Marathon Man (22 page)

Things were different during the early years of the Boston Marathon. You could have a handler who could follow alongside you as you ran. They had people going along on bikes with special drinks they had prepared for their runner. Some of them were bizarre concoctions, like arsenic and tea; things to stimulate or jolt the athlete back to alertness. I know what you're thinking: I'll stick with Gatorade. But sports drinks hadn't come to Boston even by 1973.

As a participant in the world's most famous marathon, you couldn't expect more than a few official water stops, which would be conveniently obscured along the route. Perhaps the BAA officials were concerned that the demands of pulling off a sub-2:15 time on the hilly New England terrain weren't nearly insane enough. Following his 1977 win, Jerome Drayton would have the audacity to complain that competitors should get adequate water while they ran a marathon. The response of race administrators was, “Look, this is the way we've always done things. And we're the Mecca of marathons. So if you don't like it, don't come.” As a matter of fact, in 1927, race officials, looking for a way to keep costs down, decided to eliminate water stops altogether. With temperatures hitting the eighties, many runners collapsed from heat exhaustion and had to be helped off the course.

At this juncture in my first Boston Marathon, I had a pretty good idea how those competitors must have felt in 1927. My mind had shifted into the off position, too hot and weary to think. I was taking water from anybody offering it. Mile after mile. Stop, drink, stop, drink, stop, drink. But it didn't matter how much water I drank, it did nothing to quench my thirst. I was telling myself, This is miserable. This is miserable.

Oh, how I had let the easy downhill start seduce me. I had flown down that first descent like a banshee on fire. Done in by the same reckless aggression that had caused me to occasionally run afoul of the law when I was a kid, pick a fight with my neighbor Gerald, and accidentally burn down a train car.

In Natick, scores of runners began passing me, particularly older runners. That was a surprise. Never happened to me. I always ran at the front with Amby or whoever I was up in the lead with. I was already knocked down, beat up, getting cramps in my legs, and then everyone started passing me: that was destructive, debilitating, depressing. It was not fun at all, because I didn't know why this was happening to me. I thought I was going to run a good race, like at Silver Lake Dodge.

By the time I reached the Newton Hills, I had stopped along the course around thirty times from ripping cramps. It felt like somebody had strapped burning charcoal embers to my sides. My brain was a boiling pile of goop. This is ridiculous, I thought. What was the point of going on? My body was beat to a pulp. I didn't want to spend the next several days in the hospital being fed intravenously. What if they took me to Brigham where wanted posters with my likeness probably still hung on the walls?

Of course, in my dehydrated state, there was another possibility: I could keel over and die right there on the side of the road. Or I could try to trudge up the next hill, tear an Achilles tendon or a calf muscle, and then keel over and die. When I finally finished counting the myriad ways I could so easily be picked off, I made a decision: I was going to drop out. But not before I made it up Heartbreak Hill.

I dragged my pummeled body up the steep incline, one agonizing step at a time. My long, skeletal legs were shot. I was having problems with my hamstrings and calves. I had cramps all over my body. I had a cramp in my neck! I moved slowly. No gas in the tank. I was a dead man marathon shuffling.

I staggered to a stop at the crest of Heartbreak Hill and bent over with my hands on my wobbly knees. At least I had made it to the top under my own power. At least I had something to show for 21.5 miles of hard effort. This was my “victory.”

I straightened up and gazed out at the city skyline below me. I knew that my apartment was not far from where I stood. Like it or not, at that moment, I was in full view of the spectators lining the streets below. Some of them started to shout up words of encouragement to me: “Keep going!” “Hang in there!” “You can make it!” I was too beat up to respond. I could've used an IV of fluids. Of course, they didn't have medical attention back then. Just words of encouragement.

Somebody handed me a can of soda and I instantly guzzled it, craving the sugar. The soda had a bad effect on my stomach. I felt sick. Of course, I hadn't eaten anything all day except that cup of yogurt. I started limping home, fried to a crisp. What a terrible sport this is! I thought to myself. What was I thinking?

Once I got home, I began licking my wounds. I couldn't decide what hurt more: the cramps that lasted for the next six hours, the worst sunburn of my life, or my pride in thinking I could compete against the world's top runners.

Gradually, my appetite came back and I went about replenishing my severely dehydrated body. Now came the fun part. Trying to figure out what I did wrong.

My training had gone well, I thought, but once the race got under way, I had made all the mistakes a beginner could possibly make. I didn't adjust my strategy to the weather conditions. I didn't drink enough water beforehand. I ran too fast at the start. I held firm to my unsustainable pace. I didn't feel my way through the early stages. I didn't pay attention to my competitors to see how they were reacting to the heat. I had been too cocky, too naïve, too full of myself after good showings at a few local races. I had wanted too much, too soon. I was thinking about top ten when I should have been looking to just finish. I was shooting for a time of 2:15 to 2:20. Man, was I wrong. In that kind of heat? Lunacy. The winning time was 2:16, for crying out loud!

It hadn't occurred to me to hold back my energy in the early stages; that I didn't have to be right up there with the leaders from the start. I was a cross-country and track runner; I was used to racing up at the front, you know? Usually I could do that. That's how I ran Silver Lake. Like a cross-country race. And it had worked. But it was forty degrees cooler out. My body could handle it. This hit me like a ton of bricks.

I thought about all the summers I took off from running when I was younger because I had rather have been at the beach. Because I disliked training in the hot sun. It didn't agree with my pale Irish blood. “Train over the summer,” Amby used to tell me, but I never listened. Here, withered up on the couch, I wished I had.

The marathon had humbled me. I was so devastated by how poorly I had raced that I began to question whether I could ever succeed at such a long distance, and against such high-level competition. I tried to resume my training, but it was hard. I felt angry and confused. Over the next several weeks, my running was sporadic. By the end of the month, I had stopped running completely.

I had quit running before. Was I about to do it again?

 

TEN

Boston, You're My Home

A
PRIL 21, 1975

N
EWTON,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

Once I blew past Drayton, I never again bothered to look behind me to see where he was. My eyes were fixed straight ahead. I had made my move and it was a clear break. I had gotten away. Maybe he thought I was going to kill myself at that pace and come crashing back to earth on the hills. As a matter of fact, I know that's what he thought. My good friend Tom Fleming believed the same thing. There was no way I could last the distance.

You have to understand: Nobody today tries to run away with the Boston Marathon as early as I had that April day in 1975. It doesn't happen. There are too many good runners these days. Everybody's more careful. They aren't breaking away until at least mile 19 or 20—that's where the race starts getting more competitive and emotional. The crowds are bigger, the runners are more tired, but the fitter ones will go for it. By that I mean they will throw in a surge. Change up the pace for a hundred yards, or three hundred yards, and test the strength of the competition.

Even my own brother, my most loyal supporter, thought I had lost my marbles.

Charlie pulled up to me on the press bus, stuck his head out, and shouted: “Billy, slow down! Are you nuts?”

The verdict was still out on that one. With that said, this was my third time running the Boston Marathon. I felt I knew how much more I could handle. This was Drayton's first Boston. He may have been worrying about the hills up ahead. I trained on those hills. I felt I would be ready for them when the time came. I could see from Charlie's pained expression that he was not nearly as sure about this.

I understood the look of concern on Charlie's face. He had watched me succumb to the merciless nature of the marathon for two straight years. He had seen his little bro suffer the agony of trying to run on legs that felt as if they were filled with cement, and the heartbreak of ending up a twisted wreck on the side of the road. But this was a different kind of day. Finally, I was running a marathon where I felt strong, relaxed, in command. It was a huge lift to be gliding along without a trace of fatigue. The doors felt wide open. I could run as fast as I wanted to.

I was sailing along, easily in front. I had tens of thousands of people roaring me on with every stride. They spurred me on to keep a pace that would have broken most runners. Every inch along the course was lined with people going nuts, and I was knocking out sub-five-minute miles as I flowed between the rowdy hordes. It was like a Fenway Park crowd during the seventh game of the World Series, only spread out along a twenty-six-mile country road. Their deafening screams of support drowned out the sound of my footsteps and any doubts in my mind. That intensity was pushing me into places I had never dared go before as a runner.

I felt like it was my crowd. They were on my side, particularly when I broke away from Drayton. And in a strange way, I was on their side. For instance, I didn't know that Tommy Leonard, the man who always had a big smile and a cool drink waiting for me at the Eliot Lounge halfway through my long training runs, was having a hard time miles behind me on the course that day. Recalled Tommy: “Billy's fighting to prove how good he is and I'm way back in the pack. I'm ready to drop out and just then I hear the crowd roar—Billy's just pulled into the lead. I'm telling you, he gave off mystical vibrations. I got so high I ran my best marathon ever. Three hours and seventeen minutes.”

I liked this feeling of breaking away early and running on my own. In later races, I would break free from the pack, but never as early as I did on this day. Usually, I would take off around sixteen or seventeen miles. That's where I always made my move in New York City. I would start racing hard over the Queensboro Bridge, come off the expanse, and keep surging hard for another mile or two. I hoped to drop the field with this burst. Sometimes I did.

Everything was going well as I turned the corner onto Commonwealth Ave. For all us runners, whether you think about it or not, if you're still running good at eighteen miles, you're going to have a solid race. But if you've struggled to get to that point, the last six miles are going to be hell.

I hit the first of the three hills on Commonwealth Ave., which a lot of people say is like the first punch in the runner's face, but I was thinking, This is not that tough a hill. I was running steady with my eyes focused like a laser on the lead vehicle just ahead of me on the road. It became the center of my universe; everything outside of my narrow field of vision faded from existence.

My parents always told me, “Bill, you can't go through life with blinders on.” And they were right. But if running straight ahead, free from the worries of the past or the consequences of the future, was a great liability in my life, it was a great gift as my smooth strides ate up the miles to downtown Boston.

Was it coincidence that my habit of focusing on what was directly in front of me, and nothing else, gave me the power to run 26.2 miles like few others in the world could? After all, I've never been able to look too far down the road, not like my brother, Charlie. I think this is typical of somebody with ADHD. Since I was a boy, I had lived a life that was spur of the moment. There were times, plenty of times, I paid the price for not thinking beyond the now. Sometimes I was so focused on what was directly in front of me, I missed the brick wall up ahead. But the same rules that applied to life didn't apply to running a marathon—if you were strong and fit enough, there were no brick walls ahead to fear and thus no need to put on the brakes. If you were strong and fit enough, there was only an open road for you to soar down. That's what it felt like running alone in the lead—like I was soaring and there was nothing to stand in my way.

By the time I rounded the sharp corner at the Newton Fire Station, located around mile 18 and just before the first of the four dreaded Newton Hills, I was struck with a horrible realization: I had blown it. I had run too fast over the first three quarters of the race, and now I was going to get wiped out on the demanding hills. I flashed back to the disaster I had experienced last year—and the year before that—on the final ascent into the city. The leg cramps. The dehydration. Was this going to be an instant replay?

I didn't know how hard I had pushed it, getting away from Drayton, but I knew I'd been flying like a bat out of hell up to this point. In fact, I was running thirty-eight seconds under Ron Hill's course record pace.

If I was a racecar driver, at that moment I could look at the gauge and see if I was, indeed, running at an unsustainable pace, or what's called “redlining.” But my only gauge was my brain; it was the only thing that could tell me right then if I was working too hard at eighteen miles or still running within myself. What if Charlie had been right? What if I had let my compulsion to take on Drayton eclipse my rational thinking, leading me to make a panic move that was about to send me on a suicide mission through the hills?