Running to the Edge Page 12

  He does enjoy the moment, but before very long Larsen’s mind will drift to next season’s challenges and then to something far bigger. Something preposterous but not beyond the realm of possibility. Larsen’s secret sauce has finally come together after a decade of pursuit. Eventually, he is going to want to take aim at something larger, maybe even one of the biggest races his fledgling sport has—the Amateur Athletic Union’s Cross Country National Championships. Other than that marathon in Boston, it’s the one race the country’s top runners circle on their calendars. (The New York Marathon is still in its infancy—a small group of runners circling Central Park four times.) The fancy clubs in New York and Boston and Colorado and Florida pull in the ringers for it. It may seem whimsical here at this junior college championship, but there will come a time when, in his mind’s eye, he will be able to see a group that would include the best guys on this team, the core of his little group from the Jamul A.C., going for the national crown.

  This isn’t something that gets talked about. Everyone who has doubted him all these years would probably say he’s really cracked. Junior college championships are one thing. A nice little achievement for him and his kids. But a national championship against the fastest men in the country? That’s just silly.

  Or is it? Bob’s got Ed and Terry and Tom. All he might need down the line is a few more horses.

  Or maybe some Toads.

  Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1992

  When I first move here from New York, to a land that feels far more foreign than the handful of foreign countries I have been to, I run because it’s the only time during the day when I feel like myself.

  Every other waking minute I am an alien in what is for me a very strange land. Here, the only way to get a copy of the Sunday New York Times is to line up at the drugstore on Dickson Street around two in the afternoon, when the guy in the pickup truck brings the fifty copies that get flown in from Little Rock. But the sweet tea and chicken-fried steak are magical. (Who knew there were people who pound and bread and then deep-fry steak?) The bagels are awful and the pizza is terrible. I came here after graduating from Union College for grad school in creative writing and to make myself uncomfortable. For better or worse, mission accomplished.

  I learn that sometimes the day grows hotter at twilight, something about the way the humidity surges as the sun drops that I will never understand, though my sweat glands do. Have you ever had the sensation of sweat pooling in your eyeballs at 8:45 in the evening?

  I learn what it means to run hills. Real abductor-crushing hills. The tree-covered Ozark Mountains this city is nestled into are no joke. They are long and high, and the higher they go the steeper they get. I also learn, although this I kind of knew, that there are plenty of runners here. The University of Arkansas is home to one of the great track programs. That runner who passes you on your way up the hill, or zips by you on the track? Take a mental snapshot. You may very well see him or her on the Olympic telecast from Barcelona this summer.

  Sometimes I end my runs down at the college track, because that’s where the folks going to the Olympic trials in June always end up. As I stretch on the infield, I notice a triple jumper who looks like he is flying as he practices that ballet-like hop-skip-and-jump. This is Mike Conley, the world’s top triple jumper, a few months before he takes the gold medal in Barcelona.

  There is another reason I end at the track. It begins to happen more often than not as the year goes on, after I’ve looped back from West Mt. Comfort Road where, when no cars are buzzing by, you can hear the Hamestring Creek trickling through the trees. It’s the same reason why my runs are stretching longer here, going from 6 to 8, to 10 or 11 miles. It’s why sometimes, on days when I am done with classes by mid-morning, I might head out for a short run before lunch, and then for another later in the afternoon.

  Yes, I have an idea that I want to run my first marathon in the fall, in New York or Washington, D.C. But the real reason is the running keeps me away from my studio apartment, up on the hill above the track and the rest of the athletic facilities. There, things aren’t so good. It’s where my girlfriend-of-the time is whiling away the days and weeks and months before she starts graduate school back east in the summer.

  It’s my fault that things with us are crappy as much as it is hers. We’re not near ready for this cohabitation thing. We don’t know this before it’s too late, but we are not much more than a security blanket for a couple of early twenty-somethings who are lost and lonely after college. It’s a relationship that should have ended a few nights after graduation. Instead, we’re nine months past that, and disliking each other more and more each day.

  There’s no good guy or bad guy here. We’re both just young and stupid and careless and not old enough to know how precious the time is. I’m supposed to be spending my free time writing the great American novel. Instead I run. She’s supposed to be catching up on some education research. Instead she smokes a lot of pot. She’s stoned from mid-morning, pretty much straight through the night, probably trying to escape the same stuff I am, just through another means.

  There’s a day when I confront her, tell her it looks like she’s addicted to a bunch of chemicals. So, she says, you’re addicted to running, and all those chemicals that get released in your body when you do it, those endorphins. Isn’t that the same thing?

  I don’t think it is, but I also don’t know what I don’t know—that she’s likely more right than wrong here. We go back and forth for a while on this one. At some point there’s a lull. She rolls a joint. I lace up my shoes. Another couple months like this. Then we’re done.

  The Birth of the Toads

  Bob Larsen has a coach’s wandering eye.

  There are runners in and around San Diego that he would love to bring into his fold but can’t. Rules are rules. If they are out of his district he can’t bring them in. That doesn’t mean he can’t look at them and think about what might be if, by some stroke of luck, they moved across the district lines, or if he ever got the chance to pull together a team that represented this whole San Diego area, with its odd cluster of raw material, of guys who just keep popping up out of the woodwork with fast legs and big sets of lungs. These are guys like Dale Fleet and Dave Harper and Kirk Pfeffer. The names aren’t even all that important. It’s what they represent—that idea, that willingness to run united by a single principle of seeking out the edge of what might be possible, peering over it, and then taking a fearless leap.

  Two years earlier

  University City, San Diego, Summer 1970

  Dale

  The breaking point comes in the shower, with the hot water flowing down over Dale Fleet’s linebacker-sized shoulders. Dale is a big kid. Legs up to his rib cage, pushing 6'4", big face, big forehead, soon a big mustache. He’s also got his daily, massive headache from all the noise carrying up the stairs from the living room of his mom and stepdad’s too-small house six miles inland from the peaceful ocean breezes of Pacific Beach. The noise of the fights between his mother and stepfather is becoming unbearable.

  It’s like this every night. Has been for a while now. Dale’s stepdad is not a bad guy. Carlton Pippin is his name. Dale’s mother met him four years before, after she returned to San Diego with Dale from their four-year sojourn in Washington. The venture north followed the breakup of her first marriage, to Dale’s dad. That one happened when Dale was a small boy. His memories of it are dim, though he does recall all the noise that came before it. It sounded a lot like it does now.

  On the other hand, Dale’s father is lucky to have made it to that marriage. Drafted for Korea, he was assigned to a Marine division that was scheduled to head across the Pacific during the first year of the war. Just before those orders came through, someone noticed Private Fleet was just about the best swimmer around. He’d been a lifeguard on San Diego’s beaches and part of a group of early scuba divers. The “San Diego Bottom Scratchers
Club,” they called themselves. They were famous for swimming far offshore and emerging from the waters with abalone, broomtail grouper, and the occasional 150-pound giant sea bass. So instead of shipping out to Korea, Private Fleet became a drill instructor responsible for teaching marines how to swim. Lucky for him. The rest of his platoon got wiped out in the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in the fall of 1950.

  When the Marines were done with him, he joined the local fire department and lived in Pacific Beach. By 1953 he had a wife and a son.

  Dale’s mother had plenty of positive qualities, but she was tough on her men. The ability to accept their shortcomings was not one of her redeeming traits. By the time Dale was seven, the booze his dad was drinking to numb the criticism no longer did the job. He was finished. So was the marriage.

  Now Dale is hearing history repeat itself. His mom and Carlton Pippin get into it when Pippin comes home with his 99-cent six-pack. He drinks Brew 102, the proud, crap lager out of Los Angeles. It never gets physical, but for Dale, the noise is so loud, so disconcerting, it feels like an assault, even when he is upstairs, in the shower, with the water pounding on his back. That’s when he realizes he’s got to get out of here. He’s got to get a track scholarship to some college far away.

  There is one big problem. Dale Fleet is nowhere near fast enough to earn a track scholarship. Sophomore year he was no better than the seventh-fastest guy on his high school cross country team. Junior year he was maybe the fourth-best on a team that came in third in the regional championships. His best mile time is 4:26. His best two-mile time is 10:03. Pretty good, but to get a college scholarship Dale is going to need to convince college coaches he can run even faster over a longer distance, since collegiate cross country races are at least four miles. Also, something happens to Dale in the second half of a second mile. His chest tightens. His legs turn to rubber, no longer able to spring across the trails or dirt and clay running tracks. San Diego’s other top high school distance runners pass him by. He feels as if he is running backwards.

  He’s never been all that big on training. The rest of the guys on the team live in Clairemont, several miles west. They run together there sometimes. He’s up in University City, a hike away from the group. For Dale, there is no easy solution. One guy on his team, Mark Novak, never runs a step in the off-season. Yet, he’s somehow always in front of Dale at the finish. Fletcher Thorton spends summers on his surfboard. Dale has a view of his backside during races, too. Dale knows he is not a natural. He knows he’s got to train like he has never trained before to escape. Then, maybe he can get fast enough to get the hell out of San Diego and away from his mom and stepdad’s miserable marriage.

  There, in the shower he begins to think about numbers. The times for his splits, the distances of each workout, his mile time, his two-mile time. Then he comes upon the big number—800. That’s how far he is going to run this summer, because he has decided that if he logs at least 800 miles in the dry, breezy heat of a San Diego summer then he is going to be able to run fast enough during one final glorious high school year to get a track scholarship and get the hell away from home.

  That’s about 90 miles a week, for nine weeks, anywhere from 5 to 15 miles a day. He will figure out some routes on the hot pavement that surrounds him. It’s 8 miles from his house to Clairemont High and back. That’s a decent loop. If he wants to go long, he can stretch it out to Mission Bay and loop around the water. There’s a dusty, man-made landmass in the middle of Mission Bay named Fiesta Island. The handful of folks that do run in San Diego can often be found there, trudging around its three-mile circular roadway.

  This will be a lonely endeavor though. Fiesta Island is roughly two miles but a world away from Pacific Beach, where the rest of Clairemont High School’s rising seniors are whiling away the summer. Few will understand what Dale Fleet is doing. Kids have run track for decades, but train in the off-season, and through the summer? Is this really the way a seventeen-year-old is supposed to be spending his time?

  It will have to be. To be considered for a scholarship Dale is going to have to get close to nine minutes for two miles, more than a minute faster than he has ever run. At his pace, that means he’s going to have to be roughly four football fields faster over those two miles than he is right now. That’s a lot of yardage to make up. He’s going to have to knock 10 or 15 seconds off his mile time, too. He really has no right to believe he can do this, but he does, if only because he still possesses the occasionally valuable stupidity of youth, and he can remember not so long ago, in middle school, what it felt like to be faster than just about anyone else.

  He has run regularly ever since he began winning races in gym class at Taft Middle School. The only break came during his sophomore year when he pulled a D in algebra and his stepdad yanked him off the track team. No racing, no training, until he got his grades up. It was a brutal period. All he wanted to do was run. That’s how he feels now, standing there in the shower, the noise from downstairs still rising through the house. He can’t wait to run.

  Over the next weeks, Dale pushes to his limits on the roads of University City and Clairemont, on Fiesta Island, and around Mission Bay. It’s brutal work, but that is the point, and as the summer progresses his feet begin to lighten. He is getting faster. He knows this. He wears a watch, and watches never lie. The blessing of youth also provides seemingly endless powers of recovery. He runs mid-morning and in the evening after dinner. Dale Fleet has happened on the discovery that every talented runner needs to arrive at if he wants to race with the strongest competition—to run far fast, he needs to practice running far fast.

  He needs to learn how to run fast when his lungs tighten and tell him to stop. Ignoring the pain from exhaustion is impossible. It will always be there, but it needs to not matter. It needs to become a signal that he has reached the edge and it’s time to push even faster. Sometimes, when it really hurts, he thinks of the noise that sounds like it’s going to bust the walls in his house. That helps. He also knows that when this summer of solitary torture ends, he will not have to run alone. He’ll get to run with his buddy Dave Harper. That helps, too.

  Dave

  Dale Fleet knows no matter how hard he trains there is one runner he may never catch. Dave Harper is the closest thing there is to a prodigy at Clairemont High. Running has always come so easily to him. He was the fastest kid in his neighborhood when he and his buddies timed one another’s laps around the block. He was the fastest kid in his elementary school on those 600-yard heats that were part of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test. In junior high, his father, a no-nonsense medic who served in the 1st Marine Division on Guadalcanal, entered him in an open mile race for his age group. Dave ran away from the field and won that race in 4:53. Dave’s mother and siblings never came to watch him run. His father was always there, looking on from the bleachers. He never said much when the races were over, even when Dave won, which he almost always did.

  Dave’s father favors structure, demands punctuality, and is not easily impressed. For his son, the long and lanky and prodigiously fast David Harper, running is not complicated—it’s a desperate battle to impress his father. The desperation is never closer to the surface than when Dave is a sophomore in high school. His track coach is Art Anderson. Anderson played college football at Idaho and did stints in the NFL for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Chicago Bears. Anderson becomes Dave’s torturer-in-chief.

  The practice schedule for the rest of the team goes like this: Monday is endless 400s. Wednesday is endless 200s (200s are the Kansas phenom Jim Ryun’s favorites and in 1968 nearly every amateur track coach is making his kids do exactly what Jim Ryun is doing). Tuesday and Thursday are easy road runs. Fridays and Saturdays are for rest or races.

  For Dave Harper, Anderson schedules a 6:15 a.m. pickup in his beat-up Volvo. He wants Harper running four miles before school each morning under his supervision. He also keeps a clos
e watch on his afternoon intervals. When the rest of the team is merely trying to complete their twenty-eight 200s, Anderson is clocking Dave’s, making sure each of his are under 30 seconds. It works. In a dual meet against Kearny High School Dave’s sophomore year, he goes up against a senior named Chuck Ledbetter. Ledbetter carries the reputation as the best distance runner in the region. Dave sits on Ledbetter’s tail during a slow first mile, then jumps him on a straightaway in the second. He runs his second mile in 4:30 and holds off big-time competition for the first time. This is when Dave Harper realizes he just might impress his father one day.

  As juniors, Fleet and Harper and their teammates finish third in the regional cross country championships. When it ends, they promise one another they will finish first next year. So while Dale Fleet spends the summer counting to 800, hunting for those precious seconds to knock off his times, Dave and the rest of the team, who all live near each other in Clairemont, bang out miles through their own neighborhood. They’re a motley crew with long hair and mustaches, not like those straitlaced guys from the military or the San Diego Track Club. When they come together as school begins in the fall of 1970, there isn’t a team of high school runners around more ready to accomplish what they want.

  They still listen to Anderson and follow his workouts to a T (they have little choice). But they begin freelancing, too. They decide they want to hit 70 miles each week. Before school, they strap on 10-pound weighted vests and head out on the four-mile runs Anderson set up for Dave. They whip off five three-quarter-mile loops around the upper fields of their high school. They map out a 10-mile loop from their high school, down over the bridge that leads to the bay, around the bay and back. They make a pact to run it faster than 56 minutes every time. They run that loop three days a week. Some Saturdays they do it twice. Dale and Dave nearly always take the lead.