SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

The Scottish Trans-America Trials Produce a Hero. Part 2.

The first two chapters of Flanagan’s Run were published in our last issue.

Chapter 3 THE BROO PARK

Hugh McPhail had first heard about the Trans-America at half-time in a sixpencea-man soccer match on Glasgow Green, a rough stretch of land known locally as the “Broo Park.” “Broo” was a colloquialism for the unemployment bureau which all the twenty-two players dutifully attended each Thursday. There they collected the few shillings which the government supplied to sustain them and their families for another week.

There were few recreations available for the unemployed in the bleak winter of Glasgow of 1930. The public library, the park bench, the street corner, the betting shop, the pub: there was little else to do.

The library was one of the few warm places in the city, and in its antiseptic silence lived the unemployed from 9 a.m. when the doors opened till 7 p.m. when the library was cleared. There were three activities. The first was the study of racing forms in the pages of the sporting press. On such earnest studies rested the long-odds “doubles” and “trebles” designed to bring the unemployed if not to riches then to slightly better rags. Alas, the library did not house the specialized racing papers beloved of gamblers, such as the Sporting Life. Hugh’s father, down to his last sixpence, had once sent his own son to the news dealer in search of the newspaper. Finding none available, the boy had purchased a copy of the comic paper, Comic Cuts, which featured his favorites, Wearie Willie and Tired Tim. His father, enraged, had given him a sound thrashing. However, later that evening Hugh had been treated to a massive bag of candy; his father’s Aintree double of “Wearie Willie” and “Tired Tim” had come in at one hundred to one.

The second activity at the library was sleep. All day long men who had exhausted the possibilities of the daily press and the Encyclopaedia Britannica sat

with their heads resting on the backs of their hands on the glass tables in front of them. This was a dangerous practice, for it gave the assistants an excuse to move them out. Better by far, therefore, to pretend to pore over a fast medical dictionary, snatching a few moments of furtive sleep behind it when one could.

The final activity was study—random study of anything and everything the reference library had to offer—and many men became experts on subjects as diverse as astrology and bee-keeping from those long empty hours in the silent libraries of Glasgow.

The park bench provided no such solace. The west of Scotland, warmed by the sea, is rarely bitterly cold, but its winter wetness chills the bones. Similarly, there was comradeship but little solace for those small groups who would stand hunched at street corners all over the grimy city, moving their weight from foot to foot.

The betting shop, like the pub, offered warmth, companionship and hope: when you are at the bottom of the heap the only way is up. That at least was the theory, as men placed their sixpences and shillings on drugged greyhounds at massive odds, or on long-odds horses from lush stables somewhere in southern England. The regularity of their losses did not deter them, for there was always the hope of the “big one” that would change their luck.

Glasgow was a wasteland. Its main industry, shipbuilding, had virtually closed down, and with it the small industries which supported it. The cranes lay still, like frozen prehistoric animals waiting for a breath of life. The great steel mills at Dixons Blazes were silent.

Hugh McPhail was simply one of thousands, a legion of the lost containing some of the world’s most skilled craftsmen, men denied the opportunity to express their unique and subtle skills. At first it was believed that the layoffs would be short, but as time wore on men began to rot. Deprived of work, the spine of their life had vanished, and with it the core of their belief in themselves. These men were what they worked at. Nothing in their recreation or their family life could ever make up for that loss.

Hugh had started as a shipyard riveter, ten hours a day on a narrow scaffold, his arms shuddering as he drilled five thousand holes a day; even at weekends his hands still shook. Laid off in 1927, he had spent two hard years in the mines at Shotts, south of Glasgow.

There even his fitness had not saved him. Each day, after stumbling through the early morning mists, he and the others crawled two miles underground to the coal face. For most of the time he had been in agony, for his thighs, unused to the cramped movements imposed by the narrow tunnels, were in constant spasm. Even his best friend, Stevie McFarlane, who had hardly taken exercise in his life, had found it easier. The other miners were sympathetic, waiting for Hugh and massaging his legs until he was ready to continue.

Then there was the work itself, ten hours in semidarkness, hacking at the coal face. Much of the time the men worked naked, the sweat streaming in white rivulets down their black bodies. It was no wonder that miners were lean-waisted; all day long they pumped into the face with bellies of steel. Food was taken on the job—sandwiches and cold tea, with the men crouching together in crevices, mice scuttling between their legs. Then the return, two agonizing miles bent double, back to the elevator.

Hugh dreaded each morning. The only saving grace was the miners themselves. They had been born to it, to accept scarred backs, skins veined like Stilton cheese, crippling injury and death. However, they accepted him, knowing it was barely possible that he could condition himself to the work, and respecting his painful attempts to do so. To begin with his work rate was dismal, but eventually he came to accept the pain. It took him longer to adapt to the walks.

It was not only Hugh who was cheered by the presence of wee Stevie. The miners had taken to the little man instantly. Even in the worst times his quick and ready wit had lifted their spirits. A product of the worst slums of Glasgow, he had somehow managed to rise above the stinking squalor of the “single end” which had been his home and the rickets which had put his legs in irons until his early teens. Working at the coal face was particularly hard for him, for he was not built for such toil. But Stevie McFarlane was invincible. He had already seen the worst, and it had not been that bad.

Then, after two years at the mine, came “the visit.” In the winter of 1928 the Shotts mine was visited by Lord Featherstone, M.P., and a member of the British Olympic team soon to travel to Amsterdam. McPhail was immediately sought out by the mine’s manager, Fallon.

“We hear you’ve done a bit of running in your time,” opened Fallon.

“A bit,” Hugh replied guardedly.

“Then you’ve heard tell of Lord Featherstone?”

“The Olympic athlete?”

“The pit’s due for a visit to open the new pithead baths. The usual thing—Lord Featherstone, a fella from the Scottish Amateur Athletic Association and a clanjamfray of local bigwigs. The Tories have heard you’ ve run at the big professional races at Powderhall and they think it might make a nice touch if you and Lord Featherstone had a wee race. What d’you think?”

For a moment Hugh looked straight ahead. Then he said:

“Featherstone’s a quarter-miler. My top distance is what we run at the Powderhall handicap. One hundred and thirty yards.”

“Oh?”

“Tl race him, all right, but over a hundred yards.”

Fallon nodded, and went off to convey Hugh’s views to his masters. Two days later news came through that the race was on.

It soon became the talk of Shotts, but even Lord Featherstone had to secure clearance from the SAAA to run against McPhail, for three years a “pro.” The race was therefore required to be billed as an “exhibition,” to avoid breaching amateur rules.

That night, Lang, the shop steward, broached Hugh in the Miner’s Arms, nodding to the barman to set up two pints.

Lang was direct. “What are your chances?”

Hugh shrugged. “Six weeks to go. I reckon the mining has taken about six yards out of my legs. That puts me back around ten point six. Featherstone runs about ten point one. So I’ve got just six weeks to find six yards.”

“Jesus Christ! Some of the boys are laying their wages on you already. They’re getting terrific odds.”

“I’m not surprised. The bookies’ve got it right as usual. As things stand, I haven’t got a snowball in hell’s chance. Man, Featherstone eats steaks seven days a week! He’s got his own track in his father’s grounds, his personal professional trainer. His running shoes are handmade by some guy in Bond Street. Me, I spend all week doubled up two miles underground, drinking cold tea and eating bread and butter. Who the hell’s the amateur?”

Lang put both hands on Hugh’s shoulders. “There’s a bit more to it than that, son,” he said. “There’s an election coming up soon. Featherstone only has a couple of thousand votes in hand. McNair, the Labour agent, says that a win in the sprint could come in very handy. Man, the national press is coming up to cover it.”

Hugh exploded. “What is this, a bloody three-ring circus? I agreed to run this little race; okay. But I didn’t think it was going to be built up into the bloody Olympics.”

“Calm down, lad,” said Lang. He puckered his lips in thought, then sipped his beer. “You said six yards. Jesus, we know here what professional runners have to do if anybody does. You said steaks. Then you’ll get steaks, the best. We don’t have a trainer, but Dad McPherson’s got the best hands in the business. We don’t have a track, but there’s the hundred and fifty yards of cinders down by the railroad track. We’ ll get it rolled as flat and hard as Powderhall. What d’ye say?”

“Tt’s no good,” said Hugh. “Four miles walking underground and ten hours a day at the face is no way to prepare for a sprint match.”

“We’ll get you work above ground,” said Lang. “The lads’ club together to make up your wages.”

“Then you’re on,” said Hugh, nodding.

The next night, after work, Hugh and Stevie met at the pub for a council of war.

“Six yards,” said the wee man, gulping down his McEwans, the foam staying on his lips.

“Six weeks,” said Hugh.

They took physical inventory.

“How’s your weight?”

“About a hundred and fifty-five pounds.”

“Too light.”

“Lost a hell of a lot of muscle underground,” Hugh explained.

“Your legs?”

Hugh grimaced. “The mines again—all that walking doubled up. I’ll pull a muscle just thinking about sprinting.”

Stevie made some notes. “The steaks’ ll take care of your weight. As for your legs, Dad McPherson can get to work on them, and you’ll have to stretch daily. Now that you’re to be moved above ground the muscles should start to lengthen anyway.”

“So who made you the expert?”

“IT can read,” answered Stevie, holding up a thick red book. “It’s all in The Complete Athletic Trainer by Sam Mussabini. He coaches some university guy named Abrahams. I’ve read it from cover to cover. And now it’s all in here.” He tapped his head.

“Well, just make sure it all comes out,” said Hugh sourly.

But Stevie was as good as his word and conducted every detail of Hugh’s preparation. And every day old McPherson massaged Hugh’s legs.

“Tight,” he said, on the first day. “Don’t run hard on these yet.”

McPherson had been blinded in a pit accident, but the old man had supple hands smoothed by years of massage, most if it on racing whippets.

“Stiff,” he said, when he came to knead Hugh’s calves. “But it’s all there—just wants bringing out.”

Others did their part with equal dedication. As he had promised, Lang smoothed and flattened one hundred and fifty yards of cinder track by the side of the railroad, the area earmarked for the “exhibition.” It had taken ten miners most of two days to take the wrinkles and bumps out of the surface, but in the end it was sharp and fast. “A Powderhall indeed,” Hugh said admiringly when he saw it.

For a few weeks this bleak anonymous strip of track in the middle of a grimy coal mine in central Scotland would be the focus of his life. Six weeks from now it would be transformed into an arena in which he would face a man from another class—indeed, another world. Hugh felt hair on the back of his neck rise, and he shivered. He had only run once with real money on his back, at the New Year handicap at Powderhall, and he knew the agonies of self-doubt which grew day by day as fitness becomes increasingly sharp and the mind trembles on a fine edge. He looked again down the dead, silent strip of cinder, and thought of the life which his feet would bring to it, and in turn drain from its surface.

Training—or “prep,” as the specialized preparation was called, in the timehonored traditions of Scottish professional running—went well. Prep was the

method of pedestrians who ever since the great clashes of professional sprinters in the nineteenth century had honed their bodies to a knife edge for two-man “matches,” or for those twelve burning seconds which formed the annual New Year’s Day Powderhall sprint in Edinburgh.

The method itself was a ritual whose secrets were as closely guarded as those of any ancient priesthood. After a big breakfast Hugh would be massaged lightly by Dad McPherson, then off to the track for six scores—twenty-yard sprints with great attention to relaxed running technique. Next would follow an hour’s sleep, in turn followed at one o’clock by a steak dinner; there was no such meal as lunch to the miners at Shotts.

After another hour’s sleep it was back to the track for six runs over one hundred and twenty yards, at half speed, every run watched by the meticulous Stevie, who would again stress relaxation and running form. Then, in a disused hut beside the track, where Stevie had created a primitive gymnasium, Hugh practiced for half an hour on the punchball, the sweat drenching his thick jersey as he rhythmically pummeled the springy leather ball. The next half hour was spent on hundreds of repetitions of abdominal exercises, performed until his stomach went into spasms.

“Mussabini says the secret of sprinting is in the abdominals,” Stevie would comment earnestly, tapping the spine of The Complete Athletic Trainer, as Hugh lay writhing on the floor of the hut. Sometimes Hugh wished Mussabini had kept his secret to himself.

The day’s ritual ended with a walk back through gathering gloom to McPherson’s cottage for a final massage and high tea. Hugh would then put in a light shift on the mine’s surface before retiring to bed at nine-thirty.

There was no doubt that the training was working. Every day Hugh’s recovery from runs became quicker, and gradually the running began to flow into him and from him. Under Dad’s skillful, searching fingers his muscles became soft and supple, the hardness of the months at the pit face teased gently from them.

More important, Hugh again began to feel like an athlete. With the hardening and stretching of the muscles he could feel that his mind became daily quicker and sharper, like some delicate, hunted animal learning to tread its way in a world of danger.

Nor was there a day when a miner did not approach him to ask how he was feeling. “How’s it going, then?” they would ask. “The training. Getting enough steaks, are you?”

There was no envy in their questions. Hugh was their man, on whom they had placed their hopes, and it was right and just that he should be given special treatment. The miners’ experience with whippets and pigeons had taught them that you did not treat diamonds like quartz. They knew that a professional sprinter, a “ped,” had to be treated with care, like the greyhound he undoubtedly was.

However, each question, each query about his health and well-being increased the weight of responsibility Hugh felt resting upon him. What had begun as a “wee race” was, whatever Lord Featherstone felt, going to be a race to the death for Hugh. Men had staked their wages, some their entire savings on him, for the initial odds offered by the bookmakers had been generous. Featherstone was after all an Olympian, having run 47.8 seconds for four hundred meters, one of the fastest times in the world. Hugh realized that it was not only the money, though God knew that was reason enough for concern. It was “Them” against “Us,” Tory against Labour, workers against management.

Final training went well. With two weeks to go Hugh clocked 10.3 seconds in a trial run, two yards off target time. For all that, Stevie could feel his man becoming more and more tense in the week before the race.

“Let’s go to the pictures,” he said one afternoon, over tea.

The Roxy in Shotts was a fleapit, but a warm and pleasant place. The Charlie Chaplin film The Gold Rush was ideally suited to the occasion, and Stevie knew he had made the right decision.

Then came Pathé News. A couple of items, then “Oxford versus Cambridge, Queens’ Club, London” read the titles. The annual athletics match. There on the screen was Featherstone, clad in slacks and white sweater with a woolen scarf wrapped carelessly around his neck.

“Lord Featherstone, a triple winner,” said the titles. “Four hundred forty yards—forty-eight point two seconds. Two hundred twenty yards—twenty-one point nine seconds.”

“Wait for it,” said Hugh, gripping his seat.

“One hundred yards—nine point nine seconds.”

“Jesus Christ!” Hugh exclaimed.

They could both feel the change in the atmosphere as the lights went on. All around the movie house miners were arguing.

“T think they know the score now,” said Hugh quietly, as they made their way to the exit.

“It was probably wind-assisted,” growled Stevie on the way home. “Amateur timekeepers.”

It did not take the people of Shotts long to hear that their man would have to find four extra yards by race day. The atmosphere at the mine on Monday was sepulchral.

“What do you think?” asked Lang that evening at Dad McPherson’s.

Hugh shook his head.

“Tl not run nine point nine if you took a red-hot poker to my arse,” he said, then added, “still, we’ve got two weeks, and that railroad track isn’t Queen’s Club.”

Lang’s eyebrows lifted. “How d’you mean?”

“T mean nine point nine at Queen’s Club might only be worth ten point one here. I’mrunning ten point three now, with two weeks to go. I’ve got to find two-tenths. Anyhow, for Featherstone, it’s just an ‘exhibition.’ For me it’s shit or bust.”

In his final trial, two days before the race, he ran ten point two. Everyone at the mine knew, for there were at least ten watches on him when the trial was run. Still two yards to find, perhaps three.

“I’d like you to see someone,” said Stevie as they talked together at Dad McPherson’s one night after training. “It might help.”

“Help!” exclaimed Hugh. “I’ve had help enough. Steaks, massage, my own track, handmade spikes from London. I’ll tell you the help I need. I need a bloody miracle.”

“Calm down,” said his friend sharply, as there was a knock at the door. “Here,” he added. “I’d like you to meet Jock Wallace.”

He ushered into the living room a big, heavy gray-haired man in his mid-fifties, cap in hand. The man looked uneasy and immediately sensed Hugh’s antagonism as he lay on the bed on his stomach with Dad’s smooth fingers kneading his calves.

“Sorry to trouble you . . . at this time,” he said apologetically, as Hugh looked up.

Gathering himself he blurted: “Just some advice. You forget about Featherstone. You’re not running against him. You run against yourself when you’ve got big money on your back. Run in four feet of space. That’s all. Just run in four feet of space.”

He picked up his cap, nodded at Stevie, and was led out of the room by McPherson.

Hugh scowled and looked at Stevie.

“What did he mean, four feet of space?”

“He meant run your race. If it’s good enough you’ll win, if not you lose. So just drill through your four feet of space. That’s what sprinting’s all about. You run in blinkers.”

“What does he know about it?”

“You know who that was? That’s Wallace of Perth. He won the Powderhall sprint in 1888. That old man ran with five thousand pounds on his back. He’s been there. He’s been through it. He knows.”

Wallace of Perth. Hugh had heard of him. Twelve point seven seconds off two yards handicap on crushed snow. Wallace had been a legend in his time, a Scot who had taken on and beaten some of the best professional sprinters in the world. And now there he was, a big, soft old man telling Hugh to run in four feet of space. As Hugh pondered he realized the old man was right. You ran a hundred yards in separate tunnels, the winner being the man first out of his tunnel at the

end. That tunnel was four feet wide and that was the space he had to penetrate oblivious of Featherstone.

He couldn’t sleep the night before the race. In his dreams he ran and reran the race, each time wallowing with leaden legs up endless tracks. Each time he woke up sweating.

Management tried to play down the exhibition, treating it as just a minor part of a day of handshakes, junketing and grand speeches. But there was no doubt about how the miners saw it. All morning long the pit seethed with anticipation.

Hugh could eat virtually nothing and had only tea and toast. Stevie, as was the custom, had given him a good dose of laxatives the night before, and Hugh spent most of the morning in the toilet. By noon he felt he could not run one yard, let alone a hundred.

“Relax,” said Stevie, as Hugh lay in the cottage on the massage table. “For God’s sake.” But Hugh could feel the tension in Stevie’s voice and knew that the little man had invested as much as anyone in him, not merely in money but in the meticulous and purposeful training program he had devised. For the past six weeks the bandy-legged little man had lived his sporting life through Hugh. They both knew how fragile a sprint performance was. The slightest overtraining and a muscle could go like a violin string. Undertrain, and one came to the start sluggish and heavy. In the race itself the slightest mistake was lethal: over a hundred yards there was no time to recover from error.

That afternoon, an hour before the race, even Dad McPherson sweated as he lightly caressed the muscles of Hugh’s hamstrings. The old man had put his life savings on Hugh—fifty pounds, ten shillings and sixpence, at ten to one. For him the race meant the difference between five more cramped years at the pit and a life of ease with his beloved pigeons and whippets. McPherson knew how greyhounds sprang from the traps to seek their whirling prey. He prayed that his fingers could breathe something of that quality into Hugh McPhail.

Half an hour later, a black-silk dressing gown, which had been purchased by the miners, draped around his shoulders, Hugh walked down through the packed pit toward the competition area, flanked by Stevie, engulfed by the crowd who lined every yard of the cinder route. Hugh felt weak in the stomach. This was not what he had expected; no fragile sprint was meant to bear such pressure, and certainly no man. He felt like a pit prop, bending and groaning under the black earth above. These miners were burying him beneath their hopes.

He warmed up, feeling tired and breathless. Everything poured into ten brief seconds. His mouth dried as he thought of it.

Featherstone was a tall blond man, his lightly tanned skin a product of Cannes in summer, Chamonix in winter. He had a soft handshake.

“Pleased to meet you, McPhail,” he said.

Despite his manner Featherstone was under no illusions about what was at stake. Row upon row of grimy-collared men in flat caps and pit boots, straining at the ropes which enclosed the track, made it only too clear. He checked his lane. Those fellows had certainly done a good job: it was quite the equal of Queen’s Club. He looked across at Hugh. The man had the look of a sprinter. Thick, powerful thighs, light calves, strong shoulders. Well, they would soon see.

They stripped down. Featherstone wore long silk Oxford shorts, rimmed in dark blue, as was his half-sleeved shirt. A whisper ran through the crowd. The man had a superb physique, yet as unlike McPhail’s as could be imagined. It was completely balanced, with no obvious rippling muscularity. Featherstone looked like an animal born to run.

Hugh did not even glance at him, focusing rather on his strip of track. Four feet of space, old Wallace had said . . . Gradually the area outside of his lane was narrowing, and with it the babble of the crowd faded.

“Take to your marks!” The starter stood only ten yards behind them, but his voice seemed to come from a long way off.

Hugh looked up the track again. His lane was like a beam of light, with nothing but darkness on either side. He screwed his feet into his holes, feeling the light pressure of his right knee upon the cinders as he lowered it to the ground. All was still.

“Get set!”

He lifted his hips, feeling the pressure on his fingertips.

The gun was a release. He surged out like water bursting through a hole in a dam, piercing the space, his legs eating the ground beneath him. Then, suddenly, it was slow, but not sluggish, for this was the slowness of ease, the slowness induced by a feeling that there was ample time for every movement, time enough for the high pickup of the thigh, time enough for the strong drive-back of the elbows. Hugh knew that his running was pouring out of him, gushing along that narrow four-foot strip which had been made for his movements and his alone. He ran in a sweet dream, only dimly aware of the noise which raged on each side of his lane. He wanted it to last forever. Then it was over.

Hugh’s legs burnt the final yards of the track. He had no need for the “dip” finish with which his chest snapped the tape.

Featherstone proffered his hand, this time with a firm shake.

“Congratulations,” he said. “You ran as if you were on your own.”

“T was,” replied Hugh.

When the official announcement came it was almost drowned in the shouts of the crowd. “First, McPhail, Shotts. Ten seconds even.” Many of the miners started to dance up and down, gripping each other by the shoulders. Children ran onto the track to touch him. Stevie and McPherson stood by the finish, tears

streaming down their faces. On the special dais constructed for management and guests there was silence.

Although a reporter from every national newspaper was there the “exhibition” was reported in none of them. It was as if a race watched by six thousand people had never happened. A week later Hugh and Stevie were fired. No reason was given, none required. It was not simply that Hugh had beaten Featherstone. His mistake had been in taking it too seriously—in having the miners formally invest in him in a way which Featherstone’s class had done since birth as a matter of course. Worst of all they had won for Lang, the union man, and for the people. For Featherstone the race had merely been a ripple in what was to be a successful campaign, and he was not told of Hugh’s leaving.

But Lang did not let them down. Through contacts in Glasgow the union man had arranged work for Hugh and Stevie as dishwashers in a central hotel. Ten hours a day with hands in hot greasy water was a far cry from the pampered life of a professional athlete, but Hugh was content. Those ten seconds of the Shotts sprint had taught him much about himself. He had been tried and had not been found wanting. The work in the hotel was, however, only a short step from the unemployment of 1930, and for Hugh and Stevie it was soon back to the pleasures of the library, the street corner and the Broo Park.

* Eo *

McPhail had tried them all, these pleasures of the poor, and, being physically active, had found the “‘tanner-a-man” matches on Glasgow Green most to his liking. The rules were simple enough: if you won, your opponent gave you sixpence; if you lost, you gave him the same sum.

The name Glasgow Green was misleading, for there was little green about its soccer fields. The area around the Green had once, long past, been elegant enough, with pillared Georgian houses, homes of the eighteenth-century tobacco barons, but had long since gone to seed as successive generations of the working class had pressed in and on, and the rich had moved south or west to avoid both the smoke and the workers who created it. The remaining “green” lay in the well-cut lawns provided by thoughtful Victorian councillors, but the soccer fields themselves were made of rough, black industrial cinders. Now, in winter, corrugated, gripped by frost, they could rip a man’s flesh to shreds.

The “‘tanner-a-man” matches were desperate affairs, for few of the men could afford to lose even sixpence. It was one-all at halftime and McPhail and his team were squatting at the side of the field when wee Stevie let slip that he had read in a newspaper about the Trans-America race. “Ninety thousand pounds,” said Stevie. “But the bastards’II earn it. Three thousand miles across America. Poor sods.” Stevie had read the news in a paper in which he had bought his staple diet of fish and chips, so for all McPhail knew the race had already been run. But he made a mental note before returning his attention to the game.

One of the players, McGowan, had in his early years been a professional with Patrick Thistle. He had been a beautiful player, a nimble dribbler who could lay off streams of goal-scoring passes, but a leg injury had stopped short his career. Now in his mid-forties, tubercular, he hardly appeared to run a step but dominated the middle of the field, rarely having to make a tackle, always reading each situation early, making interceptions and still pushing out accurate passes. The game was tied at two-all when McGowan fell to the ground coughing. He put his hand to his mouth and dark blood seeped through his fingers. McPhail went to him.

“Off you go, old man,” he said. “I’ll pay if we lose.”

The old player was helped, protesting, from the field, still spluttering blood. Ten minutes later McPhail laid on a pass for another team member to score in the top right-hand corner. ““You’ve earned a pint,” said McGowan, as McPhail trudged from the field.

Eo * *

The game had been over for two hours. Hugh, after a brief excursion to the public library, had settled in a corner of the pub to drink his pint with McGowan and look at the page of the newspaper which he had ripped off from the library copy, the same page he had seen beneath Stevie’s fish and chips. No, there was

where in God’s name was California? He finished his drink, and after making his farewells to McGowan returned to the library to seek out a map. California was on the west coast, and could not have been farther away. He could see no way of getting there.

“You’re not using the head,” said Stevie, when he told him.

“What d’you mean?” Hugh replied testily.

“Look,” said Stevie. “First you’ re a sprinter. You’ve never run a hundred miles, let alone three thousand. Second, you’ve no money to get there. Why not kill two birds with one stone?” Hugh did not reply, so he went on. “Get somebody to organize a Scottish Trial, for God’s sake. Some newspaper like The Times or the Citizen. That way if you are good enough you’ll find out. If not, you won’t have wasted your own or anybody else’s money, going all the way out to California.”

Hugh thought for a moment. “You’re right, Stevie. But the man for this is Jimmy G. Miller.”

Eo * *

“Jimmy G.,” as he was commonly known, a Bridgeton bookmaker of doubtful reputation, was not immediately taken with the idea of putting up five hundred pounds in prize money for an unheard-of event. ““What do I get out of it?” he asked Hugh suspiciously.

“First,” said Hugh, “the prestige. You’ve put up the cash so that a Scot can go to America and take on the best in the world. Second, the betting. You’ll take a big book on the result of the race. And third, me.”

“You?” exploded Jimmy G. “God in heaven, you’re a bloody sprinter. Where’s the money in you?”

“Give me six months’ preparation. Take me off with a good trainer and some steaks and I’ll win you that trial. You’ll get big odds on me, and clean up a packet.”

Jimmy G. took the wet stub of the cigar from his mouth and looked across the table at him. “Can you guarantee to win?”

“T can’t. That’s your gamble. That’s what you are anyway, a gambler, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” replied Jimmy G. “I’m a bookmaker.” But he was smiling.

After that events moved quickly. The five-hundred-pounds prize money that James G. Miller of Bridgeton put up for the Scottish Trans-America trial caused a sensation, and the bookmaker and his race became a national talking point, just as McPhail had prophesied. Jimmy G. was happy with the result, for overnight, for a mere five hundred pounds, he had been elevated from the relative obscurity of a Bridgeton bookmaker to the status of a national figure. Times were hard, the winter was bleak, Scotland had just lost

‘Andy Yelenak

in the annual soccer match against England. Jimmy G. had given the country something to talk about, something to which people could look forward. The only problem was that he had never organized a race in his life. He decided to seek the advice of someone who had—Murdoch, the organizer of the 1909 Powderhall marathon.

“No problem,” said the old man, and set to planning a course from Aberdeen to Glasgow.

Meanwhile Jimmy G. had kept the final part of his agreement and had sent McPhail to the Highlands under the stern eye of the professional trainer “Ducky” Duckworth. The bookmaker saw little hope of any return on his investment on McPhail, but reckoned he would soon know from Duckworth’s trials if the Glasgow man had any chance of surviving the Trans-America race, let alone winning it. Duckworth was not so optimistic, for though the trials run by professional sprinters were good guides to eventual racing form, there was no real way of testing whether or not a man could run a hundred miles without exposing him to massive fatigue, from which there might not be time to recover. There was no real precedent for training for this length of race, and there was a real danger of running your man into the ground before the contest. He therefore resolved to make the final trial at least two weeks before the race, and for it to consist of two fifty-mile runs, with three hours’ rest in between.

McPhail’s stay in the central highlands was an exhausting one. First, Duckworth boiled him down to “racing weight” from his normal weight of one hundred and seventy pounds by having him lose eight pounds in the first two weeks. During that time McPhail ran and walked only about eight miles a day, mostly on soft grass, in stints of three to five miles. At first he found this hard, particularly as Duckworth made him run part of the distance in boots and heavy clothing. Gradually, however, he felt his thighs harden again, his breathing become easier.

After a month Duckworth gave him a trial over a hilly ten-mile course. “Run it in inside an hour,” he said, “or the preparation’s over.”

Hugh got through the first five miles in well inside the half hour, with Duckworth behind him on a bicycle. Even at seven and a half miles he was inside his schedule, and feeling pleased with himself. Then, at eight miles, he cracked. Suddenly, as if someone inside his body had turned off a faucet, his legs tightened and his stride dropped to a crippled trot. Duckworth immediately saw what had happened, slowed, and sat back to watch.

Hugh had never experienced anything like this before. True, he had tightened up in sprints, but that had been painless, over in a flash. Now his thighs and the inside of his groin were screaming. Yet he did not drop to a walk. He did not dare, for he knew that if he did he would never be able to restart.

Just as the chemistry of his body had changed, so had that of his mind. Perhaps ascientist could analyze and measure it in terms of molecules whirling desperately

toward some mad collision. To Hugh it took the form of a blur of images: on the one hand, the cinders of tanner-a-man soccer on Glasgow green, endless cups of kitchen tea on endless winter afternoons, standing in line at the Broo. On the other, a chance—not much of a chance, perhaps—of a money prize and a trip to the sun on the other side of the world. Above all, a chance to break clear, to start again. On the one hand, the pain, and the certainty of at least another quarter of an hour of it; on the other, his hopes and his dreams.

Hugh started to groan. It was not a conscious groan, but one which came from deep inside and pulsed in rhythm with his now short and shattered strides. In a way it helped, acting as a sort of metronome against which his strides could be placed, his pain measured. Every now and then his groans would be interrupted by a sound which came from even deeper within him, a little scream which pierced the groans and then died away.

In the central highlands of Scotland, silhouetted against the gray winter sky, a man staggered, groaning, followed by a little man on a bicycle. Fiercer battles had been fought on stranger ground, but none more severe.

It took Duckworth more than half an hour to bring his charge around. Hugh jerked his head away from the sharp smell of the smelling salts.

“Did I make it?” he asked, propping himself up.

“Yes,” said Duckworth. “Ye ran ten miles.”

“But the time? Did I make it in the hour?”

“No. One hour and two minutes.”

McPhail wept, the salt tears dropping onto a shirt already sodden with sweat. He wept like a child, in deep sobs.

Duckworth bent down, so that his eyes were in line with Hugh’s. “Ye didn’t make it in the hour, but ye’ve satisfied me. Ma faither, when he telt me of great runners, used tae call it ‘bottom.’ A’ the great yins had it. Ye can call it whit he like—courage, stamina, endurance. He called it ‘bottom.’ You’ve got it, lad.”

“You mean we go on with the prep?”

“Aye. Now it’s just a matter of getting miles under yer belt. Now we know ye’ll stay when trouble comes.”

Three months later, his body toned and hardened by Duckworth’s training, Hugh found no difficulty in winning the Scottish Trans-America trial. He had been virtually the only trained man in the trial, a race in which he had faced the gaunt men of the Scottish Broo Parks. He led them easily through the black, slimy streets of Glasgow, and finished before forty thousand spectators at Ibrox stadium.

Throughout that day broken men stumbled around the sodden cinder track, all hope of the Trans-America gone. Hugh watched them from the comfort of the stands and asked himself why they kept going. Months later, thousands of miles from home, he was to receive the answer.

Chapter 4 THE PRESS MEETS DOC COLE

Doc stood up and propped himself on both arms, knuckles down, on the table in front of him. “Okay fellas,” he said. “Shoot.”

Wearing a faded 1908 Olympic blazer, Alexander Doc Cole looked even smaller, older, less athletic than he had at Flanagan’s press conference the day before. Bald and brown, he looked more gnome than man as he stood at a table on the dais facing the assembled press.

In fact, Doc could almost have been tailored for the Trans-America. He had set out from his home in Montgomery, Alabama, and had hitched the first two thousand miles, run the last five hundred. The long run-in into Los Angeles had got his legs and feet in shape, for he knew that the Trans-America would be a test even for someone with his background. He reckoned he would be the most experienced runner in the race, with a heart rate of thirty-four beats per minute and with over a hundred thousand miles of running in the fibers of his lean, hard legs. But he would also, at fifty-four, be one of the oldest men in the Trans-America. On the other hand, age in a race such as this would be no disadvantage. True, the young would have tough, adaptable bodies, and the Trans-America might indeed allow some time for adaptation. But they had never been where he had been, in sour lands where the body dragged itself from one stride to the next, while the mind, still fresh but desperate, fought its own battles. It was in that dark battleground that races were won or lost; and he had lost a few, but won many.

He had made good use of his thousand miles of travel. The first four days had seen the sale of a hundred bottles of Chief Chickamauga’s snake bite remedy. The first two days, in farmer’s country, he had sold it as a liniment, because farmers were always good for anything that would cure their aches and pains. He had also managed to unload ten of Dr. Pulvermacher’s magnetic belts, the first he had sold for many years. The glamor and mystery of electricity and magnetism had by 1931 worn thin. He had seen the time when he could not sell enough of the magnetic belts, the answer to every ill from constipation to impotence. The odd thing was that they did occasionally work. On more than one occasion a constipation-gripped cowboy had had to make a sprint to the john only seconds after Dr. Pulvermacher’s belt had started to fizz and flash around his belly. Doc’s information on the belt’s effects on impotence were less easily come by, but this had never prevented large sales to the lovelorn.

The next two days he had sold the remedy as a tonic, with equally good results. This change of tack also involved a slight change in formula with the alcohol content lifted to thirty percent. This form of the remedy had always gone down well in temperance towns, and many a stern Baptist maiden aunt who had

solemnly taken the pledge swore by the Chief’s answer to all ills, from the vapors to morning sickness. The remedy had an equal appeal to men, particularly when Doc described its “virilizing” qualities. Doc’s audiences therefore went off with a dollar’s worth of hope in their pocket. They had also been royally entertained.

Alas, it had not been quite like the old days. Then, Doc Cole could have swept toward Los Angeles like an avenging fury, littering the area behind him with thousands of dollars’ worth of Chief Chickamauga’s remedy and Dr. Pulvermacher’s magnetic belts, to say nothing of Simmon’s liver regulator, Dr. Kilmer’s swamp root and Perry Davis’s painkiller. Alas, federal drug controls had seen the disappearance of Dr. Hercules Sanche, Doc McBride (the Great King of Pain), Doc Ennis and his universal balm . .. Dear God, they had swept through the West like a plague of locusts. No state fair had been complete without them, dressed in their fancy vests and black bowler hats, their “wives” jabbering beside them as Queen Nookamookee, their sons as Prince Achmed lately rescued from cannibals in the Trobriand Islands. Still, if they had been rogues they had been damn funny ones, and no one had come to much harm because of them.

Those days had gone for good, and Doc had spent the last ten years behind the counter at Bernstein’s Drug Store in Montgomery, Alabama, dispensing milkshakes and homespun homilies to college kids for five bucks a week. He had, however, never stopped running. The 1908 Olympics had resulted in a four-year boom in professional marathon running, with the magic twenty-six mile three hundred and eighty-five-yard race being held for money everywhere from Cairo to the Yukon. It had been short-lived, but Doc had been one of the better contenders, though never a match for the Indian Longboat, the Englishman Shrubb, or the stocky little Italian Dorando Pietri, whose running in the London Olympics had triggered off the whole mad marathon craze in the first place. They had run anything up to ten marathons a year, and this had been too much for even the best of them, who had met with illness and injury, leaving good pickings for the second rank of runners, of whom Doc had been one. By 1913 the bubble had burst. Back they had gone to their respective countries, many to surrender their fit, hard bodies to the sniper’s bullets and shrapnel of the French trenches, others simply to bland domesticity. The world of amateur athletics was closed to them, while that of professional athletics existed only in the industrial towns of Northern England and parts of tural Scotland. Thus some of the greatest running machines the world had ever seen had been broken, dismantled or simply rusted away.

After the war there had been a delay in the revival of amateur athletics, and many state fairs and local carnivals, knowing nothing of the amateur rules, had put on “picnic” meetings for money prizes. The longest distance run had been three miles, a mere sprint to Doc, and he had won such races easily, trotting around the rough grass tracks in about sixteen minutes, far ahead of the college boys and farmers who had been his challengers. Occasionally, echoing the old days,

a town would hold a marathon, usually over only ten or twelve miles, and again Doc was back in his element, slaughtering the ill-trained locals.

In the early twenties, as amateur athletics picked up the traces, Doc had found fewer and fewer meetings in which to race, but in some ways this had been his golden period. He had gone bald early in middle age and in his road shows, as part of his Chickamauga spiel, he would issue a challenge to race the fastest runner in town. “Who’s your best runner?” he would shout, tearing off his jacket and pulling out the cork from a bottle of Chickamauga with his teeth. “Dear Lord, I’m fifty-five (he was then ten years younger) but give me a slug of Chickamauga and I’ll take him on.” Every town had its star athlete, sometimes a college boy gone to seed, sometimes a fit young farmer. The lad would be thrust forward, blushing and uncertain at first, but encouraged by the back slaps and shouts of the crowd, becoming progressively more confident as he reached Doc on the stage. “If this young feller here will give me a start . . .” Doc would begin, to be drowned in jeers and catcalls. “All right,” he would say. ““We’ll start even. But first let’s see some money down.” In a matter of minutes the farmers were raining dollars on the stakeholder, Doc’s “daughter,” Alice, betting five to one on their champion.

“One moment,” Doc would then shout above the furor. “If—if anything should happen to me, I hope you’ll see me in a Christian grave.” Satisfied by the raucous assurances of the crowd, Doc would arrange a course of at least three miles and would then give a lengthy lecture on the values of the remedy. If it was being sold as liniment he would massage himself vigorously, giving little groans if it went close to his private parts. On the other hand, if it was being sold as a tonic Doc would savor the remedy in sips, like a fine wine, before allowing it to slide down his throat.

Then the race would start. Doc usually let his challenger stay with him for the first couple of miles, always keeping a close check on his opponent’s rate of breathing. If the local boy was gasping Doc would slow down, so that the lad could finish the course in style, making a race of it. On the other hand, if the local champion was going easily, Doc would step up the pace, for he had no wish to face the sprint finish of a younger man.

Every now and then as he ran through the crowded town Doc would give a groan and hold his side, as if suffering from a stitch. The crowd loved this, for here was their champion running this smart-aleck medicine man into the ground. With half a mile to go Doc, rolling around, would obviously be in great pain. Then his “daughter” would rush to his side with a bottle of Chickamauga. Revived, Doc would sprint the last half mile and win easily. He always, however, seemed to have enough breath left to harangue his doting audience for another hour on the benefits of Chickamauga and a life of exercise and moderation.

The last years of the twenties had seen a revival in all marathon-type activity, excluding marathons themselves. Marathon dancing, pole-sitting, skipping and

cycling had become popular, but this had not resulted in a revival of the marathon-madness of 1908. Professional distance races did revive, however, and Doc, although now in his early fifties, had found no trouble in dealing with another generation of challengers.

This was a new and different group of men from the “circus” of prewar days. Unemployment was growing rapidly, and baseball, football and boxing were the only sports which offered outlets for the working class. The ghettos of New York had spawned endless Negro boxers, but football and baseball were open to whites only. Not so running, but few Negroes had any backh *

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ground in distance running and most of them were helpless after a few miles. For different reasons, it was the same for most of the unemployed white men who, in desperation, entered for local races, for they had neither the training nor the feeding to enable them to complete the distances, let alone race them.

In this mini-boom Doc thrived. With thirty years of running behind him the competition presented few problems. His only difficulties arose whenever an amateur distance runner turned professional. These were young men, running as fast as Doc had done twenty years before, and there was no way he could contain them at distances less than ten miles. The mini-boom of the late twenties did not, however, provide for Doc the economic basis for a second career as a full-time athlete, as races were spread unevenly across the continent. Doc had stayed behind the counter at Bernstein’s, happy with a steady five bucks a week, occasionally picking up races in nearby states.

As soon as he heard of Flanagan’s Trans-America race he had known that this was what he had been waiting for, his last chance to set up Doc Cole’s Drug Store or Sports Emporium and live the remainder of his life in style. The other competitors did not worry him; he knew that if he could stay healthy over the distance he would be in the frame at the finish. That hundred and fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money and anyway, he was going nowhere in particular. He had therefore given in his notice at Bernstein’s and trotted off toward Los Angeles.

Doc had reached the bustling city two days before the required assembly time, at Flanagan’s request, and had met Flanagan in his headquarters at the Imperial Hotel a couple of hours after his arrival.

“You don’t know me, but I sure as hell know you,” said Flanagan. “When I was a boy I followed all the pro marathon runners—Longboat, Johnny Hayes, Dorando. I even saw you run a marathon indoors at the Garden once.”

“That was in 1911,” said Doc.

“That’s right. You got beat by Shrubb and Dorando.”

“Right again,” said Doc, accepting a glass of orange juice.

“Well, Doc, I need your help,” said Flanagan. “I’ve set this race up, got all the organization planned down to the last tent peg. In a couple of days I’Il hold my first press conference. But hell, I never ran marathons and the press boys will want something more than a press release for what I’m going to hand them. That’s where I need someone of your weight.”

“How?”

“By you having your own conference a day later,” said Flanagan. “That way you can fill them in on all the hard technical stuff. Those press boys don’t know a marathon from a fortune cookie—you can give ’em the real McCoy.”

Doc was silent for a moment.

“Well, what do you say?” asked Flanagan.

“Won’t the other runners think I’m getting the star treatment?”

“Doc, you are a star—hell, you’ ve run more marathons than most of ’em have had hot breakfasts. So I’m certainly not going to be apologizing to anyone and neither should you. What do you say?” asked Flanagan.

“Yes,” said Doc, quietly.

* Eo *

“Carl Liebnitz.” The thin panama-hatted journalist rose, took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. “Doc, you may recall that we first met in 1904 at the St. Louis Olympics marathon. Was that your first full marathon?”

“Yep,” said Doc, smiling in recognition of Liebnitz. “The first and the worst. Thad already been two months selling snakeroot at the St. Louis Expedition. So I wasn’t in too good shape for that one.”

“TI seem to remember that it was pretty hot in St. Louis,” said Liebnitz.

Doc puffed out his cheeks. “Hot as hell! It must have been over ninety in the sun, and men dropped out like flies.”

“Did you know the Cuban, Feliz Carjaval?” asked Liebnitz.

“Felix?” Doc laughed. “Yes, I knew Felix quite well. He was a mailman, he had never run a marathon before. He raised the money for St. Louis by running around the town square in Havana for a couple of hours. When he collected enough pesos he hightailed it to St. Louis. But Felix lost all his money in a crap game and ended up bumming his way to the Olympics. Yes, I knew Felix. What a joker! But he finished fourth, a full ten minutes up on me.”

“Rae here, Washington Post. Didn’t you go on to run for Uncle Sam at the London Olympics in 1908?”

Doc wrinkled his nose. “Yes, in the Dorando Marathon. Boy! I hit the wall at twenty miles and ended up watching the finish from the bleachers.”

“Forrest, Chicago Tribune. Do you think the Trans-America field is too large?”

Doc slowly brought his little brown hands together. “It’ll soon trim down. By my reckoning the field will halve in the first week and halve again two weeks later. I don’t see more’n five hundred men making New York.”

“And women?”

Doc chuckled. “Any lady who makes the final five hundred to New York will receive achilled bottle of vintage French champagne, compliments of Alexander Cole.”

“What about a bottle of Chickamauga remedy, Doc?” chuckled Forrest.

“She’ll have taken that already just to help her get there.”

There was laughter. This was copy, what they had come to hear.

James Ferris of The Times stood up. “Doc, how did you come to acquire your medical degree?”

Cole grinned, wrinkling his leathery face. “I freely confess that I never actually picked up a college degree. But you fellers know the way it was. There wasn’t

much in the way of Harvard doctors and hospitals back where I came from. So any coot like me who came around in pin-striped trousers with a few bottles of horse liniment, swinging a two-dollar watch was elevated to the ranks of the medical profession. Me, I always looked upon it as a sort of honorary degree.”

Albert Kowalski rose. “Doc,” he said, after identifying himself, “you seem to have been around a coon’s age. Do you mind telling us how old you are?”

Doc smiled. “A hundred thousand miles old,” he replied. “Seriously, fellas, I’m fifty-four.”

“Do you think the Trans-America may have come too late for you?” pursued Kowalski.

The smile faded from Doc’s face. “Perhaps,” he said. “But I can’t allow myself to think that way. Anyhow, in a race of this distance age can be an asset. Age means experience. That means experience of pain, of injury, of days when your legs won’t move. That sort of experience is money in the bank.”

“In the Trans-America bank?” flashed Kowalski.

“For the moment, yes,” said Doc, smiling.

“What’s the farthest distance you’ve ever run?” asked Forrest.

“In a race, nonstop, one hundred miles, back in 1912 in Berlin. Two years back Tran a hundred and eighty miles in three days at sixty miles a day, in snowshoes, in Alaska.”

“So the Trans-America represents a completely unique challenge even for someone like you?” asked Kowalski.

“T should say so. Fifty miles a day for three months, over all kinds of country. No runner has ever raced such distances before.”

“What is the most you have run in training?” asked Forrest.

“Tn a week, two hundred miles.”

“So even in the first week you will be in unknown territory?” asked Forrest, scribbling furiously.

“Any way you look at it it’s unique,” said Doc. “That’s the challenge. Even old-timers like me are novices in the Trans-America. That’s what makes it a lottery. That’s why it’s pulled in two thousand runners from all over.”

“Trevor Grove, New York Herald. Doc, would it be true to say that you are the most experienced runner in the race?”

Doc shrugged. “Yes and no. Yes, I’ve run more long-distance races than most of the men here, except possibly the Englishman Charles Fox. No, because no one here is experienced at running three thousand-odd miles across America.”

“Pollard, St. Louis Star. Doc, will you have any special diet for the race?”

“The secret is to carry on as usual—never take anything you wouldn’t normally eat,” answered Doc. He held up a glass of water. “The big problem will be drink, particularly in the desert heat. When you run out of water you overheat. Next thing, it’s curtains.”

Forrest was the next on his feet. “What about race walkers? How do you see their chances?”

Doc pursed his lips. “Not good,” he replied. “Over distances in the twenty- to twenty-five-mile range, walkers can’t pump out much better than ten- or twelveminute miles. By my reckoning it will take an average pace of inside ten minutes a mile to take the Trans-America. And I believe Mr. Flanagan proposes some qualifying times in the early stages, to cut down the field. So I can’t see many of the walkers making it through the first cuts.”

“Doc, three thousand miles is one helluva long way to race. How are you going to keep mentally sharp?” asked Grove.

Doc’s lower lip pouted. “For me it won’t be a race till about five hundred miles out from New York. Any guy who goes out to race hard every day will blow a gasket in the first month. My aim is to run as if there’s no one else in the race. The moment I start racing against people at each stage Ill be finished, ’cause I’ll be racing at their pace and not mine.”

“What do you mean by only racing the last five hundred miles?” queried Ferris.

“IT mean that by that time the Trans-America will have shaken out the men from the boys. By then we’ll know who can run what. The race will probably divide itself into three kinds of runner. First, the guys who are sprinters—these guys will win short stages up to fifteen miles. At the other end of the scale will be the sloggers, coots who can chug forever at ten minutes a mile over fifty miles. In the middle will be the marathon men. They’ll run inside ten minutes per mile. By five hundred miles out I’ll know what has to be done. I reckon if ’m within an hour of the leaders at that point then I can make up the gap in the remaining distance.”

“Doc, what in your estimation will be the qualities required of the TransAmerica winner?”

Doc paused for a moment. “The Trans-America winner,” he said, “should be a pair of legs with a head on top. The man must have a tough heart to pump enough blood to let him average ten-minute miles, day in day out. That heart will knock along at a hundred beats a minute over road, over country, on rough track, on flat plains and high sierras.””

He sat on the edge of the table, his legs dangling.

“The winner will have tough, hard feet, feet that won’t cut up and blister. In the end a Trans-America runner is only as good as his contact point. Six million contacts from here to New York; remember that.”

“But what about the mind, Doc?” Ferris asked.

Doc stood up and tapped his forehead. “That’s where the real battles will be won and lost,” he said. “The winner has to keep going every one of the thousand times

his body will beg him to stop between here and New York. The winner mustn’t think of three thousand miles, only of the next one. He must live in his own mind, defeating only one man every day. Always. The same man—himself.”

“Martin Howard, Chicago Star. Are there any other factors?”

“Health,” said Doc. “If he feels ill or has tendon and muscle pains he must be brave enough to ease off and walk. Otherwise a pain becomes an injury, and an injury soon becomes crippling. In a race of this distance there is time for injuries to heal up—but only if you give your body a chance.”

“Will you wear any special clothing?” asked Howard.

Doc grinned. “You’ll make me give away my secrets,” he said. “The main thing is to let the body breathe. That’s why I run in this string vest kinda shirt.” He lifted from the table a shirt punctured with holes. “This lets the body get rid of heat. That apart, you must avoid chafing—and that means wide-legged shorts, six pairs of well-worn shoes—and protection from the sun. These are the essentials. Sunburn can make you raw meat in a few hours.”

“Doc, Mr. Flanagan tells us that Paavo Nurmi might be a competitor. What are your thoughts on that?” asked Pollard.

Doc wrinkled his nose. “Heck,” he said, “I’m surprised Paavo can even afford to turn professional.” There was more laughter. “Seriously, Nurmi is the greatest runner of all time, and if he enters, then he must be a strong contender. My philosophy is this. You don’t win races by worrying about other competitors. You respect them, yes. You keep an eye on them, yes. But worry, hell no. So if Nurmi throws his hat in the ring, so be it.”

“What about sex, Doc?” shouted a sweating reporter toward the back of the hall.

“Well,” said Doc. “What about it?”

There was laughter.

“T get your drift,” he continued as the laughter subsided. “Sex is like food—you shouldn’t change your habits even during competition. I don’t propose to change mine—but I’m sure as hell not telling you fellas what they are!”

“Pop Warner won’t let any of his players near women close to a game and Dempsey stays away from his wife for three months before fights,” observed Ferris.

“Hell, Mr. Ferris, we won’t be playing much football or doing much fistfighting in the Trans-America,” said Doc, his eyes twinkling.

“Do you know much about the form of the other runners?” Ferris countered.

Doc shook his head. “Not really. Kohlemainen I know something about—I ran against him a heap after the 1908 marathon—even beat him once in Mexico. The Englishman, Charles Fox, he’s one of the all-time greats, but Charles is now close to seventy.”