Running to the Edge Read online

  There is also Percy Cerutty, the eccentric Australian coach known for his intense, primitive, captive training camps in Portsea, Australia. Cerutty, an authoritarian coach with a shock of white hair and a build so wiry his ribs and sternum are visible through his skin, discovered running in midlife after a nervous breakdown at forty-three. He spent hours walking, and then running in the Australian countryside to regain his health. He stuck to a diet of mainly vegetables and whole grains. By the 1950s he was holding training camps that adhered to a rigid regimen of weight training and gymnastics exercises, sprinting up crazy steep sand dunes that were often no more than 30 yards high for as long as an hour, and sessions of interval training and runs as long as 20 miles, with runners varying the pace.

  Finally, there is Arthur Lydiard, the Kiwi running guru who is becoming one of the early advocates of running for health. He runs with a group that will become known as the Auckland Jogging Club. It includes runners at all levels and is believed to be the first running club of its kind. Lydiard pushes a system built around volume. He wants his runners pounding out 100-plus-mile weeks. He does not care if the pace is merely healthy. “Train, don’t strain” is the Lydiard mantra. The distance builds a foundation of endurance, Lydiard insists, and once the foundation is there, it can be expanded through speed work. Bill Bowerman, the Oregon track coach who will later help found a little shoe company named Nike, visits Lydiard in 1962. Upon his return, his Oregon runners take up “jogging.”

  Larsen doesn’t know what to believe. He knows how he feels, that the more he ventures out onto the roads to log miles, some of them very fast miles, the stronger he is in competition. The power comes from inside his chest and his lungs. He knows that science is beginning to establish a connection between running and the strength of the cardiovascular system. It is young and raw science, fringe really, but he believes it because it’s what he is experiencing. Slowly, he begins to convince his teammates to follow him through miles off the track, sometimes on the roads, sometimes a three-mile loop on the hard-packed sand of a nearby canyon. They play around with pacing, taking turns leading the way. They force each other to become less comfortable than they otherwise would be on their own. They are a good team, among the best in the country, if a click or two below world-class.

  When Larsen graduates in 1961, he decides not to go anywhere. He takes a job coaching the distance runners on the SDSU track team. He also begins doing his graduate work in kinesiology and physical education, whatever can keep him hanging around Kasch’s lab. He teaches swimming and wrestling. He has puffy cheeks, and the same strawberry blond buzz cut that he arrived at school with four years before. He could probably still pass for a freshman rather than a graduate student.

  At his team’s first workout, he gathers the group at the track, then tells them they aren’t running on the track, at least not to start. They head out to the roads and the canyons, and they begin to push. They fool around with “fartlek”—the art of speeding up for short bursts throughout a run of 3 or 5 or 8 miles. When they do train at the stadium, it’s not about head-to-head competition through a series of 400s and 800s and 1,320s. That will beat them up long before the big races.

  Instead, he lets the boys run free. Running isn’t about being brought onto a track to be beat up each day. It’s about moments of enlightenment that can be found only when you seek out that edge, that threshold, and stay there. Backing off the interval training, his boys come back fresh each afternoon. They don’t get hurt and they win more often than they lose.

  He’s circling something approaching a piece of the truth, but it needs fine-tuning. So when the year is over Larsen takes a job at a local high school in eastern San Diego County, a place where he can experiment and make mistakes for the next four years without concern, where no one will expect him to win.

  Given where he wants to go and what he wants to do, which is understand and reimagine how humans run so he can begin to develop the fastest runners in the world, Larsen’s decision is akin to someone wanting to eventually manage the Yankees believing that the inevitable path to the Bronx begins at a tiny school where most people don’t even know how to play baseball. Some are skeptical. Everyone is. Good, Bob thinks. Just how I like it. It’s easiest—and sweetest—to win when no one sees you coming.

  He will spend six months in the military and six months traveling in Europe, and then the journey begins.

  Monte Vista High School, San Diego, Fall 1963

  The track and field program at Monte Vista High School, to the extent that there is one, is awful. In front of the school there is a scraggly dirt track that is barely level. It backs up to dusty hillsides scattered with arroyos. Twenty miles to the west, near the ocean, San Diego earns its well-earned reputation as one of the most temperate places in America, some 300-plus days a year of dry mid-70s sun, with cool breezes rolling in from the Pacific. But here, inland, that sun bakes the earth hard and dry and the mercury regularly heads toward 90 and above during the running seasons of fall and spring. It’s hardly the most inviting place to spend a fall or spring afternoon. Dragonflies buzz through the afternoon air. The hills are scattered with the occasional pine or palm tree. Small collections of ranch houses will eventually cover the landscape in every direction except south. That way, there are mountains and then there is Mexico.

  The other reason this place isn’t known for track and field is there are only 1,200 students. They learn in a series of low-slung brick buildings. Some schools in the region have 3,000. That means a far smaller pool of talent. With the program on the losing end of most meets for years, the best athletes flock to the traditional stick-and-ball sports. Monte Vista track gets the leftovers. Given that, Larsen can only hope to challenge the big schools in a normal track meet, where teams score points based on how they place in races as short as 50 yards and as long as two miles.

  Cross country is different though. All a team needs for cross country is five decent runners. A team’s top five finishers account for its point total, which is equal to the number you get when you add up what place they finish in a race. Like golf, the lowest score wins. A sweep happens when a team finishes with the first five spots in a race and a total score of fifteen. One plus two plus three plus four plus five.

  This math is Bob Larsen’s friend. Success in cross country is also more about toughness than speed. Runners compete on trails and hills instead of tracks. Times don’t matter. It is all about out-running the guy in front of you, and the one in front of him, and the one in front of him until there is no one left to out-run. Do that, ignore the pain, or ignore it more than the guy in the other-colored singlet, and be fortunate enough to have teammates to do the same, and you win.

  Bob Larsen will never forget this math. It brings him comfort. Limit his pool of talent all you want. He will find his five scorers and teach them how to run.

  * * *

  —

  On the first day of practice in the fall of 1963, Larsen assembles the sign-ups and tells them to follow him. At first they don’t really understand what is going on. The track and field coach is supposed to be the guy who wears a windbreaker in the middle of the track. He blows a whistle and barks instructions. Bob Larsen is not that guy. He is twenty-three years old and fast and fit. He is pretty sure he is beginning to know how to make other people that way, though anyone who knows anything about teenage athletes and high school track would be right to think Bob Larsen was a little delusional for having any designs on optimism with this gangly group. They had done nothing that might suggest they had anything resembling speed or potential, or much in the way of desire. They will learn, Bob thinks.

  Together they start to run. He leads them far away from that dirt track at Monte Vista. It doesn’t matter that basically every high school kid trains almost exclusively on tracks at this time. They go north on the roads through Casa de Oro and Mt. Helix and Mt. Miguel and south and east into the back canyons of t
he wildlife refuge, through a riverbed and across dirt trails that few had ever thought to run before. The high school is built near the top of a hill. No matter which way they go, they quickly descend, which means on the way back they will have to go up. They find the steepest hills, dirt ones and paved ones, and they sprint up them. “Keep up with the coach,” he tells them as he pushes the pace without warning.

  He forces them to go hard for longer than they expect to, and to rest for less time than they ever have. He rarely relents, even on the hottest days. In truth, he is lucky he never loses a kid back there in the canyons, but they do keep up. They do more than that. He loves to run hard and now so do they, and now they have someone to follow. They learn that they can survive when they are pushed, that they can endure discomfort and sometimes pain, that they are tougher than they ever realized they might be, that they can run until they find their edge, and then push beyond it. After a few weeks, a boy named Bruce Hamilton, who transferred into the school that fall, becomes the front-runner, pushing the pace in training the way Larsen has shown him to.

  By the end of the fall season, they are the best small-school team in the region. But they are learning something else. Larsen is teaching these young men (boys, really) how to love running. He is teaching them to live at the threshold, to experience the primal joy of doing what the body is meant to do…run miles and travel distances. As much as he is teaching them about the toleration of pain, he is also opening up a pathway to a truth that can connect the body and the mind, one fast step at a time.

  Acapulco, Christmas, 1963

  As Christmas 1963 approaches, Larsen yearns for a tropical vacation, or at least one that he can afford on a salary of about $5,000 a year. He convinces a few buddies to drive down to Acapulco with him to swim in warm waters and have cocktails by the sea. But as the holiday draws nearer, one by one Larsen’s friends decide they have other family obligations that are going to keep them stateside. So Bob Larsen does what Bob Larsen does—he goes it alone. He drives his VW bug through the night down the Pacific coast until he reaches Acapulco. There he finds a quiet spot near the beach and parks his car. He sets up camp and calls this place home for the next week.

  Each morning he rises and heads onto the beach. All he can see is sand for miles north and south. It is the perfect place to run. The sand feels so good under his feet he doesn’t bother with shoes. He starts slowly, silently pushing himself across the beach, his toes sometimes grazing the incoming water. As he begins to move faster, he notices his feet and his legs are doing something they have never done before. Running barefoot, he isn’t running as much as he is bounding. It feels fast. All morning, each morning he does it up and down the beach, through intervals and fartleks, and hard long runs, the front of his foot hits the ground and then pops back up. His legs are lighter, like they were meant to move this way.

  Larsen realizes he is on to something, one step closer to truth and meaning. He thinks about how he has always run, how seemingly everyone he knows runs. This is all he has to go on because he has barely read a word on running mechanics—not because he hasn’t wanted to, but because barely any literature on the subject exists. All the runners he knows load off their heels. They land on the heel and follow through the step like this: heel-mid-foot-push-off-the-toe, as though it’s just a walking motion only faster.

  There, on a deserted beach, he believes he has come upon a better way—the mid-foot strike. If running is all about the push off the toe, why waste all that time on the heel? On the beach, where being fast is all about not sinking into the sand, running becomes the act of popping the knee, of springing the foot as quickly as possible, up and through off the toe and then back down again, right under the center of gravity, a tap on the ground instead of muscling through each stride. Every step gets pre-loaded on the way down and then boom, off again, like a roadrunner, churning and churning away. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Eventually, people will call this “heel recovery.”

  He thinks of his boys at Monte Vista. If he can change the power of their hearts and lungs, he can change the way they run, too. The pieces of the puzzle start to appear. He knows they are a long way from coming together, but he begins to see how it all might one day take shape.

  San Diego, New Year’s Eve, 1963

  Bob Larsen pulls back into San Diego just before New Year’s. He knows his boys at Monte Vista and everyone he will ever coach will all reap the benefits of this Mexican sojourn. At the moment, however, none of that is even a dream. There is a more pressing matter at hand. It’s New Year’s Eve. Bob has been in Mexico, running. All his friends have dates for tonight. He does not.

  Fortunately for Bob, his fraternity brother, Mike Neil, offers to come to the rescue. Mike is in law school. He knows a girl, a senior at San Diego State. Blond, light eyes, sweet, fun, good company, and strangely available at the last minute. His buddy, who’s been up to God knows what in Mexico these past weeks, needs a date for New Year’s Eve. Mike offers to set them up. Susan is her name. Why not, Bob figures. It’s not like he has a lot of other possibilities.

  They go to a party. There are some drinks, plenty of easy conversation, some laughs. She is, indeed, everything Mike told Bob she was. Yes, she says after that first date, she’d love to see him again.

  Bob has sworn off marriage until his thirtieth birthday. He wants to get some money in the bank, get started on a career. He knows soon after marriage there will likely be children, and he’d like not to be figuring out someone else’s life while he is still figuring out his. Does he know then that a little more than five years later, on December 21, 1969 (just shy of his thirty-first birthday), they will become Bob and Sue Larsen? Of course he does not know, but he sure does like how that first date went.

  Monte Vista High School, Grossmont College, San Diego, 1964–70

  Mexican epiphanies aside, Larsen’s runners at Monte Vista look like a collection of misfit toys. A kid named Don Olsen is maybe five and a half feet tall with long gangly arms. Danny Ungrich could blaze through two laps around the track but often dies after that. Rodney Stevens and David Matheny insist on running barefoot, regardless of the surface, and they often get distracted by the wildlife along the trails behind the school. They stop running to explore.

  There is a pond at the bottom of the canyon. Larsen warns everyone on the team to watch out for rattlesnakes. If he sees one near the trail as he leads the pack through workouts, he yells “snake” so the boys trailing him know to beware. During one training session, Larsen doesn’t realize Matheny and Stevens have not heeded the “snake” warning and decide to have a look. As Larsen ascends the hills back toward the high school, the boys pick up a rock and kill the snake. When they return, one of them has a dead rattlesnake draped around his neck.

  Most days though, they run with the intensity and drive that Larsen relishes. He tells them to run to the threshold, to that edge where you are running at a pace that is as hard as you can go without having to slow down. It’s the precipice between aerobic, where the lungs learn to breathe almost normally throughout the activity, and anaerobic, where they do not and the power does not depend on the efficiency of the cardiovascular system. Maintain that, for as long as you can.

  They listen, and they push themselves to the edge. He begins to take the heart rates of his own boys through their workouts. He sees that when they push the tempo to the edge on those runs to the threshold, their hearts approach 140–160 beats per minute, before quickly recovering. They can learn to keep it there, he tells them.

  In the off-season, Larsen decides his boys might benefit from running in some local road races. There are only a few to choose from but the races will keep them running. He wants them to run as part of a team. He is sure that runners train and race faster when they are part of a group than they do when they run alone. The big cities have their “Athletic Clubs,” these hoity-toity organizations like the New York Athletic Club that are as much about high
society as they are about athletics. Larsen looks at his surroundings, the dusty mountains around eastern San Diego County, and thinks, this must be the most unlikely place in the world for someone to form an “athletic club.” Which is exactly why he wants to put one here.

  On his drives through those hills, he once arrived at a one-stoplight neighborhood called Jamul (pronounced “Ha-MOOL”), a place with little more than a grocery store, a church, and a gas station. “Jamul” means “bad water” in a Mexican-Indian language. The mountains there are covered with scraggly shrubs and boulders the size of Volkswagens. Perfect, he thinks. He has the name for his team—the “Jamul Athletic Club.” His boys love it. So does he. He cuts a few J’s out of fabric. His girlfriend, Sue, sews them onto used singlets. They have their uniforms. Now they are a proper club, a team that runs all year round.

  The next year they move up to compete with the large schools, and the year after that no one can touch Monte Vista in distance running and cross country. Larsen is building something. What it is he doesn’t quite know, but his team is the distance power of San Diego.