Running to the Edge Read online

  He doesn’t yet know how important these ideas will be to a truth that he will spend a lifetime searching for, or that he will come as close as anyone to finding it. He doesn’t know that he will understand the secrets to the East African domination of long distance running before even the Kenyans and Ethiopians do. He doesn’t know that he will write the blueprints of training for an activity that will become a worldwide movement, and he will impart this knowledge to two generations of star long distance runners, that they will include collegiate and national champions and Olympic medalists, that one of them will pull off perhaps the most inspirational triumph in distance running history, and that he will do all this in relative obscurity during the next half century.

  For now, Bob Larsen is still on a remote farm in the middle of Minnesota, happy as can be, until suddenly it all ends. Life on the farm comes to an abrupt completion on a spring afternoon in 1951 with a freak accident. Bob’s father falls out of the haymow on the second floor of the barn. It’s one of those hazards that make farm life among the most dangerous existences on the planet.

  His father’s injuries aren’t fatal, but his back is wrecked, not catastrophically, but the farming days are over. There is simply no way to haul bales of hay or milk cows or drive the plow horses or drag the slop out to the pigs.

  In the summer Bob’s parents will head south and west. They will need money for the journey. Bob will collect the few hundred dollars he has earned through the sale of pigs birthed by the sow his father had given to him. He will give it to his parents. They promise to pay him back. Then they leave. Bob and his sister stay behind in Minnesota with their grandmother until his parents figure out where they are going to end up. They pause in Las Vegas to consider making a life in the desert. It is 104 degrees in the shade. They push on to San Diego, where a new life, warmer than Minnesota, cooler than Las Vegas, begins.

  San Diego, Fall 1954

  There are moments when the boy from northern Minnesota does not like high school, when he misses the family farm and the one-room schoolhouse, the simplicity of life far, far away from the big city. He misses the horses and the cows, even the smelly chickens and all the work the farm required. There are times when he feels alone. These people out here on the coast of southern California he has gotten to know the past few years are a little different, which could make any teenager slightly uncomfortable.

  Then there is gym class. Gym class has always been the time when he runs. In junior high school, these were dashes, 50 yards, 100, maybe 300 at most. The teacher lined the boys up in the schoolyard. A track was chalked off on the concrete. Bob Larsen took his spot at the front and felt no discomfort at all. He knew the boys around him would give him a chase, maybe finish within a few yards or even closer some days when he wasn’t feeling his best, but almost always he would hit the finish line first. He likes to hit the finish line first. When he runs he is at home, even through middle school, when no one ever feels at home.

  Now he is in tenth-grade gym class, his first at this dizzyingly large institution with 3,000 students called Hoover High School. A teacher named Raleigh Holt is lining the boys up for another one of these runs. He tells the boys that since they are in high school, they must run longer than they did before. This test, and it is a test, because Raleigh Holt needs it to be for reasons that will soon become clear to Bob, stretches 660 yards. They will need to be fast, but this 660-yard run is also about being strong, Mr. Holt says. Larsen stands at the front, as usual. His strawberry-blond hair is cut in a 1950s buzz. His eyes are bright and wide, focused, like they always are when he is about to run. The expression on his face is blank. Inside, where no one can see, he can feel the grin begin to emerge, because he knows what is going to happen next.

  When he first arrived in San Diego, Bob joined a fitness program at the local YMCA. It was not far from his house, northeast of downtown in a neighborhood called North Park. After the farm, nothing felt far away. They did sprints and shuttle runs up and down and across the gym floor, the rubber on the bottom of their shoes squeaking with every twist and turn. They did sit-ups and push-ups and pull-ups and chin-ups. It was tiring for some, but Bob didn’t really get tired. He does not tire the way the other kids do.

  And now he knows he isn’t going to get tired on this 660-yard run his gym teacher, Mr. Holt, is describing like a trek to the Mexican border. Bob hears the boys around him moaning. He thinks about the farm, of all those runs through the woods and across the property. They were so much longer than 660 yards. Weren’t they?

  Yes, they were. Bob knows how this will go. He knows what it’s like to work to the edge of exhaustion. He knows that work is the reason there will be so much daylight between him and the other kids after they leave the starting line. They will get tired. He will not.

  For a moment, when Mr. Holt is done speaking, the gym teacher stands silently in front of Bob. When the whistle blows Bob will sprint to the lead, the air coursing through that strawberry blond buzz. He will never look back. He won’t have to, because he knows who surrounds him—a bunch of kids from the city, and he knows they don’t have a prayer of keeping up with him. By the end, roughly 100 seconds later, his nearest classmate is 30 yards behind.

  When gym class is over, Mr. Holt strolls over to Bob. He knows the boy isn’t from here. He also knows he is going to turn Bob into one of the stars of the Hoover High School track team and one of the top runners in San Diego. He is fast. He just needs a little work.

  Before very long, for the first time, Bob begins to train. Like the racing in gym class, the training comes fairly easily. In this unenlightened era, unless you are a sprinter, there is little variation. Like everyone else who is remotely connected to running, Mr. Holt knows about the regimens the great Czech runner Emil Zátopek put himself through on the way to winning the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races and the marathon at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. In training, Zátopek rarely runs any distance longer than a half mile at a time. Occasionally he might go as far as a kilometer, or 1,200 meters. Rarely though. But he does these repetitions over and over. A morning session and an afternoon one. He will do ten 880s, with a brief rest between each one, or twenty 440s, at a pace far faster than what he will race at in those long distance competitions. His competitors are in awe of these. They listen to Zátopek speak of running twenty 440s in succession, each one faster than 65 seconds. Their legs begin to burn. It’s not possible, they think. They are right. For them it is not.

  Holt has adapted these workouts for his Hoover High School students—in other words, he has made them significantly easier. Monday through Wednesday the routine is almost always the same. The boys (it is all boys, because there is no girls team) run three 1,320s—three laps around the dirt track—with a solid 5 or 10 minutes of rest between each one. The next day they run eight 440s. Between each quarter mile, they walk a full lap of the track, which takes about five minutes. On Thursdays they “jog,” though they call it easy or light running. Fridays they race at track meets. They are expressly told not to run on weekends. Best to rest up for the next week. Same goes for summer. No running then. Summers are for recovery. So is winter.

  Thanks to a collection of very fast boys at the high school, it seems to work. Bob becomes an essential part of a team that almost never loses, even though nearly every star runner on the team, including Bob, spends weeks on the injured list. It will force him to understand that in running health is just as essential as speed. He learns early on that all the talent in the world is worthless if you can’t get to the starting line. Only later will he understand that the injuries he and his teammates are experiencing are likely the result of an imbalanced training regimen, of every runner on the team doing the same thing day after day, an endless stream of intervals around and around the hard dirt track in black leather running spikes. It’s a valuable nugget that he will store away until he begins in earnest that quest for running truth.

  Bob and the Hoover b
oys try not to think about the pain. They focus on their numbers. They are all breaking 4:30 in the mile. The best of them can get down around 4:20 on a good day. By the time they are done, everyone knows they are among the best runners in southern California. As a senior, Bob is the top miler in the city, a star recruit for San Diego State University, where he gets to consider the most important concept that any runner confronts—what comes next.

  * * *

  —

  What comes next is an up-and-down year of adjusting to life as a college runner and battling injuries. At the first practice, Larsen and his teammates are sent out on a three-mile warm-up run on the grass at Aztec Stadium. On other days, they do a warm-up run on the roads around the university. This is interesting and different, farther than Bob has ever run in one stretch. The grass feels good under his feet, especially since he is training in the thin leather racing flats that provide little cushion. Then it is back to the interval training on the track that he is too familiar with. All those quarter-, half-, and three-quarter-mile near-sprints around a rock-hard dirt oval. Three weeks into the season, his shins are shot. He shuts down for two weeks, then comes back, then another shut-down. It goes like this all year, even into the spring, when the injuries grow especially frustrating because for the first time Bob is starting to feel genuinely fast.

  San Diego, Summer 1958

  Bob Larsen knows how to run only one way—as hard as he can, to the edge of exhaustion. This is how he approaches each training session, each interval of 200, or 400, or 800 meters. He sets a simple goal—expend so much effort that when he takes his final step he has nothing left to give. Then, the only thing his body can do is collapse.

  There is a simple explanation for why he does this. He worships Roger Bannister, the Englishman who first broke the four-minute mile. He has studied the photograph of Bannister collapsing after the finish on that gray day at the Iffley Road Track in Oxford on the 6th of May, 1954. When the race ended, and Bannister had broken four minutes for the mile by six tenths of a second, he fell limp, unable to stand without the help of those around him. So Bob runs and then collapses just as the Oxford medical student did that day.

  His teammates think it might be a recipe for future injury, maybe even death. They also find it to be a bit of a hoot. They watch their teammate falling to the track at the end of each interval, leaving everything he has out there like the English guy who ran in a way that not long ago most thought was unthinkable, and they shake their heads. Bob simply believes this is how you have to run to be as great as Bannister. Seek the threshold and then cross it. Later, as his quest for running truth evolves, he will realize he wasn’t far off. But right now it’s just the beginning of his journey, one he doesn’t yet know he’s on, to understand what it really takes to run very far, very fast.

  Only in the last few months, as a member of the track team at San Diego State, where Bob is a freshman, has he begun to consider himself fast. The Aztecs are a spartan operation. The head trainer, the man responsible for the health of the athletes, is the same man who hands out the jocks and shorts before practices and collects them for the laundry after. There are no ice baths or hot tubs. The team showers are outside. Bob loves it, and like Bannister, he loves to run the mile. He can stay with the leaders in nearly any race and finish in the 4:20s. He can also run the 200 in 25 seconds. He has wheels, though the occasional stress fracture makes him feel like he has a few broken spokes.

  At the end of the spring season, his coach told him and the other men on the team to remember they are not in high school anymore. They need to get some running in during the summer. They need to come to the track, put in the time, do the work, run those intervals. Keep the rest short between each one, and push as hard as you can, will yourself around those turns even when your lungs are screaming.

  Bob isn’t sure how that’s going to work with his schedule. He now lives in El Cajon, not all that close to the university, and he has a job at the local Shell station that he is fairly certain is going to sap all his energy. Two days into summer, he knows he is right. There is little rest for the gas station attendant of the late 1950s. This is the era of the gas station worker as automobile valet. At the Shell station, Bob does a whole lot more than simply pump gas. He washes and waxes cars, changes the oil, checks tire pressure, and, if need be, changes the tires, too. He is on his feet ten hours every day. When he arrives home, he collapses on the couch in his parents’ living room. The last thing in the world he wants to do is run.

  After two days he realizes the only way he is going to get his miles in is to avoid the couch at all costs when he walks in the door. He decides to go directly to his room. He changes into shorts and a running singlet, slips on his shoes, and heads out the door for a run.

  A few months before, a podiatrist had molded a crude early version of an orthotic to slip into his thin leather running shoes. He told Bob it might soften his landing and help with the stress fractures in his shins. The hard plastic wedge is as thick as an old Coke bottle. As he runs on the roads in his neighborhood, alone in the summer twilight, he can feel the orthotics cushioning his arches.

  He often heads over to El Cajon High School, about three miles away, at a pace that would allow him to have a conversation with a buddy if there was anyone else around to do these distance runs with. At El Cajon High, he finds a few other boys doing summer workouts, sometimes on the track, sometimes barefoot on the grass fields next to the school. Then Bob heads back onto the road to run home. Sometimes, when he gets close, he realizes his legs and his body are just beginning to feel good, so he keeps going, adding on one and then two and then three or four more miles as the evening cools and darkness descends.

  The miles click by. Sometimes, mile six is easier than mile five. He will test his pace for a few miles one day, clicking off 3 miles in 16 minutes or so in the middle of the run, then easing back toward the finish. He finds the roads liberating, so different from the round-and-round of the track. Sometimes the route makes up itself. He just follows it, sometimes quickly and sometimes less quickly, however fast and wherever his legs tell him to go.

  The miles become addictive, the part of the day that Larsen thinks about all afternoon at the Shell station. San Diego is a big city compared with the farm in northern Minnesota where Bob spent the first dozen years of his life. But it is still something of a small Navy town. Larsen runs through streets of low-rise buildings and past block after block of modest California ranch homes. Everywhere he sees sailors in their whites, officers in their dress uniforms, heading over to a friend’s house for dinner. Downtown, enlisted sailors wander the city’s streets, in port for a few days and searching for some female company and something to do.

  He is always bone tired when his shift at the gas station ends, but after a few weeks he knows as well as he knows anything that if he just avoids his couch and gets out on the roads, within minutes his energy will rise. Some days he only flirts with pushing the gas pedal to the floor. Miraculously, he feels no pain in his shins. The running is pure joy, just as it once was back on the farm in Minnesota.

  Some days he pushes hard, even to the edge in spurts, that moment of liminality, when the ritual is giving way to a kind of transcendent exhaustion and he has no idea what will come next. Pain? Nirvana? Some combination of the two—the most painful kind of pleasure or the most pleasurable form of pain? He wonders if a joyful, physical pain can serve as a pathway for a deeper, wider realm of understanding. It’s like that moment when the point of a thumbtack is first piercing the fleshy part of a fingertip, and it feels strangely good. How long can it last?

  In August, he signs up for a race in Balboa Park that is called the Balboa Park 8 Miler. The event attracts the top runners from the region, college competitors and a few recent graduates, who still train, dreaming of maybe making an upcoming Olympic team before getting on with the rest of their lives. It is 1958—there are no recreational runners, p
eople who will eventually be called “joggers.” They simply do not exist yet. All summer long, as he racks up those miles in dusk on the crowded roads of central San Diego County or on a trail across one of the dusty canyons, Bob Larsen never sees another soul running the way he does.

  On the start line of the Balboa 8 Miler, he sees the best runners in the region and that’s all. This is the fourth edition of the race, which was started in 1955 by an SDSU alum named Bill Gookin. Gookin had set school records at SDSU and had a shot at national success in the middle and long distance races. He and his teammates weren’t ready to give up competitive running, so they formed the San Diego Track Club and began to organize “all-comer” meets and this eight-mile distance race over the hybrid terrain of rolling Balboa Park and the surrounding streets and boulevards. Most of the closest races were in Los Angeles, a day’s drive round-trip back then. Bill Gookin and his small crew are the only serious adult runners for miles around. Gookin is there on the start line with Bob Larsen. So are roughly 50 to 100 other men. There are no women, who do not compete in races longer than 400 meters.

  At the sound of the gun, Larsen takes off to the front. He knows this is where he belongs. He has thought this for some time now.

  As he runs the first miles of the Balboa 8, he has a summer of bliss in his legs, all those dusky ventures, mile after mile of pushing to find the moment when his legs or his lungs will give way. They never do.

  He has never raced this far, but five miles in he is still up front. He is floating over the grass and concrete, clicking off miles at a 5:30 pace and feeling he could run to San Francisco like this if he wanted to. One by one, the runners in the lead pack fall off until it is no longer a pack anymore, just Bob Larsen sailing across the course, 100 and then 200 yards ahead of the rest of the field. Down the stretch he is waving to his buddies watching beside the course. The endorphin-fueled euphoria is coursing through his body. There is no way he can know this, but he is having the greatest long distance running day of his life. He crosses the finish line in 44 minutes flat. He is nineteen years old. He cannot imagine and does not know a purer form of happiness.