Marathon Man (37 page)

As I stood there listening to the president speak, I couldn't help but experience a deep patriotic feeling. It's always an honor for anyone to run for their country, but for me, it was a unique situation because I had been a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. I was thrilled to represent my country at the Olympics, and to show all the people who ever doubted my love for America that it was as deep and as strong as anybody's.

From Plattsburgh, we were bused up to Montréal and assigned dorm rooms. Along with Frank Shorter, I arrived in Montréal as America's hot favorite to win a gold. Only I didn't feel so hot. To be more specific, my foot hurt. They'd stuck me in a dorm room with a group of sprinters who all knew one another. I was definitely the outsider. I asked to be reassigned and was put in with a couple of distance runners, which was better.

After the tragedy in Munich, they made sure no one could just walk into the Olympic dorms by erecting a security fence. But a huge number of people waited outside the gates, hoping to trade pins or get a few autographs, and that was tremendously exciting.

From the dorms, it was a long walk to the cafeteria. The task of traversing the distance with my aching foot made it feel even longer. As a marathoner, I had learned to run races with a certain amount of soreness and pain, but I didn't want to add to it. I wanted to reduce it. Today, I think the trainers would have done more to try to speed my recovery. They didn't give me a cortisone shot or something to make the pain subside. The truth is, I felt like I barely existed there. Probably because I was a marathoner and, back then, our sport was considered on the edge of the track and field world.

I attempted to run on the golf course next to the Olympic Village, but the rolling terrain was far from the remedy my ailing foot begged for. Neither were the five flights of stairs I had to walk up to reach my dorm room. Neither was the long walk to the dining room. And, God forbid, if I had to meet Ellen or some friends at the entrance gates of the Olympic Village, which was some distance from the dormitory, the trek left me limping in pain.

However, no physiologist ever inquired about my training regimen. No podiatrist asked to examine my injury. I never thought to ask. I'd hardly heard of a podiatrist in 1976. No coach offered up any words of wisdom. Here I was, the athlete with the fastest qualifying time for my event, the American record holder, hobbling around the Olympic Village, and it was like I was invisible. Was I the only American runner who felt neglected by the staff in Montréal? Was I the only Olympic athlete who felt like he was all on his own?

I finally got fed up with it. Three days before the race, I fled the Olympic Village to go stay with Ellen in a rented house outside the city of Montréal. Nobody noticed that I had left. Not my coaching staff, not my teammates. Nobody cared.

Unbeknownst to me, Ellen called Coach Squires and told him about my foot and how none of the trainers were offering much assistance. At the last moment, Coach Squires tried to come to my rescue. Despite the military-style security, he managed to get into the Olympic Village and locate the head American trainer. He convinced him to find me and to give me ultrasound treatment on my foot and ice it down. After receiving the treatment, I actually felt some improvement in my foot. It was as if Ellen and Coach Squires were the only ones who cared as much as I did about how I performed in the most important race in the world.

Squires drove over the course with me and he helped me work out a game plan. Like with the Boston Marathon, he had me run sections of the course so there would be no surprises. We sat down and talked late into the evening about strategy. By the next day, we had our plan in place. I was going to let the front-runners go early and bide my time in the middle of the pack. At thirty kilometers was when I'd make my move.

I was a little nervous because this was the opposite of how I had always raced before. I was known for pushing the pace early, but I knew that I couldn't force a fast time in the early stage, not the way my foot felt. All the same, I would run hard, but no harder than I needed as I patiently chewed up the miles, and then I'd turn on the jets at the end.

Even though I knew I was not going into the race at my top fitness level, I never doubted that I would find what I needed to make a hard charge for the win. As I've said before: My thoughts and fears were always pushed aside by hope. An athlete is always hopeful, and always should be.

I gather that Frank Shorter, Jerome Drayton, and the other race favorites didn't spend the days leading up to the marathon lying prostrate in an unfamiliar bed, watching hours upon hours of Olympic coverage on the TV. I did. I managed to go out on a few easy training runs, but for the most part my time was spent resting the foot and trying to recover from my injury. I knew I was missing important fitness training, but putting as little weight on the ball of my foot was necessary if I hoped to have any chance of being ready for race day.

It was 77 degrees at race time. Warm conditions, just as I had predicted. Yes, a hard race at a tempered pace! All of a sudden the most unexpected thing happened: It started to rain. The air immediately cooled off several degrees, indicating a fast race. Heck, maybe a record-setting race. And here I had stopped doing speed work on the track weeks ago, fearful of aggravating my injury. Any other marathon day I would have thanked my lucky stars for the cool breeze I felt brushing against my cheek. On this day, it was comically cruel.

Standing on the stadium track next to the other runners aroused an unmistakable foreboding. At the start line, I talked to some of the runners, shook a few hands, including Frank Shorter's. A thin rain drizzled down on us as the gun went off. We did a lap on the track and then out the tunnel—the classic Olympic marathon.

Out of the stadium, Shorter quickly shot up to the front and set a very fast pace to follow. I was part of a tight pack shadowing him, determined to keep him in our sights. We moved as one—Waldemar Cierpinski of East Germany, Jerome Drayton, Lasse Virén, and me—focused on the back of Shorter's head.

The streets of Montréal were lined with people, many of them holding umbrellas, urging us onward. And with that, the carefully thought-out strategy that Squires and I had decided upon went up in smoke. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but I went out hard with the leaders. My competitive fire had gotten a hold on me again. And maybe I was compensating for the fact that I was worried about my foot.

I was pushing away, leading almost. I was forcing the pace. Not a good thing. After all, you're not going to break a field of Olympic marathon runners early. They are the best-conditioned athletes in the world. They deteriorate gradually. They don't fall apart.

After only six miles into the race, I felt none of the good feelings I experienced at Boston in 1975, none of the fluidity of each stride, none of the confidence of knowing I could run with anybody over any distance. Yet, I kept pressing hard. Hunger has a knack for shutting out any rational messages being sent from the brain. At least, that's the way it's always been for me. I wasn't going to lay back because, well, I didn't know how to lay back. It was second nature to go all out in a race; it was unnatural to take my foot off the accelerator.

I was forcing the pace because that's how I had won before. I'd rushed out to the front to inflict a fast pace on my rivals. It was my way of saying to them, “Think you have what it takes to stay with me over 26.2 miles? Let's find out.” Only this time I was in no condition to pose such a cocky challenge, especially to the greatest assembly of running talent on earth. But the emotions kicked in, desire rose in me like a fever. To be honest, I didn't even feel any pain in my foot.

I glanced over and saw Finnish runner Lasse Virén matching me stride for stride. A switch went on inside me. I liked and respected Virén. We had competed hard against each other in San Blas, Puerto Rico, and afterward partied together at the local bar. But it irritated me that Virén, who had never run a marathon before in his life, had the gall to think he could waltz in and take the gold from those of us who had dedicated our lives to conquering the longest distance.

I understood why Virén had entered the marathon. He had a chance to repeat the famous triple crown of long-distance running achieved by Emil Zátopek in Helsinki in 1952—an Olympic sweep of the five thousand, ten thousand meter, and marathon. I believed that it was up to one of us true marathoners to make sure this track guy earned it the hard way.

I figured Virén was pretty beaten up after he'd just raced against the world's best in two long-distance races, and that he'd likely collected a few sores and blisters for his efforts. I knew if I set a torrid early pace, he'd feel those blisters practically popping under his feet. You see, I was not out there to make friends; I was not out there chasing butterflies with Charlie and Jason; I was out there to win the war. The eternal wide-eyed kid—everybody's harmless little brother—was now a tiger with the soul of a warrior.

Fifteen kilometers into the race, I was still maintaining my position up with the lead pack, but my body was working harder than it should have been. It was the foot thing, as well as a lack of hydration. While I had made sure to have bottles of Gatorade stationed along the course, I missed some of those bottles in the heat of the competition.

Meanwhile, Lasse Virén was heeding the advice of his coach: “Stay on Shorter's shoulder. When he surges, you surge. If he holds back, you hold back.” Good strategy—if you could do it. Keep in mind, the best runners in the world couldn't do it at Munich. Sure enough, through the next five miles, Shorter would throw in the occasional surge to test the rest of us and see the level of our fitness. Shorter was gradually able to shake four of the runners, and the lead group shrank to eight.

I felt I was already running beyond my capacity when, around twenty-five kilometers and one hour and sixteen minutes into the race, Frank broke into another fast mile of about 4:40. I could feel whatever energy reserves I had remaining drain down to nothing. Just the same, I willed myself to respond to Shorter's relentless string of uppercuts. Hold on, I told myself.

I passed the halfway point and continued to match the killer pace of the leaders, doing my best to ignore the rain needling my skin or the pain gnawing at my hamstrings. I'd suffered dehydration before and the distressing leg cramps that accompanied it, my first two Boston Marathons come to mind. But those cramps came on Heartbreak Hill—a mere five miles from the finish line. Here they made their rude entrance with only half the 26.2-mile journey completed. I knew I was in trouble, but what could I do—call a timeout?

With the rain continuing to fall hard, Frank held his firm grasp on the lead with five remaining runners strung out behind him—Waldemar Cierpinski of East Germany, Shivnath Singh of India, Drayton, Virén, and myself. Frank inserted one more surge to see how many of us, already at maximum exertion, could stay with him. This time the answer was one—the East German Cierpinski. As for me, that was the back breaker.

Cramping up like I was, my muscle energy wasn't being distributed in a normal way. My right leg was doing much more work than it was used to. The strain was too much for me to bear. I faded and my dreams of Olympic victory faded along with me.

One second I was in contention for an Olympic medal, and the next I felt I'd be lucky to survive to the finish line. I'm not kidding when I say that, either. If this were any other race, I'd probably have taken the DNF and just as quickly started pumping large amounts of fluid into my body. But there was no way I was going to drop out of the Olympic marathon—not while wearing the USA colors. I couldn't live with myself if I didn't at least cross the finish with my head held high.

Runners were going by me and I recognized Mario Cuevas from Mexico and Jack Foster, a runner from New Zealand. These were runners I'd finished ahead of in the Boston Marathon, Fukuoka, and the World Cross-Country Championships in Morocco. It was a very devastating feeling, a flashback to my first marathon failure. But as beat up as I was, and my legs were really shot, I shrugged off the voice in my head telling me to surrender.

About thirty kilometers into the race, my teammate Don Kardong came up alongside me. There was nothing I could do to prevent him from passing me. At that point, I couldn't have prevented a kid on his tricycle from passing. Kardong had run the race that I should have run. He had hung back early and conserved his energy and stuck to a smart game plan. Now he was blowing past runners like me who had pushed themselves beyond the limits and red-lined with miles left to go in the race. Don told me not to give up and I thanked him for the encouraging words. I've always liked that part of the sport. When another athlete is out of it, there was nothing but shows of support and pats on the back.

My face showed immense strain as I ran those last eight miles, hobbled with each step by brutal hamstring cramps, too tired to avoid the puddles in my way. I had been so caught up in the emotion of the fight during the early stages I ignored all the warning signs blaring, “Slow down! Danger ahead!” Now it was too late. My muscles raged all-out war against me. All attempts to weaken the painful, iron grip of my cramping hamstrings proved laughable. While I gritted my teeth and pushed on, those were the toughest eight miles I've ever had to run in my life.

Though I was still in the top ten with only three miles left, at that point, I had only one thought in my head: finish. I was reduced to doing the marathon shuffle—an inelegant walk-run motion—and grabbing my boiling legs. Those final miles back to the stadium were a slow, unabiding destruction of body and soul. As running guru Hal Higdon once said, “The difference between the mile and the marathon is the difference between burning your fingers with a match and being slowly roasted over hot coals.” Yet I knew I was going to finish. How? Because not finishing wasn't an option.