Running to the Edge Read online

  They are perfect training partners. Dave, the miler, is lightning on the track intervals. Dale, who is morphing into a true distance specialist, hammers on the roads. On the track Dave leads, with Dale right on his tail. On the roads, it’s Dale in front with Dave just off his shoulder. On those 10-mile bay loops, their goal is to go out so hard that they drop the rest of the pack as they hit the Hilton Hotel on the waterfront roughly halfway through.

  They win the large-school team championship with little trouble. Dale knows this title doesn’t help him much. Dave, whose mile time hovers just above four minutes, has plenty of come-ons from top colleges. John Chaplin from Washington State has hooked him. Dale still needs to get to nine minutes.

  He enters an open meet at Balboa Stadium where he thinks he can run fast enough to qualify for the San Diego Indoor Championship, a winter race where Fleet believes he will be in top form. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. A big kid like him should struggle on the tight turns of an indoor track. But running in front of a crowd of more than 10,000 fans that will be on top of him at the cozy San Diego Sports Arena should bring him home. That’s what he believes, anyway, and belief is what matters.

  Before the qualifying race at Balboa Stadium, teammate Mark Novak, the guy who never runs a step unless Anderson tells him he has to, asks Dale how fast he plans to run. Dale tells him 9:10. Novak rolls his eyes. He doesn’t say the words, but he might as well. A boy can dream.

  The next time Dale hears Novak’s voice it’s coming from the infield as he burns through the first mile in 4:34. Novak and the rest of the team are beside themselves. Dale’s lost his mind, and gone out too fast, they’re telling each other. As far as they know, Dale is still the guy who lumbers through a two-mile race on a track in 10 minutes. Those are high school tracks though. He’s at Balboa Stadium in front of a crowd that numbers in the thousands. He is flying. He’s never felt this fast in his life. He crosses in 9:11. That’s good enough to qualify for the San Diego Indoors, and it’s close enough to let him believe, really believe, that a sub-nine two-mile time can be his, that he will escape his home.

  This is where Dave’s speed becomes vital. Needing those last seconds, Dale spends one more month hammering intervals and 10-mile bay loops with Dave. Dave knows his job here—to make Dale work as hard as he has ever worked, to stay with him to make his legs turn over faster than they ever have.

  When Dale arrives at the starting line at the San Diego Sports Arena for the indoor championship, there are 12,000 people in the building. They are so close and so loud, the noise feels like a blanket. It’s the kind of noise that lifts you up instead of weighing you down. It isn’t at all like the noise he’s been trying to escape at home this past year, though it is one last reminder of what’s on the line—a ticket out. The track is 160 yards around. That’s 11 laps to a mile. Dale hears the sound of the gun, and then everything goes quiet. Over the next 22 laps, that silence breaks only twice. A runner nearly crashes midway through and there is one of those decibel-crushing roars of fear that nearly breaks Dale’s concentration. Then, leading in the final straightaway, he hears the public address announcer scream, “He’s going to break nine minutes!” A step after the finish line, Dale turns to glance at the scoreboard—8:58.6. Dale Fleet is free.

  Before the week is out, John Chaplin, from Washington State, reaches out to him. Then Chaplin flies down to San Diego and offers Dale an escape hatch. Chaplin isn’t the only one. Kansas invites Dale to visit. Every young runner leaps at the chance to visit Jim Ryun’s alma mater. Dale wants to stick with Dave, though, and heads to Washington State.

  As school ends and summer begins, Dale and Dave and the rest of the Clairemont crew do not relent. With two teammates heading to Washington State they feel real. Chaplin had made it clear to them they are going to be a part of something big and new. Chaplin has connections in East Africa. He’s got Kenyans like Henry Rono and John Ngeno on the way. No one in the U.S. has ever heard of them but soon everyone will know who they are. Dale and Dave don’t know a lot about African running, but they know enough about champions like Abebe Bikila and Kip Keino, the reigning Olympic 1,500 gold medalist to know that Chaplin isn’t messing around. So every day, they gather at one of their buddies’ houses to head out on those loops around the bay. When the running is done, they nap in the sun and shoot pool and enjoy the simplicity of being eighteen and fast.

  There is one last local race before they head off to college, the Balboa 8, the day when all the runners in the region try to show off the work they’ve put in all summer. The race has its individual winners but also a team competition, scored like any other cross country race, where the few clubs that exist go against each other. There’s a bunch of guys with the San Diego Track Club who want the Clairemont crew to run with them from here on out. Dale and Dave and the rest of them don’t want to do that though. They’ve got two top Division I recruits and enough firepower to give the runners from the SDTC, and the military team and that cocky crew from Jamul A.C. that Bob Larsen coaches, a run for their money one day. They want their own club.

  So what the hell should we call ourselves? they wonder. For this crew, running is equal parts competition and rebellion, a way to excel but also the thing they do because just about everyone else believes it’s nuts. Their name has to embody that. Once they reach that conclusion, there really is only one possible name. At every meet, their guy Novak, the guy who disdained training miles but somehow always managed to score near the top, would survey the competition. Then he’d pick out a target and declare, “That guy is slow as a toad.” There it is, they decide. This group from Clairemont becomes the “Toads.”

  On race day it doesn’t matter what Dale and his buddies call themselves. With a mile to go in the race, he passes this runner with dark, closely cropped hair. The guy has that stride that looks like it’s been through a few races before. He’s familiar, and for just one moment Dale thinks of something other than the finish line. A year ago Dale couldn’t break 10 minutes for two miles. Now he knows he’s got this race in the bag. He’s on his way to breaking the tape in 41:55 on a brutal, hilly course. The highlight, though, happens roughly four minutes before the finish as he passes that guy with the dark hair and sweet, but slowing stride. “Holy shit,” he says to himself as he realizes that guy he just blew by has the 10,000-meter gold medal from the 1964 Olympics in his sock drawer, “I just passed Billy Mills.”

  The next time he races he will be 1,500 miles from home.

  Kirk

  No matter his age, or what stage of his life he is in, when Kirk Pfeffer ties his shoes and takes his first steps on a run in the first light of the day, he is an eight-year-old boy once again.

  As a little boy Kirk is an early riser, always up by six in the morning, well before anyone else in his childhood home in San Diego’s East County. He can hear the birds chirping outside. And that smell, the blossoms. There is always something blooming in San Diego, something new that mixes with the scents of eucalyptus and the salty sea air—sagebrush, juniper, hibiscus. As soon as he is out of bed he wants to be in it, running through the scents. So he laces up his tennis shoes, quietly steps out his door, and he begins to run. Just down and around the block on Ridgeview Drive, enough to become immersed in the dewy morning blossoms. He does not run far. He’s only eight, after all.

  The running comes so easily to him. He doesn’t tire. At John Marshall Elementary School one afternoon he hears students boasting about a boy who ran 20 laps around the schoolyard without stopping. The next day at lunch, he runs 40 laps around that same yard. He is still running when the bell signaling the end of lunch rings. He ignores it and keeps on running as the yard empties. Several minutes later, a teacher comes out to fetch him. It’s time for class. Bummer. He would have run all afternoon.

  Kirk’s father is a parts buyer for an airplane manufacturer. There isn’t much extra money for summertime activities. The
re is a world-famous zoo in San Diego though. The zoo is Kirk Pfeffer’s favorite place in the world. He is at peace there, walking anonymously among the panda bears and the flamingos and the tourists from all across the country.

  Even better, during the summers kids get in for free. It’s not very close to the Pfeffer home. It’s about four miles, but Kirk doesn’t see this as a problem. He can run there. He takes a quarter from a jar of change. That will get him a bag of peanuts that will sate him for the day. He sets off and a little more than half an hour later he cruises through Balboa Park and into the gates of the zoo. He wanders, stares at the

  birds and the bears and the monkeys for a few hours. He eats his bag of peanuts. In the afternoon, he sets off for home, running once again.

  Just like Bob Larsen when he was a boy in northern Minnesota, Kirk Pfeffer learns that running is a very good way to get from here to there. In middle school, a friend tells him if he shows up at Jack Murphy Stadium during the second half of Chargers football games, the ushers will let him in for free. He tries this one Sunday afternoon, running three miles from his home to the stadium. He watches the fourth quarter, then runs home. He has neglected to tell his family about this plan, and as Sunday evening rolls in the Pfeffers have no idea where their son is. When Kirk finally sprints up Ridgeview Drive, his father is waiting on the porch for him. He’s not happy, though he realizes his son is going to do what he is going to do. He’s going to run. Let us know where you are going next time, he tells him. And please be careful.

  At first Pfeffer runs because he is good at it and it does get him from point A to point B. He knows he can keep going fast when others falter. Then, even as a child, he begins to understand it as an expression of who he is. Just like the rest of those who found their way to Bob Larsen—misfits and Toads alike—before he even realizes, Kirk defines himself by the miles in motion. His quest becomes his identity. Other boys are loud and rambunctious, always yelling and pushing each other. Kirk finds comfort in quiet. He rarely feels a need to be social. He plays Pop Warner football for two years. He’s not a bad defensive back. But the laps around the field at the end of practice, the thing the other boys dread, is the part of the game he likes most.

  Kirk’s father actually thinks his son’s running fetish is pretty cool, if a bit weird. He doesn’t discourage it. To show his support, he takes Kirk down to Crosswalk Sporting Goods, across from Hoover High School, and he buys Kirk a pair of adidas, the white ones with the black stripes. Given the mileage Kirk piles up and his tendency to pronate, he goes through shoes about every three weeks. Before very long, Kirk will have tried out nearly every model of adidas running shoe that exists, even one that is made of kangaroo hide. They are all basically the same boxy thing, without much in the way of arch technology or padding. No matter.

  When Kirk is a sophomore at Crawford High School, he tells his dad he wants to give this race called the Mission Bay Marathon a go. His father drives him to the start line near the water. Kirk thinks running a marathon will be a cool adventure. He’s never actually been real tired at the end of a run, so who knows how far he can go. The course travels two laps around Mission Bay and ends near the beach. Twenty miles in, like every first-time marathoner, Kirk wonders what he has gotten himself into. The sun is relentless. He can feel the blisters forming on his feet. He trudges on, finishes in 3:01. He doesn’t see his father at the finish line, so he wanders around, then decides to collapse on the beach, on the other side of the seawall and boardwalk. His father finds him sleeping there an hour later. Time to go home.

  His family’s home backs up onto a canyon and a dry riverbed. He runs alongside it as far as it goes, far beyond where the new housing developments of the sprawling city give way to the brown and green hills that lead out to the Capitan Grande Reservation. He finds a steep, 50-yard incline behind his house. When he is bored in the late afternoons, he laces up his track spikes and sprints up the hill over and over. He runs back and forth to school, three miles each way, wearing his backpack.

  He joins the track team at Crawford High and finds a kindred spirit in an assistant track coach named Dan Matheny. Matheny and his brother ran for Bob Larsen during Larsen’s early years. He likes to take small groups of runners to the hidden parts of the city. One Friday, he tells them to meet in late afternoon in Balboa Park. He tells them to bring a flashlight. When they arrive they learn why. Matheny leads them on a descent into an oversized sewer pipe. He tells them to turn on their flashlights and run. They have to hunch down to avoid banging their heads.

  Pfeffer, who is long and lean, with wiry limbs and a birdlike neck, has to hunch more than the others. He doesn’t care. They can’t run very quickly even though they want to. The lights show the cockroaches and other creatures crawling on the walls of the pipe. The pipe runs for more than a mile under downtown San Diego. Eventually, they arrive at a manhole cover. Matheny pushes it open and the runners emerge into the evening light. They can see diners sitting on the deck at Anthony’s Fish Grotto on the waterfront. Kirk thinks this is one of the greatest runs he has ever been on.

  When he isn’t leading them through sewers, Matheny drags them into the eastern hills and has them run from one water tower to the next. There is no cut trail to follow. Just spot your destination and get there. He sends them up mountains and across golf courses, through the flumes and over the old stagecoach roads near Jamul where Bob Larsen once took him. Matheny has one rule on these runs—no shoes. The Mexican Indians who first ran this landscape didn’t wear shoes, so why should Kirk Pfeffer and the boys from Crawford.

  In 1973, the summer after his junior year in high school, when Kirk is sixteen, he meets a runner named Richard Bernard at an all-comers meet he paid $3 to get into. Bernard is a few years older and lives near the beach. He tells Pfeffer about a group of hard-core runners in the neighborhood who call themselves the Toads. They run mornings on the weekends and evenings during the week. The two big guns on the Toads are a couple of guys from Washington State named Dave Harper and Dale Fleet.

  By this time, Dale and Dave have spent two mostly frustrating years in Pullman, Washington. Things started badly when they showed up with their long hair and Dale sporting a mustache. The athletic department told them to shave and find a barber. They refused, and thanks to a similarly shaggy teammate named Tim “Hawk” Robinson, who took the fight to the school administration, they didn’t have to. Dale and Dave kept their hair the way they wanted, but they soon realize there are really two track teams at Washington State, one for Africans and one for Americans.

  The Africans get coach John Chaplin’s attention. They are the Kenyan and Ethiopian transplants that Chaplin has convinced to come to the U.S. to attend school. He believes they are the future of distance running, though no one is exactly sure how old they are or what academic credentials they may or may not have. The Americans are left largely on their own and told to pound out miles in the spirit of the former Cougar phenom Gerry Lindgren. Lindgren was famous for his 150-mile weeks and for setting a series of American and college records in the mid-1960s at distances that ranged from 3,000 to 10,000 meters.

  Do what Gerry did, Dale and Dave are told. It’s also bitter cold out there near the Idaho border. There are really only two decent loops—northeast along Airport Road or south down Johnson Avenue. Dale and Dave helped the Cougars to top-three finishes at cross country nationals in 1971 and 1973, but they spend many months in Pullman looking forward to their ventures home to San Diego, a return to those warm loops around Mission Bay with their beloved Toads.

  Pfeffer joins the Toads one night, and for the first time he learns what it means to really hammer a training run, to spend three or four miles warming up and then to bear down and raise the pace for the next five or six or eight miles, to use every ounce of strength to stay with or even push the pack, help the group get to the edge. As bad luck would have it, the Pfeffers have just moved thirteen mil
es northeast that summer to Santee. No matter. Kirk gets a bicycle, rides to the beach to meet the Toads, hammers out a 10-mile run, and rides home.

  Dale and Dave and their buddy Mike Breen and the rest of the Toads have never encountered anyone quite like Kirk before. He is a metronome in motion, an absolute machine. The farther he goes, the stronger he gets. One night, after a workout, after Kirk has hopped on his bike to head home, the Toads gather to discuss whether Kirk is a guy who runs with them or whether he is a true Toad. Traditionally, only Clairemont High School guys have been full-fledged Toads. But here’s Kirk, as dedicated a runner as any of them. He’s also got a spirit that sends them hammering miles for hours around the bay or barefoot on the beach or through the hills as hard as they ever have. He’s also riding his bike some 30 miles a day to do it.

  With the Balboa 8 mere weeks away, the Toads desperately want to beat those Jamul A.C. guys from the East County—Mendoza and Lux and Cotton and the rest of them. They sure could use Kirk. He’s a true original. He’s a Toad, they agree. End of discussion.

  August 1973, Balboa Park

  Dale and Dave have a plan. It’s pretty simple. They are going out hard on this Balboa 8. They know those boys from Jamul A.C. are flying high. They’ve got their state championship. Mendoza is headed to Arizona. Lux has a ride to Oregon. Terry Cotton runs angry. If the Toads are going to take this thing, they have to send a message early. They are going out strong and building the kind of lead that demoralizes the competition, a lead that makes the guys behind you wonder early in the race if they are going to simply lose or if the competition will humiliate them.