This sort of thing worried Bob back in the 1970s, when he sensed the shoe companies were poised to take over the sport from the running clubs. Their behavior would not always be benevolent. They would be focused on building brands rather than athletes. He wasn’t wrong.
With Boston out, Meb and Hawi hit up the folks at the London Marathon, which holds its race the day before Boston this year. They look at Meb’s résumé and they are not impressed. You’ve never broken 2:09, they tell him. You’ve got no shot at a flat, cool, speed race like the one we put on. When Hawi pushes back, tells them his brother is far from finished, London paints a different picture. They see a thirty-four-year-old runner who has posted a DNF (“did not finish”) and a ninth-place 2:09:15 in his two previous appearances in London. London is the land of Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile, of Paula Radcliffe and Sebastian Coe. They are all about greatest-ever performances. You’re not up to our standards anymore, they say. Not worth our sterling.
Now Meb’s anger turns into a mild rage. He’s got people on both U.S. coasts and across the Atlantic who claim ownership of the essence of the sport questioning who he is. Without a contract to guarantee the major source of income for an elite runner, he knows there is only one thing to do. He puts two dates on his calendar—New York in November, and the Olympic marathon trials the following January in Houston. New York will pay him. New York Road Runners, the organization that puts on the race, will always have a place for the only American to win its marathon the past three decades, and Meb loves both the city and the race. He is an adopted favorite son. He knows he can run strong there. Then, at the trials he can prove that he is still at the top of the heap in the United States, and once he is an Olympian, the shoe companies and everyone else will be there for him.
Bob hears Meb out on this. He has always advised his runners not to get greedy and chase appearance fees. Train hard, the right way, and success and the money will be there. Two marathons this close to each other is far from ideal. Actually, it’s a terrible plan. The rhythm of this sport follows a spring/fall schedule. Conventional wisdom warns against running more than two marathons a year, or running two races with anything less than several months between them. New York and the Olympic trials are seventy days apart. That is a tough turnaround for anyone. For a thirty-four-year-old with some dings in the armor, it’s a flirtation with disaster. On the other hand, it puts Meb on the edge of crazy, which is where good things have often happened to those who run with Bob Larsen.
In reality, Meb has no choice. He has three children and a wife to support. He has to feed them, and there is only one way to do that. He and Bob and Hawi have a meeting of the minds. The only thing left to do is run.
* * *
—
As Meb returns to the trails and roads around Mammoth, Bob Larsen begins to recover from the loss of his wife. It has been a little more than two years since Sue passed away. For more than a year he was barely able to talk about her without breaking down. He largely avoided the topic altogether. The company he sought—his children, his friends, close and otherwise, picked up on this easily. They knew not to pry. But both he and they also knew their companionship formed his life raft. He got out of bed each morning and sought out the people he loved, people he could just be around and lean on emotionally even though he showed no overt signs of leaning.
Then, in the closing months of 2010, the fog begins to lift. Life begins to round itself out again. Also, his greatest student needs help and is smart enough to ask for it.
Things are different in Mammoth now. Joe Vigil is retired. Terrence Mahon is taking care of Deena, who is very pregnant at the moment. A younger crop of runners who also work with Terrence trickles in and out. What Meb wants is different now, too. He’s past middle-aged in running terms. Runners of his vintage are already coaching others. He wants more ownership of this mission, to design the program himself. Instead of looking to Bob for the road map, he comes up with the plan, a daily and a weekly and a monthly training schedule that he gives to Bob for approval.
For Bob, this is a beautiful thing, the true sign, even more than Meb’s three little kids padding around the house in Mammoth, that the little boy is all grown up. There are tiny tweaks that he suggests. Mile repeats one day instead of one-kilometer intervals, a little more distance on another. A few more easy running days, but mostly Meb has this down. He tells Bob he wants to coach one day when he is done. This idea that Bob has been chasing—this quest for the right way to prepare to run far fast—it’s going to endure.
As winter gives way to spring, they head out to the roads, Bob on his bike, staying close to Meb, as they prepare for the one play he can make to prove himself worthy—an elite showing in New York and top three at the Olympic Trials. He watches the small details—where the trail-leg ankle is higher than the knee of the lead leg as it churns through the running motion, how quickly he can get it back on the ground for the next pop.
He has been doing this for so long he can close his eyes and still know Meb’s pace by the length of time his shoe spends scratching the pavement on each step. He can pick up the split-second differences and tell whether Meb is running a 5:10 mile or a 4:58. Giving in to age, they dial back the volume slightly. The 135-mile weeks drop down to 120. (They will eventually get down to 110.) To make up for the lost mileage, they add in more cycling and time on elliptical machines. It’s cardio work with far less pounding. That makes it even more essential that every mile has its own purpose, even more so than each one used to. This is Bob’s way.
The basic regimen is what it always has been—the magic mix of one- and two-mile repeats, extended runs that build discipline and patience and get the body used to being under pressure for two and three hours at a time, and those medium-long ventures to the edge, the place where all great runners now know they must learn to live. Sure, they tinker a bit with the formula. Some afternoon shakeouts become bike rides or ventures on the elliptical bike. A speed workout might get an extra couple intervals in the Shitbox, while the long run gets shaved by a few miles to save the legs from another 15 or 20 minutes of pounding. They become students of every gadget available. They pack his legs in synthetic casts filled with ice, so he can walk around the house with his joints surrounded by the cold. He spends evenings in compression socks and even sleeps in them sometimes. He guards his sleep like it is the family jewel. He and Bob repeat the mantra of the UCLA great John Wooden like the gospel—practice and training is what you do for two or three hours a day. What makes you excel is how you spend the other twenty-one.
As Bob and Meb do their work, Hawi does his. In the fall, he lands Meb a deal with a Los Angeles–based fashion shoe company named Skechers. It’s a leap of faith that has plenty of folks in the running world snickering. Skechers has never made a high-performance running shoe, but they want to start getting into fitness and they want to build this new unit of their company around Meb, make him the face of it. It’s what Meb always wanted Nike to do. He understands the risk. He can hear the snickers. But he also understands Skechers is risking something on him and doing it for these crucial next two years. He can be in the lab designing his racing flats and training shoes to his exact specifications. He can help make tiny tweaks in the custom shoes—a little more support here, a little less cushioning, or more, to account for age and the increasing potential for injury. He tells them he believes he has personal records left in his legs and that he is going to the Olympic Games in London in 2012. They tell him they think he does, too, that they want nothing more than to get him and their shoes to London.
* * *
—
First he has to get through New York.
November 6, 2011, breaks bright and chilly. It’s near-perfect running weather in the Big Apple, a brilliant, cloudless day. Kenya’s Geoffrey Mutai is at the top of his game. In Boston earlier in the year, he ran the fastest-ever marathon up to that point, a blazing 2:03:02. Ye
s, there was a tailwind all the way, but the time was so fast it got people talking seriously about a sub-two-hour marathon. The mark has long been unthinkable, but Mutai has run a half marathon in 58:58. Now, with Mutai seconds from going below 2:03, the sub-2 in the marathon seems doable, roughly 1,300 meters away.
As Bob watches from Manhattan, Meb goes to the starting line on Staten Island praying for the strength to be the runner he knows he can be. He knows this course as well as any. He can see the whole thing passing through his mind as he stands on the south side of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge—the rise and descent across New York Harbor, with the Statue of Liberty and the downtown skyline in the distance off to the left, the seven-mile straight up Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, the slight ups and downs through the neighborhoods of North Brooklyn and southwest Queens. Then comes the Queensboro Bridge, the roars up First Avenue, a mile in the South Bronx, and the final stretch from Harlem to Fifth Avenue and Central Park.
He sees all of it as the cannon sounds. He shoots across the bridge with the lead pack, feeling as though anything is possible. But what is that strange thing in his right shoe?
As he comes off the bridge into Brooklyn, he realizes he has made one of the dumber mistakes of his career. He has been running with a flexible, plastic strip across the bridge of his nose lately. Most people use them when they are sleeping. Meb uses the Breathe Right strip when he is doing the opposite of sleeping. The strip pulls apart his nasal passages, maximizing airflow, making sure every extra bit of oxygen available can find its way into his lungs. Meb feels the bridge of his nose with his finger. Nothing but smooth skin.
Now he remembers that he slipped the plastic strip for his nose into his left shoe on the way to the starting line. That way he wouldn’t forget it, or put it down somewhere, or throw it out. None of that transpired, of course. Instead, he has forgotten it, and it’s in a terrible place, under the ball of his left foot. If he stops to take it out, and has to untie and re-tie his shoes, he will surely fall several hundred yards behind the leaders. That’s too big a gap on a day like today, given the mission he has set for himself—proving his relevance. So he soldiers on, feeling the nasal strip rubbing at his thin sock and the raw skin underneath. It grows more irritating with each mile, and with each mile the idea of taking it out and losing time and place gets more unattractive because with each mile the opportunity to make up ground shrinks.
Meb hangs with the leaders until the second half of the race. Then Meb’s stomach goes south on him in Manhattan. It’s a basic hazard of trying to run 26 miles at a 4:55 pace. It happens to every marathoner at some point or, rather, at many points. He vomits on the course and falls nearly a mile back. There is no touching Mutai on this near-perfect running day. He runs a 2:05:06 and wins by a quarter of a mile. Meb crosses the line in sixth place. Somehow, even with the vomit and the nasal strip that felt like a rock in his shoe down the stretch, he lowers his personal record in the distance to 2:09:13. That is faster than the time he ran when he won this race. Also, he is the top American finisher. That is no small thing. It comes with a $20,000 prize in a year when he’s mostly been running for cash. He has just posted one of the top American times of the year. And he did it with a plastic strip in his racing flat.
As he wobbles around the finish area, the soreness in his foot begins to set in. When he gets a look at it, it’s one whale of a blister, with a nasty purple hue where the skin is worn away. The Olympic Trials marathon is in sixty-eight days in Houston. He has a problem.
* * *
—
Back in Mammoth, the blister becomes infected. It gets worse before it gets better. The raw skin aches when he walks on it. He can’t even think about running. How much time does he spend staring at it each day? There are few things more frustrating for an athlete than staring at a body part and waiting for it to heal.
Bob knows this as well as anyone. Watching Meb, it’s pretty hard for him not to think about those nasty stress fractures that kept him from proper preparation for so many big races a lifetime ago. He knows something else, though. There is no harder worker than Meb Keflezighi, even at thirty-five.
Yet, the window between New York and the Olympic Trials is so delicate. Some people run marathons and don’t feel fresh on a 10-mile tempo run two months later. Here, Meb is going to try to run the race of his life less than ten weeks after a PR in track and field’s most demanding single event, while battling a nasty blister that has him sidelined. But there is a not insignificant part of Bob’s brain that believes the blister may be one of the great gifts the running gods have ever bestowed on Meb. The blister isn’t a strained ligament or a fracture in a major bone. It’s a deep skin abrasion that will heal in plenty of time for the race. It’s also forcing Meb to rest and rejuvenate. Bob knows Meb is going to be back on the roads before too long, and when he gets there, he just might feel life in his legs that he hasn’t felt in years.
Yordanos does not disagree. She knows how the past eleven months, the dealings with Nike and Boston and London, have driven Meb into a quiet rage. She knows he always channels his anger onto the roads and the track—an extra mile on the tempo run, a few extra intervals on a speed workout. In this moment of moments, if he had two healthy feet, she has no doubt how these weeks will unfold. She and Bob remind him how primed he was for New York, where he ran the time of his life—so far. A few weeks of rest won’t make that fitness disappear. Settle down. Stay off the foot. Get on the floor and play with all these little children, they tell him. Surely there can be no better therapy than that.
By Thanksgiving, he is back at it. The blister and the infection are mostly gone. The Shitbox and Lookout Mountain and Lake Mary and Green Church Road call to him.
* * *
—
It’s damn chilly in Houston the morning of January 14, 2012, with the mercury in the high 30s and not expected to rise much more than 10 degrees above that. More than 100 men are on the start line with Meb, many of them, including him, sport gloves and skullcaps and running sleeves that stretch from their wrists to their biceps. Meb has good memories from here. He has twice won national titles in this city in the half marathon. He’s here to pick up another one at a somewhat more substantial distance. Yordanos and Bob were right. The post–New York, infection-induced rest has revived him in a way all the massages and ice-infused casts never could have. He’s got fifteen marathons under his belt. He’s closer to thirty-six than thirty-five now. For a year he’s been arguing with the running establishment about whether any of that means anything. There is no more time for talking. Only running. Third may be as good as first in this race, because an Olympic trial is all about getting on the plane to the Games, but make no mistake, Meb is here to win. Bob is fine with that.
He has his eye on his buddy Ryan Hall, a gifted runner six years younger, who lived in Mammoth and trained with Meb until 2010. Then he and his wife, Sara, decided to move to Redding, 100 miles south of the Oregon border. He is so devoted to God that he has shunned all coaches and instead prays to the Lord for enlightenment about his next workout. If God tells him to run 20 miles that’s what he does. If He tells him to ease off, he does that, too, believing that his devotion will be rewarded.
The previous April, when Meb was sitting out Boston, the Lord and the running gods allowed Hall to complete the 26.2 miles from Hopkinton to Copley Square in 2:04:58, nearly three minutes slower than Mutai but the fastest marathon time any American has ever posted. Tailwind or not, sub-2:05 is moving. Now Hall believes no one can stay with him. This race is all about establishing a cushion between first place and fourth and keeping it. This is a fast, flat course that will begin with a 2.2-mile circle and then three 8-mile loops around downtown Houston. Hall’s strategy is obvious—he will push hard from the beginning and see if anyone dares to stay with him.
Meb dares. So does his old rival and friend and sometime Mammoth-mate, Abdi Abdirahman. And so does Dathan Ritzen
hein, the Michigan native who went to Boulder and is seven years younger than Meb. Everyone calls him “Ritz.” Meb remembers watching him cruise past in Central Park four years before when everything went to shit. They fire along at a 4:50 clip for the first four miles, then put up a 4:44 in the fifth one. Mohamed Trafeh, a naturalized Moroccan-American who is among the favorites, remains in the hunt, too, before dropping out ahead of the final stage (and later getting busted for performance enhancing drugs).
After eight miles they are a minute ahead of the second group. The race is now a three-seat game of musical chairs with four dancers. At the 18-mile mark, Meb, Abdi, and Hall put a four-second gap between themselves and Ritz. As they turn past the Houston Convention Center and run along Avenida de las Americas to begin the final loop, they dig for a little more juice. By mile 20, Ritz is more than 100 yards and 20 seconds back. It’s all going in the wrong direction for him. Then Meb does what any experienced elite runner would do in this situation—form an impromptu team. Meb turns to Hall and Abdi and tells them it’s time to work together and make the Olympics. They’ve done this before in the Sierras. They know what Bob has always told them—the group is stronger and faster than the individual. Nothing against Ritz. With spots at the Olympics on the line, this isn’t personal. They stay on each other’s shoulders, taking turns bearing the brunt of the wind and keeping their little clique comfortably ahead. With two miles left and Ritz still lurking, Abdi drops off slightly. It’s a game of survival for him now. For Meb though, it’s almost time to go. In the 25th mile, he feels Hall slow ever so slightly.
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