Marathon Man (25 page)

I was coming up now on Heartbreak, where I had been murdered every time before. There was no question I had great respect for the final ascent. But there comes a time where you don't want to respect Heartbreak Hill, you want to conquer it.

For me, that time was now.

T
WO
Y
EARS
E
ARLIER

B
OSTON,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

My training had gone well in August and September, and I was getting back to the shape I had been in prior to Boston. Then, over the final week of September, I managed to run 142 miles. My enthusiasm was noted in my log entry: “A new ta-rah-rah personal record in miles per week!” Now it was time to test out my progress by running as many local road races as possible.

On September 15, I entered a five-mile cross-country meet against Tufts and Boston State. Without meaning to, the night before I got semiblitzed at Jason's twenty-sixth birthday party and didn't hit the sack until three a.m. I took first place anyway, covering the five-mile course in 25:22. A week later I traveled up to Manchester, New Hampshire, for a 15K. It was a great day to race, beautiful fall weather. The one thing about road races at the time was that they were loose and fairly disorganized. Screwing up the distance was a typical occurrence. So while we were supposed to run a 15K, which worked out to 9.32, the course we ran ended up being 9.7 miles. Not that it mattered: I beat the field with a time of 47:09.

Road races were very nuts and bolts affairs. No traffic control. No clocks. No spectators along the roads. If you placed in the top three, you'd get a medal at the finish. The fee to enter each race was tiny; the Boston Marathon was a whole five dollars. At the finish there might be hot dogs. There was almost no media coverage. Maybe a local newspaper guy. I do remember seeing an article about my victory in the National Championships at Gloucester in a magazine called
Yankee Runner.
So not exactly front page of the
Boston Globe
sports section.

At the same time, Ellen started to come to some of my races with me. It's very exciting to be at a road race, not to mention I was winning. Maybe it was also a way to spend more time with me. After all, I was working full-time at Fernald and going on six- to ten-mile runs before and after work. She also started running a little herself, and would occasionally join me for a jog around Jamaica Pond. I was happy for Ellen that she was getting into running. I knew that she wanted to quit smoking, and I had experienced firsthand that the best way to kick a bad habit was to replace it with a positive habit, like running.

Unfortunately, in those days, road racing was a male-dominated sport. It's not like it is today—you didn't see lots of couples or families showing up to races. I didn't know any running couples, and to see a woman runner was shocking. Some would think: Oh, good grief, there's a woman runner. My attitude was: Good going!

By competing in these New England road races every weekend, I started meeting people like myself—that is, runners who shared my passion for training and competition. One of the people I ended up meeting was Bob Sevene, or Sev, as he was known by his friends. Sev had been one of the top collegiate eight hundred-meter runners before going off to fight in Vietnam in 1967. He served five years as an army captain, during which he survived a three hundred-foot fall from a maimed helicopter into a dry rice paddy. After a young surgeon was able to pop all of Sev's broken ribs back into place, he spent six days in a coma and another nine weeks in a full body cast. Five months later Sev was back jogging. That tells you something about his toughness. It says even more about his love for running.

The war nearly cost him his life, and caused him to miss the 1968 Olympic trials, for which he qualified in the eight hundred-meter race, and yet Sev never blamed society or the war for what happened to him. Had he lost the use of his legs, that would have been a different story. Because Sev was like me. He was happiest when he was running. He had to be around it or he felt lost.

I have such vivid memories of running through Waltham with Sev. You want to talk about hills? It was one hill after another. We usually ran along Trapelo Road, which is where the Fernald School was located. I was working a three-to-eleven shift and using my lunch break to go out on training runs with Sev. We used to motor up around Hardy Pond Road—which is now all old hotels—and out past Route 95 and behind the Cambridge Reservoir. You couldn't even run along those roads today because of all the high-tech industry. Kodak and Raytheon are back there. Back then, it was deserted. We owned those roads.

Running is a very emotional activity for me. For example, Bob was a hawkish Vietnam vet and I was a conscientious objector and when we ran we would get into these passionate political debates. As the conversation intensified, so would our pace. All of a sudden, without noticing it, we both would be flying, running sub-5:30 miles, and then we'd just laugh and look at each other like, “Holy crap, what are we doing?”

One of the reasons Sev liked running with me so much was because I could pick up his mood on any given night. If he wanted to go, I would go. If he was tired, I would just come back to where he was and match his slower stride. One night, we were both feeling good and flying along for miles. As we turned onto this dirt trail that crosses Route 9, I turned to Sev and said, “You know, I'm a little bit tired.”

“What do you mean?” asked Sev.

“Well, I ran seventeen miles this morning,” I said.

“I freaking fell over,” recalls Sev. “He had been hammering out 5:20-minute miles alongside me like they were nothing. He was the one person I met in my life who was made to run. When I say that, I mean Billy loved to fly and did it with the lightest, most natural stride ever, as if running was as natural to him as breathing.

“Of course, I think people had a tendency to read Billy as flaky. But he's brilliant. And I'll tell you what—that brilliance goes into running. Billy could tell you at any time on the roads what pace you were going and he'd be right on the nose. He learned that from year after year running around Jamaica Pond, where it's measured, and just understanding pace exactly. The same holds true for downhill running—he practiced that like crazy because he knew how important it was at Boston. This was real early in his career.”

On October 14, I entered the National Championship in Gloucester, Massachusetts. While most of the competitors were at the New England level, Dick Buerkle was a future Olympian who'd go on to set the world record for the indoor one-mile race. Recently, Sev told me about a conversation he had with one of the favorites, Tom Fleming, in the locker room before the race. He was changing into his race gear when Tom came strutting in full of Jersey confidence.

“Hey Sev, anyone I should be aware of in this race?” asked Tom.

“Tommy, watch this kid Will Rodgers.”

At that point in my career, people were using the name Will, not Bill, and of course Tommy Fleming started laughing because of the famous cowboy Will Rodgers.

Sev said, “I'm not shitting you, Tommy. Wait till you see this guy. He's the greatest thing I've ever seen.”

“Tom, needless to say, got his ass kicked,” recalls Sev. “We all did.”

Here's how it happened: The day was cool, ideal for setting a fast time, but for a change, when the gun sounded, I didn't take off like a pissed-off stallion. I fought the usual surge of adrenaline and the impulse to challenge my competition to a street brawl. Instead, I stuck with the rest of the pack and ran at a moderate pace. Amby would have been proud.

Dick Buerkle and I were battling each other neck and neck the whole way. Then about a mile from the finish line, I saw clouds of smoke billowing in the air. Suddenly, we were racing over fire hoses that had been laid across the street. The fireman spilled into the street. They thought somehow they were going to stop Buerkle and me in our tracks. But Jock Semple was ahead of us in the lead vehicle—and nobody stopped Jock. He barreled through the phalanx of fireman, yelling at them in his thick Scottish accent to get off the course. The guy was out of his mind—and the language he was using? Let's just say it was colorful.

I ran through the chaotic street, hurdling over water lines, rushing through billowing clouds of white smoke, dodging the entire Gloucester Fire Department as they battled with a crazy Scotsman. When I sprinted across the finish line, Dick Buerkle was still twenty-three seconds behind. It was a good win. I hadn't used up my reserves too early and, as a result, I had plenty over the last mile—when the scene resembled a war zone—to hold off my dangerous pursuer. In other words, I had actually employed strategy. That's what it took to beat a serious talent like Dick Buerkle.

After I returned home from my victory that night, I ran another 4.5 miles around Jamaica Pond. Later I pulled out my training log and wrote: “My one ta-da national championship zootie-kazootie! Won a 10-speed bike.” That was the most valuable item you could possibly win in those days. Top of the line. The next week I entered an eleven-miler in Gardner, Massachusetts, and took first place. “Taroo! I won a table!” I wrote excitedly in my log. I was pumped.

By now, I had committed myself to ramping up for the Boston Marathon. I even wrote it down in my log. Monday. That's when it starts. I meant it, too. When I ran only eleven miles around Jamaica Plain that Wednesday, I wrote: “Only ran once today. I am pissed!” I thought back to my attitude after I had dropped out of the Boston Marathon, when I wrote in my training log about lacking vim and vigor. Well, that wasn't a problem anymore. I had lots of vim and vigor.

The next day, I entered my second marathon, albeit a much smaller one than Boston: the Bay State Marathon. My first marathon had knocked me down, but I was still very much drawn to the distance, maybe because each marathon represented this great leap into the unknown. Nothing, not all the training in the world, can fully prepare you for what you might encounter in those 26.2 miles. Most people stay clear of situations that they can't control or anticipate the outcome. Not me. I got a rush from charging into the wild frontier. I was okay crashing to the ground because afterward I could think about where things had gone wrong and adjust for my next attempt. It's like the Rolling Stones said: You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need. That's really true in marathoning. Even if you bomb out, you learn from things and you can improve the next time.

On the day of the Bay State Marathon it was a windless day in the forties. Later on, I noted in my log that I ran a five-lap race—the first three laps at an easy pace and the last two laps at hard pace. My breathing was excellent, but I had aches in my legs and back for the last eight miles. Was it the shock of the road? I asked myself. Were my crappy shoes too thin? I didn't think I ran fast. My time was 2:28. At that time, in 1973, Frank Shorter was a 2:10 marathoner. He was 2:12 when he won the Olympics in '72. I wasn't even in the scene with him. I was no threat to him. I was no threat to anybody. Still, I was happy to win another first place prize. Maybe it would be a set of chairs to go with my new table.

Since my high school days, I've wanted to win every race I entered. When I got into the marathon, I got excited. This is for me. This is my distance. Not the two mile. The two mile was too short. I needed ten thousand meters and up. That's where I could turn the tables on all those speedsters who outkicked me at the shorter distances. Here, I could hold my own. Here, I could go toe-to-toe with the top runners in the world. That was fun to be able to do that. To have a shot at winning is very exciting and I went into every race thinking, I do have a shot.

One day while out running the hills of Waltham, Sev told me about a brand-new track club, which he had helped establish, for postgraduate runners who wanted to prolong their athletic careers. It was a bold idea for the time. You have to understand the anxiety and isolation that an amateur runner in 1973 experienced the moment he tossed his graduation cap into the air. You had almost no options beyond college, no way to train or race with a team, nobody to coach you, nothing in the way of structure or support. Jack McDonald, a Boston College senior and four-minute miler, deserves the credit for not just seeing the need for a postcollegiate club but having the audacity do something about it.

On August 21, 1973, McDonald brought together seven other local running junkies in a locker room at Boston College. Attending the meeting, in addition to McDonald and Sev, were Don Ricciato, Dave Elliott, Dickie Mahoney, and Kirk Pfrangle. Over the next hours, and many beer cans tossed back and forth, they started calling every coach they knew, hoping one would agree to train a bunch of running bums in his spare time—and for no money. After being rejected by several coaches, it looked like they weren't going to find a willing mentor. But as their hope dwindled, as well as their beer reserves, somebody stepped up to the plate. His name was Bill Squires.

One final piece of business had to be resolved—a name for the club. After “Codfishers” was crossed off the list and “Boston Beaners” was rejected, they agreed to a more straightforward name: Greater Boston Track Club.

While all that was going on, I continued traveling to road races on the weekend. I drove down to Manchester, Connecticut, for the Manchester Road Race, a 4.25-mile race held every Thanksgiving Day morning. Its status as one of the oldest road races of its kind—it started in 1927 with just twelve runners—lent it credibility and popularity with hardcore runners. It represented old-school New England road racing, and I knew it held a special place in the heart of Johnny Kelley, who had won the race six times, and Amby, who had won it nine times. I also had a special fondness for Manchester because it was the first road race I had ever run. For some reason, Coach O'Rourke thought I should give road racing a shot and so I got my first taste of long-distance competition—taking the high school division in a time of 25:18.