Running to the Edge Read online

  Larsen reads the letter again. Then he looks up at his runner. He tells Ed he wants him to go to every doctor he has ever seen about those stress fractures and shin splints. He needs to get a copy of every note they have ever written about him and every X-ray that has ever been taken of his lower limbs. He is going to take those notes and pictures with him when he goes to Los Angeles. He will show them to the military doctors.

  Ed listens, of course. Everyone always listens to Coach Bob. But this might be the most ridiculous idea he has ever heard. Ed Mendoza is one of the best runners in the country. He won nearly every race he entered last season, a state champion. He’s the favorite to win the state cross country championship in three months and he is a member of a team that is likely California’s best. He runs somewhere between 50 and 75 miles every week. Not fit for military service? He’s very likely the most fit candidate in his draft class. How are the doctors not going to see that?

  Say nothing, Larsen tells him. Don’t lie, but don’t volunteer any information either. Can you do that, the coach asks the runner. Part of him hates giving these instructions. What would his friend Mike Neil with his Navy Cross and Purple Heart think of this? Nothing good, he is sure of that. But it really has become a miserable, pointless war, and he does not want Ed to be a part of it. Also, basic training does require a lot of miles in Army boots. He’s pretty sure Ed will get hurt.

  Ed tells his coach he thinks it’s a ridiculous plan. Just do what I told you, Larsen says to him. These are facts, he says. You don’t have to say you’re an All-American runner. Show them these medical facts. Say no more.

  Ed does what Bob tells him to do. He spends the next several days gathering every medical record and X-ray he can find, all those pictures of what the inside of his lower legs looked like when he felt like the nails and the screws were digging into them, when the kid who could run two miles in under nine minutes could barely complete one lap around his high school track. On the appointed morning, he tucks the envelope with the records and the films into a bag and holds them close to his body as he rides the bus up to a big concrete building in Los Angeles where he reports for duty.

  The medical exams are among the first order of business. He sits in a room on a metal table. He hands a doctor his records. The doctor starts going through them, then excuses himself. He comes back with another doctor and the two begin to examine Ed. Then one of them leaves, only to return with another doctor. Before long there are five doctors surrounding Ed, poking and maneuvering his tibias to try to figure out what could be going on to make them look like such a mess in the film. One asks if he plays football. Another asks if he trips a lot. Another asks if he has a habit of banging his shins into wooden logs. All Ed says is that he runs a bit and when he runs this is what happens.

  No one talks for a moment. Everyone just sort of looks at one another trying to figure out what to do next. Finally someone, not Ed, speaks. It’s one of the doctors. “We call these march fractures,” he says. “With boots on you wouldn’t last a month in basic training.”

  Ed doesn’t shout or smile or scream or cry. His coach told him to say nothing. So he says nothing. “I’m going to classify you as IV-F,” the doctor says. Ed knows what this means. Every kid does in 1972. One of California’s top collegiate distance runners, maybe its best, is not qualified for military service.

  * * *

  —

  In the fall, Ed has company. In September, Tom Lux’s number comes up. His birthday, February 11, has drawn number 26 in the lottery. Unlike Ed, Tom has been thinking about this and has a plan. He has terrible vision and wears thick glasses. He thinks all he needs is an eye doctor to sign the right form to let the military know he is blind as a bat. Unfortunately his eye doctor believes when the military calls you for duty you serve. In his office, he points to a six-inch letter on the wall a few feet away. He tells Tom to say what the letter is. It’s impossible to get it wrong. Your eyes are fine, the eye doctor tells him, you are perfectly fit to serve.

  So Tom turns to Plan B, the Mendoza plan. He’s pretty sure it won’t work. He has had three stress fractures in his legs and feet over the years. He has the records and the film to prove it. Still, they don’t amount to the kind of file his buddy Ed presented over the summer. His fractures show up as calcium deposits and don’t look nearly as severe as Ed’s. They look like fuzzy white areas in the pictures, as if someone stuck a few cotton balls onto his shins before they put him in the X-ray machine. He’s not going to fool anyone, he thinks. He’s headed to the jungle.

  He rides the bus to Los Angeles, follows directions to the big building downtown. Then he waits. When it’s his turn to hop on the metal table for the exam, he gives his records to the doctor. The doctor looks at the records and looks at Tom. He brings in another physician for a consultation. They tell Tom he needs to come back the next day to see an orthopedist. All the kids who have some kind of out-of-the-ordinary medical condition that requires a follow-up exam have to do the same thing. The military puts them up in a hotel. It’s the second hotel Tom Lux has ever been in. The other one was with the team at the state championships the year before. What he wouldn’t give for another shot at something so simple as a state championship race right now.

  The next morning he heads back to the big concrete building and soon he is called to see the orthopedist. The doctor looks at the records. He examines the X-rays, then plays around with Tom’s shins a bit. Not good, he says. Tom says nothing about Arthur Lydiard, the Kiwi coach whose 100-mile-a-week training regimen he followed for much of the summer. He barely has time to. Before he knows it, the doctor has classified him IV-F, too.

  The reprieve comes so quickly, it’s almost anticlimactic. Tom finds it strange that the biggest moments of his life, the ones where his existence can head in one direction or go the opposite way, can feel so small. Like Ed Mendoza, Tom Lux is free to carry on with the rest of his days however he chooses. In the years since Larry Lux brought Tom to that basketball court and made his little brother run home, Tom has come to believe running saved his life. Now he knows it to be true.

  * * *

  —

  With the core of the team intact, Grossmont’s cross country season gets back on track in the fall of 1972. Terry Cotton brings that competitive tension to the group, just as Larsen knew he would. Once high school rivals, Ed and Tom and Terry train together every day. Or rather, Ed and Tom try to keep up with Terry, which is often hopeless. Always, they are chasing him. When they ask Terry why he runs like this, he explains that he simply can’t run any other way. They warn him that if he doesn’t ease up, those little tweaks in his Achilles and his calves are going to turn into serious injuries, but it does no good.

  With Terry on the team, Bob Larsen can count to eight: Terry, Ed, and Tom, plus Bob Wilson, Larry Stone, Joe Stubbs, Ed Kuehne, and Steve Israel. They go undefeated in their conference. In seven of eight races they score 15 points, sweeping the first five places. In three of those meets they take the first seven spots. Terry Cotton wins every race.

  Cross country is a bit like golf. Even Tiger Woods at his best can only win one of every three tournaments he enters. Certain terrain, like certain golf courses, is more suited to certain runners. Not everything can click every day. The body is so frail, the margins so thin, a sniffle, a bad night’s sleep, a nagging tweak in a tendon can lead to a slight drop-off that causes even the best runner to slip from first to fourth on any given day. And yet, Terry runs the table at the big races, too. He finishes first at the Long Beach Invitational, where he and Tom Lux are neck and neck at the end and decide to cross the finish line together. Then he wins the Moorpark Invitational, the Hancock Invitational, and the Mt. SAC Invitational.

  It’s not just Terry shining at these meets. Grossmont runs the table, too, taking first at Moorpark, Hancock, Long Beach, and Mt. SAC. They are making a mockery of the junior college competition. As always, at the end o
f every meet, Larsen wanders over to the scoreboard to study the times of the top four-year universities. Grossmont would have beaten all of them, too. His little junior college, which essentially collects kids from eight high schools, is the best distance team in California, and California is just about the biggest state in the country, with arguably the greatest collection of athletes in the land. Top to bottom, the Grossmont Griffins may be one of the best college cross country teams in the U.S.

  With three weeks to go before the state championships, Larsen brings his boys to the track. He tells them it’s time to sharpen their weapons. After months of grueling miles on the roads and through the canyons, they have all the endurance they need. It’s time to focus on speed. Terry, Tom, and Ed have a quick huddle. They want to do twelve 400s, each in 60 seconds. Larsen gives his blessing. One after another they begin to grind them out, their legs and lungs on fire. Each day they come closer and closer to the goal. At first they can sustain the roughly 60-second pace for three 400s, then it’s five, then seven, then eleven. Well, Terry can. Ed and Tom don’t quite have that speed.

  Ed is amazed. He has no idea that a body can get that much faster in such a short amount of time. His jet-black hair bounces off his shoulders with every step. Terry has been the better runner all season, but Ed has no intention of giving up his state championship without a fight. He is also beginning to experience what he thinks Terry experiences, that state of beautiful transcendence that exists just beyond the edge of total exhaustion, that place where Bob wants them to get to. That moment when the body feels as though it has nothing left to give, when everything is depleted, and then it discovers just a little more.

  For the Southern California Championship, the team heads to the College of the Canyons, on the edge of the Angeles National Forest, seventy miles north of Los Angeles. Fall rains pound the region all week and the day before the race officials have to scrap the usual course through the hills and design another one that loops around the school. There are no tricks, no sudden hills or crazy turns. It’s all there in front of them and the boys know this one is theirs. Ed and Tom and Terry push the pace from the start. By the final mile they have an 80-yard cushion. There is only one thing left to do. They all want to win, and they all will. No one has to say anything. They know they will cross the line together. They break the tape in 17:46. A kid from Bakersfield finishes next in 18:01. With Larry Stone in 7th and Ed Kuehne in 12th, the team finishes with 25 points. Bakersfield is 2nd with 75, and El Camino is 3rd with 77. It’s a wipeout.

  Once more, Larsen can see a state championship within his grasp. He knows his mistake from a year ago. His runners are so much more fit than everyone else. His task this year is to keep them loose, psyche them down rather than psyche them up. His usual string of “what-ifs”—those questions that force the boys to think about Plan B and Plan C—become a string of absurdities. What if Terry can’t break seven minutes for the first mile? What if Ed forgets how to put one foot in front of the other midway through the race? What if Tom decides to run the final mile backwards? The questions leave no doubt about their message—relax guys, we’ve got this.

  As they head out for the training run, Terry, who is usually so quiet, goes on and on about some bad apples he ate that caused him to tie his teammates in the league championship. Larsen likes this. He has no doubt that Terry and Ed are the two best runners in the state. If they are going at each other from the gun, watching for each other’s surges, making sure to cover each other’s moves, there is no way they can lose. One of them will, but only to the other, and if Grossmont goes 1-2 it’s going to be very hard for another school to win this championship.

  * * *

  —

  As the weekend approaches the team heads back north. Coincidentally, the state championships are also scheduled for the College of the Canyons, so two weeks after its triumph over southern California, the team is back in Santa Clarita. The rains have subsided. The race will take place on the traditional rolling cross country course. The night before, Larsen reminds the boys this won’t be the speed chase that the Southern California Championship was. Go ahead, push the pace he says, but no need to go crazy.

  In the back of the room, Terry Cotton sounds like he is coughing up half his lung. He’s been fighting a cold for days. Larsen scans the eyes of every one of his runners to see if they are thinking what he is—that they have worked so hard all season, beaten all comers only to arrive at the state championships with the star of their team battling a nasty cold. Will they all wake up the next morning with hacking coughs and mucus spewing from their lungs? How can he fix this? Should he quarantine Terry? He scans the room again. To a man, the runners seem to be barely noticing Terry’s hacks. Terry sleeps with the rest of the team.

  The only time Larsen senses any nerves with this crew is the next morning in the van over to the race. The razzing and verbal jousting that usually fill the bus rides are missing. An uncomfortable silence fills the room. Larsen knew this was coming. The Griffins run and compete like grown men but they are eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys, susceptible to all the frailties befitting those late teen years, when a person can seem twenty-five one moment and twelve the next. He is ready for this.

  As the boys pile out of the van, Larsen tells them to hold up before they head over to the officials’ tent to check in. Get in a line, we’ve got one more drill, he says. The boys do as they are told, leaving their bags that hold water bottles and Vaseline and rolls of tape by the van’s tires. When they are in a line Larsen tells them they need to practice exactly what they are going to do if things don’t go their way today.

  “Watch,” Larsen says. He leans one hand on the side of the van. He swings back his right foot ever so slowly. Then he brings it forward, as though he is giving a rock the lightest of kicks. As the foot grazes the dirt, he lets out an almost sarcastic “Aw, shucks.” He turns back to his team. He asks them if they got it. A few nod at him. The rest think he’s cracked. Are you sure, he asks? Let me show you again. The leg swings back, then forward. “Awww, shucks,” he says. “Now come on. Everyone over here by the van. We need to practice this.”

  This is not the time to start questioning the man’s methods. One by one, they take a few steps over to the van and kick the dirt together. “Come on now, say the words,” Larsen tells them, “Awwww shucks.” This goes on for a full minute or two. The boys are hoping no one can see them. No doubt they look like goofs. That is the point, to not take themselves or this race, or any race for that matter, too seriously. Don’t make it more than what it is. As they kick the dirt over and over, the pre-race banter returns. Time to run, Larsen tells them. We’re ready.

  As they walk over to the start area, Larsen has one more message to deliver. Like he always does, Ed is trailing the group. He’s small, and as he walks his short legs don’t cover as much ground as the rest of the team. That gives Larsen the chance to sidle up next to him. Larsen knows Terry will bring everything he has. He wants to make sure the reigning state champion does, too. “Remember Ed,” he says, “in the last half mile, no one passes you.”

  Ed tells Larsen not to worry. That last half mile is dead flat. “No one is going to pass me,” he says.

  On the start line, Ed is pretty certain a kid named Granillo from Bakersfield will bring the biggest challenge. Granillo finished fourth at the Southern California Championship behind the Grossmont threesome. Like any competitive runner would be, Granillo wasn’t really happy about how they turned that race into their own party. He assumes Granillo has placed a target on Ed’s and Terry’s backs.

  He is not wrong. Granillo is there at the end of the first mile and at the halfway mark of the four-mile race, too, as Ed and Terry push the pace across the rolling course. The third mile is where Ed is supposed to go, to build that cushion he needs to hold off the speed he knows Terry and maybe Granillo will bring to the finish. When he does go though, they go with him. Then, in
the last mile, Granillo slips from Ed’s peripheral vision. Ed knows it’s coming down to him and Terry. With a half mile to go, it’s now or never because he doesn’t have a prayer against Terry if this comes down to the last 150 yards. He starts a final surge, a furious blast that will last for 800 meters, or it won’t. The arms pump, the quads push and bang. He goes, and Terry doesn’t go with him. Ed stretches his lead over Terry to three and five and seven then finally nine seconds as he breaks the tape in 19:25. Ed Mendoza is a state champion once again.

  On the grass near the finish, Larsen barely bothers to do the math. He sees all those green and yellow Grossmont singlets so close to the front and he knows the championship is his. Griffins finish in places 1, 2, 11, 14, and 18 for 46 points. Second-place Mt. SAC is next at 102. L.A. Valley, with all those runners from all those high schools doing all those intervals all fall, doesn’t even crack the top five. Larsen’s Griffins, from those eight high schools in east San Diego, are so much better than everyone else it’s almost silly.

  Larsen wants to enjoy this moment for all it is. His top runner is the best in the state and so is his team. Terry won’t be happy. He will blame the loss—amazingly his first of his college career—on his bad-luck cold. That’s fine. He will get a chance to avenge it next season. Larsen’s team has won and he wants to be present, to be here taking in the decade-long journey to a collegiate championship. He knows there are going to be more, many more likely, until the rest of the world figures out the true value of running at the edge, of holding your hand over the candle and letting it begin to burn. There it is, the essence of Larsen’s way. Take that journey to a moment that feels dangerous. Then stay there. Make it last. Learn to find comfort in that space. Go there with a like-minded soul, so you are not afraid to push the edge out a little further on the next journey, to stay there a little longer, and then longer still. And faster. In this way, every mile, every second, becomes meaningful, because the longer you are there, the longer you believe you can stay, perhaps forever.