Pre: The Story of America's Greatest Running Legend, Steve Prefontaine

by Tom Jordan

  It was fun traveling around with tour partners Ralph Mann and Dave Wottle, but by the middle of July and the U.S. match against Sweden and West Germany and his old nemesis Harald Norpoth, Pre was ailing. His troublesome sciatica was back, but so were Norpoth’s recurrent stomach problems.

  In the 5000-meter, Prefontaine ran the first 3000 in 8:02, and only the wraith-like Norpoth stuck closely. Then Pre had difficulty.

  “It was at that point that I wanted to bear down and step up the pace,” he said, “but I couldn’t. I wasn’t tired, but I couldn’t go any faster. My race in the 5000 is in the last five laps, but when I’d start to move that last mile, my back would tighten up.”

  Norpoth outkicked Prefontaine over the last 200 for a 13:20.6 to 13:23.8 win. There were bigger rivals in Pre’s career than the wily West German—Lasse Viren among them—but none whose racing style he detested more. “Anybody but him,” Pre said. “I’ll be back.”

  Upset by his physical problems, Pre cut short his tour and returned to the United States after one more 5000, a loss to the Belgian Puttemans at an international meet in Louvain, Belgium. The 1973 tour was less than Pre had hoped for, but during three of the races he had run the fastest 5000 of his life and set an American record, recorded the third-fastest 5000 ever by a U.S. athlete, and become the number nine American in the 1500. By now, however, he was thinking in terms larger than being the best American.

  An Extra Season

  Pre flew back to Eugene and resumed the lifestyle of the student-athlete on summer break. He drove new cars down to California to be sold and waited around until there was one going north.

  He continued to train in preparation for the cross country season, an extra one he was granted after sitting out the 1972 fall season. He also readied himself for a final semester of classes before graduating with a degree in Broadcast Communications in the winter of 1973.

  One day, shortly after his return from Europe and the galling defeat by Norpoth, a group of Oregon runners were out on a road run. One of them, Dave Taylor, is a runner of slender physique, much like Norpoth.

  “Guys on the team used to give me a hard time about how I’m built,” he explains, “so I had this T-shirt made up with ‘NORPOTH’ on the back.

  “About halfway through the run, I whipped off my sweatshirt and took off sprinting in front of Pre. He went into a rage, and came up and grabbed me and started choking me, and said, ‘If that skinny sonuvabitch, if he ever does that to me again, here’s what I’ll do to him,’ and here he was beating me up on the run. It was in fun and he was smiling, but he let us know that he didn’t really appreciate what the guy had done.”

  Oregon doesn’t run many meets during its cross country season. The goal is to emerge from the fall with a solid foundation for outdoor track, and a five- or six-mile race every weekend is more likely to tear the runner down than to build him up. It’s not that the season is underemphasized, the coaches will tell you, it’s just not overemphasized.

  So when Pre met up with John Ngeno in the Northern Division race of the Pac-8, he may have been a tad short on races. Or, perhaps Ngeno was improving and Pre wasn’t, the doubters said. In any case, Pre had to hustle to outsprint Ngeno at the tape by 0.8 second. Right then, the chances for a third Pac-8 cross country title looked in doubt.

  Pre, Ngeno, and Danny Murphy at the mile-mark of the Pac 8 meet—November 1973 DAVE DRENNAN

  But the next week in the Pac-8 meet at Stanford’s golf course, it was the Pre of old. Tough, cagey, indomitable.

  Through the flat first mile-and-a-half, Ngeno pulled Pre and Irishman Danny Murphy from Washington State free from the pack. Rain was making the going slippery, and at times the Kenyan’s naturally skittish gait was close to sprinting as he windmilled around the turns and got 50 yards on Steve.

  On the back three miles of cambered hills, Pre closed and caught Ngeno with two miles to go on the 5.9-mile course. He ran the fourth mile in 4:20 and finished by breaking the record he shared with Gerry Lindgren from four years before by a convincing 28 seconds.

  “He just alternated the pace, and I love that kind of race,” Pre exulted.

  In the typical postrace crush of reporters and autograph seekers, someone asked the winner if he was looking forward to future races against young Craig Virgin from Illinois, who the summer before had broken Pre’s two-mile high school mark by a half-second. The pride flared in Prefontaine.

  “It’s not a matter of me racing him; he has to come and race me!” Still irritated, Pre continued, “That’s not much of a record-breaking performance—what, a half a second—no, I’m not impressed.”

  With two weeks to go before the NCAA Championships in Spokane, Washington, Prefontaine received continuous treatment on his back and trained as best he could. Despite his convincing win in the Pac-8 meet, his confidence was at an all-time low.

  The team captain rallies his troops. But he talked more confidently than he felt. Spokane, 1973 JEFF JOHNSON

  “We went to the NCAA championship meet in Spokane,” Dave Taylor recalls, “and I’d never seen Pre act like he did there. He had injured his back and was really in a panic. He was a regular person at that meet—even locked himself in his room at 8:00 that night. Rose nearly got him.”

  Nick Rose of Western Kentucky had been running well that 1973 season. He came from the British blood-and-guts school of distance running, where you ran until you dropped. But he was also intelligent, and race-wise enough to have won the International Junior Cross Country match in 1970. Still, Prefontaine was Prefontaine, a fact of which Rose was aware.

  “I had been running the way I run best,” Rose says. “Just hammering for about four miles and then hanging on, and I thought that was what I was going to do.”

  By the halfway mark of the beautiful course, Rose had 50 yards on Pre and seemed to be gaining at each downhill stretch. The course was a loop, and on the second circuit, the pack behind could see the lead Rose held.

  “I thought it was all over,” exclaims Doug Brown, an Olympian in the steeplechase in Munich. “At three miles, Rose had a good 50 or 60 yards on him, and I thought, ‘Wow, the race is over. Pre’s gonna get beat—he might even come back to me!’”

  "That guy had a helluva lot of guts or confidence or something to let me get that far ahead." —Nick Rose JEFF JOHNSON

  Pre draws even—one mile to go. JEFF JOHNSON

  Meanwhile, both of the front-runners were in a quandary. The pace was hurting Pre. He glanced back and saw that nobody was going to catch him for second, “so it was either do or die,” he later told Taylor. So he went after Rose.

  “It’s strange,” Rose muses. “I didn’t really think that I was going to beat him. I knew that I had a big lead at one stage, but I just had this feeling . . . I was sort of waiting for the guy to come up and take me, and when he did, I had sort of given up a bit. Maybe if I had had more confidence. . . .”

  With less than a mile to go, Pre pulled even, and once level, knew the race was in hand. Rose clung, then faded, and Prefontaine had his third cross country title, leading his Oregon team to an overwhelming victory in the team championship.

  "It was my turn." —Dick Buerkle, after winning the 1974 CYO two-mile. It was Pre’s first defeat over a mile to an American since the summer of 1970. WALLEY BROWN

  Buerkle’s Turn

  The 1974 indoor season started with the invitational CYO meet in College Park, Maryland. Pre had been training hard for three weeks to prepare for the two-mile race.

  The field did not look overpowering, although Dick Buerkle, who had given Pre the struggle the year before in the AAU Championships, was in it. Pre led, as usual, through a 4:15 first mile, which broke him away from everyone but Buerkle. In fact, Dick moved into the lead past the mile.

  “I wanted to challenge him, see what he had,” Buerkle says.

  With five laps to go on the 160-yard track, Buerkle moved out into lane two, but Pre could not assume the lead. “When I moved out, if he took off, then I�
��d just have had to stay with him, run a little harder,” Buerkle states. “But when I moved out and he didn’t do anything, then I knew it was mine. I went out and ran as hard as I could, and he didn’t stay with me. l looked back with a half-mile to go, and he was hurting.

  “I just moved out; it was my turn. He was tuckered out.”

  Buerkle’s time was 8:26.2; Prefontaine’s a still-good 8:33.2. It was his first loss to an American at a distance over a mile since the AAU Championships of 1970.

  Pre shrugged off the defeat, but as one teammate recalls, “he worked his tail off when he got back to Eugene. He was super-pissed.”

  A week later, he won the two-mile at the Sunkist Invitational in Los Angeles in a time not much faster—8:33.0—but with no one within seven seconds of him. Buerkle was not in the race.

  He continued to train hard, and with the defeat by Buerkle still fresh in his mind, his mental direction asserted itself. In fact, Pre’s next race may have been his finest indoor race ever. Not because it was fast—it was, an American record 8:22.2 for the two-mile—or because it excited the fans—it didn’t, as the Portland crowd of 8,000 present for the Oregon Invitational was strangely lackluster in its support. No, because this one race shows how much Pre could put his mind to running when he wanted to.

  Dave Taylor, who was there, describes it well:

  “Geis was in the race, and he and Pre had a little feud going. Geis took off from the gun and went through the half in about 2:04, and Pre was right behind him.

  “Then something really strange happened: Pre took off at about the half, and all of a sudden he got so involved in the race that he basically went into a trance. I’ll never see anyone run this fast again. He ran 61 for the next quarter and 2:03 for the next half. He came through the mile-and-a-half at world-record pace. And you could look in his eyes, and he was so involved I don’t think he even realized where he was.

  “Then somebody shouted at him, and he started looking around and slowed down, just like that. He just snapped out of it. I’ve always felt that if he’d gone another quarter before he snapped out of it, that would have been pretty awesome to see.”

  Pre’s finest indoor race ever, the 1974 Oregon Invitational in Portland. He seemed to be in a world of his own as he set an American record in the two-mile. JEFF JOHNSON

  One month after his loss to Buerkle, Pre was now thoroughly in shape. Realizing this, he extended his indoor season to include the San Diego Indoor. In the two-mile race was New Zealander Dick Tayler, fresh off a 10,000-meter triumph in the Commonwealth Games the month before. Here indeed was worthy competition.

  For awhile, it seemed like a typical Prefontaine indoor race—Steve doing all of the work, and everybody else hanging on for as long as possible. By the mile (4:09), only Tayler was with him, and they had a 40-yard gap on the field. Pre was running close to world-record pace, and he was beginning to feel it.

  Suddenly, with six laps left, Tayler moved to the front.

  “I realized by taking the lead so early, it might have cost me the race,” Tayler explained later. “But I felt good and I wanted the screaming crowd to see a record. I knew we could do it.”

  Pre relaxed behind Tayler for four laps of San Diego’s super-fast 160-yard oval, then sprinted by with two laps remaining for a two-second win in 8:20.4, the third-fastest in the world at that point, and another American record.

  “Those people from overseas are much more generous that way,” Pre commented about Tayler’s pacesetting. “I wish more Americans were that way. The track felt great,” Pre concluded, “but I didn’t.”

  6

  Hard Work

  To attain and maintain the fitness of a world-class runner, three factors must be present: physical ability, mental tenacity, and plenty of hard work.

  From those early years in Coos Bay, of sprinting between telephone poles and tacking up notes on his dresser to “Beat Doug Crooks” or some other rival, Pre had these factors in abundance. Later, surrounded by very good, even great runners at Oregon, he was nonetheless a step above, and everyone recognized it.

  “There did seem to be a difference between Pre and the other runners,” teammate Lars Kaupang of Norway says. “He seemed to be able to go out on the track and do three-quarter miles, half-miles, miles, all by himself, and he was able to push himself to a limit that nobody else could.”

  Training was not always all that much fun, as Pre himself admitted. “It really gets grim until the competition begins,” he once said. “You have to wonder at times what you’re doing out there. Over the years, I’ve given myself a thousand reasons to keep running, but it always comes back to where it started. It comes down to self-satisfaction and a sense of achievement.”

  Road Training

  There were several unusual features to the Prefontaine training program. No matter what time he went to bed the night before, Pre was up the next morning at 6:00 a.m. and out the door at a six-minute-mile pace. He believed that any work done at a pace slower than that would not do him any good. Considering his abilities, he may have been right.

  And while he certainly trained on the roads, Pre was not a road runner. He never ran road races and never pushed his daily road workouts. They were a means of building strength while recovering from some brutal afternoon track sessions. During the time they shared the trailer in Springfield in 1972–1973, Prefontaine and Pat Tyson often did their morning runs together.

  Pre’s teammates and coaches, Fall 1973. Standing left to right: Bill Dellinger, Dave Taylor, Gary Barger, Randy James, Scott Daggatt, Bill Bowerman. Kneeling, left to right: Terry Williams, Steve Prefontaine, Tom Hale UNIVERSITY OF OREGON ARCHIVES

  “Whenever you went for a run with him, he would never let you know when he was going to turn,” Tyson says. “He wouldn’t warn you, in other words. Most runners are kind of polite and will signal when they’re about to turn right or left, especially when you haven’t been on that run before. But Pre would just cruise, and you would learn to keep a couple of yards behind him and watch very closely. He definitely led the workouts.

  “Steve would always ask me, when we were on a run in the morning especially, ‘How’re you feeling? How’re you feeling?’ I think he was really concerned about how I felt, but I’d just say ‘fine’, even though sometimes I might have felt terrible.

  “Pre didn’t like to go on a run of more than 12 miles. Said he didn’t enjoy running that much. He would max at about 10 miles. They were always at six-minute pace or faster. On Sundays, he might go out for an additional 4 to 5 miles in the afternoon real easy—excuse me, six-minute pace.

  “The runs he’d pick were boring and repetitious—through Springfield by the railroad tracks, by industry. He always seemed to be fascinated by that. I’m sure he liked the trails, too. I never really analyzed it, but he may have wanted to be around more civilized things, so he ran through city streets. And he liked to stay away from hills.”

  On the roads for the easy days, Pre relaxed a bit and became less competitive. “That’s where I really got to know him,” teammate Mark Feig reflects, “on the roads, where we could talk. That’s where I first learned of his warmth and where he was headed.”

  There was time to talk, trade jokes, and pull a few, too. Sometimes a guy nicknamed “Jack Frost” would tag along on the road workouts. He would rest up on the more intense training days, and then come out on the distance days to try to run with Pre. Eventually, it got to Steve, so one time he led Jack Frost up a deserted road in the woods, then sprinted back to the main group, leaving Jack to find his own way back to Eugene.

  “There were some guys who just wanted to be able to say they had run with Pre,” teammate Steve Bence says, “and he took care of them.”

  In the never-ending struggle against boredom, Pre wanted to run new routes. “All right, you guys decide where we’re going to run,” he would challenge Feig and Bence when they trained together on the roads. Feig would suggest the Bike Trail or Skinner’s Butte, and Pre would respon
d with “That’s not very original; everybody does that all the time.”

  “So we’d end up with him going off in the lead and end up running the same old thing we’d done before,” Bence says.

  To teammate Terry Williams, it sometimes seemed that Pre could have cared less where he was going on his runs. “Like one day, it was raining kind of hard. We have this cemetery right across from the gymnasium. He started out there—I thought we were going for a road run—but he just ran there. I followed him for 40 minutes in that cemetery, and he never did one full loop as we wandered around.”

  To break up the routine, Pre joined Oregon Track Club teammates in Eugene's first international race in the fall of 1974. ERIK HILL

  Serious Business

  If the roads were a time of recovery and comradeship, the track was where he savaged his body. “When he was on the road, he just ran,” Tyson says, “but he thrived on the track. On the track, he was in his own little world.”

  Pre would arrive at the Hayward Field track just before the start of the daily afternoon workout, and sometimes after it had started. A few laps of warmups, and he was ready to rip through the workout, tear it to pieces, and leave most of the Oregon team far behind in his wake. And unlike those who could manage several such workouts and then break down with illness or injury, Pre had the physique and temperament to come back for more.

  “I guess the thing that stands out,” says Oregon coach Bill Dellinger quietly when asked of Pre’s greatest talent, “is that he went through four years of college without ever missing a workout because of a cold or illness. Four years of never missing any meets.