Now he knows the moment a year in the making is mere minutes away. With Hall tiring, he pushes. He digs just enough to hold steady. With three quick turns in the final mile, he disappears from Hall’s sight, grabs an American flag, and waves it all the way to the finish line. The clock ticks to 2:09:08. It is his second personal best in three months. The $50,000 winner’s check is his. Ryan Hall comes across 22 seconds later. Abdi finishes 17 seconds after that, eight seconds ahead of a surging Ritz. Everyone is under 2:10. On Meb’s first Olympic team in 2000, just one male marathoner got on the plane to Australia. It was that charity spot, because no one in the country finished under the Olympic standard of 2:12 in the trials.
That embarrassment got Bob Larsen launched on this whole journey to raise the bar of the sport he fell for a half century ago. In a dozen years Americans have traveled from a place where no one could touch 2:12 to a place where a sub-2:10 doesn’t guarantee a spot on the team. That is no small thing. Bob would never say mission accomplished. The mission is never accomplished. It only moves to what’s next, but it appears to be headed in the right direction.
Meb’s father, Russom, now seventy-four years old, grabs hold of his son and somehow hoists him on his shoulders. Meb isn’t done, and he isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, except London. He is fairly certain the folks in Beaverton, Oregon, and at John Hancock are seeing this.
London, August 2012
London really is going to be the end. That has been the point of these past years. A third Olympic team and another national title to go along with that silver from Athens and the win in New York. There isn’t much left to prove. An Olympic marathon and then maybe one last jaunt in New York. Then it’s going to be time to grow up, to not live by mileage logs, from workout to workout, week to week, race to race. It’s going to be time to leave the mountains, to move the kids down closer to their grandparents and aunts and uncles in San Diego. It’s going to be what the life of a thirty-six-year-old runner is supposed to be—charity races, speaking engagements, sponsor appearances, coaching. Bob gets that. He’s come to London to enjoy one last Games, because soon it’s going to be time for Meb to step back from the edge.
That doesn’t mean Bob has to like it. The concept that he has implanted into the ideal vessel, it’s still working. He knows the number everyone else is fixated on—36. But the number he can’t get out of his head is 2:09:08, that PR Meb ran in Houston on a day when he likely could have gone faster if he really had to fight for the win instead of just the top three.
It’s what he thinks about as he cycles alongside Meb in the mountains during those months leading up to London. A gluteus injury in April costs Meb a crucial month of training. It limits his longest pre-London threshold run to 12 miles. But into the summer, as the Games approach, Bob listens for the scratch of Meb’s shoes on the pavement. He knows Meb’s knees are still churning through the motion, almost as fast as they ever have—fall and rise, fall and rise. Why stop now?
It’s what Bob thinks about here in the shadow of Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace, as Meb gets handed the wrong bottle at the first fluid station. It’s got someone else’s mixture rather than Meb’s familiar mix of water, carbs, and electrolytes. He gets sick a few miles later. What a terrible way for this journey to end. At the halfway mark he is in 17th place. Somehow, though, during the next 65 minutes Meb climbs all the way back into the race. In the final miles, as Meb passes Bob, Bob holds up five fingers to tell him he’s in fifth place. Keep pushing, you’re that close to a medal. Meb finishes fourth. He has run on the edge again, just as he always has. Most see this as a cruel loss, one spot from the podium, a bitter fade into retirement.
For Bob, what Meb is doing at thirty-six years old is the ultimate manifestation of his theory. This career Meb has pursued, and is still pursuing, is one long run on the edge. Back in the 1960s, conventional wisdom said intervals are short and distance runs are slow, until Bob pushed those Toads to understand that neither one of those had to be that way, that the truth of a runner’s potential could be found in how long he could stay on that precipice, that threshold of exhaustion. How long could he make it last? How long could he make the pursuit of the epic run—that run that is so hard and so natural it feels like it might last forever. Believe you can make it last longer than everyone says you can and you very likely will. It hurts? Try running a little faster, and now try doing it 8,000 feet above sea level. The breakthrough is just up ahead, around that next bend.
Now the world says thirty-six years old has to be the end of the road for the long distance runner. Why? Because there are days when the gun sounds and the journey to the edge carries unexpected pain in the Achilles, or a blister under the foot, or a turning stomach? Why does that mean that the idea, the possibility of truth and glory, are gone? If Terry Cotton and the rest of the Toads could figure out how to get themselves to the edge and stay there for 14 and 18 and 20 miles, can’t Meb make this all last, with the right tinkering?
After the race, Bob listens to what Meb says when the writers approach with their pads and tape recorders.
“May Ryan Shay rest in heaven,” Meb tells them, remembering his friend and training partner who collapsed at the 2008 trials marathon.
Then he adds, “I told coach, ‘If I could have two more weeks, I know I can run 2:07 or faster.’ ”
And finally, Bob hears the words he has been hoping to hear. “If I’m still running close to my PRs, God willing, I might still stick it out for a couple more years to see what happens.”
Perfect, Bob thinks. There’s going to be another race. There will be another journey to the edge.
Right on Hereford. Left on Boylston.
Boston, April 2014
The day before the 118th running of the Boston Marathon, Meb Keflezighi runs into defending champion Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia in a hotel elevator. Desisa is a rising star. Tall and lanky and twenty-four years old, he ran under 2:05 in his debut marathon in Dubai the previous year. Then he won Boston a few months later, though few remember anything about the actual competition in that race. Meb wishes Desisa luck. Desisa barks that the race is going to be a war and he plans to destroy the field. Then he storms out of the elevator. It’s unclear to Meb whether Desisa even knows who he is, or that he is even a member of the elite field.
It’s hard to blame him. Meb was not supposed to be here. After London, he decided to give racing one more year. Skechers wanted to keep him on board. New York Road Runners and the folks in Boston promised to pay him to race. Why not see what happens? Then a foot injury kept him off the start line in Hopkinton in 2013. He spent the day hanging around the finish line, doing hits for the television coverage of the race. With his day nearly finished he heard the blast that changed everything about that day. The explosion killed three people, including an eight-year-old boy who was exactly the same age as his oldest daughter. It destroyed the limbs of sixteen others. On the plane back to California, he vowed to come back and run in their honor. He didn’t care whether anyone paid him to do it.
Preparing for New York in the fall, a calf injury and a banged-up knee stunted his training. It showed. In the 20th mile, he hit the wall. He walked for a bit. He thought of dropping out. Then he heard a sub-elite runner from Staten Island promise to help him get to the end. They crossed the finish line arm in arm in 2:23. A sweet story, but not the reason Meb had always shown up on starting lines. He even received a trophy for finishing first in his over-thirty-five age group. If this is what it’s come to, I’m done, he thought. But he knew he had to get to Boston.
His life is different now. With his kids elementary school age, he and Yordanos decide they should be in a less remote locale than Mammoth Lakes. Meb has to find a way to get his time at altitude in spurts, in four- and six-week stretches in the mountains before the biggest races. He’s living in San Diego now, training on the streets of his youth. He runs in the footsteps of Toads once more.
On Fiesta Island and the paths of Mission Bay Park, he nods and waves and gives countless thumbs-ups to the everyday runners who are out there for many of the same reasons he is. The father of a friend of his from high school days rides his bike next to Meb to pace him and carry fluids. Bob drops in and out and is often on the other end of the phone, talking through training plans. As Meb stretches one morning, a woman comes up to him to say hello. He asks her what gets her out of bed and lacing up her shoes in the morning. She tells him she had just finished chemotherapy the day before. Now it’s time to run again. Yes, it is, he thinks.
He travels to Houston for the half marathon national championships in January. The old man feels good that day. He pushes the pace early, and wins by 15 seconds. He starts to dream. With Boston three months away, he knows he needs to get up high now that he is feeling healthy again. He has sold his house in Mammoth, so he reaches out to some old friends there. His massage therapist offers him an extra room in his house so he can get the altitude training he needs there. Others cook his meals. The old gym welcomes him back. There is a hiccup ten days before the New York half marathon in March. He strains his hamstring. He decides to run the race anyway, even though he knows he has to set aside his hopes for another PR.
Geoffrey Mutai is competing, and Meb manages to stay with him for 10 miles, then lets him go and finishes in 1:02:53, nearly two minutes off the pace. The performance isn’t what he wants it to be, especially one month before Boston. He wanted to battle the best runner in the world to the end and plant the memory of that feeling of matching the best at the forefront of his mind ahead of Boston. Now he’s going to suffer from the classic short memory that every runner has. He will remember too well the feeling of fading against Mutai at the most important moment.
Bob tells him to think a little harder, to take the long view. He won the Houston Half once before this year—in 2009, the year he went on to win New York in that same year. That’s your omen. Get back to the mountains, and get healthy. You’re right there, and because of that fade in New York, you’re the only one who knows it. That’s when good things happen. Ignore everything else.
With those thoughts in his head, Meb’s psyche shifts. When he strains his oblique muscle nine days before Boston, it’s nothing more than a small bump in the road. He takes a day off from training, gets a little work done with the massage therapist, and decides he is good to go. The rest will serve him well. The hay is in the barn. His work is done. In many ways, so is Bob’s.
There is a quality to the kind of coaching that Bob has pursued that is something like parenting. It’s that part where you have a vision of what is most important about life and must figure out how to convey those values and the truths you cherish to the people you love. In the best of circumstances, they embrace what you hope they will embrace, and then search for the boundary of what you believe they can become. In so many other professions, the goal is to make money. Coaches set out to make people, people with roots and wings, with unmatched appreciation for where they started and an unrivaled belief in the dream of where they can go. When they go there, in ways both large and small, they take you with them.
In Boston, Meb Keflezighi knows much of the running world considers him the ultimate underdog, if they even consider him at all. Yet, even he can’t conceive the level to which, at thirty-eight, his prospects have faded in the minds of the elite. In the official race hotel, he is Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait, the unseeable and officially dead former quarterback of the Los Angeles Rams, trying unsuccessfully to get people to realize he is there, that he is ready to play football again. Meb will be on the start line feeling as sure as he has ever been that he can be a factor here. Still, the East Africans don’t even discuss him in their pre-race strategy sessions, where they decide the pace for the first 13 miles. They focus only on one another. Most of them weren’t even born the last time an American won this race in 1983. They were children when Meb won an Olympic medal. Boston belongs to them.
Meb doesn’t know this, of course. He isn’t invited to those discussions. He and Bob have their own plan anyway. It’s no different from the plans they made twenty years ago. Stay relevant, then dictate before anyone wants to be dictated to. Make everyone else run your race. The forecast is temperate. Push the pace. Force the issue. He sleeps well the night before. Why not. It’s his nineteenth marathon. Then himbasha, the magic Eritrean bread. Then it’s time to race.
There are so many runners who are faster than Meb in the field, so on the way to the starting line he focuses on the calm, sunny morning. Clear skies, 50 degrees, a little breeze from the southwest. Bob notices how calm the forecast is. He also knows that at thirty-eight, Meb might be a hair too old to cover the surges that the speedy Africans will likely bring. As they walk to the starting line, Bob tells him there won’t be a headwind. If the pack starts slow, you can take a lead without worrying about a battle with the elements. He can’t be too greedy, though. Even if there is an opportunity to move out front, he has to maintain an even pace on the notorious course with its second-half hills. To win, he has to set a pace so that the race finishes between 2:07 and 2:10. That’s how small his window of victory is. One hundred and eighty seconds, roughly 1,000 yards, over 26.2 miles. If the pace is faster, he won’t be able to keep up. If it is slower, he will lack the speed to outkick a rested, younger field at the end. It’s a tiny needle to thread.
On the start line with some of the best Africa has to offer, he can see where the money that Nike used to pay him has gone—the training centers in Africa that the biggest shoe companies now run for these men. The chip is back firmly in place on his shoulder. Can he send them and everyone else who counts him out one more message? It’s where Bob has always wanted Meb’s head to be, and it’s right there once more.
Meb has been around so long, and he’s the last American to win anything major at this distance. But the win in New York in 2009 was a lifetime ago. There are no Meb signs in the crowd. He is a true afterthought. He and everyone else know the window for him to win a major race is going to close, even for Meb, even for someone who believes he can run on the edge forever. Bob and everyone else can see the skin on Meb’s face is getting ruddy. There are tiny sprinkles of gray in his scalp. Maybe the runners surrounding Meb will notice that, too. One more reason to underestimate him. Or maybe, he thinks, they won’t bother noticing him at all, until it’s too late. That’s more likely than anything at this point. Even when Bob has talked Meb up among friendly company lately the reaction he has received isn’t all that different from all those other times he believed in what no one else did—Toads, Americans beating Africans, Meb getting back to the Olympics. They smile politely. They say nothing.
Standing on the start line in the silence before the cannon, Meb’s mind drifts to the year before, the victims of the bombing. He has written their names on his bib. He closes his eyes. He hopes for peace. Then there is a boom. Time to go.
Bob watches him bound off the line and sprint to the front. Sure, he thinks, why not? Then he loads onto a bus bound for Boston, 26 miles away.
During the first few miles, Meb notices the Africans don’t want a fast race. They keep going to the front as a group, trying to block anyone who attempts a surge. The pace is relatively slow—a 4:59 opening mile. The first five-kilometer (3.1-mile) split is a little more than 15 minutes. Meb notices that Desisa’s mechanics are off. He seems to have no rhythm. He is fighting rather than running. After five miles, Meb decides to make his first surge—just to see the African reaction. There is none. He’s still among the invisibles. Only Josphat Boit, a Kenyan-born naturalized American citizen, goes with him. At the eight-mile mark, Meb tells Boit he has no idea what the Africans are doing. The two draft off each other for the next two miles, trading the lead. Then Boit, better known for shorter 5,000- and 10,000-meter races, opens up a lead of nearly 50 meters from miles 10 to 12.
Meb stays calm. Boit hasn’t been here
before. He doesn’t understand he is falling into the trap that Boston’s mostly downhill first half sets for the uninitiated. Newton and its hills await. He glances over his shoulder and sees a large group—the Africans—not far behind. He sprints to catch up with Boit.
They pass the halfway mark in 1:04:21. Meb does the quick 2x calculation in his head. The race is right in his sweet spot. He has no idea why the Africans have let this happen.
Gazing at the crowd every so often, Meb can’t believe how big it is. In some spots it’s six and eight and ten people deep. Every other one of them seems to be wearing one of those blue and yellow “Boston Strong” shirts that have been all over the streets the past few days, and he has never seen so many flags. It’s like a July 4th festival on steroids. Boston is a big city but on this bright blue day it feels like a small, tight-knit village, united behind the purpose of showing the world what it means to be fearless. That energy becomes a tangible thing, a kind of force that he knows he alone is going to feel when it truly counts.
At 14 miles, Boit accidentally clips Meb’s foot. It’s what happens when a runner tires and begins to lose the rhythm of someone he is working with. Meb is feeling as good as he has ever felt in this race—a race that didn’t even want him a few years back. Now he decides to make a move. It’s early yes, but there is an opening. Dictate. He starts to push in the 15th mile and runs mile 16 in 4:39. That puts him all alone at the beginning of the brutal Newton hills.
Running to the Edge Page 31