Running to the Edge Page 14
Those boys from the Jamul A.C., they are thinking about something else. This is their race. These guys with their fancy scholarships at Washington State aren’t going to beat them on their territory. Not today.
Who any of these guys are, their specific backgrounds, won’t eventually matter all that much—and certainly not to the local running guru watching from the side that day. What matters is their service to the principle that Bob Larsen has been trying to manifest, the idea that what is truly possible is somewhere in the neighborhood of what most people believe is impossible. That’s what gets them out on this starting line this morning and onto the streets or the trails or the track on every other one. They are chasing victory, but also the primal idea of doing what the body was meant to do, doing it beautifully and to its fullest extent, which are really the same thing.
When the pistol sounds, Dale and Dave sprint to the front. It’s a tricky course. The roughly 150 runners cover the roads and paths and grass fields and up and down the aptly named Zig-Zag Hill near the eastern edge of the park. All those turns give a leader an opportunity to disappear, to “run-and-hide” in runner speak. That’s exactly what Dale and Dave plan to do.
For 30 minutes the plan works. Dale and Dave are so far in front, they begin to wonder if the Jamul boys decided this is hopeless and dropped out. Kirk falls off first, and with two miles to go, Dale drops Dave and edges into the lead. When he feels like his cushion has grown comfortable, he steals a quick glance over his shoulder. That’s when he sees them, back there in the distance, those yellow and green singlets of the Jamul A.C. He realizes Mendoza and Lux are in pursuit.
Dale knows what to do here. Stay cool. Hold your form. Don’t panic. Only, he does panic. He turns back to Dave and screams as loud as he can, “They’re coming!”
With a half mile left, they come over the Cabrillo Bridge—nicknamed “Suicide Bridge” for its popularity as a death jump spot among so many San Diegans. Dave becomes its next victim. He’s done himself in with the too-fast start. Mendoza and Lux chew him up and spit him out. Passing the rococo, Spanish Colonial landmark known as the Museum of Man, Dale can feel the finish line edging closer, but he knows he’s got nothing left. This plan that he and Dave worked out, it’s all gone to shit.
With 300 yards to go Mendoza and Lux do the deed and pass him by. They even do that celebratory gentleman’s-tie thing, joining hands and finishing together in 41:12, shattering Billy Mills’s course record. Dale and Dave finish third and fourth. Their teammates are seventh and ninth, but it’s no consolation. They lost to Lux and Mendoza and they’re as bitter as runners can be.
Taking all this in, not far from the finish, is Bob Larsen. At the start of the day he was pretty sure this was the way this race would go. When summer began, and Tom was getting ready to go to Oregon and Ed was preparing to ship out to Arizona, Tom showed Ed a copy of the famous Lydiard book that touts the value of volume. In addition to all the threshold runs Larsen has been putting them through, Ed and Tom are well over more than 100 miles a week. They are in the best shape of their lives and they know it. No one was going to put them away early in this race.
What no one, not even Bob Larsen, realizes is that what has just transpired carries a larger meaning than just another win for the triumphant Tom and Ed and a dispiriting loss for Dale and Dave. Dale and Dave are the same age as Tom and Ed. They are only going to get faster. Then there’s Kirk Pfeffer, who now lives in Santee, a stone’s throw from Grossmont. Kirk runs with the Toads. If Larsen has anything to say about it, Kirk will be at Grossmont. The way he runs, that easy rhythm, Larsen is dead-certain the farther he goes the better he will be. Larsen has the freakish Terry Cotton for another year, too. Right there, in a ten-mile radius, are six of the best young runners in the country. One more would make seven—a full cross country team that chases the spirit of running in the manner of a dream.
Their times track to about 31 minutes for a 10K race, not all that far behind where the top guys finish at the Cross Country National Championships. These guys have work to do, the kind of work that very few others in the running game in 1973 are familiar with—pushing the pace the way Larsen would want them to. But maybe putting together a local collection of runners to take on the fancy athletic clubs at a national meet isn’t all that nutty after all.
September 7, 1996, Central Park, New York
I’m getting married at 6:30 tonight in North Salem, New York, about fifty miles north. Being the groom, there is not all that much for me to do before then. Even if there was, on this day of days, there is no way I am not going to run.
I don’t overdo it. Just the usual six-mile loop around Central Park. I live four blocks from the West 72nd Street entrance, the one across from the Dakota and next to Strawberry Fields. It’s always clogged with tourists trying to breathe the air where John Lennon took his last peaceful breaths. I don’t mind them at all. If I didn’t live here, I’d visit this spot, too.
It’s a little after nine in the morning when I turn south onto the Park Drive. Wouldn’t you know I am a little nervous and can’t sleep. The park is already hopping. The running lanes are filled with packs of training groups setting out on medium-long runs in preparation for the New York Marathon two months away. I’m running that one, too. It will be my first New York Marathon, and my fourth overall. In other words, I know enough to have gotten my long run out of the way earlier in the week, before the day I have to walk down an aisle and say “I do.”
I curl around the south end of the park, cruise past the Boathouse, fight my way up the hill behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Is it me or does it feel a little harder than usual today? I’m looking all around as I run, trying to take in the color of the sky (yellow-gray), the quality of the air (kind of heavy and sweaty), and all the people who pass me along the way (the most beautiful in the world, always). I keep telling myself when I next run this route I will be a married man.
I keep an eye out for Madonna. She runs in the opposite direction, wearing sunglasses and a hat and next to her bodyguard, though usually a little later in the morning. It’s also probably too early for a John Kennedy Jr. sighting. The unofficial prince of the city is usually zipping around here on his roller blades on the weekends. Even with the sunglasses, you know that hair and that jawline anywhere. There’s no bodyguard around him. No one ever bothers. He’s just another New Yorker out enjoying the park.
The Park Drive descends after it passes the reservoir on the East Side, winding into the edge of Harlem before turning sharply uphill for a quarter of a mile, just long enough to make the hill feel like real work, like preparation for something, like the ascents of the five bridges connecting the boroughs in the NYC 26.2. The Columbia cross country team is out here in the afternoons, running this hill over and over. It never looks fun. Then the road rolls up and down to the south edge of the reservoir, and from there it’s a straight three-quarter-mile shot down and flat back to where I started. I’m drippy and winded, but far looser and less nervous than when I started.
There’s a wooden fence around the edge of the Park Drive at 72nd Street. I use it to stretch sometimes after I am done running. Nothing too intense. I lean over and push against it to stretch my hamstrings. I use it for balance when I pick my foot up and put my heel in my pocket to stretch my quads. I do some of that, and then, just because I am not in a rush and I want to take another minute to take in sights and sounds and smells on my last morning as a single guy, I take a seat. I’m there for a minute or two when I realize there’s a growing group of men about my age (twenty-seven) and a little older gathering around me. They seem to know one another. They are gathering here, I assume, for a pre-marathon training run.
I do a few more stretches, take in a few more sights. I trade smiles with a guy who does a little of the same next to me. When I sit back down, he sits and he asks me how I’m feeling and says something about it being a nice morning. I tell h
im I’m doing just fine, and yes it is a pretty good morning for running. We trade a few more friendly words about nothing important—miles this week, whether we are both running New York. There are some self-deprecating jokes about our respective shortcomings as runners, some chatter about where we live and what we do.
He asks me how long I’ve lived in New York. I tell him four years in the city, but I grew up not far away, and I’m thinking this is one of the friendliest guys I’ve met in a while. I generally find New Yorkers friendly and helpful and endlessly generous, but I don’t end up talking to a lot of folks while stretching and running in the park. Just doesn’t happen. Then he asks if this is my first time running with the group, and what I’m doing after the run, and that’s when, finally, I realize what’s going on here. I see a few of the members of his group wearing the blue “Front Runners” singlet, and I realize what this is. “Front Runners” is a running club mostly for the LGBT community.
His life is going one way. My life is going the other.
Well, I say, I actually just finished my loop. I’m not with the group. I’m just stretching here. And since you asked, I’m actually getting married later.
This being 1996, saying you’re getting married is a pretty clear declaration of what side of the fence you play on.
Ohhhh, he says, and we are both smiling at each other. Well, good luck with that he tells me. I hope it goes well.
I tell him I hope it does, too.
It’s the first time in my life a stranger has tried to pick me up. I don’t care a whit that the come-on came from a man. It counts. I will pass that bench on thousands of runs, through decades of marriage and the births of multiple children. I will think of that sweet man who runs like I do nearly every time.
The Jamul Toads
“Talk to your guys. Ask them what they think.”
This is the message Bob Larsen gives to scrawny nineteen-year-old Mike Breen, on an early-summer morning in 1974.
Mike Breen is what happens when a coach like Bob Larsen, from a school in a tiny district, wins a state championship and dominates the bigger schools. Word gets around fast that there’s a coach who has a magic touch, a kind of running whisperer who surfaces where no one expects him to surface, mysteriously and with little warning. In running circles, no matter how small and concentric they still are, Bob Larsen is becoming a thing. And Mike Breen is the connective thread that is about to create a dream for Bob Larsen.
Mike has stringy, light brown hair, two Bugs Bunny–like front teeth, and a cheesy mustache in the spirit of everyone’s hero—Steve Prefontaine, one of America’s current running rock stars. In June 1972, Frank Shorter is still a largely unknown Yale graduate and law student three months shy of an Olympic marathon gold. Prefontaine is already “Pre”—the future, even the present, of American running. He made the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1970 at nineteen. He looks like a fifth Beatle from the Sgt. Pepper era. Most importantly, he races from the front with a terrifying aggression, and he never loses a college race between three miles and 10,000 meters. Not one.
Clairemont High School, where Breen attended, running a couple years behind Dale Fleet and Dave Harper, is in the western part of San Diego County, by the beach. Grossmont is in the east, inland, toward the desert. Clairemont is not in the Grossmont district. Remember, community colleges have zones, like public high schools do. Mike Breen is not supposed to go to college there. He’s supposed to go to San Diego City College. But there is no running whisperer at San Diego City College. So Mike Breen does what the best runners in the region will eventually do—he gets an address in the Grossmont district and registers for school there. Luckily, he’s at the apartment the afternoon an inspector from the school district shows up.
“Yes, this is where I live,” he tells the inspector, half truthfully. When school starts he runs for Bob Larsen.
In his first year he does everything Larsen can ask of a runner who doesn’t have the innate gifts of a Terry Cotton or an Ed Mendoza. Mike is a brawler. A 4:20 miler and 9:19 two-miler in high school, he was champion of the region’s Western League and a member of a youth team that toured Europe. He makes all-conference his first year at Grossmont. He helps the Griffins sweep the Long Beach Invitational, the Southern California finals and capture a second straight state championship. They will win seven more championships before Larsen moves to his next job. Since summer began though, he’s been splitting time. He trains with Larsen and his college boys from the Jamul A.C. on certain days, and with his old posse of Toads in the west county on others. Dale and Dave are back from Washington State. Kirk Pfeffer, who is set to start Grossmont in the fall, has been coming around. They hammer out loops around the bay and up along the coastal hills like they always do when they are together. They swear this summer the Toads will reign supreme at the Balboa 8.
Sometimes Mike and Bob Larsen get to talking about these two different sets of runners, the Jamul A.C. guys in the East County and the Clairemont guys in the West. As they philosophize about running and speed and life, the conversation casually wanders to its logical conclusion—that there isn’t any good reason why this much talent, so close in age and geography and spirit, battles against itself. Why are they not running as one club, united. The things that they could do together.
This is the message Bob asks Mike to deliver to Dale and Dave and Kirk and everyone else who has caught this running bug in the fiercest way. These are the guys who can cite every race and PR Prefontaine has run up in Oregon. They are junkies, and running is their heroin.
Let’s get together, let’s talk about this, Bob suggests to Mike. Larsen knows how good they all want to be. Mike knows that Dale and Dave are essentially training on their own, and Larsen can help get them where they want to go.
Mike Breen does as he is told. He doesn’t know how this is going to go over with the Toads. All he knows is Bob Larsen is as good a coach as there is. Any runner worth his spikes ought to run over mountains for the chance to work with him. And yet the Toads have this thing, this special, organic, independent thing. They’re just a bunch of young guys from the beach (or close to it) who like to hammer together. No one tells them what to do or where or when to run.
This is one of those inherent tensions every dedicated runner confronts at some point. When runners find their tribe—when they find a brotherhood made real through shared sweat, miles, and sacrifice—they organically create a shared language and shared sense of ritual. To add outsiders into that in-group, or to yield control of the working dynamic to a coach, this is not a small ask. And yet every high-performing runner knows his pilgrimage requires finding a guide, and then maybe another one, too, and figuring out how to bring more brothers and sisters into the fold. New legs. New life. Whoever those people are they must understand that the quest is not merely about an athletic goal. It is a vision quest.
Maybe just listen to what Larsen has to say, Mike tells his guys when they gather next. Fine, we’ll listen, they say, but no promises.
* * *
—
The summit happens on Sunday morning, July 28. On the grass just south of the Hilton Hotel on Mission Bay. Larsen’s crew is there, including Mendoza and Lux. They are home for the summer and training with Bob and the rest of the Jamul A.C. The Toads bring everyone who has ever touched their club, even some shot putters and discus throwers and high jumpers they competed with in high school who want to be a part of a certified club to compete at certain meets. They believe there is power in numbers. They want to show they are real. There are about thirty of them in all.
Larsen asks them, Do you all understand how good we can be, the things we can accomplish together? But then Bill Gookin, the old-timer from the San Diego Track Club, chimes in. Gookin complains about this group and its amphibious name. “Toads” suggests a lack of seriousness and direction, he says. None of this sounds good to Dale Fleet, who really wants Larsen to help guide
him and Dave, but is growing more annoyed by the minute. That’s the point of the name, he says. He doesn’t have the energy to explain the concept of irony to Gookin, how showing up at a race with a cartoon of a toad on your singlet, then running the daylights out of the competition is like sticking up your middle finger to the establishment in the greatest way. The name will not disappear, Fleet says.
Larsen says he really doesn’t care what the club is called. All he has ever wanted was the chance to guide the most talented collection of young runners the region has ever produced, and if the Toads are looking for help, he’s willing to give it. He doesn’t bother explaining the science of the threshold run, or that he knows how to get runners from the start to the finish faster than they have ever done so before, or that he knows how to win. He doesn’t have to. They know this. They have lived it. Let’s come together and surprise the hell out of some people, show them what it means to run the way we run out here, pushing the pace to the edge, he says.
Since Dale and Dave are the Toads’ best runners, what they want is going to carry the day. They don’t really have a coach of their own. They largely supervise themselves, and know that Larsen offering his services is a godsend to them. Dave has had it with Washington State. He’s done with school, done with the cold, done with Coach John Chaplin and his African imports. He’s dropping out and moving home to start working maintenance for the San Diego School District, but he wants to keep running. Bob Larsen is his lifeline. Dale isn’t sure whether he’s going back to Pullman. He might take a semester off after the cross country season. He’s about done with Chaplin, too.
Look, we’ll do this, Dale and Dave say. But they want one thing to be very clear—this is a merger and not a takeover. The Toad name has to remain.