But he is not alone at all. As he pounds up the hills, he can see wonder in the eyes of all these New Englanders lining the streets. There is an American in the lead late for the first time in forever. A kind of mania spreads through a crowd here to celebrate a region’s resilience, its relentless need to rise beyond the bombs and the death of the year before. The spontaneous, desperate chants of “USA! USA!” pound in his ears as he turns at the Newton firehouse and heads for the next ascent. This does not feel like a road race, Meb thinks. It’s more like a World Cup soccer game. He loves everything about it.
As he climbs, a too-familiar pain returns. Since 2007, when he had that bothersome callus removed from the bottom of his left foot, his foot blisters in every marathon. Sometimes it’s a mere annoyance. Sometimes making each step in the final third of the race feels like a nail pounding through his skin. Sure enough it’s the pounding nail on this day. But he sees the American flags, he hears the “USA” chants, and he tells himself to ignore the pain. Those cheers carry him through the hills and across the 21-mile mark, where Heartbreak Hill finally crests and descends. And still, he runs alone. Bob Larsen knows there is only one explanation. The Africans behind Meb have no idea who is in front of them.
Just then, a disturbing realization hits Wilson Chebet, the top-ranked marathoner in the field, and the rest of the Africans. The man in the lead is so far ahead he has disappeared. At twenty-eight, Chebet, a Kenyan, is ten years younger than Meb. He has broken two hours, six minutes in multiple races, including two wins in the Amsterdam Marathon. He and his comrades decide that it must be Meb who is up there ahead somewhere. We have a real problem, Chebet thinks. Now or never, he tells himself, and he presses on the gas.
The lead doesn’t disintegrate all at once, but after a mile he is roughly 25 yards closer, and after another mile another 25 yards are gone. Meb is now within shouting distance, maybe 50 yards ahead, an actual competitor rather than just a speck in the distance. Then 100 minutes into this 118th running of the grandest of all marathons, after Meb has run alone for better than a half hour, he glances over his shoulder as he approaches the end of the 23rd mile, where Chestnut Hill bleeds into Brookline. He sees an orange blur. He knows immediately it is Chebet, who appears far closer than he was roughly two minutes ago, the last time Keflezighi glanced back over his shoulder. Now Meb must confront an uncomfortable truth—I am being hunted.
The two almost make eye contact when Meb swivels his head a few seconds later to check on how quickly the lead is shrinking. At the 24-mile mark, they zip past Coolidge Corner, feeling the gravity and extra speed that comes with Beacon Street’s slight downhill. Fenway Park is not far. Meb swivels his head again. He knows his lead is 25 yards at best, a distance that Chebet might be able to erase with a furious sprint. Then Meb realizes he has another problem. He thinks he is going to throw up.
Meb considers slowing down and letting Chebet catch him. That way he can salvage energy for a sprint to the finish, those last 600 yards on Boylston Street. He quickly decides this is a terrible plan. Eliminating what was once a lead of several hundred yards will undoubtedly inspire Chebet to blaze ahead. “Maintain the gap,” Keflezighi tells himself, as he tries to will away the wave of nausea gnawing at him. Meb tries to feel better by reminding himself that if Chebet felt as good as he needs to feel to win the race he would be next to him by now, and he isn’t. He is also pretty sure the world thinks Chebet is going to eat him in a matter of minutes, because Meb Keflezighi is nearly thirty-eight years old and trying to win a race that can’t be won, not by him anyway.
Bob knows there is another move to make here, that Meb has to do what he always has done when good things happen. He must push before the other guy thinks he is going to push. Go early, not late. But he can see Meb’s steps aren’t what they were even moments ago. They are more labored, heavier, every one a battle. It’s that rare moment in his half-century career where the man who knows everything about this game has no idea what is going to happen, and isn’t that the beauty of it all?
In his head, Meb keeps repeating three words—maintain the gap. With a mile to go, the gap has shrunk to six seconds. It’s all going the wrong way. They pass Fenway Park. Maintain the gap.
With 1,000 yards to go, just before the slight final rise, Meb thinks of two words—“quick feet.” He knows what lies ahead. Two quick turns—the most beautiful six words in distance running. Right on Hereford. Left on Boylston. Then he will see the finish. Here, he decides is his chance to put this race away, to rise once more and deliver one final primal scream that he and his country will not be discounted. You’re not supposed to push here. It’s too early, that last stretch on Boylston can last a lifetime. If you go now there’s a better than average chance you are spent with 300 yards left, plenty of time to get chewed up and spit out.
But going early has always been what he has done, and he’s way too old to start doing anything differently now. He’s going to run those turns so hard he disappears from Chebet’s sightline once more. He’s going to break that Kenyan the only way he knows how—he runs that turn onto Hereford so hard he pulls even with the police motorcycles leading the race. Turning onto Boylston, he’s gone again. Then that deafening roar, an entire city screaming, swallows him whole as he sprints to the end, beating Chebet by 11 seconds. He breaks the tape in 2:08:37. He has never run faster.
For the first time all day, Desisa and Chebet accept the idea that Meb Keflezighi can win the Boston Marathon.
At the finish, Yordanos leaps into the arms of the man who has just blazed 26.2 miles and survived. She then realizes this might not be the best idea. She finally lets go. Then it’s Bob’s turn. He embraces the champion of the 118th Boston Marathon, and as he holds Meb he is clinging to so many others—all the Terry Cottons and Ed Mendozas and Mike Breens and Tom Luxes who have made him look smart for fifty years. Perfect, once more.
It’s a funny thing about these long running races. The start and the route to the finish and the finish line itself are so clear. And yet each one feels like a mysterious journey, each mile bringing another surprise. This quest Bob Larsen has been on for most of a lifetime, it’s not so different. At the beginning, there was simply love and fascination with the most elemental activity. That somehow evolved into a drive to make others understand something they could not without him, using methods unlikely ever to be abandoned again. They made a very simple and very complicated attempt to be fast and in doing so become the best version of themselves. Of course it would end up here, in this epic moment, watching an American man win the grandest race with the perfect run to the edge.
This life is one long race. Bob Larsen has won.
Onward
I have run two marathons in torrential rain. This first, in 1997 in New York, was notable for reasons other than the rain.
My wife decided to run her first and, so far, only marathon that year. Her goals were where they should be. She merely wanted to cross the finish line. In training she ran roughly a 10:30 mile pace. We both figured she would finish in about five hours. I would run with her and help her get to Tavern on the Green. Since I was going to run about 90 minutes slower than my usual pace at the time, I didn’t train very hard. I never ran more than 12 miles on my long runs.
The gray morning of the race, we passed the hours before the start on Staten Island huddled on garbage bags. When the announcement came that it was time to head for the corrals, my wife delivered some interesting news.
“You go ahead,” she said. “I’m going to run alone.”
This would have been good information for me to have had a few months before.
“What?” I asked. She repeated her intentions.
I guess she hadn’t liked my attempts at inspiration during training. On one run, as we trekked up Harlem Hill, I told her the only hills that exist are the ones we create in our minds.
“Oh, fuck off,” she told me. Then she explained that, in fact
, we were running up a killer hill. She was right.
Running alone probably was the right move for her, but there I was on Staten Island with only one way to get home. When the cannon boomed I set off over the bridge and figured I would run until I could not run anymore.
I don’t remember when the skies opened up. It was early and often. When I slogged past the Boathouse in Central Park about 220 minutes later, I looked down at my shoes and saw water around my ankles. What the hell am I doing here? I thought. I resolved to get to the finish line and never do this again. My wife crossed the finish line in five hours and 40 minutes next to an octogenarian who had run the first New York Marathon in 1970. I’ve rarely seen her so happy.
I stayed true to my promise for fourteen years. We had three children. I pushed all of them in running strollers, singles and doubles, for miles on end, packing bread and carrots to feed the ducks and horses in Central Park and plenty of chocolate muffins and pacifiers for the small people being pushed along. They were good girls.
Then in 2011, I followed through on a commitment I made long ago to one day run a marathon to raise money for The Hole in the Wall Gang, a camp for kids with cancer and other serious diseases, where I had been a volunteer counselor in 1994. My close friend runs the camp’s foundation. He gave me a bib for New York. I raised a bunch of money, and there I was back on the bridge heading from Staten Island to Brooklyn. The drawstring of my shorts broke two miles into that race. A friend I was running with gave me two extra safety pins, which held for the next few hours somehow. I limped across the finish line in 3:44 and figured once again I was done.
At work the next day, a colleague ten years older and significantly faster wandered over to my desk to tell me he had been studying my splits. He told me he thought I could go much faster, and he could help me get there. I told him I always wanted to qualify for Boston. He said that I would.
That was sixteen marathons ago, and fifteen marathons before the other one that took place in a torrential downpour.
God willing, there will never be another Boston like the one that unfolded on April 17, 2018. Or maybe God willing there will be.
I’m sure there have been more epic conditions for this race. They’ve been doing it for 122 years, after all. But that Monday was as high on the misery index as anyone could remember.
For days, many of the race’s roughly 30,000 participants had been staring at weather apps and radars, playing amateur meteorologist and praying that the forecast for temperatures in the 30s and 40s with driving rain and a 20–30-mile-per-hour headwind somehow wouldn’t come true. We traded notes all Sunday on what we were going to wear. In the end, I never took off my windbreaker. Neither did the women’s winner, Desiree Linden. That never happens.
I rose at 5:54 Monday morning in my cousin’s apartment in the South End to the sound of birds chirping. My hopes rose, too.
Then I walked to Boston Common in slanted rain to take the bus to the start in Hopkinton. My shoes were soaked and my toes nearly numb as I took a seat on the bus. I was bundled up like a third-grader ready for a walk to school. In Minnesota. In January. In the next seat was a woman from Utah wearing a racing singlet and running sleeves she planned to discard. It rained here three years ago, she reminded me.
I knew that. I ran that year, too, but in 2015 the rain didn’t start until much of the field, including me, was nearly half done. And that year’s race felt about 15 degrees warmer than the 37 degrees it was as we journeyed to Hopkinton. Yet there was little question this steely woman from the West was way less terrified of the next few hours than I was.
Any hopes of pre-race comfort in the tents behind the school disappeared when we arrived at the start village behind Hopkinton High School, which had turned into a mud bowl. Smart runners brought a second pair of shoes to change into on the start line. I brought extra socks, but putting a dry sock into a mud-soaked sneaker doesn’t work so well.
For the first five miles my feet felt as if they were in ski boots. I couldn’t feel my toes as the rain shifted between steady downpour and Noah’s Ark–style soaking. I desperately wanted to finish, but I didn’t want to lose extremities in the process. I started jogging my memory to recall the hospitals along the route. There are several, thankfully. And then, after about an hour, it all became sort of normal for a bit. I settled into a rhythm.
There were moments during those 3 hours, 24 minutes, and 49 seconds when the rain slowed, though it never stopped, and the wind quieted, and I thought, okay, no big deal. Then, just as quickly, Mother Nature unleashed storm cell after storm cell for a few minutes just to keep us on our frozen toes.
So why not quit? Because long distance runners live for the story. We love you thinking we are just crazy enough to run 26.2 miles in driving rain and freezing temperatures. Could there be anything more rebellious, almost countercultural, just like distance running was in those pre-running-boom days? That spirit lives on. Pre would have loved that Boston race.
Also, while plenty of Bostonians were smart enough to stay inside—this is supposedly the area with the largest concentration of graduate degrees, after all—tens of thousands came out to cheer us on, and did they ever bring it. Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender” was blasting on the speakers as I passed through Natick. You could hear the Wellesley women screaming in mile 13 a good half mile before we got to them. An old college friend appeared to cheer for me on Heartbreak Hill. Hadn’t seen her in twenty-five years. And yeah, of course she lives right off Heartbreak Hill.
Then, finally, it was our turn for the six most beautiful words in distance running. “Right on Hereford. Left on Boylston.” I was streaking toward the finish line in Copley Square, airplaning my arms and weaving across the road in delirium. Sure, there was some hypothermia. Another deluge, more gusty winds. Bring it on. In the telling, which is all I have now and all that matters, it’s the best Boston—evah.
Unless I meet with some terrible misfortune and die in the middle of a race, there will likely be a time in my life when marathons are something I used to do. People often ask me how many more I will run. I tell them I have no idea, because I’m really so far from being ready to say that I don’t run marathons anymore, that I don’t get the purest joy from rising early on a weekend morning and heading out on the roads or a trail for a long, long time, or from standing on the same starting line with the fastest people in the world, and 50,000 other like-minded souls all wanting to be a part of something so much larger than ourselves, running to the edge to make some sense of our stupid little lives.
May it ever be thus.
A Note on Sourcing
The material for much of this book comes from dozens of first-person interviews with the characters in the book, as well as with people who know a lot more about running than I do and are a lot faster than I am. I did rely on a number of books and articles about running and runners to fill in certain holes and to make myself smarter about this pursuit.
They include:
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, by Christopher McDougall
The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It, by Neal Bascomb
Run to Overcome: The Inspiring Story of an American Champion’s Long-Distance Quest to Achieve a Big Dream, by Meb Keflezighi
My Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Medal Life, by Frank Shorter
Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon, by Ed Caesar
Let Your Mind Run: A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory, by Deena Kastor and Michelle Hamilton
Bowerman and the Men of Oregon: The Story of Oregon’s Legendary Coach and Nike’s Cofounder, by Kenny Moore
Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, and America’s Greatest Marathon, by John Brant
14 Minutes: A Running Legend’s Life and Death and Life, by Alberto Salazar an
d John Brant
The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, by David Epstein
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight
In addition to these books, there were many helpful articles I found in the annals of Sports Illustrated, Runners World, the Los Angeles Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The New York Times, The Associated Press, and The Wall Street Journal, some of which I wrote myself and had forgotten I had done so. Also, Dyestat has a remarkable database of nearly every California High School Track and Field Championship going back to 1915, which is pretty remarkable. And Gary Close’s scrapbook from his Grossmont days is an amazing thing.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, this book owes its existence to two incredibly generous and special people.
The first is Bob Larsen, who spent countless hours answering endless questions. He never lost his spirit or good humor, and he never asked for anything in return. I’m not sure they make people like Bob anymore. He has had a remarkably successful life, and yet he has a humility that seems to know no limits. Go ahead and try to find someone who has something really bad to say about Bob Larsen. It’s darn near impossible.
The second is Robert Lusitania. Robert made and then released a terrific documentary in 2015 about his old running coach and the Jamul Toads called City Slickers Can’t Stay with Me. He invited me to a screening the day before the Boston Marathon that year. I went and knew immediately I wanted to write a book on the topic. When I approached Robert with the idea, half expecting him to tell me to go find some other story, he said, essentially, how can I help? He gave me phone numbers and email addresses of old Toads and showed me outtakes from his own interviews with them to provide me with background. He’s a gem, and a pretty good filmmaker at that.
With Bob and Robert’s entrée, nearly every Toad I reached out to was happy to talk. So thanks to Mike Breen, Ed Mendoza, Tom Lux, Dale Fleet, Thom Hunt, Dave Harper, Kirk Pfeffer, Glenn Best. Gary Close, also a Toad and Grossmont Griffin, has an amazing scrapbook that was ridiculously helpful.
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