Running to the Edge Read online

  In fact, there is plenty he doesn’t know. Most importantly he has no idea why he is having this magical day. He doesn’t know that within those long runs in the evenings, the hard ones and the less hard ones, and even those exhausting days at the gas station, lies the secret to his success this day in Balboa Park. He doesn’t know that this is the secret he will chase as he evolves from Bob Larsen, surprise winner of the 1958 Balboa 8, into “Bobcat” and “CBL” (short for Coach Bob Larsen)—a man who teaches others that they can find strength that they never thought they had if they can fearlessly search for it, again and again. He has no idea or plan for any of it as he accepts the congratulations. All he knows is that he is the Balboa 8 Mile champion, that he has just pulled off an epic run and he should probably celebrate, though not too much, because this race is over, and his mind goes very quickly to what comes next.

  Why We Run

  So, a question: Why do we run?

  Bob Larsen has sensed from his first days in the sport that the answers are equal parts science and existential philosophy. He knows that running can be many things—a form of medicine, a means of escape, a mission, a destiny—all at once.

  First some science. The human body bends in the direction of decay. Without regular and increasingly challenging activity, the systems of the body slowly, or in some cases quickly, descend into inefficiency and malfunction. After people reach roughly their mid-twenties, bones lose their density, and muscles lose their mass. Mitochondria, the tiny structures within each cell responsible for converting nutrients into energy—hence their reputation for being the body’s power plants—get worse at doing their job with each passing year. Muscle cells shrink, and fat cells grow. This happens to people who are wiry and fit, and those who are round and out of shape.

  A body that is in training and then stops training experiences all this in microcosm, a quick descent from in-shape to out-of-shape that mirrors the aging process in a way that is adjusted for time and age and the level of fitness that was reached before the break in training began. The fittest athletes experience the decay more acutely than anyone because they have more ground to lose. Good runners who can complete 5 kilometers in 20 minutes may lose only 10 seconds, or less than 1 percent, after a week of inactivity, but after a month that 5K time may grow by more than a minute as the body’s ability to circulate and use oxygen efficiently drops by roughly 12–15 percent. After two months, efficiency has dropped by more than 25 percent. Endurance is among the first traits of fitness to go, even among the most fit. Scientists compare this phenomenon to the changes that a pot of hot water and a boiling one will experience when they are removed from heat. After five minutes, the pot of water that was boiling will still be hotter than the other one, but it will have lost a higher percentage of its heat than the pot that was merely hot.

  The challenge for humans—or the subset of people who care about such things, including those who can run very fast for a very long time—is how to keep the body on a slow boil. The idea is to train the body so that the heart is very good at pumping blood. The 60,000-odd miles of blood vessels need to be especially good at getting blood to the corners of the body where oxygen is needed most, especially to the muscles that work the hardest during a physical exercise. Fortunately, vigorous training increases the number of capillaries, which are the tiniest blood vessels responsible for feeding oxygen to muscles. It also increases the size and the quantity of mitochondria, those power plants charged with transforming nutrients into energy and supplying that energy to our billions of cells.

  Here is what happens when our bodies run: We breathe harder, and we force our hearts to pump more quickly. This forces our blood vessels to dilate, so more blood filled with oxygen can get to the muscles that need it. When the muscles use up their initial store of complex sugars, also known as glucose, which they use to produce energy, the muscles throw off hydrogen ions and carbon dioxide. That causes capillaries to dilate, allowing for even more blood flow and oxygen to the muscles.

  A body that has trained also produces a vastly different group of metabolites, those small molecules essential to the chemical reactions that must occur in all living organisms that want to survive. Those reactions include converting food to energy and into the various proteins and other organic substances essential for cells to thrive, and also for the elimination of waste.

  The well-trained body has far more glycerol, which breaks down fatty tissue, than the untrained one, and far less allantoin, which can bring on a condition known as oxidative stress that causes cell damage. In this way, every run becomes a battle against decay and death—a battle none of us will win but which many cannot resist fighting.

  The evolutionary biologists tell us we are bred to be distance runners, that we owe our very existence to it. Think of early humans, they say. They live in the Serengeti. They are hungry. Their brains, compared with the size of the rest of their bodies, are so much larger than nearly every other animal’s brain. Keeping that brain alive requires well-nourished, oxygenated blood. At any given moment, the brain uses 20 percent of the blood that’s in the body. The brain uses all that blood to fuel the electrical impulses that neurons use to communicate with each other and keep the body’s cells in working order. Keeping that blood healthy requires thousands of calories every day.

  Plant food is fine, but it can be hard to get enough of it on the African plain. Animal meat is better. There is a problem though—nearly all the animals are faster than the humans. That makes them hard to capture and kill. Early humans don’t have guns and bullets to shoot them. They have rocks and spears. Advantage animal.

  Humans, though, have a secret weapon: sweat glands. They have the ability to cool themselves through perspiration. They also have muscles and lungs that adapt to activity. The more activity, the bigger the capacity of the lungs and muscles. In a 100-meter race, or even a 1,000-meter race, the humans don’t have a chance against the animals. However, give a human a few months to practice and stretch that distance to 3,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 meters, and things start to get interesting. The animals can’t cool themselves. Think of dogs and horses that pant feverishly in the heat, especially after exertion.

  The early humans are also blessed with an intricate series of muscles in the back of the neck that allow the head to stay upright and balanced when the rest of the body is moving at full speed. The Achilles tendon helps, too. The roughly eight-inch elastic strand that attaches the calf muscle to the heel is a near perfectly designed energy storage unit for an animal that wants to run on two feet. It is one of nature’s most delicately designed springs, storing and then releasing energy every time the foot hits the ground and pushes off. Other primates, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, have their own unique advantages, but they would kill for the human Achilles tendon.

  Sweat glands, muscles in the head and neck, an Achilles tendon in each foot—these are priceless tools. So when it comes to long distance running, advantage human. Blessed with these gifts from nature, humans learn how to run constructively in groups, how to take turns giving chase and tracking their prey. They learn how to run their prey into submission.

  The evolutionary biologists preach the gospel of the “Running Man,” who lives on in the spirit of the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico, those ultra-marathon champions celebrated for their barefooted dominance in trail races across the Rocky Mountains.*1 And yet, while the scientists can explain with fascinating precision why humans can run, and how we perfected this skill thousands of years ago chasing zebra and ibex on the African plain, we haven’t had to run our prey to death for thousands of years. We really don’t have to run anymore at all. So why do we?

  Because it makes us thin? Yes, for some. Because it allows us to win races? For the luckiest of us, those blessed with speed, this, too, may be true. Because it makes us feel good? Who doesn’t crave the rush of endorphins that courses through our bodies after even a mediocre run, to say nothing of those magic
al days when we stop even though it feels like we could just go and go and go.

  All this is true, but maybe another answer has to do with battles.

  Now comes the philosophy.

  We relish those fights against time and decay and death, even if we know they are ultimately unwinnable. With each step, each stressed breath, every elevation in the heart rate that restarts the process of improved oxygen circulation and capillary production and metabolite efficiency, each extra second we save on a clock that measures how we are, or are not, letting time slip away, we can better fool ourselves into thinking that aging and expiration are optional. Or that they have been delayed for another day.

  There are other battles we run from, too. Consider Frank Shorter for a moment. After all, he is the supposed father of the American running boom. In an earlier era of Olympic telecasts, Shorter won the gold medal in the 1972 Olympic marathon in Munich in front of a captivated U.S. television audience drawn to the Games that year in record numbers. That was the year Palestinian terrorists took hostage and killed eleven Israeli athletes. Shorter watched it from his balcony in the Olympic Village, a mere forty yards across a grassy yard from the terror. Then, a few days later, he became the first American to win the race since 1908, inspiring 1970s America, so worn down by war and the sense of everything coming apart, to begin to lace up its shoes and run.

  Shorter first became a star runner at the Northfield Mount Herman prep school in Massachusetts and then a college champion at Yale. He has long been rather matter-of-fact about why he ran. In his memoir, Shorter compared running to reading a book.

  After a while, you’re not really conscious of reading. It’s just images through your head. It’s the same with running a marathon. People always ask me why I do it. Well, I am good at it, and we do the things we excel at. But also, I just like being out there. I like it better than anything else I’ve ever done. I like being able to think about it as I go along. I get so seriously involved with the race, with what my body is doing, I don’t have time to notice things around me.

  Or even what might have been inside him, which, as he would only realize later, was sort of the point.

  In his sixties, Shorter accepted he could no longer bury memories of his troubled childhood in Middletown, New York, where he was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father. Publicly, Shorter’s father was revered as the dedicated town doctor. In private, he was a monster. He abused Shorter and his eight brothers and sisters. He raped his daughters and beat a young son who suffered from Down syndrome. As the second-oldest brother, Shorter tried to protect his siblings as best he could. As soon as his father entered the home, life became a chess game of motion. How could Frank move to intercept his father, distract him from unleashing his cruelty on the rest of the family. To be still was to surrender, and Frank didn’t like to surrender. Running became an extension of the movement and activity. Shorter ran to school, and to his friends’ homes, one in particular, a few miles away, that became, secretly for him, an oasis from his father. If he was running he was safe, moving beyond the reach of the abuse.

  Shorter is now sixty-seven years old. He still runs.

  So, we run to avoid death, to play at that game of transcending our finite reality, for a moment, so as to imagine we are more than this single life in the most endorphin-juiced way.

  And we run away from trauma with the miles of body in motion. And here is one more possibility—maybe running is a way of reimagining the life-death duality. This is a part of what I do on some of my most special days as a runner, even though I toil far off the elite pace in marathon after marathon. The run can be a meditation-in-motion, a cleansing of all the sensory realities we encounter. The run is white noise, a way to simply experience time as a body, a piston, that exists away from the mind and only in the body as a live reactive presence. Running is escapism, but it is also the opposite. It can be the ultimate expression of being awake and alive only as a body that occupies space and time. A painter doesn’t merely create a painting. When he is painting and creating at his best, he is a part of that work of art. This is how it can work for the runner and the run.

  * * *

  —

  Now, another question—how do we run best?

  Greek coaches poked their charges with forked sticks and told them to practice holding their breath. Roman athletes practiced abstinence, slept a lot, and had slaves lash their backs with rhododendron branches. A nineteenth-century miler (and boxer) named Captain Barclay filled his day with uphill, half-mile sprints, moderate six-mile walks, and lying in bed naked for a half hour at high noon. Training at intervals of a half mile to 1.5 miles with rest in between becomes an approach at the dawn of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, the Finnish legend Paavo Nurmi gets Olympic glory after indulging in long training runs at a steady pace.*2 Emil Zátopek becomes the greatest runner ever doing as many as seventy 400-meter intervals at 65–70 seconds in a single training session.

  For a twenty-year-old Bob Larsen, champion of the 1958 Balboa Park 8 Miler, running (and the attempt to figure how best to prepare to run) becomes the ultimate puzzle. Within weeks of that triumphant day, he is back in school, back in training, doing his coach’s interval workouts around the track at Aztec Stadium. His lungs have never felt so big, but his shins are starting to ache again. He runs for three weeks, then he has to take two weeks off. Then he returns for another three weeks of intervals, racing his teammates through a series of quarter- and half-mile repeats over and over, as though they are at the national championships each day. Every week, seemingly, another one of them goes down with another leg injury. Only Bill Gallagher, one of Larsen’s teammates from Hoover High School, manages to stay healthy. Bill is majoring in engineering. His class schedule and his lab work only allow him to train two or three times a week with the rest of the track team, and he isn’t breaking down. But he isn’t getting much faster either.

  Even more frustrating, Larsen and his teammates know how close they are to being exceptional. They aren’t blowing away the competition, but they can do the math. At practice, before and between and after those intervals, they sit on the infield grass and tally up and multiply and divide the times they have run and compare them to the national records that their contemporaries have set—records that stand at 8:46 for two miles, 14:16 for the 5,000.

  Larsen has just won an eight-mile race in 44 minutes, 5:30 miles, and it wasn’t very hard. He can get to 4:20 in the mile. He and his teammates can breeze quarters in 65 seconds or so. This is not so different than the workouts Roger Bannister did in the run-up to breaking the four-minute mile—10 quarter miles beginning at a 66-second pace, a couple of minutes rest between each one, and slowly trying to knock a few seconds off the quarters and cut down on the intervals of rest as the race approached.

  “Those records,” Larsen tells his teammates every afternoon, “they’re soft. We can break them.”

  There is one problem. They can’t stay healthy. If they aren’t healthy they can’t train, and if they can’t train they can’t improve. This is not only a problem for Larsen and the rest of the Aztecs at San Diego State, but for seemingly every top American runner. All of them, at one crucial moment or another, get saddled by injury. Shin splints, stress fractures, tweaked knees, sore ankles, pulled quads and hamstrings and calves. The Europeans are clearly putting up better times than the Americans, but maybe they aren’t any faster, Larsen thinks. Maybe they are just healthier. Maybe they have solved the injury puzzle, so they are able to train more.

  One morning in the fall of 1959 Larsen puts a foot on the floor as he climbs out of bed. His leg, weakened from the stress fractures, now buckles. Larsen collapses to the floor, pain coursing through his shins. He takes a few days off from training. The pain subsides. Then he tries to run again. He begins to think he just might have the engine of a Cadillac, but he has been stricken with the body of a Rambler.

  His mind chu
rns. More than ever now he is looking for the big answers he senses are out there…a truth that will connect training and injury and ability in some kind of transcendent way.

  At meets he quizzes opponents who win races, asking them what their workouts are. They give answers like “10 by 600” or “8 by 800.” He asks them why? They shrug and say they do what their coach tells them to. There is no trial and error. No one thinks about running technique much either, other than some chatter about long strides vs. short ones.

  Then he gets a break. In San Diego’s kinesiology department he discovers a new PhD recipient named Frederick William Kasch. A native of Chicago, who played baseball at the University of Illinois, Kasch arrived in San Diego in 1948. He teaches a range of courses in exercise physiology and applied anatomy, and he develops the then-revolutionary idea that regular exercise can make the heart stronger and prevent heart attacks. It can also help someone with a bad heart make that most essential of all muscles stronger. He develops a fitness program for adults to prove his theories, measuring their capacity when they first show up and then tracking their progress as the weeks go on. This at a time when the consensus within the scientific community is that to exercise vigorously after the age of thirty-five is to flirt with a catastrophic cardiac event.

  There are others who are researching the path Larsen is following. He discovers the writings of Woldemar Gerschler, a German coach and researcher who, along with Zátopek, forms the bedrock of European interval training. Gerschler, the director of the Freiburg Institute for Physical Education, built the connection between fitness and pulse rates. To many it sounds like a silly concept, but people pay attention to him because before World War II he trained the great German half-miler Rudolph Harbig. Harbig cut two seconds off the world record in the 800 meters in 1939, lowering it to a then unheard-of 1:46.6. Gerschler establishes a series of hypotheses based on the concept that the heart is just another muscle that can be trained. The more and harder you run (or swim or ride a bike), the slower your heart will beat when it is not under stress. And even though your heart is beating more slowly, it will still pump the same amount of blood. As you exercise more, the heart can pump at a slower rate, thus working less hard, even as you increase your stress level.