Marathon Man (40 page)

Between long training runs back and forth from the store, I'd go into the store and help customers find shoes and give them advice. I made sure we sold only top-of-the-line running gear—Asics, Nike, New Balance. No junk shoes allowed.

With that said, I was convinced that it could be more than just a shoe store. That's why I called it a running center. I wanted it to be a source of information for runners. We provided beginners with an extensive collection of resources. I also ran coaching clinics for kids and adult joggers. I would talk about how to avoid injury, pick the right shoe, and the proper way to train for a marathon. We even brought in a nutritionist and podiatrist to give lectures.

Charlie, Jason, Ellen, and myself were a team—a funny kind of team. We weren't your typical store. We were an off-the-wall store. We didn't know what we were doing at first. None of us had a lick of retail experience. What it came down to in the end was that we all loved running. We all felt that the sport should have a much wider audience. It should be better understood. More people should join us on the roads, not just hardball types, but everyone. Dentists, firemen, daughters, and grandmothers. We had an eager welcome, open-door policy.

Every day, more and more people gravitated to our store. It soon became this vibrant hub of activity for Boston runners, and a central place where they could hang out or meet up for long runs. Word of our fantastic local running community spread and, one by one, great runners from around the world started moving to Boston to train with us.

Greg Meyer was one such person. I had gotten to know Greg at the World Cross-Country Championships in 1978—we were teammates and we passed the time together playing poker. He was just a young Turk out of the University of Michigan, unsure about where to go next in his life. “Why don't you move to Boston and join the GBTC?” I told him. “I'll give you a job at our store.”

Greg took me up on my offer and he was suddenly part of our tight crew. He became good friends with all of us. If I couldn't go to a race, I'd tell them to invite Greg. I wanted to support the young guys on their quest, just as Amby had done for me.

In our heyday, we were the golden bloom of running stores in the country. We had twenty guys working in the store. One day, I saw this sixteen-year-old kid sitting quietly in the corner, reading running magazines all day long. So Charlie and I finally walked up to him and asked, “What are you doing? You've been here all day.” With his Texas drawl, he told us his name was Dave Dial and that he was a runner. That's why he'd come to Boston. His mother and father had put him on an airplane and he'd flown here by himself. Charlie and I basically adopted the kid for a while. He ended up working for us at our store for years. Over time, the staff became so close to one another that the store felt like a family.

Another great part of opening the store was that I could sneak out twice a day—fourteen miles in the morning and another ten miles in the afternoon. I rarely ran through the streets of Boston alone. I could always count on a group of my Greater Boston brothers—Bobby Hodge, Dickie, Sev, Scott-ha, Vin-ho, the Rookie—to follow me through the hills around Boston College or the bike paths along the Charles River.

We used to churn through the streets in packs sometimes as large as thirty people. Greg Meyer recalls the sudden outpouring of support that Bostonians showed us, their local boys in running shorts, as we raced by: “Heads would literally pop out of manhole covers and yell, ‘Kick their asses, Billy!'”

As was customary, we'd stop partway through our long run at the Eliot Lounge, where “startled businessmen looked up from their martinis” to see a motley bunch of sweat-drenched young men clamor onto barstools. Tommy Leonard would instantly respond to the uproar, quickly pouring us sea breezes and uncorking raunchy one-liners. After a quick drink and some boisterous conversation, I would lead the jumble of bodies out the door and we would continue on our long run.

Following a hard workout, there might be another reconvening at the Eliot Lounge, a place that some claim inspired the show
Cheers
. Just switch running for baseball and Tommy Leonard for Sam Malone.

As always, Tommy would make sure to keep the beer flowing for the club—and for himself. I stuck with a gin and tonic or a blue whale. I never indulged too heavily, unlike some of the working-class heroes who frequented the bar. I always made sure to try and get ten hours of sleep.

I was conscious of the fact that other guys in the club pushed themselves further on training runs because I was there. They would tell themselves, If he can run a 2:09 marathon, and I'm hanging with him in our daily workouts, that means I'm not far behind. Everybody felt they had an open shot—Hodge, Graham, Mahoney, Fleming. Of course, it worked both ways. I had a pack of hungry runners pushing me on long runs. I couldn't give somebody the self-satisfaction of having whipped my butt in practice. If one of them did, I'd have to hear about it for the next couple of days.

On a regular basis we'd jog a mile to the Boston College track to work out with Coach Squires. Workouts would get competitive from time to time. Somebody would want to go hard the last four hundred meters. The runners with good, fast twitch muscle fibers would sprint across first. Guys like Alberto and I were in the back getting stomped.

People would beat me on the track and, therefore, assume that they could beat me in the marathon. Once they made that effort at New York or Boston, and got to a point at fifteen or eighteen miles, they discovered I was a different kind of animal on the roads than they'd encountered during practice. My philosophy was always, You can win the workout. All I care about is winning the race.

In the end, we were just a bunch of neighborhood guys, but we were going out and winning races. A lot of runners, not just folks in the Boston area but all across the country, had the sense that “if a guy like Billy can win, a regular guy just like me, then I can too.” And they were right—a lot of Americans were succeeding on the roads and on the track, like no time before or after. Randy Thomas won the Ohme-Hochi 30K in Japan. Bobby Hodge won the Mount Washington Road Race four straight years. Alberto Salazar won the New York City Marathon back to back. We were all having our own successes, athletically and financially. But at the same time, we still remained friends and saluted one another and the club and Billy Squires. The feeling was, “We worked for this together.”

On April 16, 1978, I held off a hard-charging Jeff Wells by two seconds to win my second Boston Marathon. But what made that day even sweeter was watching with joy as two more of my Greater Boston teammates, Jack Fultz and Randy Thomas, finished in the top five. The next year, I broke my own course record in a time of 2:09:27. But what really shocked everybody was that four of us from the GBTC finished in the top ten. Bobby Hodge took third, Randy Thomas came in eighth, and Dickie Mahoney, a full-time mailman, placed tenth. As Scott Douglas wrote in
Running Times
: “If you scored the race as a team event, Greater Boston, a seat-of-the-pants club with a minimal budget, would have beaten all other countries, including the rest of the Americans.”

I look back at our achievement and feel pride, but also gratitude that I got to be part of a group of running brothers who felt the same spark of electricity, and limitless possibility, shoot through their veins that shot through mine. The marathon may be run alone, but nobody makes it in the long run without close friends to lean on.

The team model of the GBTC—which led to astounding results for U.S. distance runners in the late 1970s and early '80s—was all but given up by the 1990s. At the 2000 U.S. Olympic marathon trials, we only had one woman and one man qualify to compete in the Sydney games, which is pitiful. The same year, only twenty American men had run a sub-2:20 marathon, compared to 267 in 1983. After hitting this low point, the people over at U.S. Track and Field finally did what they were supposed to do—they created a high-altitude track and field training facility in Mammoth, California. That's where our current crop of high-level marathoners train.

While American athletes train more in groups now, the sense of unity and shared conviction is nothing like in the days of the Greater Boston Track Club. If you want to see the tight club mentality of the seventies running boom, you need to travel to Kenya and Ethiopia. It's no surprise they now dominate the distance events. Meanwhile, this common spirit of enthusiasm and devotion to the cause, and to one another, is missing among our best distance runners. We need to change this if we are to recapture an era of American marathon success, when athletes like Frank Shorter, Alberto Salazar, Greg Meyer, and myself came out of our running clubs to triumph at Boston and around the world.

Charlie and Jason were part of a second level of runners who would meet up at the store for long runs. Maybe they couldn't keep up with my Greater Boston teammates and me, but they were training hard, too. They might be running seventy miles a week, not 110. Charlie and Jason and their crew would gradually pick up the pace and begin surging and thrashing against one another. They called them “hate” runs. We had our Greater Boston Track Club—they dubbed their crew the Sick Puppy Running Club. In the end, it didn't matter that we were all at different levels. We shared the exhilaration of pushing ourselves beyond our normal limits.

The local running scene was made up of a crazy, fun-loving group of families and friends. I remember it being 100 degrees and we'd all go running to Hal Gabriel's birthday party on July 10. Then we'd have birthday cake and ice cream outside. There was a very strong neighborhood feeling. Patti Catalano would be there, the American female record holder for almost every distance from five miles to the marathon. No one talked like Patti, with her thick Boston accent. Dickie Mahoney, the fastest, hardest-running mailman in the world, talked the same way. Like many local runners, the store gave Patti a place to go where she felt she belonged.

In December, a month after we opened the store, Charlie and I decided we should have a group run to celebrate the season. We called it the Jingle Bell Run. As far as I know, it was the first of its kind in the country. Today, you'll find them in practically every major city. A group of the employees and some friends we knew decided on a whim we would run down to Boston Common. I wanted it to be purely for fun. Not a race. Not at holiday time.

When I first came to the city, I was awestruck by the sight of all the spectacular Christmas lights in Boston Common. I'd never seen anything like that. It must have always been in the back of my mind how beautiful it would be to run through there at night. When we got down there, it was even more striking than I had remembered. Running together with my friends around the Common was not that different from running around the woods with Charlie and Jason as kids. It's the eternal childhood.

After that, we ran back to the store for food and refreshments. It ended up being four miles there and another four miles back. I'm not sure we realized it was going to be that far. But in those days we were young and running a lot and nobody seemed to mind.

The story of our Jingle Bell Run spread through word of mouth. The first year seventeen people participated. The next year we had over two hundred people take part in the run. It became a big annual event and then we started raising money. We raised money for Massachusetts Special Olympics for years. I had been a special education teacher, so this seemed right up my alley.

I later got more involved with the Special Olympics in Massachusetts. Once Tom Grilk, who was head of the BAA at the time, and I handed out medals to the athletes at the Mass Special Olympic state championships. Working at the Fernald School, I understood the power of just recognizing somebody, letting them know you saw them and they mattered, especially people who had been rejected by their families and society. Very small things could make somebody happy—a Tootsie Roll, a smile, a walk outdoors.

One of the reasons that I still love traveling around to different road races is that it's a chance to see all my old running friends from those days: Coach Squires, Amby Burfoot, Bobby Hodge, Alberto Salazar, Greg Meyer, Joan Benoit Samuelson. Sadly, some of my friends are not here anymore. This year, we lost Jason—one of our Three Musketeers.

Charlie, Jason, and I were the best of friends for sixty-four years. We were like brothers. He left a gaping hole, not only at the store where he worked since it opened in 1977, but in my heart. In thirty-five years, he almost never called in sick. He was incredibly committed to the store, just as he was to his running—to the last days of his life. Our lives were intermeshed. We were both conscientious objectors. We both lived together in Boston. We rode that same wave during the running boom. I would give him the shirt off my back because I know he would do the same for me.

I still remember the time he gave me the money to buy my first motorcycle and how excited we were to go cruising around town. Jason was the guy who drunk-jogged down the finish line of the Boston Marathon with me—and was there by my side, riding alongside me on his bike, as I ran toward the finish line and an American record. I'll miss him.

As for Charlie, he's still my ace in the hole. He's been a good big brother. He's had to carry the weight of looking out for Jason and me all these years. He was the one who really kept the running center going steady for all these years. As far as I'm concerned, it became his store. He earned that. I think our shared love of running brought us close as kids and that connection between us endured through the peaks and valleys of our individual lives.

My mom and dad were quietly focused people. Charlie became that way running our business and I became that way with running marathons. Most of what we learned from our parents came through osmosis. Never sit back on your laurels. If you persist and keep plugging away, you're going to do all right in life. And that's a marathoner's message, too. There's no way to excel as a distance runner without putting in the nitty-gritty, day-in, day-out effort.