Running to the Edge Read online

  Also by Matthew Futterman

  Players: How Sports Became a Business

  Copyright © 2019 by Matthew Futterman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Photograph on page viii courtesy of Robert Lusitania. Photograph on page 277 courtesy of Marathonfoto.

  Cover photograph by Andrey Burmakin / Shutterstock

  Cover design by John Fontana

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Futterman, Matthew, author.

  Title: Running to the edge : A band of misfits and the guru who unlocked the secrets of speed / by Matthew Futterman.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018049020 | ISBN 9780385543743 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385543750 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Running—Training. | Running speed.

  Classification: LCC GV1061.5 .F88 2019 | DDC 796.42071—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018049020

  Ebook ISBN 9780385543750

  v5.4

  ep

  For my girls

  Author’s Note

  I wrote this book because I have long been fascinated by something I do not possess, which is speed. Every runner I have ever known—including an eighty-five-year-old woman in northern California who ran seven-hour marathons, and Eliud Kipchoge, the otherworldly Kenyan who runs them in just over two—shares a desperate desire to run faster.

  I started searching for a story that might explore what drives so many of us, from the very fast to the very slow, to begin, or end, or break up our days by heading out to the streets or the trails to run some miles. Sometimes we don’t even know how far we will go when we start. And isn’t that the beauty of it?

  Then I saw a picture of a running team from the mid-1970s. They had scraggly hair and hopeful eyes, ridiculous (or amazing) uniforms with a toad logo, and the kind of lean physiques that only thousands of hours of roadwork can produce. I knew their coach, Bob Larsen, from his work with the marathon champion Meb Keflezighi, but I had no idea this was where it all began.

  Those guys called themselves the Jamul (pronounced “HA-mool”) Toads. They looked a little nuts, which is how most people felt about nearly every runner who logged heavy mileage back then. I had a hunch they embodied the obsessive and rebellious spirit at the roots of this strange endeavor and that those runners and their coach could help me understand why we run. As I unearthed their story, I realized it went so far beyond what I expected.

  I like to think the spirit of those Toads, so visible on that photograph, is timeless. It lives on today at every level of this beautiful pursuit.

  Matthew Futterman

  November 2018

  “It is the brain, not the heart or lungs, that is the critical organ.”

  —Roger Bannister Miler. Neurologist.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Matthew Futterman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Athens, Greece, August 29, 2004

  ONE

  Bobcat

  Why We Run

  East Hampton, New York, September 2015

  The First Horse: Ed Mendoza

  Larchmont and Mamaroneck, New York, November 1979, September 1985

  Another Piece for CBL: Tom Lux

  Schenectady, New York, 1991

  The Outlier: Terry Cotton

  Peace and War

  Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1992

  The Birth of the Toads

  September 7, 1996, Central Park, New York

  The Jamul Toads

  Hamptons Marathon, the Last 13.1, September 2015

  1976

  TWO

  Can We Be Fast Again?

  New York City, November 2013

  Higher

  Spring 2016

  Up High

  The Road to Athens

  Harvey Cedars, New Jersey, August 2017

  Fall and Rise

  New York, November 2016

  Back to the Edge

  Right on Hereford. Left on Boylston.

  Onward

  A Note on Sourcing

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Athens, Greece, August 29, 2004

  Bob Larsen has lost his mind.

  That’s been the word around the campfire in running circles for a little while now. For three years he’s been dragging runners up to Mammoth Lakes in California’s southern Sierras, preaching the benefits of running and sleeping so far above sea level. There, and only there, they will find what they need to avoid getting laughed at by all those Africans—the Kenyans and Ethiopians and everyone else at the top of the game, runners who barely consider Americans to be participants in the same sport anymore. Judging from the results of the past couple of decades, they really have no reason to.

  And yet, Bob Larsen believes as strongly as he believes anything that after these Olympic Games they will. That’s why everyone who knows anything about running is certain that Bob Larsen has cracked. Sure, he spent the 1970s figuring out how to run so far, so fast, before anyone else had cracked the code. Then he produced all those national champions and Olympians at UCLA in the 1980s and 1990s. But this idea that runners from his part of the world can figure out how to keep up with the folks born and raised to be champions in East Africa’s highlands, well, that just seems a little loony.

  Bob Larsen does not think so…though maybe it is, and maybe Larsen is a little loony himself. Case in point: He spent several days hunting for the coldest freezer in the Olympic Village, comparing set points and feeling inside them, searching for the one that will keep the ice vests he wants his marathoners to wear (until right before the starter’s pistol fires) as cold as possible. He finds the coldest one in the kitchen near the village dining hall. He finds this pushy New York woman who works there. She promises she can barrel her way through any obstacle. She gets the vests into the freezer the night before the race, and gets them to him the next day.

  Bob could sense the eye rolls and the sideways glances from the other coaches when he told them of his quest for the perfect freezer. That was just fine with Larsen. This is how it was back in the 1970s, when he took that first group of hippie runners no one took seriously and he elevated them to national prominence. When no one sees you coming, you have them right where you want them.

  For a moment one week earlier, on the middle Sunday of the Olympic Games, the running world stopped and had to reconsider Larsen’s sanity. On that day, American Deena Kastor came from way, way back in the women’s marathon and sneaked onto the podium with the bronze medal, the first U.S. distance medal since 1984. Deena who? Kastor had been one of the runners Larsen and his partner in crime, Joe Vigil, started shuttling up to Mammoth Lakes a few years back, high in the Sierras. And here in Greece, she wore the ice vest to the start line, the
n raced the plan Larsen and her coaches had designed for this crazy, blazing hot Olympic marathon.

  The course followed the trail that gave the race its name—the road from Marathon to Athens, the one Pheidippides ran to announce the Greek victory over the Persians. Pheidippides collapsed and died after delivering the message. To avoid that fate in the heat of the Athens summer, Kastor’s coaches told her to let everyone else fight for the lead early, and especially during that largely uphill stretch between miles 2 and 20. They bet the heat and the stress of the course would produce widespread panic among even the elite of the field. Panic produces mistakes. Let the others make those mistakes, and then pounce. They did, and then she did.

  Still, that was the women’s race, the Larsen skeptics whispered. The women’s field lacked the depth and firepower of the men’s competition. Kastor had done well, but the African men had proven themselves an entirely different life form. Unapproachable.

  Larsen can feel those doubts, the subliminal snickering, as he rides to the start line with his prized protégé, the twenty-eight-year-old Meb Keflezighi. Exiting the bus, Meb gets the ice vest pulled on tight. For ten years he has done nearly everything Larsen has told him to do, and he isn’t about to stop now. Larsen let him come to Athens for the Opening Ceremony. Then he put Meb on the first plane back to a hotel in Crete, where they had set up a base camp for training in the weeks ahead of the Games.

  More fun in the Athletes Village, Meb said.

  More sleep on Crete, said Bob. And that was that.

  Weeks before this marathon, which is scheduled for 6 p.m. on the final day of the Games, Meb drove the course with Larsen.

  “What do you think you can run out here?” Bob asked him.

  “In this heat, 2:11 or 2:12,” Meb said.

  “I agree,” Bob told him. “And if you do that you are going to get a medal.”

  On paper, Meb should have no shot at the podium. There are 101 runners in the field. He has the 39th fastest personal best for the marathon in the competition. His best is 2:10:03. Kenyan Paul Tergat, the world record holder and favorite, has run a 2:04:55. That’s more than a full mile ahead of Meb’s best pace.

  No one knows about the work though, the work that Bob and Meb have put in, running to the edge of exhaustion, the work that is at the very foundation of every lesson Bob has delivered to every runner he has guided the past forty years as he quietly tries to solve the secrets of distance running. It’s a place he knows is filled with the truths that can only be found when we go to the place we fear more than any other—and stay there. Because when you go there, day after day, what happens in the race is not about how pristine your practice track is, or whether there is a certain logo on the side of your shoe or on the singlet across your chest. It might be a winged foot, or a swoosh, or even a toad. The race, and winning the race, will be about being the best version of yourself on the day you are supposed to, and what happens when you pursue that edge without fear. Nothing else.

  In the warm-up area before the race, Bob and Meb don’t speak of any of this. They barely talk at all. “Just another little race,” Bob tells Meb with a wink. There is no need for any last-minute reminders. Meb knows everything he needs to know. He knows to keep an eye on the Italian Stefano Baldini, who has a proven record of running strong in the heat. It’s in the low 80s as race time approaches. There is nothing more to say.

  As Meb goes to the start, finally discarding the vest, Larsen loads into a van for coaches that will take him to the 10-mile mark. He will wait there for his one live glance at Meb during a race they have worked for a decade to reach.

  As he stands at the side of the course a little less than an hour later, Larsen begins to see the lead pack approaching. They are cruising over that historic route at faster than five minutes per mile, a time that seems inhuman to most for even one mile, much less 26. Then, he spots Meb, just behind them, trudging along. Meb may not be the most beautiful runner, but he is right where Larsen wants him to be, tucked just behind the lead pack, right where no one can see him coming.

  “Perfect!” Larsen says to his charge.

  Meb flashes a thumbs-up and a smile. Larsen does the same. Then Meb is gone.

  It really is perfect, Larsen thinks, the kind of perfect that exists out there at the very edge of sanity, which is actually a place that is not very insane at all. This is where Larsen has always landed during this never-ending quest…the elusive perfect he has spent a lifetime searching for. Always, the closer he gets to it, the further it stretches out of reach. Or does it? As Larsen watches Meb and the lead pack disappear down the road, he wonders if he’s finally found it.

  ONE

  Bobcat

  Central Minnesota, 1951

  Bob Larsen can’t remember a time when he didn’t run.

  During the first dozen years of his life, a life on the farm in the lake country of Minnesota, he runs because he has to. Here, much of Bob’s life involves figuring out the fastest way to get from point A—his home in the woods—to point B. Sometimes he saddles his horse, but more often than not, he arrives at the same answer—running. He runs to school. He runs to his friends’ houses. He runs because his family’s log cabin and farm are a two-mile trek on a narrow lane to the closest road. That road is a dirt road. So is the 15-mile route to Detroit Lakes, the closest town. Down that road is the rest of the world—school, and friends, the closest stores, none of which are very close at all.

  The nearest friends are three miles away. His one-room school, with one teacher for all eight grades, heated with a wood stove, is two and a half miles from the cabin. A general store is even farther. When Bob is nine, his mother teaches school a few miles into the hinterlands. She brings Bob and his sister, LaDonna, with her in the family coupe. On the way, they pick up a few Native American kids from the White Earth Reservation who only rarely attended school in the past. They are older and bigger than Bob and LaDonna but in the same grade. Everyone wedges into the coupe and bounces along the dirt road to the schoolhouse.

  At recess, the children run through the woods playing cowboys and Indians, climbing trees and hiding in the branches, covering long distances by moving as quickly as they can, then trekking back when the school bell rings. Bob almost always chooses to be an Indian. The Native American kids usually play the cowboys. They chase each other all around the land near the school. No one can catch Bob.

  The next year Bob and LaDonna return to their regular school. In the afternoons, they often hustle home on a shortcut through the woods along the shores of the lake and streams on the edge of the neighboring game refuge. There are deer and foxes and turtles. If they get hungry they stop to pick wild berries and chokecherries.

  Their farm is roughly 600 acres, with decent farming conditions, though not as good as the pricier land farther to the south. The soil is rich, and there are wide, level expanses. Half the land remains wooded, but there is still plenty of space to grow alfalfa, corn, and wheat every summer, and occasionally potatoes and other crops. Bob’s mother has a large vegetable garden. In the fall, she cans the vegetables so her family can eat them through the long winter. They raise cattle—milk cows and calves, bulls and steers. They also have pigs, sheep, chickens, and a few turkeys kicking around. One gets slaughtered for Thanksgiving, another a few weeks later for Christmas. They have horses to ride and horses to plow. Bob owns a horse. He pays $90 of his own money for it, money he earned selling baby pigs at the county fair. With the exception of the milk cows, the number of animals they raise depends on the expected price of the meat at the market in Detroit Lakes, where they rent space in a freezer, store some of their meat for sale and some for personal use. On the farm all they have is an icebox. They cut the ice for the icebox out of the lake using hand saws during the winter. The plow horses pull the ice cakes onto the shore and up to the barn. They cover the ice with sawdust, which keeps it for the summer.

  When B
ob was young he helped milk the cows by hand twice a day. Eventually, his family gets a milking machine. They drink this milk, raw. It is rich and thick. So is the butter they churn from it, and the ice cream his grandfather makes with the hand crank during the summer.

  Their cabin sits about thirty meters from Buffalo Lake, which is almost entirely surrounded by woods, creating an intense sense of a family alone in the wilderness. There is also a pond in the middle of the property. Run to the other side of the farm and the shoreline of another lake appears. Minnesota.

  Bob runs to get from the cabin to the barn, to round up the cows for milking twice a day. He runs to get to the fields, and sometimes to go into the woods to explore and to find wild berries. Every day he shovels manure, and during the winter, snow. Muscles take root in his upper back. Before he was eight years old, he learned to drive the team of horses pulling a wagon or a sled. None of this is easy, but it is the only life he knows—all farm kids do this sort of physical work daily, the kind that pushes them to the edge of exhaustion. And there is a payoff. They get strong from it. The strength makes them confident, and when they are challenged they believe they will have an advantage over kids who don’t grow up on farms.

  For Bob Larsen, this sense of physical superiority drawn from hard work will never go away. He will learn how to use it for himself and to pass it down to runners he turns into champions. He will feel it when he runs with the bulls in Pamplona. He understands bulls, he understands work, he understands self-reliance, and he understands how to move quickly using only the power of his legs.