special book bonus

The first trip outside the United States was more than memorable. Part 3.

8. The Olympics

EXICO CITY, MEXICO, October 1968. Olympians earn their way to the

Games. Journalists and tourists pay their way, or find someone to pay it for them. I joined the latter group in traveling to the Mexico Olympics. My first impressions of my first trip outside the United States and to my first Olympic Games went into my diary that first night. Among the first words were, “The weeks to come may be a fiesta or a fiasco. Whatever happens, this will be an adventure I won’t forget.”

I chose the words with more care than usual. Usually I wrote quickly and sloppily, knowing that no one else would ever read these lines. Now I was on assignment to write a “Mexican Diary” for Track & Field News. This writing, plus coverage of a few events, was part of my double duty here—and the lesser part.

T&FN’s more senior writers (and I was second to the bottom in seniority on this staff) could have handled the wordsmithing. What really allowed me to come here was agreeing to act as a tour guide. The company had booked Olympic tours since Helsinki in 1952. With these latest Games sitting so close to the States, this tour group was the largest yet at more than 1,000. With tour director Ed Fox, I arrived a week before Opening Ceremonies to check the housing, collect the tickets, and greet early arrivals.

My tries at recapturing Spanish, dormant since a college class seven years earlier, must have sounded ridiculous to the natives. I got the idea they wanted to say, “Why don’t you speak English so I can understand you?” But they were patient, didn’t laugh, and seemed pleased that I at least tried their language.

Armed soldiers surrounded our Mexico City “home” called Villa Coapa. A neighboring apartment complex served as the press and officials’ Village in

At work

at Mexico City’s Olympic Stadium. I’m not applying ChapStick to sun-blistered lips here but tape-recording notes on a race in progress.

addition to housing athletes who had overflowed the main Village. The soldiers were there not so much to protect the villagers as to prevent the local violence of recent weeks from erupting again. My first attempt at a Spanish conversation was with a teenage soldier. His job appeared to be keeping all Mexicans out, not any foreigners. Behind the military barricades stood a billboard proclaiming ironically, “Todo es posible en la paz.” All is possible in peace.

At the fence line of Villa Coapa, a half-dozen small autograph hunters surrounded me. I protested, “No soy importante” (I’m not important). In Spanglish, a boy said, “No senor, in Mexico you verrry importante.” I signed and signed.

Early in this Olympic visit, I learned the tricks and advantages of pretending to be an Olympic athlete. At 25 and with a younger-looking face, I could act the part even if my legs couldn’t have given a convincing performance. I’d been told, “Walk up to any guarded gate and act like you know where you’re going. If challenged, say you forgot your badge and keep walking. You can go almost anywhere this way.”

My first morning in Mexico City, a guard at the overflow Village stopped me and pointed to my chest, where a credential should have hung. I shrugged and said approximately the Spanish word for “forgot.” He waved me through. Inside I met Hal Higdon, who had also faked his right to enter.

I’d known Hal since 1960, as both a runner and a writer. I had thought of him as an old runner before, and now he had aged to 37. He stood talking with an even older man (all of 50, I’d learn later)—weathered of skin, graying of hair, and wiry of body. Hal introduced him only as “George.” This meeting, which

would go unnoted in the published diary, would be the most important event of this Olympics for me.

Update: Village people

From different directions, Dr. George Sheehan from the East Coast and I from the West had come to this Olympic city. Now we had broken into an Olympic Village. We joined the stream of residents moving toward the cafeteria. No one challenged us as we took our first breakfast as pseudo-Olympians. George wore faded Levis, old Tiger Cortez shoes, and a sweatshirt bearing the name of his running club, the Shore A.C. in New Jersey. His face wore the lines of a doctor who had faced too many midnight crises and a father who had ridden herd on a dozen children.

I’d actually spent a day near George at the 1967 Boston Marathon, but neither of us had noticed the other. He was already a marathon veteran by then, and I—at half his age—was a neophyte running my first marathon anywhere. We stood on the same starting line wearing race numbers 84 and 85, in a field that numbered only 600. We remembered talking to some of the same people that day, but neither of us recalled seeing the other.

George was one of a new breed—a middle-aged man who not only ran but raced hard, fast, and often. His reputation as a runner had already started to spread outward from his home base in New Jersey. (I’d heard of him by 1968.) He was also part of another new breed, a runner who felt compelled to write in first person about his experiences. He wrote occasional columns for his local newspaper.

In the Village, George was as much an interloper as Hal and I. We three left here together. At the gate, kids with pen and paper swarmed to us. We lapped up this attention, thinking we might never again be asked to sign anything more than a check or contract. None of us could have guessed that this chance meeting, in a place where we didn’t belong, brought together a trio that would become the most prolific authors in our sport’s history. George Sheehan would be the widest read and most quoted of all.

9. The medalists

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO, October 1968. You can’t see Olympians up close anymore, at least not at the Games (or the Trials) and not likely anywhere else. Watching on television at home, you get a better look at these runners than do the fans in the overpriced Olympic seats. Well-fortified lines divide the doers from the viewers.

Those lines weren’t so clearly drawn or severely enforced at the Mexico City Olympics, so I stood close enough to some of the Olympians to touch them. By the time the track events began at Stadio Olimpico, I’d perfected the art of going where I didn’t belong. I’d gravitated to seats in the sparsely populated athletes’

section with the same ploy each day: point to chest and say in Spanish “forgot pass.” My seat was low down on the backstretch side. Most days I sat with the same two athletes, a female I thought of as the Sweet Swede and a male nicknamed the Happy Hungarian.

They shared my views of what would become the two most talked-about events of these Games. The first was the Bob Beamon looonnng jump. The second was the Tommie Smith-John Carlos gloved salute. We all but missed both of them.

Busy talking in our one common language (English), we saw Beamon only after he had popped from the far end of the pit and sunk to his knees, hands covering his eyes in disbelief. The reader board’s metric mark, 8.91, impressed only the Europeans, who couldn’t translate instantly for me. The Smith-Carlos demonstration went unnoticed or at least unremarked from the opposite side of the stadium where we sat.

My most memorable race from these Olympics was the 1,500-meter final. By then, I’d touched the two main protagonists. By chance, I’d shaken hands with both of them outside the competitive arena.

Jim Ryun’s future wife, Anne, along with other family members, came to Mexico City with the Track & Field News tour. Jim made a practice of running over to our housing complex to visit them. I’d never even seen him in person until that morning when he stood before my apartment waiting for someone, anyone, to join him. When he spotted three of us leaving to run, he asked, “Can I join you?” I told him we would slow him down. He said, “Not at all. It’s just an easy 30-minute run today.”

He knew the territory better than we did, having been here longer. “Let’s go to Azteca,” he said of the soccer stadium about two miles away. The locked, spike-edged gate didn’t stop him. He crawled right over with the rest of us to have a look inside. If he had slipped, I could see the headlines: “Ryun Spiked While Breaking Into Stadium—Out of Games—Track Writer to Blame.”

Safely back outside the spikes, Ryun said, “I’m going to pick up the pace a bit.” He shook hands all around. Soon he was just a dot in the distance, but none of us would ever forget how we had stayed with Jim Ryun for as long as we had. Not many runners could say that.

Soon I became a regular visitor in the athletes’ Village. And soon after that I was hopping onto buses labeled “‘Atletas” that took them to the stadium. One afternoon I walked into the bus behind someone with “Kenya” on his back. He took an empty seat, and I grabbed one beside him. Only then did I look him in the face and see this was Kip Keino. He saw me staring and smiled, showing the gap of a missing lower front tooth.

We made small talk during the short ride, Keino answering in precise Swahili- and British-accented English. I didn’t confess to being a journalist. Reporters don’t ask athletes for their autographs, which I did. At the stadium, where he was

about to run a 1,500-meter heat, I wished him luck. “And to you as well,” he said, thinking that only an athlete would ride this bus.

Kip Keino and Jim Ryun met later in one of the most anticipated races of these Games. It would be one of the best finishes of any Games for both of them, even though Ryun’s performance was widely panned in his county’s second-place-isfirst-loser media. Despite the breathtaking altitude, Keino set an Olympic record that would stand for four more Olympiads. Without benefit of an altitude birth or much training there, Ryun ran a time that would have won him all previous Olympics but one. His mark would still have put him on the US team 40 years later. This is failure?

Much later, Keino would become a Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year— not for his running but for helping to raise dozens of orphaned Kenyans. Ryun, himself a onetime S.J. honoree, would be elected to the US Congress. I might have argued with his politics but would always applaud his service.

Update: lean times

The Olympic experience came home with me, to stay for months afterward. At the time, I credited the effects of altitude for the very best races of my best racing year. I later realized that something else I’d brought back from Mexico City had helped at least as much. While there I’d successfully avoided the ailment known as ‘“Montezuma’s revenge” or “‘turista.” On the last day, I ate an ear of corn from a sidewalk vendor. The bathroom runs began right after my flight back to California.

After suffering for a week, I saw a doctor. The weigh-in found me 15 pounds down from the pre-illness norm (and my lightest since junior high). In a glorious window of time between the return to strength and health and the return of all the lost weight, I went on a racing tear: four permanent PRs at distances from 10K to 30K, plus my fastest mile on slow training. The unplanned and unpleasant “diet” helped me peak for the personal “Olympics” that followed the real Games.

10. The return

DES MOINES, IOWA, April 1969. When you move away, life goes on without you back in the old hometowns. I left lowa partly because races were so abundant out west. Iowa got along just fine without me, as races started sprouting there soon after I left. By 1969, Des Moines had its own marathon. It toured the city where my running first turned long and slow and finished on the track where my family celebrated Christmas-in-April each year. I had to run this race.

I trained more for the Drake Relays Marathon than for any of my previous five marathons. The longest run pushed out to 28 miles, much of it on the newly built but not yet open Interstate 280 near my California home. I broke three hours for only the second time, still finishing in the bottom half of this field of 22. But

Icouldn’t have felt prouder of where this finish was: the same line where Uncle Chuck Henderson had won his Drake Relays watch in 1931, where future brotherin-law Elliott Evans had won his in 1968, and where I’d ended dozens of races and hundreds of training runs since 1960.

My best competitive moment at Drake had been the 1961 high school mile, where I’d run second to Don Prichard. Eight years later, while shuffling stiffly away from the stadium, I met Don as he came in to watch the afternoon events. He asked where I was living and then said, ““You’ve come a long way.” So had he. Don had returned safely from war as a junior Marine officer and was now in architecture school at Iowa State.

The longest half mile of the day took me back to the Henderson house near Drake’s campus. Dad, who had seen me run a marathon for the first time, was headed out the door. He greeted me with a nod and one of his closemouthed smiles. I wouldn’t see him again after he drove me to the airport the next day.

Update: finish lines

Boston, the Methuselah of marathons, has enjoyed more than 110 runnings. That’s an astounding figure when you consider the usual life expectancy of races. Five years is about average. Ten years is a long run. Very few races reach 25.

The Drake Relays Marathon reached its 25th birthday, after starting in 1969. Think how long ago that was. The term “running boom” hadn’t yet been coined then. The 10K road race hadn’t been invented. The New York City Marathon didn’t exist. Boston didn’t require a qualifying time. Frank Shorter, Jim Ryun, and Bill Rodgers were all college students. Alberto Salazar, Mary Decker, and Joan Benoit were all preteenagers. Women marathoners were still officially banned, and none had broken three hours. Marathons nationwide numbered only about a dozen.

Drake’s marathon was one of those few. Now this historic relic is gone, the victim of eroding numbers over the years. The race peaked at about 1,000 runners in the late 1970s. It was barely one-third that size by its 25th running in 1993. This would be its last, as directors Joe Bisignano and Cal Murdock said in advance. Their prerace statement read, “The decision to end the marathon was an emotional and difficult one. It was losing support, and if the trend continued there soon would not be enough participants to justify the expense and effort. So we decided that rather than allow the race to die of attrition, it should go out on a high note.”

When a race dies, it usually sneaks away quietly, as if ashamed that it can’t go on forever. You hear about the cancellation only after the body has cooled. If it was a favorite race of yours, you feel betrayed. The organizers gave you no chance to say goodbye and thanks for the memories. Drake’s marathon went out in style. Responding to the news that this would be their last chance here, nearly

twice as many runners signed up as the year before. Many were old-timers. Bruce Mortenson, the 1970-71 winner, came back. Dale Roe ran his 23rd Drake Marathon. I was the lone returnee from the first-year field of 22.

A quarter century later, my time had slipped by an hour. This would be my last time to break four hours—though I finished much higher, percentagewise, than the first year at Drake. By now, marathoning was growing from midpack on back. But the only time that mattered to me here in Des Moines this day was measured in years, not hours and minutes.

This wasn’t purely a nostalgic event. Many first-timers planted a fresh set of memories. Most of them were part of David Whitsett’s marathon-training class from the University of Northern Iowa. The students earned an automatic A by finishing the race. Dr. Whitsett gladly gave highest grades to all 72 of his runners. “I’m elated for them,” he said.

This class made up most of the audience for my talk the night before the marathon. I told these young runners about planting much of my own early history on or near this course at their age. Memories still pop up around every corner whenever I come back here. “Don’t mourn the loss of this race,” I told the old-timers in the audience. “It has had a good run, a much longer one than a race can expect. Celebrate the Drake Relays Marathon’s long life as you run it tomorrow. And remember that it won’t really be gone when the running ends.”

A race has a finish line only on the road. As long as the event keeps running through your mind, it never ends.

11. The LSD

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA, June 1969. You never know when you adopt a practice if it will last long or end soon. Dozens of training plans had come and gone for me by now. But finally I was well settled into a way of running that came to be known as LSD. I was content with where these long, slow distance runs were taking me. The previous year had been my best yet as a runner, with most of the many races resulting in PRs (some of which would become permanent).

By mid-1969, I’d also settled into a dream job in a dream place, at Track & Field News in the San Francisco suburbs. One of the earliest articles under my byline talked about a chance meeting with a near-Olympian. At the time, I’d only practiced slowing and lengthening the runs. I hadn’t given the practice a name or given any thought to writing a book about it. Finding enough facts to fill a magazine article before its deadline passed was still hard enough.

The first long and close look at long and slow running came in the 1969 T&FN article. It quickly set in motion a series of events that led to my becoming known—deservedly or not, for better or worse—as Mr. LSD. This piece signaled my turn away from reportorial writing toward a more personal style that rested

less on facts and figures than on observations and opinions. Here’s how that writing started:

The four of us fidgeted as we waited for Bob Deines to arrive. Each of us three-hourish marathoners, about to meet this 2:20 man, asked one way or another, “TI wonder how fast he goes in training?” This wasn’t intellectual curiosity speaking. It was personal concern. None of us wanted to suffer so early on a Saturday morning, yet none wanted to miss this chance to run—at least a little bit, even too fast to talk—with this marathon prodigy. He was the alternate for last year’s US Olympic team and placed sixth at Boston in both 1968 and 1969, all before his 22nd birthday and his college graduation.

Our worries began melting the minute Bob walked into Jeff Kroot’s living room. He complained, “I’m tired, I’m hungry, and my foot hurts.” With blond hair flowing almost to his shoulders, 140 pounds spread sparingly over 6 feet of bone, and glasses that gave him a look more scholarly than athletic, Bob could have been a protester left over from the previous day’s massive antiwar demonstration here in Berkeley.

We started to relax in his company. But that question still hung over us: how fast? Bob hinted right away that we needn’t worry, that he was in no mood for speed this day. “I raced last night in Los Angeles, three miles in 14:05 [within two seconds of his best], then drove all night,” he said. “We just got here. The heel I bruised in the Palos Verdes Marathon last week is hurting. And all I’ve had to eat since last night is some oatmeal cookie dough.”

His choice to join us this morning was practical. “The last thing I want to do is run,” he said, “but I’ve gotta do it. And it’s easier to do it with you guys than by myself.” Trying to sound nonchalant, I finally asked, “How fast do you plan to go?” He said, “About eight-minute-mile pace.” He is taking it easy this morning, I thought. I could see why. As if reading my mind, he added, “This is what I do almost every morning—two hours at about eight-minute pace.”

Lasked, “So what do you do in the afternoon, after your slow morning run?” He said, “That’s it. I never train more than once a day. I’d rather get in one solid long run a day than two short ones. Besides, all that showering and changing is a big waste of time.”

He added, “I may not have the greatest training method in the world, and I don’t claim that it is. But I enjoy it, it works for me, and I don’t get hurt.” At age 22, he already was among the fastest US marathoners, but his running sounded as simple and enjoyable as ours. He ran twice as much because his level of success required it and raced a minute or two per mile faster because he could. Yet he trained even slower relative to his racing times than we did.

Bob contrasted the road racing he preferred with the college running he did to earn his scholarship. “We were running a cross-country meet, and about