This is my attempt to tell the somewhat outlandish story of how I got to run in the 1988 Olympic marathon, thus fulfilling a 20-year dream. As I was watching the 1968 Olympic Games on television as a 17-yearold, I kept having this strong intuitive feeling that one day I, too, was going to be in the Olympics.

And sure enough, 20 years later, it happened, but it happened after much blood, sweat, tears, odysseys, triumphs, tragedies, successes, failures, surgeries, wrong turns, blind alleys, and convoluted and winding roads.

During that 20-year process, I had to tune in to my inner self on a regular basis, had to keep the faith. No matter where I went or what I did during those 20 years, my inner voice had one message: run. And run I did, but seldom in a straight line.

Throughout all of the strange trips I took along the way, running was my rock (and roll). In what follows, you’ll read about me living in communes and yoga centers; visiting nude hippie beaches; often living off the land and on the road; hitchhiking all over the USA, 49 of the 50 states; sailing to the South Pole as a merchant mariner; being a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War; getting maced in Washington, DC, during protest riots while on LSD (and I don’t mean the Long Slow Distance kind of LSD); enjoying some unusual experiences in the Army during the Vietnam era; and running, running, running, trying to reach my Olympic running goal. It was really a wild and crazy time.

I was probably the original Roads Scholar. It was a long, long road, but I finally made it, for when I marched into the Olympic Stadium in 1988 for the Opening Ceremonies, I was so full of joy that the whole time I kept saying, “Thank you, God, I’m finally here.” My case is a true case of that old adage, “God works in mysterious ways.” And to take it a step further, I got to walk into the Opening

Ceremonies in a costume as a Samoan, wearing my lava-lava (wraparound) and kukui nut bead necklace. How cool is that, I ask you?

Beginnings I was racing as early as age 10 in my grade school, Queen of Peace. We had a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) team with plenty of tradition behind us. I was in the Penn Relays in 1961 on a 4  110-yard relay. I think we came in last, but it doesn’t matter; it really built a fire in me that has lasted a lifetime. I was on our CYO team from the fifth grade through the eighth and really loved running and racing.

I went back to the Penn Relays in 2011 and ran in a 4  400 men’s 50-plus relay, thus celebrating my 50th year of competing at the Penn Relays (not consecutive). The next time I was on a track team after grade school was in 1968 as a senior in high school at Bishop McDevitt (Wyncote, Pennsylvania). I was fairly good and ran the 440 and 880 [yards] with best times of 52 seconds and 1:57, respectively.

That year, 1968, was surely a really wild and crazy time of change: social change, cultural change, political change, and more. I remember being around pot as early as 1967. On July 4, 1968, I took my first hit of acid (LSD), a few years before I discovered Long Slow Distance, the other LSD. I knew I liked running and I continued to run and compete throughout the summer of 1968, but drugs and revolution were also all around me and influencing me. It was a really great and heady time.

I had to have desire to run and compete as I would hitchhike about 23 miles up to Ursinus College that summer to compete in a series of open track meets.

Courtesy of Gary Fanelli

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Here I am (last one on the right) in 1968 as a high school senior at Bishop McDevitt in Wyncote, Pennsylvania.

I wanted to be a miler and Jim Ryun was my hero. I had his book The Jim Ryun Story. It helped keep me steady throughout all of the tumult of the drugs and hippie counterculture all around me. I would run in the day and at night I’d be at the Electric Factory watching and listening to the likes of Janis Joplin, the Who, and others. At the same time I was subscribing to Track & Field News, and I’d purchased Fred Wilt’s How They Train, and I was really serious about wanting to become a good runner.

My first road race was in August of 1968—a Browning Ross five-miler on East River Drive in Philadelphia. I ran 32:33. That September I was home and watching the 1968 Olympic Games on TV. I was thrilled and inspired; it was amazing to watch. I also had a very strong intuitive feeling that some day I, too, would be in the Olympic Games.

College daze I had just enrolled in our local Montgomery County Community College (near Philly). While the Olympics were inspiring, our college was in an old school building that was formerly a high school, so the facilities were really bad. We had no track or cross-country team. I didn’t feel good about that, especially since I was studying phys ed, among other subjects. And to be quite frank, I wasn’t doing all that well. Smoking pot occasionally between classes didn’t help much, either, but that was the way it was back then.

On October 24, 1968, I turned 18 and I had to register for the draft. There was much antidraft movement going on all over the country, and I was learning about all sorts of new things. I decided I would register as a conscientious objector. Well, the draft board had a meeting to interview me. The board asked if I was a Quaker, and I said I wasn’t, but I said that the Ten Commandments said “Thou shalt not kill,” and I was a Catholic, and it was part of my belief. Needless to say, the board did not grant me CO status. It was a political thing, I guess, as they needed cannon fodder over in Vietnam. So I was allowed to put my status on appeal.

In November I was so distracted that I dropped out of college. Taking drugs didn’t much help; it merely added to the ball of confusion. I took a job at a factory doing mechanical assembly. My relationship with my then girlfriend, Karen, wasn’t going very well either. She went out with another guy and I got upset—so upset that I quit my job and left home.

In December of 1968 I took a train to Miami, where I got a room in Miami Beach and landed a job at the deluxe Deauville Hotel, as kitchen help. It was fun and I was making money and learning a lot and getting experience with life and work. I still continued my little runs of two or three miles.

That all lasted until March of 1969. My parents were supportive of me, wanted to see me do well, and they could clearly see me struggling. So suddenly I was

back in Ardsley, outside of Philly, where I grew up, back living at home, still running and feeling this feeling about being in the Olympic Games someday. I took a job with Jack Bucciarelli as a landscaper. Jack was an authentic Italian, with a terrific Italian accent. Over the phone on the day before I started working, he advised me to pack a lunch, but it came out as, “Ay, bock a launch.” I was amused. The work was hard but kept me strong for my running.

Penn Relays time came around and I asked Jack for a few days off. He was reluctant, so I up and quit, and went to the Penn Relays. This was in April. Once again I was very inspired and being there to watch the stars shine helped me solidify the fact that I wanted to develop as a runner.

The summer of 1969 was spent with friends. We were hanging out as we had for the two years before that at the Hot Shoppes. It was a really turned-on summer. I had my first experience with hashish. It was sweet. The guy I got it from had been an excellent athlete as a swimmer and a wrestler—good enough to go to states in high school.

One day we were just hanging out in the middle of the day when Jack Olone said a friend of his called Dingbat was living outside of Los Angeles and had space for us there, so right then and there, at the drop of that hat, we decided to hitchhike across the USA to Los Angeles, so on the road we went.

On the road It was an amazing and unforgettable experience. Hitchhiking was still cool back then, and hippies had no trouble getting rides, although we sometimes had to wait for hours for the right ride to come along, but hey, we had the time and the patience. We got rides from all kinds of people in all kinds of vehicles. Everybody was cool. I remember entering onto US Route 66 in St. Louis. I was fascinated. We took that good old Route 66 all the way to Los Angeles, and we hit all of those stops made so famous by the song by Nat King Cole, “Route 66.” It was like it all came alive; it was fabulous. Of course we were weary, tired, hungry, and dirty. We made it to Los Angeles and stayed at my friend Dingbat’s place and it was fun. But soon I returned home, once again hitchhiking back across the United States, this time alone. I still had my running goal in mind.

Back in Philly in July of 1969, I didn’t do much more than I was already doing. I was running daily but also hanging out and getting high and going to rock concerts like the great Atlantic City Pop Festival, which was a two- or three-day event similar to Woodstock, but a month before Woodstock. I got to see and hear Janis Joplin once again and many other great bands, like Creedence. We camped out, barely slept. It was a real free-for-all with plenty of drugs, booze, you name it; it was one of those summer-of-free-love things.

I had an order blank all filled out, ready to head to Woodstock, but a friend was getting married at home the same weekend, so I stayed home and gave my

Courtesy of Gary Fanelli

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Here I am (218) with the Philadelphia Pioneers cross-country team at Belmont Plateau, home of the 1976 AAU cross-country national championships, and venue for hippie func­tions I attended, like the Be-In, a groovy festival full of music and war protest.

friend T (a member of my CYO track team) a hit of mescaline at the wedding reception, which was then in Technicolor! T loved the mescaline. As the summer wore down, I was still running and attending hippie functions like the Be-In, a groovy festival full of music, drugs, war protest, and more at Belmont Plateau, home of the 1976 AAU Cross-Country Championships, a fabulous place for running.

There were a lot of organized war protests that fall as students were back in college but mobilized to get together in large masses to protest the war in Vietnam. I was eager to join them as my first track coach had been killed in Vietnam and some of my other friends were coming home dead from ’Nam. It was an intense time.

In November of 1969 I remember hitchhiking to Washington, DC, for a huge war protest. The SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was there, thousands were there. I arrived in DC that Friday night ready for the big protest scheduled for Saturday on the Mall.

My friend J and I had hitchhiked down from Philly and we took acid just before we arrived. We got to sit in a hippie safe house. The whole area was brimming with angry youth. That night we were staying near Dupont Circle; violence was erupting, with some people smashing storefront windows. Out came the canisters of tear gas. I wasn’t even involved in any mayhem but felt the sting of the tear gas while under the influence of LSD. I just got out of the way and made it back to the safe house.

Back home once again, I got a crappy job. I was living at home, running, and still hanging out with my hippie friends. One night I heard some of these friends talking about how they just came back from Maui in Hawaii and how they had lived in this commune known as the Banana Patch and how cool, groovy, and

fun and beautiful it was. (“Beautiful” was a very much overused buzzword back then, as everything was “beautiful” when you were high.) Well, one of my other buddies (Trainor Wilson) and I thought it would be a fun idea to go there and check it out and live there. We sure were carefree and adventurous.

On to Maui So one day in mid-December we packed up some stuff and headed out on the road, which was vastly different than in the warm summertime. I remember being dropped off outside of Gettysburg and being really cold. I hitched as Trainor sat inside the laundromat on that street corner. We decided to head down to the southern route to stay warm. It worked.

We arrived in Los Angeles once again, went to LAX, and with student discounts bought tickets and flew via United Airlines to Hawaii. Hawaii was fabulous. We didn’t stay long in Honolulu—just long enough to get a flight the next day to Maui. Arriving in Maui, we found it was illegal to hitchhike there and that the locals didn’t like the invasion of hippies very much. We first arrived at the nude beach at Makena; it was filled with what seemed to be hundreds of hippies. We arrived after dark, hungry and tired, built a fire, and were baking potatoes when up ran a wild-eyed hippie in a loincloth who threw sand all over our fire. I later found out he was a leader there and was named Jeremy Peck; he put out the fire because he said it was a sacred beach, which made no sense at all. As we would soon learn, there were many things there that didn’t make much sense.

I was kind of shy about getting naked, so I split the scene and went on over to the Haiku Meditation Center. I was welcomed there to learn yoga and meditation; it was excellent. We had morning meditation, breakfast, work, lunch, more yoga, work, dinner, and meditation and an inspiring speech, then bedtime. It was a really fun place and pleasant. I learned great yoga positions that I still use to this day; they became a staple of my stretching routine during my entire running career. Staying flexible has helped me avoid injuries.

After staying there a few weeks and learning this fabulous yoga and meditation, I moved on over to the nearby “Banana Patch,” where I got to stay in the community shelter. This place is now legendary. We had people there with names like Shenandoah, Euphrates, Morning Star, Umboko, Tex, and a lot of people with regular names. I enjoyed the Banana Patch. It was situated in a valley where bananas grew and was owned by a man named David Joseph. We were allowed to harvest bananas on the side of the valley opposite his market. I would go into town frequently, a place called Hana, where I would walk up and down Highway 36, staying fit with all the walking. Sometimes I would run for a while. People would give us rides, too, but the rule was you couldn’t stick your thumb out or it was considered hitchhiking, and the cops would hassle you over it.

I was enjoying my Maui experience, but once again, my inner voice began talking to me, and every time it did, it would always say something like “I am a good runner and I need to follow that path more than anything.” My Olympic dream was really there throughout anything that I did or anywhere I went. I needed all of these other living experiences in order to become myself. I dropped out of college but it was like I had become a true Roads Scholar, living on the road for many months at a time, hitchhiking in almost every state in the USA. The only state I never got to is South Dakota.

Leaving Maui I felt a yen to leave Maui. I didn’t have any money and at age 19 I was too proud to ask my parents to bail me out and send me money from Philadelphia. Sometimes I would go into Kahului, a relatively big town on Maui, and I’d do a little shopping there. I used to walk by this storefront Army recruiting place. The recruiting sergeant there used to pull me in like a carnival barker. At first I was standing my ground, as any upstanding, antiestablishment hippie would. He’d go on a spiel about how great the Army was. I figured he was looking for bodies to fuel the war in Vietnam. Every time I left his place, he would say to me, “Keep them boys up there in the Banana Patch straight.” He just didn’t get it. I thought he was corny and square. I never told him that my draft status as a conscientious objector was pending.

On a later trip into town, he once again pulled me in. I told him I was a runner. He told me how great it would be if I joined the Army, that I could run for Special Services, and be in the Army and go back stateside to the mainland and just run for the Army. The runners in the Army were at Fort MacArthur in the Los Angeles area. I already knew Tracy Smith, Mel Pender, and others who were stationed there. I mulled it over and came back the next time and struck a deal with this sergeant. He told me that if I joined, after basic training I could go over to Fort MacArthur and run for the Army. I really liked the idea, and it was a way for me to get off of this beautiful island. I had had enough of paradise.

The end of March 1970 saw me sworn in to the Army at Fort DeRussy in Waikiki, Honolulu, Oahu. I would be sent stateside in a few days. I didn’t know where I was to be sent. I boarded a United Airlines special flight with a bunch of locals from all over the Hawaiian Islands. Some had been drafted, some had enlisted. Our flight arrived in Monterey, California.

I liked that idea. Our basic training was to take place right along the Pacific Ocean at Fort Ord. It sure was beautiful, but it was definitely not all fun and games. We had live rounds fired just above our heads and we were tear-gassed, too.

Our drill sergeants were hard-core military, most of them Vietnam vets with Smokey the Bear hats, loud voices, and harsh attitudes.

I did very well in the physical skills and exercises. I had also scored extremely high on my written exam, so much so that me and four other guys out of hundreds were pulled aside one day and asked to report to this movie theater. Once inside we were told we had scored especially high on our intelligence tests and would have an option to report to Washington, DC, to do “special work” for the US government. Personally, I was flattered but wasn’t interested in becoming a spook, so I declined. Besides, I was on track to go to Fort MacArthur after basic training, and that is what I wanted to do.

Our unit used to have races on this dilapidated excuse of a track, and the drill sergeants used to bet one another that their recruit could whip some other recruit from a different unit. My drill sergeant knew I was fast and a decent runner. One time I was lined up against this other recruit I knew. His name was Grissom. He was a good athlete. Before the mile race, he came up to me and told me he had run a mile in 4:43. I didn’t tell him I had run a mile in 4:26. I just kept quiet. In the race, he had the lead for over a half mile, so I tested him and he didn’t react, so I won handily. My drill sergeant won mucho money, and he was quite happy with me and treated me just a little bit nicer than most.

I was eventually done with basic training and was promoted to go to a special school called Leader Preparation Course. I did well there as well and came out on top of my class. I was now ready to go to Fort MacArthur to be with other runners. But the Army had other plans for me. I was told I was going to be sent to Vietnam instead of Fort MacArthur. I was floored and quite upset. I felt cheated, and there were a lot of logical reasons I didn’t want to go to Vietnam.

I basically quit the Army and became a “refusenik” of sorts, and by August I was handed an honorable discharge. So what did I do? I went and hitchhiked back home to Philadelphia. I wanted to run, I wanted to become a good runner, and I wanted to go to the Olympic Games one day. I could feel it inside me. Part 2 will appear in the next issue.

Courtesy of Gary Fanelli

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Here I am at the North American Vegetarian Society in Malaga, New Jersey, in 1975, where I did “co-op” work. I started to be consistent with my running at this point.