.
* * *
—
For Bob Larsen, Nike’s back-and-forth with Hawi and Meb is like that old Yogi Berra aphorism—déjà vu all over again. For Bob, it’s his third go-round with the Nike folks on this sort of thing. They blew off him and his Toads in 1976, and then their support for his Mammoth idea was limited at best. Given the size of the company, that $30,000 or so they sent to Mammoth represented barely a rounding error on the balance sheet, a $20 tithe into the bowl at church on Sunday morning to assuage the guilt. It’s almost funny in a way. These guys never learn.
He also knows exactly how this one will go. Nothing motivates Meb like being disrespected and doubted. This is how it was in 2001, when he told Meb to go for the American 10,000 record on the night when Nike was flying in rabbits to Palo Alto to make it all about Bob Kennedy. It’s what gave Meb that extra gear in Athens, when no one took the guy with the 39th best time in the field seriously except the two people who knew what had been going on in the Sierras for a year. It’s what got Meb another slew of national titles and the elusive win in New York in 2009, after two years of injuries and a consensus in the running world that Meb was done, that Athens was a fluke, or one of those things that happens when suboptimal conditions serve as an equalizer and bring the fastest runners in the world back to the ones who are just a click slower.
Of course Bob doesn’t see it this way. This sport, this life, is about a rhythm—fall and rise, fall and rise…Since Athens, that moment of ultimate validation for his quest, he’s been through the ultimate falls and rises, both on his own, and with Meb. He believes in rising.
Mammoth Lakes, New York, Houston, London, 2011–12
Along with great endurance and a killer set
of lungs, temperament and faith have long been two of Meb’s true gifts. Through disappointment and injury, he knows to channel his anger and he never asks why. He believes there is a reason things go a certain way. His job is to search for it. Within that search, lies enlightenment. Except now.
This time around—after getting the Merry Christmas news from Nike—he’s seriously pissed. He does not understand how a group of people he has worked with and for and proven faithful to for more than a decade would stall and lowball him like this. Worse, they seem to not understand the essence of who he is, what drives him. Wasn’t it just fourteen months ago, on the streets of New York, that he proved that?
He believed he could still win anywhere on any given day. With a previous two years like this, including the Olympic medal, how could Nike, a company that prided itself on carrying the heart and spirit of distance running in its DNA, not see this? If they don’t see it now, they will soon, he promises. Bob Larsen already does.
There are a few raw, come-to-Jesus conversations with Yordanos and Hawi. Do you really want to keep competing and risking your health, they ask? Yes, he says. And once again he finds his way to channeling the anger.
Each morning in the Sierras he rises with his wife and three daughters, all under five years old, with a mission. Sometimes he meets up with the handful of top runners still hanging around Mammoth. Mostly he runs alone, without training partners, without much in the way of real income. He will have to earn that on the roads, with prize money that will hopefully prove to the folks who run the big shoe companies that this part of his life is not over, that he is going to rise. First, though, he falls again. Nike isn’t alone in losing faith in him. In early winter, the folks at John Hancock, sponsors of the Boston Marathon, refuse to offer him a spot and the appearance money that comes with it in their elite field. They tell him his fifth-place finish the previous year, nearly four minutes back of the winner, a minute back of Ryan Hall, simply isn’t good enough. Their money is better spent on other, younger runners. Meb is certain they are taking their cues from Nike, conspiring to bring his career to an end so the focus shifts to the other American hopes in the stable.
Running to the Edge Page 29