Marathon Man (29 page)

The other guys in the group—Hodge, Thomas, Fleming—had all been serious talents in college. I don't know what they thought of me when I showed up—a skinny, quiet kid with shaggy blond hair and faded brown corduroy sweatpants. Probably not much.

Coach Squires was one of the first to incorporate speed work into distance runners' training. Before that, marathon runners were referred to as “plodders”—the old-style guys of the thirties and forties looked like they were just going so slow. I wasn't a plodder, but I didn't do enough speed training. I had the other pieces of the puzzle worked out—the daily high-mileage runs. What Squires added to my repertoire was the ninety percent–effort track workout. He had me and the others doing mile or mile and a half pickups at the world-class marathon pace of five minutes per mile. Nobody had their athletes doing long speed intervals like that in 1974. Number two, Squires believed these flow intervals should be run at a moderate pace, where it was hard and comfortable at the same time—where everybody else did them full-out. Eventually, I was running 5:20 a mile in practice and just floating along.

Coach Squires was a man so far ahead of his time I'm not even sure he always realized what the heck he was doing. He devised unusual workouts for us. One I remember in particular he called the simulator—as in simulating a race. He started us out with a quick one mile or two miles on the track and then we'd go out on the Boston Marathon route and run the hills, then we'd finish on the track with another hard effort. A hard start, a hard finish.

Squires made us run from Boston College out to Wellesley and back along the Boston Marathon course. The purpose of these hill workouts was not to break us, but to build us up. As Squires explained once: “A workout is an effort where you can control your speed. That means you can control your form. They always have more in their gun when they leave. I'm not into these practice runners, the Cinderfellas, who want a Purple Heart for their workout. I always say, ‘Let's see what we do on Saturday in the race.'” If somebody did try to be a hero during a training run, Squires would give him a lengthy earful, much of it incomprehensible.

Squires knew that by having us train on the actual Boston Marathon course we would gain an edge. “We did it so many times,” said Squires, “you could do it in your sleep.” Preparation was key. Know the course, know your opponent, know yourself, your real power, get in touch with it. Only then were you ready to go into battle.

I liked Squires. He was quirky but wired—kind of like me. I fed off his intensity. We all did. He was one of the guys in a sense, living the runner's life, still running in races himself. Sometimes you couldn't make out what had just come out of his mouth—he spoke his own loopy language—but it didn't matter. What came through loud and clear was his passion. He wanted us to be great, believed we could be great, and got us all believing we could be great. But he required you to listen to him and not question his training program for you, not even if you watched him scribble it on a paper napkin at the Eliot Lounge. He demanded that kind of total belief in him. And he got it from us.

No matter what Squires put us through during practice, he kept it fun. He might direct his whip-smart sarcasm at you, especially if he thought you were stepping out of line, running too hard for his taste or not running hard enough, but he never got mad at anyone. He wasn't a drill sergeant. He didn't need to be with us. We were as hungry a bunch of runners as you could find. No need to crack the whip. We were aiming high. What Squires did was get us to think bigger than we'd ever thought before.

That Squires was willing to coach a bunch of out-of-shape guys clinging on to their college glory days—and do it for no pay—spoke to his ability to see potential in people where others saw none. This attitude was shaped by his own improbable journey from a working-class South Boston kid with a serious heart defect to a three-time all-American at Notre Dame. After serving in the army, where he was part of a unit known for its runners, he came back to Massachusetts. For a second, he considered moving to California to work in the sales department of Wilson Sporting Goods. Then one day, while on a run at Wakefield High School, the high school runners begged him to coach their team. In his mind, it was practically his duty to turn these “pathetic crapburns,” as he called them, into real runners. And he did just that.

Relying on his own unproven training methods, his stubbornly independent philosophies on life, and his razor-sharp instincts, he led Wakefield to a state championship in his first year. A few years later, he was hired as the track coach at Boston State College, where, over the next eighteen years, he'd produce sixteen all-Americans—a very impressive feat. Say what you wanted about Squires's unorthodox coaching style, it garnered results.

I think of Squires as more than just a coach, but a kind of wizard. He couldn't wait to try out his wild concoction of training methods on us. While his daring brew involved a mix of strength training, high mileage, and speed work, the key ingredient to Squires's workouts defied explanation. It was as if Coach sprinkled pixie dust over our sneakers before each of our group runs and said, Awake! His spell caused us to magically kick it into another gear during our workouts and got us to perform at our highest possible level.

Squires, always bursting with energy and ideas, kept us fired up from the start of the workout to the end, when we were drenched with sweat and looking around at each other, wondering how in the world we'd just run as fast and as long as we had. But more than energizing us, Squires served as a spiritual antidote to all the harsh judgments made about us runners in those days. People would ask me why I ran so much, as if it were some form of mental illness. I was told I was too old to still be running; it was deemed an inconsequential activity and thus not an appropriate use of time for a grown man.

In the face of such prevailing attitudes, many of us quit running after college. As a consequence, many of us lost a big part of who we were, and what our hearts desired most. It wasn't until joining the Greater Boston Track Club that we got back that feeling we had lost. We were suddenly reminded how running, perhaps more than any other sport, is a celebration of life. It makes your world a brighter place. It gives you this lift, a confidence to stand tall and feel good. Better than good. Boundless.

We had let society shame us into giving up the one activity that gave us the most happiness since we were kids. Now that we were running on a team again, to many of us, it felt like we were living a second childhood. Squires was the man leading the charge, encouraging us to shout it out loud to the world, I'm a runner. I can do this. I can have this great thing in my life, and I can find satisfaction in achieving whatever it is I set out to do, no matter how many miles it takes to get there. I don't have to be afraid to pursue my passion even if it seems silly or pointless to others. After all, the point of life is to enjoy it to the fullest, not merely survive. This was our radical battle cry as runners against those people who sought to marginalize us. Choose to live life to the fullest. Choose to run. Over time, our call would prove irresistible.

We were pushing one another as teammates like the Kenyans are doing these days. We were lucky. Boston had been a center of track for years, from the fifties on. So there was a history here. I think it had to do with all the colleges around the area—a source of young runners—and the Boston Marathon. Those of us who didn't have the speed or coordination to be sprinters moved on to the longer races and later to marathons. There was a certain unstoppability about it.

The Japanese and Finns and Germans and Soviets had what we didn't—state support, training camps, high-paid coaches, and scientific training programs. In our own country, we were outcasts; a fringe group of hard-nosed, fun-loving individuals doing something that we enjoyed, for God knows what reason, because after you come up with the romantic clichés about loving running, the rest of it is all just hard, bone-grinding work, day after day. And I think, frankly, the people who ended up running 150 miles a week were the people who started winning things and realized that winning, even if there was no cash prize, was its own reward. So, we kept doing it for rewards of a not very traditional nature. We were clearly iconoclastic, rugged souls of some sort.

Tommy Fleming and I would talk every day on the phone about our training. Tommy would want to know what I did. If I told him I ran twenty-two miles, the next day Tommy would run twenty-three. So we fed into each other's competitiveness that way. As Tommy once said: “When I ran with Billy, he would use terms like ‘crush,' ‘kill,' and ‘destroy.' I had never heard a runner talk like that. Which will give you some insight into the fact that what you see on the surface is not what is inside that man as a competitor.”

Anyone who ever trained with me will tell you the same thing. You would never in a million years predict that I would win the Boston Marathon. I was just another guy who was part of the fun-run group. An average, everyday runner. When I wasn't running, I was a friendly, low-key guy. Some even used the term “spacey.”

I remember training with a friend of mine and four other runners, doing mile repeats on the road. My friend would always finish with a terrific burst of speed. When I asked why he was running so hard, he said, “You've got to win the workout.” I had never heard that before. He went to Michigan State. He was a track guy. The track world is very competitive. Road racing is more “take your time, you've got a long way to go.” When Amby and Johnny Kelley ran together through the trails, or when Amby and I ran together around campus, it was never about winning the workout. When things were going well, I would just be floating along the road without any effort.

Despite working for free, Squires was very committed to us. We never had any real arguments. I was glad to do the workouts he suggested—the pickups, the intervals, the hill work. I listened to Billy but sometimes I took what he said or did with a grain of salt. Squires thought if you were running more than ninety miles a week you were wasting shoe leather.

He used to tell the other GBTC runners: “You don't need to do all that loopy stuff Bill does, running a hundred fifty miles in the woods, staring at the bluebirds.” But I liked running in the woods with the bluebirds. Squires was wrong. I did need all that loopy stuff. It was in my blood, just as it was in Amby's and a long line of New Englanders before us—Tarzan Brown, John “the Elder” Kelley, Johnny Kelley, and even Henry Thoreau, walking hours around Walden Pond.

It was nothing personal against Squires. I was a road runner. My training method was based on what Amby had taught me at Wesleyan. I wasn't going to change my high-mileage running routine. I was a very “I'm going to do it my way” person. With that said, I was excited to know that I could take a break from running a million laps by myself around Jamaica Pond to meet up with a group of good guys who could hang with me on runs, even push me. That's what you look for in training partners. Also, I could see they were like me, trying to build on the success they had as college athletes, aiming for the next road race. No more scholarships to win. No chance of prize money. When I think of our focus, I think of the Greek virtue of excellence that was behind the Olympic games. This was just love of the sport.

There was a great feeling of brotherhood, and excitement, in all of us aiming to fulfill the same dream. None of us were getting paid and yet we thrived on the physical challenge. We were like a struggling rock band. A couple of the runners lived together in a house. Whenever we traveled to a race, there'd be five or six of us piled into a hotel room, sleeping on the floors, the sofas, wherever. We were not doing too much better financially than the Kenyan runners living together in training camps, sleeping in primitive huts without electricity and running water.

Although we faced the same dire money woes, we were all constantly joking around, sharing funny stories, trying to one-up one another. We all gave one another interesting nicknames. Some of the guys used to call me “Feather Shoes” because of my light, effortless stride, but my most popular nickname was “Will-ha.” “Will” was the name that showed up in the press, thanks to a local reporter who mistakenly stated my name after my Falmouth Road Race victory in 1974. The “ha” was added to make it sound Finnish. We so greatly admired the “Flying Finns” for their legendary running prowess—and their
sisu
, the Finnish word for “pure will” or “guts”—we called ourselves by Finnish nicknames. Most of these Finnish names ended with a “ha” or “ho” as in Paavo Kotila, the three-time Finnish champion and winner of the 1960 Boston Marathon, or Vomma Iso-Hollo, two-time gold medalist in the 1930s. So I was “Will-ha,” Scott Graham was “Scott-ha,” and Vin Fleming was “Vin-ho.”

Four months before the Boston Marathon, in the middle of winter, eight of us from the GBTC piled into a couple of beat-up cars and drove to Philadelphia to compete in the city's marathon. After two of our runners secured a hotel room with two double beds, the rest of us snuck up the back stairs. We tossed the mattresses on the floor so that all eight of us had a place to sleep—a pair on each mattress and a pair on each box spring. We woke up the next day and ran the marathon in the wind and cold and rain. I crossed the finish line to win the race in a time of 2:21:57, then we packed into the cars, and headed back to Boston. By then, we couldn't scrape up enough money between the eight of us to pay for the tolls on the Mass Turnpike; we had no choice but to stick to the back roads.

These group excursions were a common part of our lifestyle. Running meant everything to us. It sustained us like oxygen. It mattered because we believed it mattered.

I would have a great time going out on a long training run with my friends. And we would run together all year round. It didn't matter if there was a blizzard. Of course, not everybody was happy to share the roads with us. Some people saw us as threats—we might cause them to crash or something. We definitely felt picked upon by the drunk, macho part of society, members of which would on occasion roll down a window and toss a beer bottle and yell some big obscenity at us. I had friends who wanted to fight back, but these guys outweighed and outmuscled us two to one, so I didn't like those chances.