Heat or cold, rain or snow, the run must go on. Part 11.

46. The heat

OSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, April 1976. The running body is a great furnace but a poor air conditioner. The activity and the clothing warm us on the coldest days but overheat us on the hottest no matter how much we strip down. A 20-degree rule applies here, the runner’s day feeling that much warmer than the thermometer reads.

By that standard the early miles of that year’s Boston Marathon felt like 117 degrees. Even in actual temperature, a high of 97 at the noontime start, it would be my hottest race day ever—at any distance. It meant that I would work my hardest to run my slowest. I had been warned to toss out the prerace pacing plan and slow down, or else.

Dr. George Sheehan had put a healthy fear into his audience on Sunday morning when he told us, “Everyone thinks we’re talking about someone else when we tell the dangers of heat stroke. But I can almost guarantee that one of you is going to have serious trouble tomorrow.” He paused to let this message soak in. Then he added, “We had a man die of a heat stroke here three years ago, and more than two dozen were hospitalized. And it was 20 degrees cooler then than it will be tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, the Boston media were warning race viewers of the danger runners would face. The Sunday Globe printed two articles. One, by local coach Billy Squires, listed the symptoms and treatment of heat stroke. The other article noted, “Spectators along the way will play an important role with hoses and sprinklers, bringing some relief to the runners.” Monday morning, as the temperature climbed into the 90s before the noontime start, a car with a loudspeaker traveled the route. An official pleaded with residents to help in any way they could. They responded on this day of a race that came to be known as the “Run for the Hoses.”

We could almost float to Boston, and this human help plus dramatic cooling after two hours held down the casualties. Race physician and former marathoner Warren Guild said, “It was a tough day to run. But we sent fewer people [16] to the hospital than we did last year, when supposedly it was an ideal day for running.” Competence and caution on the part of the runners, and cooperation from the fans who became participants that day, turned this potential mass catastrophe into a safe and satisfying experience for most of us.

It was for me. Though I set a PW (which I would later “break” easily), this was my first negative-split marathon. Plus I had started this race with laryngitis—a terrible malady to have at the talkathon that is Boston weekend. The heat burned this bug out of me before the postrace parties began.

Update: Winning streak

Mark Covert was a racer, not a pacer. He surrendered nothing to the heat and let no runner get away from him—until “my legs went dead at 15 miles” and he dropped out. I heard about this much later, back in the hotel room we shared that weekend. The DNF was a big blow to the competitor in him but was no setback for his inner streaker because this bad day still counted as a run day. By 1976 he had gone nearly eight years without taking a day off from running. That streak eventually stretched on through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and far into the 2000s.

Covert once was a racer of some note. He finished seventh in the 1972 Olympic Trials Marathon. “When I was younger and racing a lot,” Mark told the Los Angeles Times on the 25th anniversary of his streak, “my attitude was that no one was going to out-tough or out-strength me. They might beat me, but they were going to have to run hard that day. The streak was part of that attitude.”

Now the coach at Antelope Valley College in California, he recalled to a local reporter, Mike Butwell, “I got to 100 days without even knowing it. I thought, Wouldn’t it be something to run every day for a year? A year became two, and two grew into five. Now the streak has a life of its own.” Covert has fought hard to keep the streak alive. “At this point it’s a big deal for me,” he said. “I don’t know what it means to other people other than they think Covert is a little wacko.”

How wacko? You be the judge. In 1980 he ran on the pitching deck of a cruise ship caught in a Caribbean storm. “The crew was taking bets on when he was going overboard,” recalled his wife, Debi. That same year Mark was hospitalized with a severe case of flu. When a doctor told him he must stay overnight, he recalled, “I popped right up and said, ‘Get me out of here!’”

In 1982 Covert ran on a broken foot, suffered in a midrun leap to avoid stepping on a snake. “I taped up the foot with an Ace bandage and wore a heavy construction boot and shuffled three miles in 25 or 26 minutes. But I got my run in.” In 1987 he ran right before and the day after hemorrhoid surgery. “I was in a lot of pain,” he said, “but I survived.”

Other than running more often, Mark Covert isn’t much different in outlook from the rest of us runners. He said, “There are no days when I get up and think, Gee, if I didn’t have this streak I wouldn’t go for a run. That’s never happened.” Like us, he runs because he wants to, not because he thinks he must.

47. The third

doesn’t have just one winner. Third place is as good as first. And at the Olympic Marathon Trials of 1976, where defending Olympic champion Frank Shorter and American record holder Bill Rodgers were shoo-ins for one and two, the third finisher would be the biggest winner of all. The consensus among runners I talked with here was, “I’m running for third.”

That Saturday morning I filled out a 3-by-5 card labeled “Realistic Chances.” Then came 12 names, plus another one set apart from the rest with a “?” beside it. The name Tony Sandoval was a late addition, based more on his short-distance times than on his marathon experience (one race).

Mark Cullen, gathering data for his article for the upcoming Track Trials program, asked to see my list. After scanning it, he said, “You’re missing someone.” Who was that? “Don Kardong. Anyone who can run 12:57 for three miles and finish sixth in the last marathon trials a month after having mono must have something going for him.”

The runners who thought they had a chance at third chose one of two tactics: all-or-nothing, or hang-back-and-hope. Sandoval and Kardong hung back together. When I caught my only glimpse of them on the course, at 10 miles, they lagged in 26th and 27th.

Back at the stadium, I relied on periodic progress reports from out on the road: at 15 miles, Rodgers, Shorter, Barry Brown, Tom Fleming, Bob Varsha. At 20, same top three, with Varsha and Fleming trading places behind them. Four miles later, Brown gone, leaving Varsha and Fleming fourth and fifth. Then came the surprising announcement: Sandoval and Kardong now running six-seven.

Shorter appeared fresh as he entered Hayward Field first. Rodgers was close behind but looked nearly spent. They completed their lap of the track before the real question of the day was answered. Several voices shouted at once, “It’s Kardong!” A grin split Don’s face and he slapped a friend’s hand as he came through the gate. Sandoval arrived next, and the difference in his face and pace told the story of how far apart third and fourth places are in the Olympic Trials.

Marshall Clark cried as he saw Kardong and Sandoval on the track at the same time. He had coached both runners at Stanford University. Clark congratulated one runner and consoled the other. Then he said, “I have mixed feelings about that one, I tell you.”

The two runners had roomed together in Eugene and had run together for much of the marathon. With little more than a mile to go, Don had turned to his younger, smaller friend and said, “I’ve got to go.” As Sandoval finished, Kardong put his arm around him and said, “I’m going to try for the 5,000-meter team. If I make it, I’ll drop out of the marathon and you’ll go as the first alternate.”

That wouldn’t happen. Don Kardong would place fourth in the Olympic Marathon that year. Tony Sandoval would win the 1980 Trials, making the teamto-nowhere.

Update: Our humorist

We can’t see a golden age while it is happening. We can’t spot the greatness of an era until we’ve seen how far it stands above the years that followed. Given a generation’s perspective, we now see the 1970s as the golden age of US men’s Olympic marathoning. We can say the same for US running writing, and in two cases the names of runner and writer overlap.

Look at all the 1970s yielded: in Olympic running, Frank Shorter’s gold and silver medals at Munich and Montreal, plus the fourth places of Kenny Moore and Don Kardong. In best-selling writing (for all topics), the running books of Jim Fixx, George Sheehan, and the Bob Glover-Jack Shepherd team.

These authors earned their success. They wrote well and delivered the right messages at the right time, as running and running bookselling boomed together. But Fixx, Sheehan, and Glover-Shepherd weren’t the best runner-writers the 1970s spawned. Those were Moore and Kardong.

They have more in common than their near-misses at the Olympics. Moore and then Kardong, a few years later, were Pacific Northwest-born, ran for Pac-8 (now Pac-12) colleges, were world class in track before turning to the marathon,

Don Kardong and Tony Sandoval aren’t yet visible behind Trials leaders, including Frank Shorter (35) and Bill Rodgers (52).

and peaked in the 2:11s. And both broke into running writing in a magazine that I edited at the time. Moore first appeared there in 1970 and Kardong five years later.

Kenny would say now that he didn’t write for the magazine Runner’s World then. It merely reprinted a piece of his from the University of Oregon alumni publication. Don wrote an original article for RW about one of the first US track teams to visit China. How he told that story distinguished him from his fellow Olympic fourth-placer Moore, and their styles still contrast. One isn’t better than the other; they’re just different.

When I first talked to Kenny Moore about rerunning his article, he was studying for a graduate degree in creative writing. He was in training for the career to come. When I asked Don Kardong to write his first article, he was working as an elementary school teacher. A career as a writer? You can’t be serious.

Kardong’s apparent lack of seriousness, or at least his inability to take himself and the sport too seriously, would distinguish his writing and endear him to readers. With Moore, you expected to be impressed by the depth of his thoughts and observations. With Kardong, you expected to be amused by his experiences and misadventures.

This isn’t to say that Don writes the way a slapstick comic performs. He’s no buffoon. His relaxed style features a gentle gibe here (often aimed at himself) and a clever turn of phrase there. The writing appears to entertain Don as much as it does his readers. It seems to be his break from the serious contributions he makes to the sport and to his community.

He helped professionalize running as a cofounder of the Association of Road Racing Athletes (later called the Professional Road Racing Organization, or PRRO). He served as long-distance chairman of USA Track & Field and as president of the Road Runners Club of America. At home in Spokane, Washington, he launched and now works as full-time director of the Bloomsday 12K race. Alas, he keeps so busy there that readers only rarely get to smile and laugh along with Kardong in fresh writings. Their rarity makes them all the more prized.

48. The shoe

EUGENE, OREGON, June 1976. To fully enjoy a sports event, you need to pick favorites and then root for them. I didn’t go to my second Olympic Track Trials as a fan of Garry Bjorklund: didn’t know him, wouldn’t meet him until years later. He won me over, along with much of the crowd, while first seeing him race.

Lining up for the 10,000 final, Bjorklund wore a new growth of beard and a stoic, almost sad expression. In the early laps he ran so smoothly that he made even the stylish Frank Shorter look a bit ragged by comparison. But Bjorklund’s running didn’t come as easily as it appeared. In 1970-71 he was the country’s bright young hope in the distances. A year later he had broken down. Instead of

running the last Trials in Eugene he was home “nursing an injured pride” and an injured left foot. Surgery removed a small bone from that foot, and he didn’t run normally for two years.

Bjorklund was healed now and training and racing better than ever. He figured to be one of three serious contenders in the Trials 10,000, along with Frank Shorter and Craig Virgin. After the heats a fourth man had entered the mix. Bill Rodgers had run his best time of 28:32 to qualify for the final. Rodgers, who had already made the marathon team, was perhaps the most relaxed runner in the Trials. “I’m only here to get some speed work and to set a PR,” he insisted.

His coach, Billy Squires, said, “He won’t run the 10 at Montreal even if he makes the team, which is unlikely anyway. He already set a PR in the heats, and matching that time on short rest probably won’t be good enough for the top three.”

The big four—Shorter, Virgin, Bjorklund, and Rodgers—separated themselves from the others by about halfway. And just as they did that, someone stepped on Bjorklund’s left heel, yanking off his blue shoe. “A million things go through your mind in that second,” he said later, “and none of them are good things. Through the years the portrait has been painted of me as a hard-luck Joe. I thought it was happening again.”

The left foot, the same one surgically repaired in 1972, was now exposed. The arch was heavily taped to protect the old injury, but there was nothing between the toes and the hot, hard track. One shoe on, one off, caused balance problems. Going doubly barefoot would have been better, but there was no stopping now to drop the other shoe.

Bjorklund stayed with the other three runners through 20 of the 25 laps, then began to slip. He fell as much as 40 meters back. The crowd, now fully aware of his lost shoe, chanted, “BJ! BJ! BJ!” He said later, “That’s my nickname. How did the crowd know it? The people in Eugene know everything.”

Shorter and Virgin broke from Rodgers. Bjorklund crept up on Bill, but with a lap left he still had some 30 meters to make up. BJ kicked. The crowd roared louder. “IT can’t remember ever feeling

Garry Bjorklund (14) lost his left shoe in the Trials 10,000 but not a spot on the Montreal team.

tired in that race,” he was to say. “I was just concerned about the shoe. When I started my sprint, I forgot about everything else. I’ve never had a sprint like that.”

He had heard rumors of Rodgers not running the 10,000 at the Games even if he qualified. But Bjorklund would say, “If I got third, there would be no doubt.” Just before the finish line he passed Rodgers.

After his victory lap (at the Trials placing third is a victory), Bjorklund retreated to the medical tent to pull the tape from his bare foot. “Any blisters?” someone asked. He answered, “Only on the foot with the shoe.”

Update: Big miles

Three years later I spent a week with Garry Bjorklund in Hawaii on a speaking tour that veteran running writer Hal Higdon arranged. Garry had come to the islands straight from a Minnesota winter with plans to compile a 200-mile week. Lasked him what he would be doing if he were at home.

Typical of northern Midwest Scandinavians, he wasted no words. “Two hundred,” he said. He made clear that he would have worn more clothes and would not have enjoyed himself as much, but he would have reached his quota even in Minneapolis. The Hawaiian trip was a lucky break.

Bjorklund ran his 200 miles that week. It was the closest I’ve ever come to watching a runner disintegrate before my eyes. The first day of the trip, in the waiting lounge at San Francisco airport, I met a normal, rational, energetic human being. By the next weekend, he could barely walk or talk straight. He finished his 200-mile binge on Sunday with the Honolulu Marathon and then six more miles that afternoon.

He didn’t do this every week: couldn’t have stood it. He ran by three-week cycles. This obviously was his big-mileage week. He would follow it with an easy week when he might run as little as five miles a day. Then he would complete the cycle with a week emphasizing speed.

Bjorklund was training that winter for the 1980 Olympic Marathon Trials the next May. When the US-led boycott robbed that race of its usual value, he switched to Grandma’s Marathon in June. He was ready. He won it in 2:10:20, a PR and just one second slower than Tony Sandoval’s winning time at the Trials.

49. The opening

at Opening Ceremonies, and afterward, for the medalists. But while running on the Olympic tracks and roads, the athletes compete for themselves and against each other. They have enough to worry about without carrying the weight of their countries on their shoulders.

Nationalism, carried too far, interferes with the competition. We see this by who’s missing from the Opening Ceremonies. In 1972 it was the white-ruled South Africans, in 1976, most of black Africa. (And in the next two Games it would be the American-led boycott of Moscow in 1980, then the retaliatory Soviet bloc absence from Los Angeles in 1984.)

The last time before 1976 when I wasn’t in an Olympic Stadium for Opening Ceremonies was 1964. That year the ceremonies were televised live in the United States, at two o’clock in the morning in my time zone. I woke up to watch. The latest ceremonies from Montreal started at noon on California TV. Instead of watching I went to the zoo with my wife and daughter.

My change of heart about these ceremonies in just 12 years wasn’t a rejection of the sport and its athletes. If anything I was more excited than ever about their part in the Olympics. I would be in Montreal to see that part. But the other part, the political part that marches out most obviously on opening day and later for the victory laps and medal-giving, had lost its allure.

Twenty-six holes appeared in this latest opening parade where athletes from that many nations, mostly African, should have been. Among the absent were at least a dozen runners picked by Track & Field News as medal contenders and dozens more who should have followed human pacesetters at the Olympics instead of their national leaders away from there.

We’re taking these Games too seriously if we and they think that athletes can change the course of world politics by running or not running. Jim Murray, the witty and wise columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote before the Montreal Olympics opened, “It’s time somebody took the bloody flag out of games [athletes] play. A sprinter from the steppes of Russia is no more responsible for the Gulag Archipelago or the goings-on in Lubianka Prison than Jim Thorpe was responsible for the treatment of American Indians or Frank Shorter was responsible for Watergate.”

Murray asked where it all might end: “Do teams refuse to play Notre Dame in football because of the Pope’s stand on birth control? Does Notre Dame cancel a series because a rival coach is an atheist? Does Michigan refuse to play Ohio State because [that state] voted Republican?” He concluded, “Sport as an instrument of international policy is spitballs against a battleship.” As messy and as futile.

Olympic athletes in this boycott-ridden age don’t so much separate into winners and losers as into survivors and victims. The survivors who marched into Montreal’s stadium to open these Games survived the political shenanigans. Now they could run as free agents, not as nationalities. Now, finally, they could start winning and losing on their own, the right way.

Update: On course

The closest I ever came to running on an Olympic track was 33 years after the fact, in Tokyo when I ran a token lap while vacationing there. At the three Games

I attended, a concrete moat topped by spikes separated the runners from the viewers in Mexico City, and my seats at Munich and Montreal were at least 50 rows removed from the action. I didn’t get much closer to the marathon courses at those two Olympics. Mexico City’s route was too crowded to run any other time. Munich’s streets were too far from my housing.

In Montreal, though, the marathon road ran right past the house where I stayed with RW tour leaders Bob and Rita Anderson. I ran often along the blue line, including race morning. Loud slapping sounds woke me before dawn that day. Below the bedroom window I saw a truck, flashing emergency lights, moving slowly down the street. Workmen dropped no-parking signs onto the shoulder. Another crew followed, washing the roadway.

The marathon wouldn’t start for 12 hours. By then this street would be closed to traffic and guarded every 100 yards against intruders. Already tables and chairs awaited the officials. A TV platform sat empty at a nearby corner.

Here was my chance to run on the Olympic course on marathon day, before the Olympians did. I ran back from the “SK” painted in front of our house, past Olympic Village, through Olympic Park, and down the ramp to the locked marathon gate of the stadium. Then I ran up the long and steep ramp, taking the same route as that the marathoners would see in their early kilometers.

That evening I watched the runners disappear out the marathon gate. Inside the stadium, we heard little about what was happening along the blue line for the next two hours. Then little-known East German Waldemar Cierpinski broke the suspense by returning to the track first, just as his national anthem for the women’s 4 X 400 team ended. He relegated defending champion Frank Shorter to silver medalist. My favorite runner here, Don Kardong, ran the race of his life—coming within three seconds of the bronze medal that went to Karel Lismont of Belgium.

Later I walked back to our house along what had been the marathon course. The no-parking signs, barricades, tables, chairs, and platforms were gone. Rain and darkness left the blue

<4 Before Don Kardong made his many contributions to the sport, he barely missed a medal in the Olympic Marathon.

line invisible. Traffic was back, and this was only a city street again—except in the memory of anyone who had run here.

50. The solution

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA, October 1976. Runners are both doers and viewers. We run, but we also watch runners who go much faster than we ever could. This being an Olympic year, I spent much of 1976 writing as a viewer. The year ended with a book that redressed the balance. I wrote it entirely from the perspective of a doer.

Of all my books, Long Run Solution would say the least about racing, high level or low, and the most about what the runs themselves had come to mean to me. Here are some of my favorite paragraphs from what would become the personal favorite of my books:

¢ Running is a pursuit of happiness. A few lucky people can find calm contentment sitting down. Those of us who are like hyperactive 9-year-olds won’t sit and wait for happiness to come to us, so we must find it in a way that better suits our personalities—by chasing after it. There is happiness in the pursuit—enough of it not only to tranquilize us against the everyday

tensions and anxieties of a neurotic world but also to help correct certain types of severely disturbed behavior. Movement is strong medicine.

¢ My running is fun, not ha-ha fun but a quieter kind of contented fun. Not fun every minute of every day but fun in the overall effect. My running is easy and comfortable, and it feels good. Seldom is there a morning when I don’t feel better in the last mile of a run than I had felt in the first mile. Never is there a day when I don’t look forward to my run. Sometimes I don’t want to go very far or fast, but I always want to go.

° Once each day, at about the same time and for about the same amount of time each day, I quietly go out of my mind. I leave my rational mind behind and spin out for at least a half hour, usually longer. It’s brainwashing in a positive sense—in the sense of cleaning and clearing gummed-up thinking by intentionally not concentrating on any thoughts for a while. We can’t stop thinking, of course, but we can stop guiding our thoughts in specific directions. Let the mind float or leap at will from one subject to another without focusing on one or giving it greater value than another.

¢ The brain is a garbage bin that collects sensory stimuli at an astounding rate. It takes in just about everything it’s offered in the way of sights, sounds and smells. Usually we’re so busy taking things in that we don’t have time to process them. Running at a “meditative” pace gives us a chance to catch up. We can stand aside and watch ideas float past as if they’re pieces of garbage on a conveyor belt. We can poke casually through the information, plucking out the few bits worth saving and letting the waste fall away. The recycled pieces are automatically stored for future use.

¢ After meditating comes creating, which is putting meditation into action. I write right after I run because more good ideas come to me when I’m running and not thinking about writing than when I’m staring at a blank page, straining to draw out the right words. I’m not saying running will turn you into a creative genius. It won’t magically put talent into your head and fingers. But it will clear away the accumulated debris that clogs up what talent is there.

¢ The challenge of running is not to aim at doing the things no one else has done but to keep doing things anyone could do—but most never will. It’s harder sometimes to keep going back over the same ground you’ve covered a thousand times before than to go someplace you’ ve never been. It’s harder to get down to the little, everyday tasks than to get up for the big, special ones.

(Long Run Solution is now available for e-readers, through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)

Update: My favorite

Long Run Solution, my 1976 book, was a sprinter. Title aside, it started fast and finished early. The book sold well its first two years, as all running books did in the Jim Fixx-inspired sales boom of the late 1970s. Then it stopped selling, as all running books did in the Fixx-inspired glut of the early 1980s.

Today hardly anyone remembers LRS. But it remains my favorite of those I’ve written—which isn’t to say that it’s my best. In topic and tone, none matches Did I Win?, the tribute to and biography of George Sheehan. That really is George’s story, which I transcribed for him as he looked over my shoulder from his next life. Of the books that tell what I myself know and love about running, LRS is my favorite for these reasons:

° It was my first real book. The earlier four were all booklets, none longer than 96 pages. They were training for the book that runs at least twice the length of any before it—which gave it that much more depth.

° The book is my clearest statement of how I feel about running. Much of what I’ve written since then is touched on here, and most of these feelings have changed little in the meantime.

Long Run Solution wasn’t perfect, or even as good as I like to remember it. Some of the wording is embarrassingly rough or laughably outdated. The book needed another editor, but at the time I edited my own books. That’s like a doctor trying to perform surgery on himself.

In the style of a generation ago, the only singular pronouns used were masculine: he, him, his. That doesn’t work anymore when nearly 50 percent of runners—and readers—are women. I bragged of my then-nearly 20 years of running. Now every other runner I know has continued at least that long. I portrayed myself as a grizzled veteran at age 33. Now I have children older than that. I talked of sevenminute mile training pace as “easy.” Now Id strain to race a single mile that fast.

But the book also talked of reserving an hour a day for ourselves, for the pursuit of happiness as well as health. This I still preach, and practice. Another reason Long Run Solution became my favorite book was its timing. My PRs had hardened into concrete by then, and I had recently survived my big injury scare (and resulting surgery). The time had come to decide what to do for the rest of my running life.

Naming LRS as my favorite book might sound like a knock on the many books that followed, but not really. They all served purposes, just as races do after the last PR is set. There is value—even a certain nobility—in keeping going after we’ve peaked. Which is the message of the book: Do what it takes to run long, not in miles but in years and decades.

Going Far will continue in the next issue.