“Duel In The Sun” Revisited
INTO THE DARKNESS
Off they trotted into the darkness, aided only by three flashlights Michelle had planned to deploy at that point. They were recorded only through one more aid station after that, Dardanelles (65.7 miles).
She and Dave didn’t speak much, but Michelle’s distress with her burning quadriceps and her nausea was obvious to both of them. She had stopped running, even in short bursts, because her dizzy state unsettled her sense of balance and added the element of fear to her worries. Thirty miles to go. Could she make it? Maybe when they reached the next aid station, Peachstone (70.7 miles), she could take a quick nap and snap out of it. Thirty minutes of downtime wouldn’t jeopardize her ability to finish the race, she reasoned.
But with every wavering stride, she lost a little confidence. She stepped off the trail every time another runner came up from behind to pass them. Those passes seemed to come more frequently the farther she traveled. She had made up her mind by the time Dave gave her the choices—ahead to Peachstone, back to Dardanelles, or retire. One male runner came through, and she tried to get him to take her race ID to turn in. He refused. Right after him came a woman, and she took it. The moving train of flashlights continued down the mountainside, but now without Michelle Barton. She turned to climb a vertical trail toward Dave Van Wicklin’s home on the outskirts of Foresthill.
It was the same steep footpath she and her friend Ashley had missed the first day she arrived to do the official practice runs in late May, the missed signpost that turned their own private practice run from eight miles into 18 that day. When they reached the top of the hill, Dave was tempted to flag down the only car on the road to get a ride to his home, but then he thought better of it.
“T didn’t think it would be a good idea to try to bum a ride at three in the morning,” he said. So they went the last mile on foot.
Up ahead at Placer High School, volunteers had laid out a tent city on the football field to greet the finishers. As runners came through a gate from Finley Street, they stepped onto an artificial 400-meter track around the field and headed toward the finish line. Alerted by spotters with cell phones on the street and made knowledgeable by facts he had stored in his notebook, the public-address announcer stirred up the crowd to applaud as each runner rounded the track.
Michelle wasn’t there to enjoy the applause, but she may try again, armed with more knowledge of how to fuel her body for the special demands of this race.
Postscript: Since her Western States 100 attempt, Michelle has since finished a 100-miler and won a SOK outright, beating all the men and women.
Hal Higdon’s Classic Chronicle of Boston’s Best Duel: Alberto Salazar vs. Dick Beardsley, 1982. Part Il.
HAL HIGDON
Editor’s note: Part1 of “‘Duel in the Sun’ Revisited” appeared in Boston Marathon & Beyond, a special issue about the Boston Marathon published in April 2006.
IND GAMES
At Wellesley College, women from the school crowded into the streets, forming a corridor so narrow that the entourage of vehicles accompanying the lead runners had to slow to squeeze through. The female spectators shrieked in appreciation of the runners passing their doors. “They were screaming so loud it hurt,” recalled Salazar. Several of the lead runners offered quick waves of thanks. Most yearned for the relative quiet once the college was behind them, although there was little quiet on the Boston course that year. The unseasonably warm and sunny weather, plus the promise that Alberto Salazar might set a world record, had attracted more spectators than anyone could remember from previous years. Some suspected the number to be as high as two million, although nobody could say for sure. Boston was a sporting event where you could not count the number of tickets sold.
Nike had a store on the left side of the road, just before runners departed Wellesley around fourteen miles. In passing, Salazar spotted a number of Nike employees he knew, including Brendan Foster, director of marketing. Briefly relaxing his concentration, Salazar smiled and waved at them. Beardsley noticed: “It was as though Al was saying, ‘This is my turf. This is my territory.’ He wanted me to know how relaxed he felt.” In response, Beardsley began to wave at spectators on the right. He saw that Salazar immediately got a stern look on his face, as though he disapproved.
Remembering the incident years later, Salazar would recall that immediately after he waved at the Nike employees, Beardsley moved to one side to pat the back of a wheelchair athlete they were passing. “It was to psych me out,” Salazar interpreted the action, “to show me how good he was feeling.”
Actually, although Beardsley did pat the back of a wheelchair athlete, this happened in the Newton hills, almost four miles farther down the road! It was an example of how runners in a marathon often compress time, blotting large segments of a race from their memory, as they concentrate on the effort required to continuously move at the fastest possible speed for a period of more than two hours.
At that point in the race, Salazar felt anything but good. “My hamstring felt tight through the halfway point, so I had been concentrating on running as easily as possible,” Salazar recalled. “But I had not taken much water: a mouthful here, a mouthful there. It was seventy degrees, but dry. Since I wasn’t perspiring, I hadn’t thought much about the heat, or the fact that I might be losing fluids. By thirteen miles, I started to work a little. By fifteen, it took more effort. By the hills at seventeen, I had really begun to hurt.”
Salazar was not the only one hurting. Among the leaders, Doug Kurtis began to fade after ten miles. He eventually would finish 109th in 2:27:13. Ron Tabb and Dean Matthews failed to finish. Tabb stopped at thirteen, blaming a new pair of shoes. Matthews dropped out at fourteen miles with calf problems. He said: “One minute, I was running strong; the next minute, I was out of the race.”
Beardsley remembers: “Each mile, we’d lose another runner.” By mile fifteen, only Bill Rodgers and Ed Mendoza remained with Salazar and Beardsley.
Near sixteen miles, Rodgers took a brief lead on the long downhill stretch leading to Newton Lower Falls. Rodgers excelled as a downhill runner, one reason he usually ran well at Boston. But his surge into the lead proved to be a final and desperate gambit. Salazar, Beardsley, and Mendoza quickly caught him. Rodgers began to lose contact.
It was now a three-man race. Beardsley surveyed the two other runners and himself: “Of the three, I thought Mendoza looked the best, then all of a sudden it was like he dropped off the end of the world. One minute he was there, and the next minute I looked over my shoulder and couldn’t see him.” Mendoza would fail to finish.
As they made the right turn onto Commonwealth Avenue at the firehouse and headed up the first of the four Newton hills, it was now a two-man race. As planned, Beardsley picked up the pace, moving clearly in front. They had reached the “moment of truth” anticipated by Salazar, when Beardsley would attempt to destroy him. “This is it,” Salazar told himself. “Don’t let him break you! You’re better than him!” Salazar kept reminding himself that if he just stayed with Beardsley to the top of the hills, he could win.
TWO-MAN CONTEST
Salazar might tell himself that, but he was not sure he believed his own words. Beardsley would stretch his lead by several yards, and Salazar would need to
fight to gain the yardage back to avoid getting dropped, which would have been devastating psychologically at that point. Mostly, Salazar tried to run just off Beardsley’s left shoulder, a half stride back, signalling that he was there and waiting, but sometimes the effort to hold that position was too great, and he dropped to a drafting position immediately behind Beardsley. It was a position he disliked to assume. It wounded his dignity. “It was frustrating for me to be behind him,” Salazar admitted. “It was a matter of pride with me that I didn’t want anybody to be close to me at that point in a marathon.” Salazar had no choice. He was running as hard as he could to stay even. Any time he moved to Beardsley’s side as though threatening to take the lead, it only urged Beardsley to run faster.
Beardsley was acutely aware of Salazar’s position. “I never looked back,” he would say, “but the way the sun was positioned, I could see the shadow of Alberto’s head. A couple of times the shadow would loom up bigger, and I’d figure he was getting ready to jump me, so—boom!—I’d take off, because I wanted to get the first jump. The shadow never disappeared. I couldn’t get rid of it.”
Salazar kept telling himself: “There’s no way I’m going to lose this race! There’s no way \’m going to let him beat me!” Any chances of improving his world record had long ago been forgotten. Salazar later would admit: “My attitude changed during the race from wanting a fast time, to wanting a clear victory, to finally just wanting to win.” Salazar began to realize that, unless Beardsley cracked soon, it might come down to a sprint on the final straightaway, something he feared despite his seemingly superior speed.
Beardsley was in front doing what he had to do to beat the world record holder: run fast between seventeen and twenty-one miles. The fact that four of Boston’s toughest hills were located within that four-mile span was almost incidental to his strategy. He had trained on those hills in a snowstorm, so he dismissed them. “T didn’t even see the hills,” Beardsley would say later. “The hills weren’t even there to me. I went flying through the hills.”
Royce Flippin, a reporter for The Runner, had been assigned to watch the race from the Woodland checkpoint at 17.75 miles, where he had a view of the top of the first hill. He had watched Mendoza slowly slipping away after the runners had turned at the firehouse. “At the top of the grade,” wrote Flippin, “Beardsley seems unaffected by the ascent. He is still running fluidly, with a faint look of anticipation on his face. Salazar appears hot and fatigued, his jaw hanging slightly open and his head dripping from a recent dousing. But he is on Beardsley’s shoulder, and as Beardsley crests the hill and begins to surge down the other side, Salazar goes right with him in what has become a two-man contest.”
It was Beardsley’s strategy to not merely run fast up the hills, but to run fast over the crest of those hills, down the back sides and into the flat valleys between the hills. Beardsley felt he could not afford to allow Salazar even a few strides to relax and gather confidence. Thus, he would betray no hint of weakness. He
wanted to hammer, hammer, hammer on his rival until he broke. The pair started up the second Newton hill, having covered near eighteen-and-a-half miles. At that point, an employee from New Balance popped out of the crowd and attempted to jog with Beardsley for a few strides. He could barely do so, but handed the runner a bottle of water, shouting: “Dickie, Dickie, keep it up!”
Beardsley drank from the bottle, carried it for a period, then offered it to his rival a half step behind. Salazar shook his head.
Beardsley and Salazar rushed over the top of the second hill and into the valley leading to the third, a short hill where a statue in honor of the elder John Kelley would be erected a decade later. Beardsley continued to push, but he had not yet broken Salazar. “I was in the lead,” Beardsley recalls, “but I was not leading. Al was right off my left shoulder. But at this point, I could almost feel the crowd come to me and say, ‘You’re the farm boy from Minnesota. You’re about to score a major upset.’ Because now we were at a point where nobody had been able to stay with Alberto Salazar before.”
The lead pair moved over the top of the third hill and across the short, flat stretch before the ascent onto fabled Heartbreak Hill. Heartbreak held no fears for Beardsley; he had conquered it in a snowstorm. He had no idea yet how much he had begun to hurt his rival. Their charge through the hills was at apace faster than anyone had ever run the Newton hills before. Salazar could only remain near Beardsley by reminding himself continuously: “You’re better than him! You just ran 27:30! You can beat him!”
<@ Through Heartbreak
wm Hill, Salazar hung with : | P a Beardsley, telling himself 4, repeatedly, “You can beat him!”
Clay Shaw
Salazar would say later: “It was a whole different game once we got to the hills. We had been running really slow, and from my point that was fine. But once we started up, he began pushing the pace at an intensity that neither of us could continue to the finish. It was a matter of time before either he would break me, or he would have to slow down himself.”
DOWNHILL RACERS
When they crested Heartbreak Hill, Salazar was not broken. But neither was Beardsley. The duel continued as each looked for a sign of weakness in the other. Beardsley remained in the lead as they began a long descent past Boston College. It is this descent that many runners fear more than the preceding ascents, because of the punishing effect that downhill running has on the muscles. The elder John Kelley once referred to this stretch as the “Haunted Mile.” The ghosts of many runners who at least figuratively had died on this descent were present.
Tom Hart, another reporter for The Runner, was stationed by the Lake Street checkpoint near twenty-one miles. “Beardsley looks stern, but still loose,” wrote Hart. “Maybe it’s only an illusion engendered by the pertly upturned bill of his white cap, but he seems to have more left than Salazar, who runs with an absence of expression to which Raymond Chandler might have done justice in describing a professional killer. Salazar is locked in two steps directly behind Beardsley, and he’s not enjoying himself.”
But neither was Beardsley enjoying himself at this point. Five miles remained, and he knew those last miles would not be fun. He also was close to cracking, although he did not want his rival to know it. A sudden move by Salazar might finish him. Beardsley would recall: “I had taken that pounding punishment coming down the long hill after Heartbreak, and my legs bit the bullet. I thought I could break him, but he went right with me. He was still there—and, J couldn’t feel my legs! There was just a numbness from the waist down. I put it on automatic pilot, running just on instinct, putting one leg in front of the other.”
ONE MILE AT A TIME
Beardsley decided to adapt a mental strategy that would ignore the fact that five miles remained. He would run those miles one at a time, not caring whether there was another, not worrying whether or not tomorrow existed, unconcerned whether any moment he would step into a sewer to be carried far out to sea. He accepted any artifice that would allow him to remain in front, because any moment Alberto Salazar might fall into his own sewer.
“Okay,” Beardsley told himself at twenty-one miles. “You’re leading the Boston Marathon. You’ve got the world record holder on the ropes. You can hold this pace for one more mile. One more mile! Only one mile to go!”
Clay Shaw
4 Beardsley’s mantra over the final miles was “One more mile!”
At twenty-two miles, Beardsley punched the reset button on his mental speedometer. “Okay, Dick. Still in the lead. All you have to do is run one more mile and you can win this race. One mile to go!”
And at mile twentythree: “One mile to go! You’re beating the world record holder. One more mile!”
The runner behind him, meanwhile, continued to employ his own mental strategies. “Once we got off
This article originally appeared in Marathon & Beyond, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2006).
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