Marathon Man (31 page)

B
OSTON,
M
ASSACHUSETTS

Three years ago, I'd stopped running completely. I'd been working as a lowly hospital orderly, pushing bodies to the morgue, hanging out at bars with Jason, drinking and smoking and trying to meet a girl. Suddenly, I was now the best road racer in New England. Some guys might have been content with that sort of rapid rise. Not me. I was on a mission to win the Boston Marathon.

Step one was to quit smoking. I did that by tossing my last pack of Winstons in the garbage. Next was to build up my base. I did that by running thousands of laps around Jamaica Pond. The next step was to test myself on the local road-racing circuit. By 1974, I was dominating the competition. That told me something. Then came San Blas. My first international competition. I had hung with Lasse Virén. That told me something. Then I took on the great Marty Liquori at Falmouth and blew him out of the water. While that win gave me a big lift, I felt that I should beat him, a miler, over a longer distance. What I needed now, before I knew I was ready to achieve the ultimate prize, was a true test of my mettle. I couldn't have asked for a tougher challenge than the third annual World Cross-Country Championships held in Rabat, Morocco.

It's hard to appreciate the magnitude of the World Cross-Country Championships today, but forty years ago it was the ultimate showdown for long-distance runners—on par with the Olympics. What made it the greatest—and toughest—single running event on the planet was that it assembled the world's best track and field athletes in the same place at the same time to compete at one distance—twelve kilometers. Everybody from the world's best miler to the world's best marathoner showed up to compete.

Our team of seven American runners, led by 1972 Olympic champion Frank Shorter, would be taking on teams of champions from around the globe. The awesome collection of talent included future 1976 Olympic fifteen hundred-meter gold medalist and world record holder John Walker from New Zealand, future two-time Olympic champion Waldemar Cierpinski of East Germany, 1972 Olympic ten-thousand-meter fourth-place finisher Mariano Haro from Spain, 1972 Olympic bronze medalist Ian Stewart of Great Britain, and 1974 Boston Marathon champion Neil Cusack from Ireland, who had beaten me a few weeks earlier in the 20K.

My claim to fame was that I had won a bunch of road races around New England; suddenly I was about to go head to head with the greatest collection of champions from around the world. Up for grabs was no less than this title: greatest distance runner in the world. I should have been petrified, but I wasn't. I was excited to see what I could do.

The U.S. trials were held in Gainesville, Florida. I had gone down with Scott Graham and a bunch of other friends from the Greater Boston Track Club. Someone in our group had a friend who lived in Gainesville and agreed to put us up. We ended up sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags; it was one of those deals.

When I arrived in Florida, I was still battling a nasty cold. My first day there I went for a forty-minute run at a slow pace. I felt dizzy and weak. I took some cold medicine but nothing helped. The day before the race I ran five miles over the 15K course and practiced some hurdles, which I had never done before in my life. That night, I felt gloomy about my chances, noting in my journal: “Felt spacey and I'm still sick. Depressed about the race tomorrow but praise the Lord I luck out.” I was nervous.

The trials at Gainesville would decide who earned a berth at the World Cross-Country Championships, but the event was huge for another reason—for the first time ever, I would be facing off against Frank Shorter. I couldn't imagine this reality back in August of 1972 when I was sitting on a couch in my dingy apartment, eating junk food, watching Shorter obliterate the field in the Olympic marathon to become a running legend.

I remember Shorter arriving at the trials in a nice sports car. He was definitely the big gun. I would also be going against my former college teammate Jeff Galloway, who smoked me on the track when he was a senior and I was a freshman. I was always thankful to Jeff for finding time to help me with my homework and, along with Amby, showing me that long-distance running could be a blast. I would also be competing against my mentor, Amby.

The race itself was in a huge cow pasture—totally insane. It was a beautiful day. They had these big steeplechase hurdles. I didn't know how to hurdle at all. I was totally finessing it. I ran solid, despite feeling under the weather. Somehow I managed to tie Gary Tuttle for third place. Of course, Frank Shorter was victorious. He beat me by thirty seconds. The important thing was that I had punched my ticket to the big race in Morocco. As for Amby, he had the worst race of his life and finished far behind me.

I remember how excited I was to receive my U.S. team uniform in the mail. I relished the chance to proudly represent my country after being labeled unpatriotic for my opposition to the Vietnam War. Of course, I felt that I was doing my patriotic duty by refusing to fight in a war that did not represent either American values or national interests. At the same time, I understood that many people didn't see it that way. I was excited to be an ambassador and to shine brightly for the red, white, and blue.

By the time I left on a plane for Morocco with my U.S. teammates, I had fully recovered from my cold. I was sitting on the plane with Shorter and Galloway when I mentioned that I was in dire need of a new pair of shoes for the Boston Marathon. Shorter said he knew someone at Nike. Who could have imagined that “someone at Nike” would mean running superstar Steve Prefontaine? Not me.

We arrived in Morocco a couple days before the race and checked into a hotel. At some point, I left the hotel and went down to this little old market and bought a rug—a memento from the trip. When I got back to the hotel, I made a surprising discovery: I didn't have any racing shoes. I'd forgotten to bring them. I went to Gary Tuttle, who I had hung out with a little at the trials, and asked him if he had any extra shoes. He loaned me a pair of beautiful Asics spikes that, as luck would have it, fit me great.

Race day was perfect for running—sunny, dry, 70 degrees. I was so wired—wired out of my mind. I had been pushing myself for months, building my speed under Squires, building my strength on long runs with my teammates. I was putting in eight-mile runs at a 5:10 pace, two hundred-mile training weeks. I was ready to go for it.

Early on, Frank and I ran shoulder to shoulder but just as he started falling back I made a break for the front. I kept passing runners until I was in the lead. I was moving! The hurdles? I felt like I could jump over anything. I could not be stopped. Man, that feeling. I did hit it good: what they call a sweet spot; I hit the ball just right. It was an audacious thing for a total unknown like me to break from the pack. I just felt on.

I have a picture of me going over this hurdle in the lead with two other runners—Ian Stewart of Scotland and Mariano Haro of Spain. I held off the two challengers until the final one hundred meters when they both outkicked me.

It was a breakthrough feeling when I crossed the finish line in third to claim the bronze medal. I'd just run the race of my life. I'd never run a race like that, ever before. Nobody had given me a chance against the world's best—I didn't even think I had a shot at a medal—but an unstoppable feeling came over me during the race and I flew. I had no idea what the hell was going on, but I suddenly went from being fourth in the trials to third in the world and the second American man to ever medal at the World XCs.

Everything changed, really, starting that day. Frank Shorter took twentieth that day; Olympic gold medalists were behind me. He didn't run poorly. He ran steady, but I don't know if he ran as well as he did at the trials. Frank was a four-time national cross-country champion in the United States, but you're talking about the whole world of distance running at the time. So, I knew I could run with anyone then; that was the feeling I had. I can run with anyone.

I was so sky-high after that race that I went out for a seven-mile run on my own; I just kept going, I was so psyched.

When I came back from my run, an official approached and told me, “Give us a urine sample.” Yes, they actually did drug testing in 1975. I don't know what they were looking for, maybe steroids. I was just shocked. I couldn't pee; I was dehydrated from the race and then running an extra seven miles in the heat. So, when I came back for the awards ceremony, I gave them a urine sample. They probably couldn't believe that somebody like me could take the bronze medal.

I remember the next day seeing coverage of the race in the newspaper. It was in French so I couldn't read it, but I could see the photos and that was exciting. To this day, I treasure my third-place prizes: a bronze medal and a strange-looking gold candlestick, which still sits on my fireplace.

This breakthrough set me up for Boston. My mind, after that race, changed; my attitude changed. I was always a competitive runner, training to be a competitive runner, and it had been a long haul. I had this strange, circuitous route that took me on all these detours. But after that race, that mentally gave me the strength of mind where I thought, Whoever's there at Boston, I'm going to go with them. It was dangerous to think like this as a distance runner. Get too cocky and that's when you get brought down in this sport. The marathon loves nothing more than teaching the fittest among us lessons in humility.

During this whole time, nobody in the press noticed I'd become only the second American ever to medal at the World Cross-Country Championships. (To this day, I'm only one of four American men to have medaled.) It wasn't a big deal to them, or to anybody else, for that matter—with one exception. Amby Burfoot.

By then, the once heir apparent to the New England running legacy had missed the 1972 Olympics, then gotten asthma working on a house, and settled down in Groton with his wife and kids. He was now a writer for
Runner's World
magazine. Amby asked if he could come to Boston and stay with Ellen and me, and interview me for the magazine. As Amby recalled: “For a New England road racer coming off the slush-covered winter training roads to place third in this Olympic-caliber event was virtually unthinkable. Maybe nobody at the
Boston Globe
took notice, but I did. Something was up. I wanted to find out.”

Three weeks before the Boston Marathon, Amby and I sat at the kitchen table of our tiny basement apartment in Jamaica Plain, drinking wine and eating spaghetti. In those days, runners ate tons of pasta, almost every single night. The place was kind of frumpy—after all, Ellen and I were living a kind of low-key, low-expense life. I remember Amby and I having one of those fun Italian dinners. We chatted a while about our lives and running.

For a couple of years after his victory in 1968, Amby entertained optimistic thoughts about repeating his success in the Boston Marathon. But for Amby, our college years—when he was so focused on running and all he did was go to classes and do his homework and work in the cafeteria and run—had been conducive to training to be the best. Once he entered the real world, and found himself working in an elementary school classroom for seven hours a day, it wasn't as easy to find the time to train and to keep the dream afloat. Amby had a few years when he went back to Boston and thought he was in 2:14 shape and thought he was going to run well and finish in the top five, but those races never developed. He also had other years when he was in miserable shape, because the teaching load just sort of ground him down, and he wasn't ready to run well. He kept trying, more or less, for eight years; he sort of gave up the ghost in '76.

The New England running scene was like one big family, so I would still see Amby before and after a race. We would shoot the breeze. Sometimes, we would jog around together during my warm-up. But also, in the years I was running at the top, he was always very careful about not wanting to bother me before a big race. But seeing my good friend would never be a bother to me.

Amby looked over at me and asked about Morocco. “How the heck do you think you ran so fast?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, taking a sip of wine. “I went into the lead at about three miles and really felt good—not fatigued at all. It didn't feel fast at that point and I kept expecting people to go past me.”

Amby gave me the same bewildered look sitting there in the kitchen as he did during our long training runs through the trails around campus, when he would be running with a look of intense seriousness and turn to see me wafting easily at his shoulder. He couldn't comprehend how I could feel that relaxed and easy while racing stride for stride in a grueling battle of wills. Or how I could have a superrelaxed approach toward so much in life and running, but I could snap into another gear, and another intensity and aggressiveness, when I got to the twentieth mile of the marathon. To be honest, I don't either. All I know is that I had this ability to be relaxed ninety-eight percent of the time, which is what you want over long distances. But I also had the ability to turn it on that crucial two percent of the time.

Listening to me describe my Morocco race, Amby sensed that something big was in the wings for me. But what? He couldn't tell me. He didn't know. He just sensed it. Maybe, he thought quietly to himself, if Bill had a good day at Boston, he could finish in the top ten, perhaps even crack the top five.

Sometimes a runner's career is one of gradual improvement, but my performance in Morocco amounted to an abrupt leap forward, even if Amby was the only person in the world other than myself who could see this clearly. Now the question was, could I do it over the full marathon distance? There was no way to find out but to line up at Hopkinton and fire the gun.

 

FIFTEEN

I Can't Run That Fast

A
PRIL 21, 1975