Marathon (vol. 6, issue 6), 937 points; Boulder Backroads Marathon (vol. 7, issue 4), 886 points; Calgary Marathon (vol.3, issue 2),876 points; Cape Cod Marathon (vol. 7, issue 5), 863 points; Cincinnati Flying Pig Marathon (vol. 3, issue 6),901 points; City of Los Angeles Marathon (vol. 8, issue 1), 788 points; Columbus Marathon (vol. 8, issue 4), 866 points; Crater Lake Marathon (vol. 7, issue 3), 790 points;** Dallas White Rock Marathon (vol. 4, issue 6), 856 points; Detroit Free Press Marathon (vol. 5, issue 3), 892 points; Edmonton Marathon (vol. 2, issue 2), 814 points; Fox Cities Marathon (vol. 3, issue 4), 865 points; Glass City Marathon (vol. 6, issue 1), 862 points; God’s Country Marathon (vol.6, issue 2),695 points;** Governor’s Cup Ghost Town Marathon (vol. 2, issue 1), 795 points; Grandma’s Marathon (vol. 3, issue 1), 968 points; Greater Hartford Marathon (vol. 6, issue 3), 898 points; Honolulu Marathon (vol. 2, issue 4), 906 points; Humboldt Redwoods Marathon (vol. 2, issue 3), 809 points; Idaho Great Potato Marathon (vol. 7, issue 2), 771 points; Key Bank Vermont City Marathon (vol. 4, issue 2), 888 points; Kiawah Island Marathon (vol. 6, issue 5), 825 points; Lake Tahoe Marathon (vol. 6, issue 4), 867 points; Las Vegas International Marathon (vol. 1, issue 5), 831 points;* Lincoln All-Sport/National Guard Marathon (vol. 8, issue 6), 843 points; Motorola Marathon (vol. 5, issue 6), 876 points; Napa Valley Marathon (vol. 2, issue 5), 913 points; Nokia Sugar Bowl Mardi Gras Marathon (vol. 7, issue 1), 837 points; Ocala Marathon (vol.7,issue 6),810 points;** Ocean State Marathon (vol. 5, issue 5), 886 points;t Park City Marathon (vol. 8, issue 2), 837 points; Philadelphia Marathon (vol.1,issue 4),838 points; Pittsburgh Marathon (vol. 1,issue 6), 904 points;t Portland Marathon (vol. 3, issue 3), 943 points; Quad Cities Marathon (vol. 4, issue 3), 885 points; Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon San Diego (vol. 9, issue 1), 919 points; Royal Victoria Marathon (vol. 5, issue 4), 918 points; San Francisco Marathon (vol. 1, issue 2), 903 points;* Santa Clarita Marathon (vol. 4, issue 4), 866 points; Shamrock Sportsfest Marathon (vol. 2, issue 6), 866 points; Steamtown Marathon (vol. 3, issue 5), 892 points; Twin Cities Marathon (vol. 8, issue 3), 888 points; Vancouver International Marathon (vol. 1, issue 1),851 points;* Wineglass Marathon (vol. 1, issue 3),839 points; Yonkers Marathon (vol. 8, issue 5), 751 points;** Yukon River Trail Marathon (vol. 5, issue 1), 870 points

The Las Vegas Marathon score went up due to the race moving its expo from tents at Vacation Village to one of the major downtown hotels and expanding the expo. The finish line area has also been improved: with the new finish line area, the 90degree turn into the final 70 yards is now a thing of the past.

The San Francisco Marathon score rose in the wake of a half-dozen years of enjoying an increasingly stabilized race organization, gradual growth in size, and attention to detail. The course, although not perfectly agreeable to fast times in a city built on seven hills, has been much improved, as have the prerace activities.

At Vancouver, the score has gone up based on several factors: many of the bridges (major uphills) have been removed from the course, as has the industrial area on the far end of the Lions Gate Bridge. In addition, the entire event has been consolidated into one area (the BC Place complex, which is one of the few remaining structures from Expo ‘86), which contains the Vancouver Marathon offices, fitness and health expo, seminars, and the start/finish areas.

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

If You’re Not Careful, the Foolish Excesses of Youth Will Stick to You for the Rest of Your Life.

The first four chapters appeared in our last two issues.

ECEMBER 1983 CONFESSIONS OF A NUTRITIONAL AGNOSTIC

“T’m an atheist with one foot in the door of agnosticism,” said Woody Allen. “I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I do plan to take along a change of shorts.”

Most of the top runners I know feel the same way about diet. They’re skeptical of nutrition being the prime element in racing success, but they like to check each other’s grocery lists. Just in case.

When I was a freshman in college, I read an article on one of the quarter-milers on our team, who was known for racing well on limited training. When asked what his secret was, he said, “I owe it all to my diet.”

This, the notion that you could eat your way to success or failure, became a team joke. “T lost it at the dinner table,” and “I was carrying too much excess baggage, so to speak,” became excuses for poor performances. After college, when I suddenly lopped twenty seconds off my three-mile best, a reporter asked me how T explained the sudden improvement. The old joke came to mind.

“T owe it all to my diet,” I told him. And I went on to describe a typical day’s food intake: Froot Loops and orange juice for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cookies for lunch, pizza and beer for dinner. I wasn’t making this up, by the way.

My diet made the pages of a national magazine, not once but several times afterward, and my reputation as a nutritional junkie has followed me around like a jackal ever since. I’ve been both a dietary pariah among runners with nutritional sensibilities and something of a hero to the dietary unconscious. I’ve been justly

scorned by true nutritional believers, awarded boxes of Froot Loops by race organizers, and made privy to the worst nutritional confessions imaginable.

While attending a running camp where only nutritionally sound food was served, I was hustled aside one morning by a man who told me, while his gaze darted nervously back and forth across the landscape for the approach of the camp director, of having driven to town the evening before for a hot fudge sundae.

“T thought you’d appreciate hearing about it,” he said, after describing his transgression in great dripping detail. I was, so it seemed, his sucrose soul-mate.

I’m not sure I deserve the reputation. My diet has always been eclectic and ethnically balanced. As a fast-food dilettante, I have dabbled in burgers, fried chicken, burritos, pizza, and barbecued rice. I graze in my backyard amid strawberries, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, and pea pods. At meals, I eat everything in sight, and there is generally someone with better nutritional insight than mine supplying the options.

But it is between meals, I suppose, that I lose control and earn my reputation. Cookies, crackers, cakes, pies, pastries, pop, and beer are all devoured and guzzled, but chief among my weaknesses is ice cream.

As a child, I would sit in front of the television after dinner with an enormous bowl of chocolate mint chip or fudge swirl, joyously playing with my dessert, whipping the chocolate in with the vanilla, digging caverns into the side of the frozen mountain, and consuming mouthful after mouthful until, inevitably, [had to leave the room to put on a wool sweater. Then it was time for a second helping.

In college, I did not outgrow this habit. Many times my teammates tried to rescue me from supposedly lethal helpings of ice cream and hot fudge on evenings before important races. Or so they said, though the indulgence never seemed to bother my performance. And even now, well into my adult life, 1 am impressive in wrestling with a Mount Everest, Pig Trough, or whatever specialty concoction an ice cream establishment may set in front of me. I just have to remember to dress warmly.

I know I’m not alone among runners in harboring this sort of passion for caloric excess, nor in generally adhering to a less than model diet. It’s not unusual to hear runners justify the time they spend exercising as a balance to the time they spend eating, especially eating unwisely. More than one running club I know of would be more appropriately termed an eating club. But whatever their dietary sins, most runners, even the top competitors, don’t seem to believe they’re doing themselves much harm.

It’s not unusual to see runners before a marathon loading with all manner of “good” and “bad” carbohydrates, but this kind of loading is almost as common at other times as well. After the 1980 Honolulu Marathon, I went with a group of Nike runners that included Patti Catalano to a restaurant we had enjoyed the previous year. The headwaiter immediately recognized our group.

“Ts that girl who had three desserts last year back?” he asked. Patti blushed.

At a study of competitive distance runners conducted at the Aerobics Clinic in Dallas in 1975, Frank Shorter was taken aside by Kenneth Cooper and urged to improve his diet. The body, Frank was told, is like a race car that needs highgrade fuel to perform at its peak. Frank had been filling his high-performance body with low-octane fuel. Junk food.

“IT know your times would improve if you would improve your diet,” said Dr. Cooper. “Someday I’ll prove it to you. Someday,” he concluded with a smile, “they’ll award me the Nobel Prize for proving it.”

“The Pulitzer Prize, maybe,” responded Frank, “for fiction.”

Top runners, of course, are not always immune to the attractions of diet in the quest for excellence. If dietary intake can improve performance by even a small percentage, so the theory goes, then it’s worth serious consideration. If nutrition is responsible for even the minutest of advantages in otherwise equally endowed, equally trained, equally motivated athletes, then it will spell the difference between victory and defeat. Or, as Masters runner Alex Ratelle has said, “What do I eat before I race? I’ll tell you what I eat. I eat whatever the guy who finished ahead of me in the last race ate.”

Ratelle’s quip has an unmistakable ring of truth about it, suggesting the quest for The Secret, a magical formula for athletic success, the fountain of fastness. “Eat what the winner eats” is a motto that has set more athletic eating trends than science will ever encourage. This is not necessarily good news.

As competitors, we seem able, on the one hand, to believe that training is the deciding element of success while on the other hand suspecting that the other guy might be hiding something from us. A particular foodstuff in the closet, perhaps, or a vitamin supplement under the napkin? What is that powder he’s dumping in the blender? We are both amused and fascinated by our suspicions.

At last count, Lasse Viren had revealed four key Nordic secrets on various occasions in response to media questions about how he had won all those gold medals. Lasse’s secrets? Reindeer milk, reindeer meat, reindeer blood, and reindeer excrement—the first three being key elements of his diet, the last rubbed judiciously on his legs right before the race. He was kidding, of course—wasn’t he?

There is a natural tendency, in fact, for people to assume that an athlete of Lasse’s talent must have something going for him other than superb conditioning, tactics, and motivation. Blood-doping or reindeer blood, perhaps, but something must be giving him the edge, right?

Most dieticians are dubious of there being any sort of miracle food to improve athletic performance, although this hasn’t stopped athletes from trying a whole host of dietary tricks. Whether it’s wheat germ, spirulina algae, bee pollen, or vitamin supplements, there are always plenty of athletic advocates around to sing the praises.

Among dietary tricks for runners, though, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world would have to be carbohydrate loading. Discovered by cross-country skiers as a way of increasing glycogen storage in the muscles, the technique of depletion and loading has been widely used among marathon runners to improve endurance. Though there are many, myself included, who continue to use the system, there are also plenty of detractors around to point out the risks and complications of drastically altering the diet.

“T tried depleting once,” Frank Shorter said at a clinic I attended a few years ago. “But after one day I started seeing double, so I went and had a handful of M&Ms and a couple of beers and felt fine. I’ve never depleted since.”

Frank is not the only runner to have given up the severe depletion phase of carbo loading. Whether to avoid shock to the system or problems around home and work, many runners have modified the scheme, depleting in moderation or not at all, but still loading with reckless abandon. Personally, I feel that if you haven’t suffered through three days of weakness, ill manners, and suicidal depression that characterize depletion, you don’t deserve to go into a marathon with extra glycogen.

Aside from the notion of a secret food or dietary trick, most people believe that athletes must generally eat differently than the rest of society. In spite of the evidence to the contrary, athletes are believed to shun most of the foods that other people enjoy. A few years ago, the most common line runners heard was probably, “Ten miles a day? I don’t even drive ten miles a day.” Now, the thing I keep hearing is, “What’s a runner doing eating that?”

And what is “that”? Beer, soft drinks, tacos, pizza, ice cream, cookies, et cetera. In short, all the good stuff. And not all of it, by the way, deserves to be titled “junk food.” Pizza and tacos, for example, aren’t badly balanced according to most dieticians, and even my beloved ice cream has its share of nutritional advocates. But the general public continues to believe that athletes avoid these kinds of foods. Perhaps some do. But not many.

It may be true that athletes eat differently than the rest of society, though not in the way most people assume. High-mileage runners seem to be able to satisfy basic nutritional requirements because they eat a lot. As Dr. William Bennett says in The Dieter’s Dilemma, “One of the wonderful things about exercise is that it allows the body to take over the job of weight control, so that you can eat more and automatically expose yourself to more nutrients, such as vitamins and minerals.” Or, twisting Bennett’s words to fit my own beliefs, one might say that even the runner who lives on Ding-Dongs and beer must occasionally consume apples and oranges. Voracious caloric intake demands it.

In fact, exercise seems to have several advantages for those who want to avoid restricting their diet. It burns calories, may suppress appetite, and, it is now believed, acts through the brain to modify the body’s metabolic rate. Peter Wood

and other researchers at Stanford University have shown that runners typically consume more calories than their sedentary counterparts and yet weigh significantly less. Fat people aren’t gluttons, runners are. This is not news, of course, to our nonrunning friends and relatives who have seen us in action.

Still, the general public have seen so many commercials with trim athletes eating low-calorie foods that they’ve actually begun to believe that that’s what they eat. The simple fact that carbohydrates are the main nutritional accomplice of exercising athletes has had trouble finding acceptance in many quarters, mainly because of the emphasis on protein in dietary advertising.

When sugar-free sodas and light beers first began to show up sponsoring road races in the mid-seventies, many runners were incredulous. “Can anyone tell me,” asked one runner at a prerace clinic sponsored by a light beer company at about that time, “what a bunch of ectomorphs like ourselves are doing sitting around drinking diet beer and low-cal pop?”

The beauties of carbohydrates, though, are finally being given their due, and the legion of carbo supporters is continuing to grow. Researchers at MIT have recently shown that eating carbohydrates may raise the level of a particular chemical in the brain, thereby lessening depression and sensitivity to pain, as well as inducing calmness, relaxation, and sleepiness. I’ve known this, more or less, all my life.

Moreover, the whole insistence on avoiding sugar has come under fire in recent years, especially when the alternatives may be more harmful than the sweet stuff itself. William Bennett (a man who is rapidly heading to the top of my “Top Ten Nutritional Counselors” list) has more to say on the subject in an article in American Health, where he contends that fat and sedentary lifestyles, and not sugar, are the main culprits of obese America.

“Choosing to drink a diet cola instead of a sugar-sweetened one is a strategy designed to avoid walking about a mile and a half,” he says. “But the tactic would only work if artificial sweeteners actually replaced sugar in the diet. Instead, artificial sweeteners seem merely to provide an additional source of sweet taste that appeals to an inborn appetite but does not truly satisfy it.’ And so on.

I may be accused at this point of being capricious in quoting nutritional research and information, of having chosen what supports my eating habits while ignoring the rest. In doing so I’m in good company.

A whopping big serving of nutritional information seems to be based more on wishful thinking than on science. Nutritional information and advice seem to change more often than the weather, and when they do, science is usually to blame. Someone finally decides to do some testing.

The best recent example of that is the “complex” carbohydrate escapade. After years of hearing that “simple” carbohydrates like glucose, sucrose, and fructose enter the bloodstream too quickly, thereby causing a rapid rise in blood sugar and blood insulin, while “complex” carbos like the starches found in rice

and potatoes do not, Phyllis Crapo of the University of Denver Health Sciences Center decided to test the theory. The result has been a dramatic reversal of nutritional dogma. Some “complex” carbohydrates, she found, like those in white potatoes, whole-wheat or white bread, and cooked carrots, are worse than sucrose in raising blood sugar levels.

“Potatoes are like candy as far as a diabetic is concerned,” concludes coresearcher Jerrold Olefsky. And since every “complex” carbohydrate gives a different glucose response, we’ll have to stay tuned to find out who the good guys and the bad guys are in this episode.

This sort of nutritional revisionism, I suppose, should not be cause for despair. It is, thankfully, the melody of science, which seems to be a relative Johnny-comelately in nutritional discussions. And while science spends its days carefully testing hypotheses, I plan to spend mine eating, drinking, and running merrily, knowing that nutritional information is progressing by leaps and bounds, although probably not fast enough to save me.

And in the meantime, for those of you who seem to want rules of diet to live by, I offer you ten of my own, developed during a third of a century of conscientious consumption. Not science, of course, just the deranged preachings of a nutritional agnostic.

lurge you to consider them, though, in spite of warnings from the American Dietetic Association about excess sodium in the diet, with a grain of salt:

1. If it’s labeled “healthy” or “natural,” or any derivative thereof, hold onto your wallet and run for cover—Real natural food grows in your garden and has bugs and worms all over it. “Natural” shouldn’t necessarily be considered a compliment. Think of natural disaster, natural childbirth, et cetera, before you buy anything “natural.”

2. If you run one hundred miles a week, you can eat anything you want—Why? Because (a) you’! burn all the calories you consume, (b) you deserve it, and (c) you’ll be injured soon and back on a restricted diet anyway.

3. There’s no such thing as a bad carbohydrate, with the possible exception of squash. Carbohydrates are all good, though some of them, of course, are guilty of causing roller-coaster swings in blood sugar levels and rotting your teeth.

4. There is no such thing as a complex carbohydrate. If carbohydrates were complex, they wouldn’t answer to such a pretentious name. They would have been satisfied with a name like “protein” or a supremely overconfident moniker like “‘fat,’ which is a substance complex enough not to have to prove it with a four-syllable title.

5. Avoid carbohydrate loading when friends or relatives are in town. During depletion you’ll insult them, during loading you’ll disgust them.

6. Drinking two cups of coffee shortly before starting a marathon will help release free fatty acids into the bloodstream. I don’t know exactly what they are or what they do, but at least they’re free.

7. Avoid any diet that discourages the use of hot fudge.

8. If you eat foods that are half as nutritious as they should be, eat twice as much.

9. Whatever substance you’re being encouraged to take in large doses today will be found to be carcinogenic within six months.

10. Without ice cream there would be chaos and darkness.

SPRING 1981 DROPPING OUT

The flight to Europe had begun with a teddy bear, but was rapidly degenerating into Texans.

We had left Spokane, Dan and I, sitting across from a teenage girl cuddling her teddy, some vague recollection of familiarity and security connecting her to the ground, its tattered and weary face no longer beaming joy to the little girl who had first welcomed it to her bed. Now ole teddy had been dragged along against his will onto an airplane, and he obviously wasn’t enjoying himself. He had performed noble service in bringing his mistress to the edge of adulthood, but now, by God, he deserved a rest! Not some fool trip on an airplane with a girl old enough to be someone’s mother.

Some people, I thought, looking at the poor captive, just don’t know when it’s time to move on.

And then we picked up a load of Texans, who could not possibly have been as stupid as they acted. Seemingly within minutes of taking off from Kennedy Airport, the whole lot of them were drunk. They became creatures with the bodies of manatees and the personalities of jackals.

“Bob’s bar is open for business!” one bellowed, staggering in the aisle.

“Hey, look at Animal!” another shouted, beaming at one of his friends in the back of the plane. “That boy’s tryin’ to sleep. Hey, Animal!”

Yuk, yuk.

It was, coincidentally, the middle of the night. Animal and the rest of us were trying to sleep. But like most slobbering-drunk, gorilla-brained packs of good old boys, this group thought they were entertaining everyone within eyesight and earshot. Most countries have enough sense to sequester their insipid inebriates in dark corners of the land where they can eventually eliminate each other fighting over who can spit the farthest. The U.S.A. was apparently sending some of theirs abroad with pocketsful of oil money to act as goodwill ambassadors.

I slunk down in my seat and tried to ignore them.

The question of what I was doing on this airborne oil rig was a good one, especially in view of the discomfort I was enduring. Months earlier I had been invited to run the Frankfurt Marathon, much to my excitement and dismay. Excitement, of course, because I would be able to take a road trip to Germany, with as many excursions to bordering countries as time, good sense, energy, and money would allow. Dismay, because I would have to run another marathon.

You see, I was rapidly becoming disenchanted with marathons.

While the Texans railed on about how much they could drink, I closed my eyes and reflected on my last two serious marathon efforts. Last November, Rio de Janeiro. I had enjoyed a week in one of the finest places on earth, a truly cosmopolitan city designed to be picturesque and playful. Rio is spread among the enormous rock-bunions, stone-blisters, and boulder-corns of some huge granite giant’s foot, the big toe of Sugarloaf pointing at the sky. The scenery is unbeatable. The beaches are a tribute to hedonism. The women are alluring and intriguing. To marathon here does not make sense.

Nevertheless Jose Werneck, a local sportswriter and broadcaster, had caught marathon fever in the states and was determined to see it spread to his homeland. Tapping insistently on the Jornal do Brasil, his employer, he was finally able to convince his bosses to host a major marathon through the streets of Rio. Everyone, including Jose, was amazed when over a thousand runners showed up one warm evening to take a shot at forty-two kilometers.

The race time was planned to take advantage of the setting sun. We began in the late afternoon, as thousands of people were heading home from a hard day at the beach.

One must admire the courage of Jose and the other organizers in trying to direct hundreds of runners through city streets filled with Latin drivers. Rio is a city of tunnels, turns, and traffic, a nightmare for footracers. As we wove our way along the first few miles, we were asked to stay in the right lane for safety. Meanwhile, cars honked, motorists yelled, engines revved, and motorcycles buzzsawed their way down the lanes next to us. Pedestrians stepped in front of runners and bicycles swerved between them.

Greg Meyer, leading the way through this maelstrom, nearly collided with several of the bicycles that surrounded him during the race. Edson Bergara, a Brazilian runner, was running well in second place when a motorcycle ran over his foot, and he had to stop for a few minutes. All the runners had trouble breathing in the exhaust-infused tunnels. The noise was overwhelming.

Except for missing out on water at the first station, I survived the first twenty-five kilometers with minimal discomfort, considering the obstacles. It was impossible to feel relaxed, but at least I was progressing normally toward the finish, running a solid though lackluster race. One does not recognize the progressive effects of

dehydration, though, until one is a veritable prune, a camel with shriveled hump, a sun-bleached desert-mummy. Though it wasn’t warm by Brazilian standards, by thirty kilometers I was in heat trouble.

Or so I thought. Maybe it was glycogen depletion or lack of training or jet lag or bad attitude. All I really know is that I was dizzy, exhausted, sore, tight, and dry as [hobbled the last few kilometers along Ipanema and Copacabana beaches, with two large blood blisters on my feet and a dagger-stitch in my side, whimpering and mumbling to myself. A guy rode up on his bike and assured me that if I kept going I would get third. I got sixth.

My hosts were understanding. They were pleased with having put on Brazil’s largest marathon, determined to correct the mistakes they had made, and seemingly unconcerned with my having performed poorly. I, on the other hand, was embarrassed to have flown so far to have run so shoddily. The warmth of the Brazilian people and the Brazilian weather had made for a great trip, but what was the point of the marathon?

“I’m gonna give that girl a kiss!” one of the Texans was telling his friend, loudly, as the stewardess walked by.

“She’s a cold one, she is,” the other replied. “I wouldn’t bother, if I was you.”

Thankfully, neither did, and I returned to my personal reverie.

Last March, Tokyo. All my life, or at least since I’ve been marathoning, I’ve wanted to run in Japan. After the Montreal Olympics, I thought I’d have a chance at an invitation to run Fukuoka. None came. Years passed.

Then, out of nowhere in particular, I received an invitation to run the Tokyo/ New York Friendship Marathon, sponsored by the Fuji-Sankei conglomerate. I was soon whisked, slippered, through the accommodating skies of Japan Airlines to Tokyo, where I was interviewed and photographed at Narita Airport. The other passengers stared in puzzlement.

“What was all that about?” one of the Americans from the flight asked me as we waited to go through customs. “Are you someone famous?”

“T run marathons. The Japanese love marathons.”

Indeed they do. And they treat their guests, marathon or otherwise, uncommonly well. Whether they’re offering food, drink, gifts, or assistance through the maze of incomprehensible Japanese signs and symbols in Tokyo subway stations, they treat outsiders well. As a result, I enjoyed my visit there.

I enjoyed the Japanese love of gadgetry, whereby every room becomes an empty space to be lit, wired, and secured with every conceivable kind of device. My modest hotel room contained smoke alarms, three sprinklers, a thermometer, doorbell, TV, refrigerator, radio, alarm clock, heater, air conditioner, and a telephone with an extension in the bathroom. And lamps: ceiling lamps, foot lamps, telephone lamps, a reading lamp with a smaller dim lamp with fluorescent knobs,

lamps in the bathroom and the closet, and a flashlight in case all the other lamps went off. The light in the closet lit up automatically when the door was opened, and the light switches were illuminated when all the other lights were out. The radio played the sounds of birds chirping for an hour each morning, and more than once I was awakened by a telephone call replete with those bird sounds, played for my benefit by Herm Atkins, Benji Durden, or one of the other runners on hand for the marathon.

And of course I enjoyed spending time with those other runners. Like Herm, who heard me tell Durden, as Benji was lining up french fries on a hamburger bun for a carbohydrate sandwich, that that was the kind of bizarre activity that might end up in a magazine article, and who proceeded to line up french fries on his own hamburger bun. Okay, Herm, you made it into the magazine, just like I told you.

Like Chris Stewart, the irrepressible British runner, whose lines like “My, but aren’t you a squishy ball of delight” are so outlandish as to prove effective on ladies of various persuasions. “How can I kiss you if you’re so tall?” Chris told us he had asked an American girl down South a few months earlier. “She just smiled, patted me on the head, and gave me a bagel.”

Like Gary Fanelli, whose subtle wit was generally lost in translation. “Mexicans have a good altitude on running, at least in Mexico City” and “Finland really made the greatest contribution to distance running—the Finnish line” and “Seiko’s the man to watch” were all about as funny as puns ever are, but his cry of “Hey, Elwood!” upon seeing [AAF magnate Adrian Paulen walk by, an obscure reference to the Blues Brothers, was largely lost on the old boy, although it did cause him to stop and shake Fanelli’s hand.

And I enjoyed the fervor with which the Japanese embark on a marathon venture, whether it’s the constant media attention or the joyous celebration. They handle every detail with a care and precision that suggests their high regard for the sport. In Japan, marathoning is a major event, not something that sprouted in the dark when no one was looking.

So I enjoyed Japanese hospitality, Japanese culture, spending time with other runners, and the whole atmosphere of the event. And then came the race.

I was not without my excuses. I had come to Japan with a weak arch in my right foot, and it had bothered me on every training run. Beyond that, I had strained a neck muscle a few days earlier, and it was still difficult to move my head. For good measure, I had bitten my tongue.

In spite of these precautions, I felt I might be obliged to turn in a good performance if I ran conservatively in the cool weather. At least I wouldn’t be wrestling with the heat as I had in Rio. We began the race in Tokyo’s Olympic stadium and were soon traveling the city streets, where thousands of fans waved flags and shouted encouragement.

While Benji, Herm, Randy Thomas, Rodolfo Gomez, Tommy Persson, and a few others were battling for the lead during the first half of the race, I moved steadily through the field farther back, hoping to finish well. Until thirty kilometers I felt fine. From thirty to thirty-two, my body began breaking out in question marks. At thirty-two kilometers, the bubble burst, the sack broke, and the bottom dropped out of my race. I made it to forty kilometers because I knew there would be syrupy orange juice there. I stopped and drank three glasses. I made it to the finish because I knew there was a box lunch waiting for me, and I imagined chocolate cake. There was none.

During my stop at forty kilometers, while I stood silently consuming one orange juice after another, I remembered watching a movie of the Tokyo Olympics, where a Japanese runner had done almost exactly the same thing. We in the theater audience had laughed in delight. Now I was in the movie, and the Japanese audience around me was beginning to chuckle as I began downing my third cup. Thus was irony having the last laugh, though I couldn’t have cared less. My bloodstream needed sugar.

It was the clearest, most isolated case of glycogen depletion I have ever experienced, and it was horrible. Afterward, I sat eating a sandwich in a room below the stadium, wishing I have never heard of the marathon. Rudolfo Gomez had won, Tommy Persson had finished second, Randy Thomas third, Benji Durden fourth, and I had hit the Tokyo wall. All the sake and Kirin beer in Japan, most of which I tried to consume that evening, did not lift my spirits. Again I had flown a long way to run poorly.

As I flew home a couple of days later, I did some serious soul-searching. Did I train properly? Did I load correctly? Did I pace myself intelligently? Was I too old? Not interested enough? Should I quit marathons? Quit running altogether? Or what?

Before the marathon I had made the decision that, due to the cool weather, I would avoid taking fluids at the aid stations. My stomach is sensitive to having anything added during a race, and | avoid taking fluids if it seems feasible. Yet if Thad taken juice early in the Tokyo race, perhaps I would have delayed hitting the wall or avoided it altogether. Too much fluid and I might throw up, as I had done in three previous marathons. Not enough and I might hit the wall. I asked myself: Is throwing up worse than hitting the wall?

After a while, several things became clear. One, the attraction of wanting to run with the best runners in the world was still strong in my psyche. There would be no resorting to the life of a fun-runner. Two, I would recommit myself to a serious training regimen, with intervals and long runs. Three, I would go through the entire carbohydrate loading diet, including depletion, prior to my next marathon in Frankfurt. In spite of the difficulty of finding enough pure protein while in another country, in spite of the absurdity of being in Europe and having to avoid

the native cuisine, and in spite of the overall stress, ill humor, and bad manners associated with depleting, I would do it.

And now, confident that dedicated carbo loading would be the key to my race in Frankfurt, I rode the plane to Europe with my photographer friend Dan Leahy, a carry-on bag filled with beef jerky, and a load of drunk Texans, one of whom was trying to get to his seat behind me but was listing badly to starboard.

A moment later, the bastard spilled nearly his entire glass of rum and coke on my sleeve. A bad omen.

As usual, the prerace travel was going well. Dan and I spent several days in Amsterdam, interviewing some of the top Dutch runners, sightseeing, and dodging traffic. The weather was cooperative and the people we met were accommodating. It was as enjoyable as Rio and Tokyo had been before the gun fired.

On our second day in Amsterdam, I stopped eating carbohydrates. For the remainder of the depletion days, I ate nuts, cheese, and beef jerky and stared ruefully in the windows of bakeries and chocolate shops. Dan agreed not to make loud noises of appreciation while eating Dutch chocolates, or at least to be out of earshot when he did so.

On the final day of depletion, I went on a long, slow run through one of Amsterdam’s parks, while my head buzzed in anticipation of my first good carbo load the next morning. Down deep, I was pleased at having avoided temptation and sure it would pay off at thirty kilometers. I left Amsterdam the next morning with a belly full of cereal, bread, fruit, and chocolate, and while I sat on the train to Frankfurt watching the scenery pass by, I could almost hear the thousands and thousands of slow-twitch muscle fibers lapping up those carbos.

We arrived in Frankfurt a few days later and were greeted with all the hoopla that attends city marathons these days. Signs, banners, and posters announcing the First International Hoechst-Frankfurt Marathon were everywhere. Hoechst, Germany’s enormous chemical company, is also the name of the Frankfurt suburb where much of the race takes place, and the company was determined that their sponsorship of Germany’s largest marathon would also be a sponsorship of Germany’s best marathon. Company personnel, and especially race director Hans Jurgensohn, had worked diligently for months to achieve that goal.

It’s interesting to note the enthusiasm with which much of the world has taken to the marathon in recent years. It’s no accident that many U.S. runners have suddenly been besieged with invitations to marathon races in cities that a few years ago would have considered the idea preposterous. Nearly every major city in Europe seems to have caught marathon fever. Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, Paris, and Antwerp in the spring. Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki in the late summer and fall. And I’m sure I’ve left a dozen others off the list. More established marathons through less congested areas of Europe are suffering from

the popularity of liberating urban streets for a few hours of running. Somewhere behind this is the ethic of urban renewal. Frankfurt was no exception, and the city’s enthusiasm over the thousands of participants in the event was contagious. I badly wanted to run well.

European runners do not typically celebrate before running, and thus the prerace spaghetti feed caught a lot of them off-stride.

“Wouldn’t it be better to wait until after the race for all this?” one of the Irish runners wondered as the festivities began.

Still, the U.S.-style carbo-loading dinner went well, as race organizers introduced their field of invited runners from Great Britain, Greece, Canada, Egypt, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Spain, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, the U.S., and Brazil. Thus did the specter of my Rio race haunt me as I sat down to the blandest meal I could assemble from the assorted pasta dishes on hand. There was no more room at the table with the U.S. flag on it, and I found myself sitting at one with the rising sun. And thus did the Tokyo race haunt my meal as well.

The next morning, during those few hours before the marathon when a runner considers all the things that can possibly go wrong in the twenty-six miles ahead, I reflected on some of the things that had destroyed other marathons I had run: dehydration, muscle fatigue, muscle tightness, groin pain, arch pain, knee pain, jet lag, blisters, sideaches, vomiting, and whatever combination of the above is called “hitting the wall.” Though I had carbo loaded admirably this time, though I had avoided spicy foods, though my training had been good, and though the weather was reasonably cool on race day, I felt ill-at-ease. Rio and Tokyo were in the back of my mind, and there were still too many things that could go wrong.

When the gun fired, I began running what I hoped would be a conservative, solid race, far enough back in the field that the major problems would forget I was there, but close enough to the leaders that I would have a shot at the top few places.

The Frankfurt Marathon, as I’ve mentioned, was a well-organized affair. Precautions had been taken to ensure that runners were treated well before and during the marathon, that sufficient aid stations were available on the course, that spectators had been briefed about the top competitors in the race, and that times were accurately presented during and after the marathon. Each kilometer of the course was accurately measured and marked, which is why I can be sure of the precise point in the race where I stopped and began retching miserably.

It was at twenty-seven kilometers that nausea overcame me while I was struggling to stay in contact with two German runners who were traveling along in seventh or eighth place. It was right near the “27K” sign that my stomach began expressing its discontent at being attached to a body that had been shunting all its

blood supply to its legs for the last hour-and-a-half. It was in the bushes next to the Main River that something green and unpleasant ended my hope of breaking out of a marathon slump. I threw up for ten minutes.

Farther along that same river, Kjell-Erik Stahl of Sweden was gradually breaking away from German favorite Gunter Mielke and Frank Richardson of the U.S., who had fallen victim to a sudden side stitch. Meanwhile, I was spitting green mucus and walking. Unable to find a ride, I finally began to jog slowly. Much, much later I finished.

Idecided, during that first flash of emerald insight at the twenty-seven kilometer mark, that I was through with marathons. One bad race in Rio was understandable. A second unpleasant clash with the wall in Tokyo was unsettling. But three strikes, as they say, and you’re out. I was quitting marathons for good.

My mind was made up by the time I crossed the Schwanheimer Bridge and began the last few kilometers to the finish. I was hoping that Dan, who had been taking pictures from the press truck, would have the presence of mind to take a picture of me finishing my last marathon. Instead, he had the courtesy not to. I finished as discreetly as I could and headed for the showers.

For four days after the race, Dan and I spent time south of Frankfurt, in and around the city of Freiburg, while I recovered from the humiliation of my third disastrous marathon. Tom Steffens, a German runner, writer, and teacher I had met the previous fall, had volunteered to put us up for the remaining few days of our trip to Europe. During those days, while we enjoyed sightseeing and generous portions of Black Forest cake and German beer, I went on several easy runs through the woods, and my decision to give up the marathon became firmly fixed in my mind. When I mentioned it to Tom during discussions, he listened politely and then said, “Let’s not talk about it now,” or “You’ll feel differently in a few days,” or something else to indicate he was unwilling to accept the decision. When I mentioned it to Dan, he humored me by seeming to agree, knowing it wouldn’t do any good to object anyway.

The beauty and serenity of the Black Forest made it a good place to consider the ramifications of the decision while nursing my body back to health, but by the time we were ready to head for home, my decision hadn’t changed. I was glad to be free of the agonies of future marathons and anxious to pursue a different training program.

It’s impossible to imagine any city that has been tortured, bled, and left to die with any greater success than Cleveland. The city’s fate was sealed years ago, when the people with money decided to move to the suburbs. They were followed shortly afterward by the people without money, which has left Cleveland occupied only by people who are too burnt-out, cast-out, inebriated, or confused to care whether they have money or not. Long ago, the air was left to corrode, the lake

to stagnate, and the river to burn, while millions of Ohioans stood conspicuously on the sidelines in embarrassment.

From the Black Forest, Dan and I traveled circuitously to Cleveland for the Road Runners Club of America National Convention and headed for a downtown hotel. Arrangements were soon made for us to run outside the city.

The area surrounding Cleveland turned out to be a stunning contrast to the city itself. During a long run with members of the Southeast Running Club, sponsors of the RRCA convention and part of the organizing team for the Revco-Cleveland Marathon and Ten-Kilometer Run, we trotted through some low-traffic rural areas a few miles outside of town whose beauty would be hard to surpass in any section of the country. But the very beauty of the scenery seemed to make our return to urban Cleveland even more depressing. Once I returned to the hotel, I didn’t leave for almost two days.

In even the most devastated cities in the world there is generally a level of backstreet energy, seedy activity, or downright viciousness within the city’s core. Without being necessarily redeeming in nature, such areas at least pulsate with life. There seemed to be no such area in Cleveland. Instead, hopelessness echoed from the brick buildings, with only an assortment of derelicts on hand to hear the sound.

Nothing, though, is totally without hope. With unbounded and perhaps unwarranted faith in the future, prominent members of the Cleveland community joined the nationwide urban renewal campaign a few years ago, and since then pockets of rejuvenated Cleveland have evolved. A new building or two. A shopping arcade. A renovated hotel.

Somehow, the new life seems to confuse old-line bums. They sit numbly on benches and curbs downtown, waiting for the Final Curtain, and are as surprised at the rejuvenation campaign as they would be at a rich man stopping his Mercedes to ask if they’d like a ride to Shaker Heights. And they seemed just as confused to find thousands of runners lining up for a long-distance race through the city one Sunday morning in May.

One must admire the enthusiasm of Revco, race director Jack Staph, and the rest of the marathon organization for attempting to instill life into Cleveland with distance running. Somehow, after seeing what the city had to offer, it seemed like trying to cheer up a funeral by handing out smiley-face buttons. It seemed ludicrous to suggest that the footsteps of all those runners would be anything more than the ping-ping-ping of drops of water in the cellar of a deserted factory. The slogan “Bringing a City to Its Feet” was everywhere to promote the race, but the mood of the city, carried over to the race, was lethargic.

But then I wasn’t in the best of moods. I was only a few days removed from my third disgusting marathon performance in a row, and I was going to be a difficult person to convince that a marathon of any sort would instill hope into a depressed entity.

Thad given up the marathon, and I let people know it. Most thought I was kidding, or at least that my mood would pass. But I was happier with my decision each day and ecstatic not to be running another marathon that Sunday morning in Cleveland.

Both the marathon and the ten-kilometer run had attracted quality fields, with the shorter race in particular promising stellar competition among many of the world’s top road racers. I stood at a point just short of the mile mark and the same distance from the finish on the out-and-back route, where I could get a good look at the race as it developed. In the park nearby, where spectators waited next to tramps for the runners to pass, a pigeon perched lazily on the head of the General Cleveland statue had the best view of all. Nearby, a small band was playing to generate excitement, but their music seemed to bounce off the buildings like the sound of a bee buzzing in an oil drum. This was not a scene compatible with energy. I was anxious to get this exercise in futility over with.

In a few minutes the gun fired and thousands of runners began their long trek. And then a miracle happened.

As I stood watching the first steps of all those runners, a spark ignited in the cobwebs in the back of my mind. A gentle magic began to work. As the racers passed at a five-minute clip, followed by an unfolding string of fun-runners, health-runners, age-group-runners, tall runners, small runners, fit runners, and fat runners, the strange beauty of this kind of event, where human beings of all persuasions test themselves against themselves and the road ahead, began to transform Cleveland into a city with some meager spirit.

It didn’t last long. When the last of the pack passed, the buildings were there again, cold and impassive. A half-hour later, as the ten-kilometer runners went by, the city came alive again for a few minutes. And when Nick Rose swept past near the finish, followed by Thom Hunt, the sparks caught hold. I was getting wound up in this running thing.

I went back to my hotel room and sat down on the bed. I was moved by the ten-kilometer run, and that was fine. But what would the impending finish of the marathon do to my mind, after I had suffered thrice and made the monumental decision to quit the event? Was I going to follow through with the rational decision of someone who had endured three marathons of terrible consequence, or was I going to get caught up in the energy and mystique of the thing again?

Having asked the question, I returned to the street, walked to the finish line, and watched Charlie Vigil finish first for the second year in a row. As I watched, I tried to steel myself against the inevitable attraction that seemed to creep around the edges of my determination not to marathon again. I was partially successful.

That evening, Dan and I left Cleveland and headed back to Spokane. It was a long flight, offering a lot of time for thought. As we flew, I reflected on my trip, on my decision not to run marathons again, and on the way the marathon had

helped transform a hopeless shell of a city into an area flickering with life, even if only for a few hours. Nothing, apparently, is beyond hope. Perhaps, I reasoned, I could find personal solace in that. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hasty in giving up the marathon. On the other hand, I had made my decision, and I was still pleased with the thought that I wouldn’t have to shoot for twenty-six miles again. I would enter a new era, give up the familiarity of the marathon distance, begin anew. I promised myself that I wouldn’t forget the dehydration, the blisters, the sideaches, the muscle cramps, the depletion, the throwing up at twenty-seven kilometers. I would honor the pledge to my body after all, and run no more marathons.

And then we stopped in Chicago, and a girl got on the plane and sat in the seat across the aisle. She had a teddy bear. Different girl this time, different teddy. If anything, this one was even sorrier than the one that had begun our trip. It was missing an eye, there were loose stitches in the side, and bare patches showed around the edges. It looked like it had run a marathon before boarding.

Agitated, I looked over at the poor thing. Sadder but wiser after all the trouble he’d obviously been through, he was still a comfort to the girl who cradled him in her lap as the plane took off, stroking his fur and soothing her fears.

“Dammit,” I thought, “some people really don’t know when it’s time to move

FALL 1982 EYE OF THE TIGER

When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired you wish your opponent would crack you on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round remembering that the man who fights one more round is never whipped.—Gentleman Jim Corbett

A couple of years ago I got into a discussion with another automobile driver over proper traffic flow. Two shots to my face and he won the argument, giving me a lesson in humility and the left hook. For weeks my face swelled with evidence of what it’s like to earn one’s living as a prizefighter.

The marathon can teach similar lessons. It can hit hard, quickly, and ruthlessly, and only a fool attempts to battle it without adequate preparation. Naturally, every marathon has more than its fair share of fools.

A day after the 1981 Honolulu Marathon, I was running five miles with Boston radio and television commentator Tony Reavis. I had watched the race the previous day from the lead vehicle, calling in reports to Reavis for KKUA radio every mile or so, watching Jon Anderson maintain his margin of victory over Duncan Macdonald. Macdonald, in turn, was almost nipped in the last few meters by a hard-charging Kjell-Erik Stahl of Sweden. As Reavis and I ran the

next afternoon, we spoke in particular of Stahl, who seems to thrive on repeated marathon racing. The Hawaii race was reported to be his eleventh of the year. A week earlier he had finished twelfth at Fukuoka, only to return to the marathon at Honolulu, where he led the field for fourteen miles before finally finishing third behind Macdonald.

“That guy is unbelievable,” said Reavis. “I was out this morning and saw him running again, the day after the marathon!”

“T saw him, too,” I said. We compared notes, and it appeared that Stahl had either been running for over an hour that morning or else had had two separate morning runs. As we marveled at his swift return to training after a hard marathon effort, amazed and amused at his resiliency, we spotted him again.

There, heading back toward Waikiki on either his second or third training run the day after a 2:17 marathon, went Kjell-Erik Stahl, already preparing himself for his next go-around with the twenty-six-miler.

Stahl is not the fool mentioned earlier. Rather, his hollow cheeks and generally somber disposition suggest Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. In Stahl’s case, though, the figure in the painting might well be howling, “The Tokyo Marathon in two weeks? Nooooooo!”

And yet Stahl seems to take to his task without fear, superbly prepared, ready to go one more round with the champion, the marathon. Never whipped.

Not all of us are so fortunate. In the past few years, marathoning has spiraled worse than inflation. While the growth of road racing in the U.S. has centered on the ten-kilometer distance, the phenomenon elsewhere has found its expression in the marathon. Virtually every major city around the world now has a “major” marathon, and the attraction of the event has led many of us to try it too often. Stahl, at least, seems prepared for the onslaught. Many of us end up flat on our backs.

My last full marathon attempt was in Frankfurt, Germany, on May 17, 1981. After that race, in which I started with high hopes and fell apart—broken, vomiting, depressed—at just under thirty kilometers, I swore off marathons. There had been two prior disasters at the distance, and the third strike meant I was out. Knocked out, perhaps.

The winner of that Frankfurt race, incidentally, was a tall, thin, dour, and determined-looking Swede named Kjell-Erik Stahl.

By the time of the 1981 Honolulu Marathon, I was already questioning my decision to give up marathons. As Reavis and I ran, I was contemplating a return to the Islands a year later as a competitor, not a radio commentator. The Honolulu Marathon would be celebrating its tenth anniversary, they would be inviting back all past winners, and it seemed as good a time as any to jump back into the ring. I’m not sure why the boxing metaphor seems so appropriate to the nonviolent sport of running. Certainly the personal aspect of long-distance running, where success rests with the individual rather than the team, is similar to boxing. Perhaps

the violence of boxing, directed at another individual, is sublimated in running, becoming a different kind of aggression. Both sports definitely require coming to terms with personal suffering in pursuit of success. But more than anything, it is the long hours of preparation that link boxing and running. And both sports, consequently, require a particularly personal honesty, the absence of which is extremely painful.

When Muhammed Ali got into the ring with Larry Holmes for his fourth try at the world championship two years ago, the world took a deep breath. The man was too old, too slow, too heavy. And yet this was Muhammed Ali, who could work magic. A few rounds into the match, though, when the boxer’s magic failed to materialize, the world looked the other way. Unprepared for the encounter, Ali was pummeled repeatedly, paying a painful price. Mercifully, the ex-champ wasn’t forced to go the distance.

For my own part, I had become convinced that my last three marathons had exacted a painful toll primarily because I wasn’t ready for them. Before going the distance again, I would get ready. Play the theme from Rocky, please.

Anyone who has made a marathon comeback, from illness, an injury, or a layoff, knows the feeling. Days of sluggishness, when lazy muscles are asked to be active again. Weeks of gradual increases, when a ten-mile run is ultradistance and a twenty-miler impossible. Months of planning, when the long-term goal seems a fuzzy dream, too near to prepare for or too distant to be relevant.

And moments of despair, when the time and effort spent seem out of proportion to the projected rewards.

At the low ebb of my training slump, I was running twenty miles a week. Slowly. In a way, the slump was enjoyable. Injuries receded. Energy increased. I accomplished large amounts of work during the day, and I ate dinner at dinner time. I read books again, and discovered television. My weight ballooned up to 155 pounds. My wife Bridgid told me it was nice having me around again.

As a result, when I began increasing my training, the long road back seemed even longer. What might have taken me six weeks to accomplish at age twenty was now taking twelve weeks or more. With other commitments impending, it seemed frivolous to be spending so much time preparing for the marathon, and my training suffered as a result. I got injured easier and recovered slower. The fatigue of a hard workout lasted for days.

My original rationale for giving up the marathon had been solid. The event is generally overrated, tending to overshadow shorter races. The time required to prepare and recover from it drains energy that might otherwise be used for 10K races, track events, cross-country, and of course nonrunning activities. The risk of injury is high and the chance of hitting some sort of wall is excellent.

But in spite of all this I had decided to go at least one more round with the marathon, for whatever reason, and slowly but surely I made progress. Seventy

miles a week became comfortable. Morning workouts were added. Nagging pains in my legs diminished, and I began twenty-mile runs again. I had decided to include quality work—intervals, hill repeats, fartlek—from the very beginning, rather than concentrating on increased mileage alone. The plan was successful, and my leg-speed improved along with my endurance. Once again, though, what had been swift progress at age twenty in terms of speed was now, at age thirtythree, painfully slow.

In the best of times intervals are no fun. During a comeback they’re acutely miserable. Facing a set of ten hills one evening, standing in the dark at the bottom of a quarter-mile slope, I experienced the mild despair that seems to precede any interval workout. Stretching my hamstrings, calves, quadriceps, and groin in anticipation of the repeated anaerobic pain ahead, I tried to focus on Apollo Creed’s words to Rocky Balboa.

With genuine inspiration and considerable amusement, I began the evening’s workout repeating the words that would become my comeback theme.

“Eye of the tiger, Rocky. Eye of the tiger.”

I was not alone in arriving in Honolulu ready to make a comeback of sorts. The comeback theme is a consistent one for this marathon, with the general thought process seeming to end with the line, “. . . and if I don’t do well, at least I’ll be in Hawaii to recover.”

The 1982 Honolulu Marathon would be Frank Shorter’s fourth Hawaiian comeback attempt in as many years, following a frustrating pattern of injury, recovery, reinjury, surgery, and recovery that had finally brought Frank back to road-race form but not marathon success. Kenny Moore made a marathon comeback attempt at Honolulu in 1978, finishing with a 2:19:09 performance, and gave up serious marathoning shortly thereafter.

Jack Foster, winner of the 1975 race at the age of forty-three, now retired from active marathoning and running only three times a week, was in town for a 1982 comeback of modest expectations.

Duncan Macdonald, hometown boy and three-time Honolulu winner, had come back again to the Islands for his yearly marathon attempt. Or perhaps biyearly, since a 2:13 performance earlier in the year at Chicago had made him the 1982 Honolulu favorite, along with returning champion Jon Anderson.

And, of course, Kjell-Erik Stahl was in town for his thirteenth comeback of 1982. Miami, Beppu, Rome, Boston, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Orebro, Rio de Janeiro, Athens, Chicago, Columbus, New York, and now Honolulu.

The days leading up to Sunday’s event were unusually festive, even for Honolulu, a marathon known for its love of celebrating before, during, and after the actual footracing. As part of the marathons’ ten-tear anniversary, officials had organized a seven-day agenda of festivities. More than ten thousand entrants were

on hand to enjoy a week of dining, dancing, and dashing around Waikiki, leaving little time for worrying about the twenty-six miles ahead.

When they weren’t joining in the celebrations, the few reporters and others interested in picking a winner of Sunday’s race cruised among the athletes, looking for inside information on who was fit and who wasn’t. The smart money seemed to rest on Macdonald and Anderson, with Shorter a serious outside shot and Stahl a possibility. Tony Reavis, though, back in town to commentate for KKUA radio, jokingly suggested that Stahl, with a five-week hiatus from marathoning, had had too much rest this year and wouldn’t be a factor.

I was asked a number of times about my own level of fitness. I answered honestly that I was making a marathon comeback, hoping for a modest 2:20 effort, and planning for a full effort in mid-January at the Houston-Tenneco Marathon. Reporters are used to hearing runners downplay their own fitness, speak with awe of other runners in the field, and then go on to win the race, so there was some reluctance to take me at my word.

Jim Barahal, a local runner and physician known as Dr. Sport on radio, was especially keen on seeing me pull an upset. But I had enough of a sense of my current condition to know that the likelihood of an upset was low.

“This is just going to be a 2:20 effort for me,” I told him again. “If you’re looking for a dark horse, go with Dave Gordon.”

“Dave who?” he asked, smiling.

“Dave Gordon. He’s a young runner from Olympia, Washington. Went to college in Montana.”

“What’s he done?”

“He’s been running well in the Northwest,” I said. “He was third at Bloomsday in Spokane, and he’s run a couple of great races in the Seattle area.”

Barahal hesitated. “What do you think about Shorter?” he finally asked.

In fact, though, Dave Gordon was a good bet to surprise a few people. Young and eager to prove himself in the Honolulu field of veterans, he had enjoyed 1982 as a breakthrough year, running head-to-head with the likes of Rodgers, Shorter, Lindsay, Rono, and Sinclair. He is only a notch, and a slim notch at that, from the very top, and he runs aggressively and fearlessly. At Honolulu, he might suffer the fate of a couple of other young runners in past years—Tom Wysocki and Jon Sinclair—who raced well early before running into trouble around twenty miles. Or, like 1979 winner Dean Matthews, he might fool the veterans and steal the marbles.

I saw Barahal again on Saturday morning, the day before the race.

“How’re you feeling?” he asked.

“T feel good, Jim,” I answered, but he was asking more than that, still suspecting I might be preparing an upset.

“You look really fit this year,’ he said. “Last year you seemed kind of heavy. You were clearly out of shape. But you look real thin this year.”

“T got a haircut,” I said. “People always tell me I’ve lost weight when I get a haircut.”

“You’re still planning to run a 2:20?”

“T’m going out at a 2:20 pace,” I answered. “If I feel great I’ll pick it up. But I really don’t want to go a hundred percent here. My goal is still Houston.”

Barahal continued to fish for a winner. “It seems like most people here are picking Duncan,” he said. “What do you think?”

“Duncan’s in great shape,” I answered. “He’ll be tough to beat. But I still think Dave Gordon’s got a good chance.”

“T don’t know,” Barahal said. “I talked with him yesterday. I don’t think he’s ready to win. He didn’t look like he wanted it that bad.”

“Maybe not,” I answered, and the conversation turned to other things.

That evening I ate dinner with a few friends, Macdonald included. In my first Honolulu Marathon in 1976 Duncan had taken me to a Mexican restaurant for a prerace dinner. The next morning I threw up at nineteen miles and Duncan won the race. Since then I’ve been superstitious about prerace meals. Two out of my last three races had seen me throwing up before the finish, and I didn’t want it to be three for four after the next day’s race. The evening before my 1978 Honolulu victory I had had chicken, so this time I had it again, and then headed back to the hotel for bed.

The Honolulu Marathon starts at 6:00 A.M., so an early bedtime is advisable. Thad just drifted off to sleep when the phone rang.

“Don?” It was Barahal. “Hey, I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to ask you again what some of Dave Gordon’s best performances are.”

I mentioned a couple.

“Okay, thanks,” he said. “I’m going to go ahead and pick him on the radio tomorrow as a favorite. But I couldn’t remember any of his performances. Thanks a lot. Good luck tomorrow.”

Dave Gordon. Eye of the tiger. I fell asleep.

The Honolulu Marathon is not without its niceties, but the early starting time is not one of them. At 4:30 a.m. the hotel operator called. By 6:00 a.m. I had joined ten thousand other runners on the starting line.

A light rain had fallen earlier, raising the humidity but not lowering the temperature much. When the cannon blew, we were all off to a hot, muggy start.

The first few miles of the Honolulu Marathon are run in the dark, and as a result I missed seeing the first mile marker. I spotted the two-mile mark, though, and realized that at 10:40 I was right on projected pace: 5:20 per mile, 2:20 marathon effort.

While I muddled around with my modest goals, Frank Shorter was on kamikaze pace: 4:54 at the mile, 9:58 at two miles, and well in the lead. In a different

race, Frank’s pace of under five minutes per mile wouldn’t have seemed extreme. At Honolulu, where times are generally four minutes slower than elsewhere, his pace left a lot of fast runners behind.

In retrospect, Frank’s plan seemed to be to go out at five-minute pace, hoping he could maintain a lead and steal the race. In reality there were at least three quick runners, Macdonald, Stahl, and Gordon, breathing down his neck. By ten miles Stahl and Gordon had reeled Frank in. It was becoming a duel between the perennial marathoner, Stahl, and the newcomer, the challenger, Dave Gordon.

My own perspective on the race was, of course, much different. I worked to stay relaxed at 5:20 per mile, hearing as I passed the five-mile mark that Shorter was leading, and wondering whether the old champ’s comeback would be successful.

As I passed the same ten-mile point where Gordon and Stahl had caught Shorter, I noted the time and realized I was still on pace. I had passed aid stations to avoid stomach problems, I had maintained a steady pace, and I was feeling good. Then the weather changed.

The newspaper described it the next day as a mini—Hurricane Iwa, the storm that had ravished the Islands a few weeks earlier. From my perspective, it was a twenty-minute fistfight with the elements, as sheets of wind and rain blew across the course. My legs tightened, my stomach cramped, and fancy footwork became a necessity in traveling down the flooded street. Marathon volunteers huddled under umbrellas and tarps to stay dry, and aid-station sponges were used to dry off rather than get wet.

It seemed as if the storm might last for the rest of the race, but just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

A spectator held out towels as if, clairvoyant, he had anticipated the storm and planned accordingly. I found myself running next to Boulder runner Stan Mavis, who, similarly clairvoyant, had worn a baseball cap to keep the rain out of his eyes. Mavis and I broke through the storm at fourteen miles, both, I think, suffering from the experience.

And of course we were not alone. Up front, Shorter had headed to the side of the road for a pit stop just as the storm (and Stahl and Gordon) reached him. From my vantage point farther back, I suddenly spotted Frank running about a hundred yards ahead of me, and I tried to take my mind off the growing fatigue by keying my strategy for the next few miles on catching him.

Meanwhile, Gordon and Stahl ran together through fair weather and foul until just past fourteen miles, when the younger runner made his move. By fifteen miles he had a lead, and from there to the finish he continued to lengthen it, feeling strong until twenty miles, but continuing to lengthen his margin even as he tired near the end. Gordon finished in 2:15:29, over a minute better than the course record, enormously pleased with his marathon breakthrough. Eye of the tiger.

A little farther back, Duncan Macdonald caught Kjell-Erik Stahl to take second, both runners turning in times nearly identical to last year’s.

Much farther back, I struggled to stay with Mavis, who seemed to move up easily to catch and pass Shorter at about seventeen miles. Eventually I couldn’t see him anymore. A Japanese runner, Katsuhiro Tachikawa, passed me a little later and went after Shorter. Mavis passed me again. He had made a pit stop of his own.

By twenty miles I had almost caught Shorter, but from that point on Frank moved away, eventually taking fifth place, behind Tachikawa, in 2:22:16. Shorter was followed by John Gailson (2:22:39), Mavis (2:22:56), Jon Anderson (2:23:11), and, in ninth place, inordinately pleased with completing twenty-six miles in a time of 2:23:28 without breaking down, throwing up, or dropping out, me.

The last six miles had held a fair amount of fatigue, nausea, and suffering, but I had made it to the finish line on my feet. I had gone the distance. Let’s hear that theme from Rocky, please, one more time. With feeling.

Shortly after finishing, as my wife Bridgid and I wandered through the picnic area at Kapiolani Park, I spotted Jim Barahal, radio’s Dr. Sport, once again.

“Hey, thanks for the tip on Gordon,” he said. “I owe you one.”

I hadn’t been the only one to mention Gordon to Barahal. Bridgid had been even more emphatic about Gordon’s abilities, and her sentiments had been echoed by others as Barahal had painstakingly done his prerace interviewing. As a result, he had gone on the air early that morning to name Gordon as the prerace favorite. No one else in town had heard of him.

The long-shot choice had been impressive. It was like picking Leon Spinks over Muhammed Ali a few years back. Dr. Sport had done his job well.

Barahal left, and Bridgid and I walked to the start of the homestretch of the marathon. As hundreds upon hundreds of runners passed by in varying degrees of elation and exhaustion, I wondered what marathon stories they might be completing themselves. In all likelihood, in fact, this tenth Honolulu Marathon, with over ten thousand stories to tell, was also telling the story of its own future.

In years to come, the Honolulu race would undoubtedly continue to follow its course as a self-proclaimed “‘people’s race,” catering to thousands of runners from Hawaii and the mainland who want to celebrate their marathon attempts in Honolulu, with fireworks at the start, Tahitian dancers at nine miles, enthusiastic volunteers and spectators throughout the race, and a shell necklace at the finish line. Oh, yes, and possibly a midrace hurricane.

In another respect, it would also continue to produce competition between young runners on their way up in the world of marathoning, the Dave Gordons of the sport, and older runners, who have generally seen better marathoning days.

The middle group of competitive runners, the prime candidates for heavyweight champion of the marathoning world, will probably save their races for other courses, where greater prestige and money abound.

My own story had ended happily that day. The 2:23:28 was a fair distance from my personal best of 2:11:16. Miles, in fact. In light of my recent marathon performances, though, the ones that drove me to quit, I was immensely satisfied. With a marathon of 2:23 under my belt, I could begin thinking about 2:18 and below. I could contemplate a fast race in Houston a few weeks later.

Measured against Gordon’s 2:15:29, of course, a time worth 2:11 under more favorable conditions, 2:23 didn’t seem like much. It was difficult to avoid feeling a certain amount of envy for Gordon, a young runner on the brink of his best competitive years.

And yet finally, when all was said and done, the 2:23 set well. Unlike Muhammed Ali, those of us in the marathon fight choose our own opponents—2:10, 2:20, three hours, or just going the distance. All we have to do is choose wisely, jump back into the ring, and fight the good fight.

And those of us inclined to envy the Dave Gordons of the sport can still take heart from the thirty-six-year-old Swede Kjell-Erik Stahl, who had finished third that day, and who would most certainly be out training again the next day, already preparing himself for yet another bout with the twenty-six-miler.

Eye of the tiger indeed.

Thirty Phone Booths to Boston will continue in our May/June 2005 issue.

Adventure Running At Its WORST!

In 1989, two runners set off to become the first to run from Death Valley to Mt. Whitney and back—in mid-summer. Lottsa luck, fellers!

Send $22 in US funds (shipping/handling included) to: Rich Benyo, Box 161, Forestville, CA 95436, USA

Please Print

Street

Town, State/Province.

Zip/Mail code Country

Allow 6 weeks for delivery. If you wish a personal autograph, please include name of person for whom book is intended.