On THE Road

with Kathrine Switzer

ANTIPODES

NEW ZEALAND, October—Today, after packing for four hours, I go out for my last run, not wanting to miss the sunshine and the last fresh air P’Il breathe for 24 hours and the last pollution-free air I’ll breathe for a long time. I’mrewarded with brilliance and warmth, a perfect spring day.

The Wellington Botanical Gardens are filled with people. Some are spread-eagled on the lawns like sacrificial offerings to the sun, but most are slowly walking and breathing deep the smell of plate-sized magnolias and shielding their eyes from the glaring intensity of bed after bed of tulips that move from crimson to cerise to magenta and end with a whimsical checkerboard of black and white.

Evenrunning slowly, I’m moving too fast for this setting. I’d like the color and the smell of this place to be the last things I take with me into the gray and airless cylindrical science fiction world of a 747 that will be my home for the next day.

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL, October—The hatch opens, and the memory of my springtime soft air is speared by 44-degree temperatures. The sweet jasmine smell is now a tart tannin. The lengthening, bright afternoons suddenly reverse, turning dark

and windy. But it’s the color that most unsettles me: Strong browns and rust in golden light overpower the intense chartreuse and silver, and the shock

of a new hemisphere is complete. The first thing I want to do is run, which is the fastest way for me to acclimate and beat the jet lag. The first run, like the first sleep, will feel fabulous. Then the circadian rhythms, closely honed by daylight and seasons and meted out by the secretions of delicate hormones, will begin to rebel against this total reversal of all that my body has nurtured into balance. Air travel is a cruel and unusual thing to do to yourself, and for the next three days I fight night sweats, day chills, and the feeling that ’m

walking on a tossing ship.

Exercise is the only thing that comes close to making my body feel

better, and the miracle of movement and sweat and deep breathing reminds me that my body has always tried hard for me, and even the simplest effort will give me a dash of hope. Endorphins do that.

I come in sweaty, stinking from airline food (What do they put in that stuff!!?) and give my thighs a pat as I step into the shower. “Good job,” I tell my legs. “Just a few more days, and running will be nice again.” I believe in all kinds of positive reinforcement.

I’m back in the United States to broadcast or speak at the Twin Cities Marathon, the Tulsa Run, and the New York City Marathon and spend some time “home” in Virginia. New Zealand is also home; I live in both places. It’s a complicated—but interesting—life.

With any luck, Pll fit ina run with my club, the Washington RunHers, too, because ironically, none of my work on this trip actually involves running per se, the actual thing I like to do the most.

When you’re a runner, people let you run. When you’re a worker, everybody wants a piece of you. So my runs are usually among the discarded paper cups and orange peels that litter a race course after an event, and I consider myself lucky when I get ina run. If I don’t carve out the time on

these trips, I’ll be running in the dead of night.

So at Twin Cities while at the fun run and kids’ events the day before the marathon, I realize I may not get in any run at all if I don’t jump in and run the SK. Since it is 2 A.M. my time, I’ve been hanging out at the Starbucks tent, trying to fool my adrenals. I put down my coffee cup and begin loosening up with 2,000 other neighborly souls. It is bliss. Not only do I meet friends I haven’t seen in years (you see so much more when you run!), but the sun comes out, warming us all to giggliness, and sparkling Lake Nokomis as we trot by.

“Your mothers will be angry with you up there!” the bullhorn blasts again, this time just at me.

Best of all, the SK run puts me into a joyous mood, and I am delighted at the surprise that comes next: thousands of little children participating in the 10-and-under half-mile fun run. Because there are so many parents, I can’t see over them, so I join half a dozen kids who’ ve climbed up some

race scaffolding to watch. I am a bit conspicuous being the only “grownup,” but kids are great—they look at you once, and then assume you are one of them.

Wave after wave of children run past us, and I begin idly to time them, a lingering habit of a die-hard track fan. I am astonished to see that their age, 6 or 10, is irrevelant, as great numbers of them effortlessly and naturally run a half mile in just about three minutes. After all the dire reports about our kids being overweight sloths, it is heartening.

One of the members brings her houseguest, who just happens to be Tsige Bikila, daughter of the great Abebe Bikila.

It is fun seeing those who had written themselves into their own Nike or Reebok ads: On this special day, breasting the tape with arms dramatically overhead in imagined victories, little flushed faces beam, “I, too, am Michael Johnson, Michael Jordan, Meredith Rainey!” We’ ve got to do more with this talent and spirit.

“Hey you kids! Get down, NOW, off that platform. It’s dangerous!” the bullhorn blasts at us, and the kids

slide off the plywood stand and down the sides faster than cockroaches on a New York City kitchen counter. Every head in the audience turns. Only I am left, moving as fast as I can but very much out of my league in the scurrying department. “Your mothers will be angry with you up there!” the bullhorn blasts again, this time just at me. You’re right, my mother would be angry with me up here, I think, catching a nasty splinter in my butt for added emphasis.

The next day, broadcasting the performances of some of the finest runners in the world, including a beautifully run 2:27 course record by a tanned and gazelle-like Olga Appel, I think of those kids and how I enjoyed their performances just as much. I hope they’ll still be running by next spring. As I fly home to Washington, that thought stays with me, as does the throbbing splinter in my backside, a fitting reminder of misspent youth.

WASHINGTON, D.C., October— The run with the Washington RunHers is acasual affair, more of a yogurt and muffin catch-up session in Potomac Park than an actual run. But running always brings a bonus, and often a surprise. One of the members brings her houseguest, who just happens to be Tsige Bikila, daughter of the great Abebe Bikila.

“Am I dreaming this?” I wonder.

Tsige is incredible-looking, with Abebe’s same oval face and searching eyes, but unlike her father, she tops it with long black spiral curls.

“Your father is a god to me,” I say.

“Thank you,” she says. “He was a very special man to many and very, very special to me, and it is my dream to write about him to tell people this, to keep his memory alive.” Tsige has with her a book she’s written about her father and published in her native Ethiopia, a book from the heart and a great labor for her, as it is written in English, her third language.

Tsige was five when her father died, and she wisely wanted to describe firsthand what his life, home, and training was like.

loffer to try to get her some exposure for the book in the States, including some publishing help, and maybe something in New York at marathon time.

Ibuy two copies of the book, which I am convinced will become collectors’ items and will appear like pieces removed from a time capsule. On the plane to Tulsa I find myself reading Abebe Bikila’s life story instead of doing my stats for the Tulsa Run 15K.

TULSA, OKLAHOMA, October— Tulsa is basking in Indian summer and is alive with sports. Besides the Tulsa Run 15K, the PGA is in town, and the World Series is on TV, where the stumblebum New York Yankees have begun to crack the invincible Atlanta Braves.

All day long people shuttle back and forth between the runners’ expo where they pick up their numbers and the Southern Hills Country Club where they follow the golf action.

Mostly they want to watch Tiger Woods, the 20-year-old phenom who had just signed an $8 million contract with Nike.

While I usually have reservations about 20-year-olds getting $8 million sports deals, I’m thrilled about Tiger. He’s breaking stereotypes of race, age, and size and inspiring thousands of teenagers, hordes of whom are playing hooky in Tulsa to trundle around the course with him. He’s the best thing to happen to golf ina long time.

Running desperately needs a Tiger Woods. Hell, what running desperately needs isaPGA! How onearth can a golf tournament offer $3 million in prize money when in the same town a race—one of the best in the country and with an equally-talented field—offers only $35,000?

Worse for me is the fact that few of the 8,000 runners in the race— people who make running an important part of their lives every single day—seem to mind that running is organized and promoted so poorly as a sport.

In the 15K, Joseph Kamau, coming off a hot American season, burns a course record of 42:50, even with a mile-long hill at the end. He is using the race as a tune-up for the New York City Marathon. It was a remarkable and well-applauded performance, but clusters of autograph-seeking teenagers do not clamber all over Kamau at the finish. And this is not because Kamau is Kenyan. A few years ago they did not clamber over winner Jon Sinclair either.

Infact, nobody clambers overrunners because they are not significant in the scheme of Big Time Sports, and this infuriates me because runners have to run their bloody guts out to win. Until our sport is professionally organized and promoted from the top—which creates sponsorship, TV coverage, and money, which creates role models and grassroots programs and kids who grow up wanting to be heroic runners—we’ Il just remain part of a fitness activity with a few good races like Tulsa.

The night after the race, while the finish times are being set in type in the Tulsa World, the storm that organizers feared would hit earlier arrives, bringing cold rain, thunder, and lightning, effectively flooding out the PGA final round and all the $50,000 corporate tents.

Tulsa Runrace director Jack Wing instantly becomes a religious convert, and in a possibly unconnected incident, the Yankees win the World Series!

NEW YORK CITY, November—Six days before the New York City Marathon, the Big Apple has the Mother of All Ticker Tape Parades and threatens to upstage what many consider the Biggest Parade on Earth: the fiveborough, 30,000-strong marathon. It is Grete Waitz, German Silva, and Carl Lewis competing against Yankees’ manager Joe Torres, a whole team of heroes, and totally insane fans savoring their best New York moment in 15 years.

When the last of the Yankees’ confetti is swept up, it is no contest. The decisive winner in the hype campaign isa4-foot, 11-inch, 85-pound Kenyan sprite named Tegla Loroupe, who enchants the entire city.

How one tiny beacon can radiate such a powerful light is a wonder, but all are at her feet—crusty journalists, cynical insiders, chambermaids, bellboys, and even a homeless man who rises from his bench to shout, “Hey! You’re Tegla!” when she passes.

Tegla is the two-time champion of the race and is going for number three. Only Grete has done that, but even Grete in maturity does not have what Tegla has at 23: pure magic. And pure guts. She’s saint-like, wise, and affectionate, and runs like a lion in the face of intestinal parasites, dislocated disks, and last year, the death of her beloved sister. Life shouldn’t come any harder, and yet Tegla continues. She also runs in the face of social opposition in her native country and thus has come to change it.

When Tegla returned home to Kenya with a Mercedes after her first victory at the New York City Marathon and became the first black African woman to win a major marathon, she inspired thousands of women and began a social revolution of sorts in Kenya. Women flocked to her saying, “Thank you, Tegla, for showing us that we are not useless.” Tegla in turn preached the value of education and self-respect.

Only 20 at the time, Tegla then lambasted the Kenyan Athletic Federation for overlooking talented women in preference to men, particularly those from minority tribes like hers. It is one thing to inspire others and quite another to have the courage to criticize a rigid hierarchical social system.

After her second win in 1995, the government welcomed her home with a parade and ceremony normally reserved only for returning warriors. And Tegla continued to talk, this time urging women to be financially independent: “You never know who’ll marry you and want you to stay at home. If you have property, men will respect you.”

Tegla was matter-of-fact about her plan to run a course record at this year’s marathon, and she flew her mother, Mary Lotuma, in from Kenya to bear witness. Tegla is in demand, and she accommodates every request.

At all but one appearance, she shines. The exception is the grand opening of Nike Town, Nike’s showcase superstore located at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, probably the most prestigious shopping corner in all of Manhattan. Phil Knight himself is the center of the sports glitterati, who ride glass- and chrome-wrapped escalators past interactive displays and movie screens throughout six floors of clothing, shoes, and accessories, all of which looked alike. I could only tell women’s from men’s clothes by a bra top, and soccer from basketball by a collar on the shirt.

It is all expensive, of course, but the purpose is not to buy, or even for

Nike to sell. Nike Town is a paean to Nike’s own cult of physical greatness. I don’t see how Nike Town actually has anything to do with real sports. This is bewildering, and slightly depressing to me, because it all began with running, with Phil Knight as a renegade runner of the 1960s selling great shoes out of the trunk of his car. I applaud success, but not when the cost is losing touch.

As I leave the party, I am besieged by a group of street protesters with signs and flyers loudly denouncing Nike for paying below-subsistence wages—that’s less than $1.85 aday— to the Indonesians who make their shoes.

Fortunately, I come back in touch with Tegla, who asks me to come to her room where she presents me with a beaded Kenyan belt and bracelet. I’mnotsuperstitious until I’m moved, soI declare them magic and wear them all weekend, especially during the race when I am riding alongside her.

The race itself was billed as a Kenyan spectacle, with Tegla heading the women’s field, along with her training partner, Joyce Chepchumba. The men’s race was to be ashowdown between Cosmas N’deti, three-time winner of the Boston Marathon, and Moses Tanui, who won Boston this year, preventing N’deti from acquiring an historic four victories in a row.

Inaddition to this rematch, the race includes a dozen of Kenya’s finest runners, plus Martin Fiz, Andres Espinosa, and Luca Barzaghi, hardly names to underestimate. Totally overON THE ROAD WITH KATHRINE SWITZER M9

looked is Joseph Kamau, who had wowed me in Tulsa.

Although it is a freezing day for a broadcaster on a motorcycle, the 44 degrees and slight breeze is a day to show your stuff as a runner, and Tegla wastes no time doing it. Abandoning her usual come-frombehind-late strategy, Tegla begins hammering 5:18 miles after 5K, and drops everyone, including helpmate Chepchumba. For a while in Brooklyn, it looks as though Tegla is going after the world as well as course record.

Except for taking copious amounts of water, she looks good, too. Spectators are visibly startled to seea woman so soon after the lead men, and they scramble for their signs, many of which read “Run, Tegla! Go girl!”

Tegla started too

fast, and the others

judged better,

resulting in the most

exciting women’s

race in NYC

Marathon history .. .

Tegla comes off the Queensboro Bridge and turns up First Avenue into that vast crowd, her traditional triumphal moment, but as she heads uptown, her sprightly up-on-the-toes style goes flat-footed. Chepchumba

catches back up. They run together for a while, and then,. at 20 miles, Chepchumba looks overat Tegla questioningly, and Tegla’s faceregisters only sadness. Inablink, Chepchumbais gone and Tegla sinks deeper into her hips, her eyes closing. Anuta Catuna whizzes by like a meteor, tracked doggedly by Franca Fiacconi, a woman twice Tegla’s size and running like a heatseeking missile.

The simple analysis is that Tegla Loroupe started too fast, and the others judged better, resulting in the most exciting women’s race in NYC Marathon history, with places changing as late as Central Park South. Catuna hung on to win in a new Romanian record. Fiacconi pushed hard to take second.

But there is no simple analysis for Tegla. As I leave her to stay alongside the new leaders, I feel like I am deserting her. I want to take away some of the pain, and I can’t. I want the beaded bracelet to make a miracle. And I want to tell her that she will someday get the record, anda lot more, too. Well, maybe. J believe it, anyway.

In our last interview, both of us shuddering with winter cold, seventh-place Tegla says, “I am happy. I had courage.” Of that, there is no doubt.

The simple analysis is that I’d become a biased reporter. But nothing is simple with Tegla. The truth is that I’d become an adoring fan.

The Kenyan men’s shoot-out plays into the hands of the less pressured,

too. Unheralded Italian Giacomo Leone sticks with the time-honored strategy of starting cautiously and winding it up later and surprises everyone but himself with a 2:09 victory. Turbo Tumo is second, and the overlooked Kamau is third.

MID-PACIFIC, November—Over the billowing snowscape is a band of indigo and apricot. It is dawn, and somewhere down below is Tahiti, then Fiji, and soon Aotearoa/New Zealand, a husband I’ ve missed, and a bed I’m desperate to sleep in.

Because I cross the international dateline, the entire day of November 5 has been erased, so the American elections must not have taken place. Was anything else real? I have only the New York City grit in my hair and a beaded Kenyan bracelet still on my wrist to prove it. I’m a champion of Fearless Flying, but I take no chances. The bracelet is there to keep the plane from crashing. It works, too. The door opens, the smell of sea air and jasmine rushes in, and I step out. Spring has become summer since I was last here. Somewhere else it is winter.

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