Running to the Edge Read online

  After spending four years at the little high school out in the sticks, Larsen’s phone begins to ring. On the other end of the calls are college coaches. What is he feeding those boys? One call comes from the University of California at Irvine. Another from Pomona, one of the prestigious Claremont schools some forty miles inland from the Los Angeles coast. A coach from Cal Poly calls, too. All want the same thing. They want Larsen to help coach their kids.

  He lands at Grossmont Community College, a school that sits atop a hill in El Cajon, ten miles east of San Diego’s Pacific shore. There are glorious, 360-degree views of the valley below, the mountains to the north and south, the ocean to the west. The dirt track is at the top of the hill.

  On the surface, it’s a curious choice. Why not go with a more academically known—or bigger—school. Oddly though, junior colleges in late 1960s California are a hotbed of running talent. These schools don’t have powerhouse football teams, but in many cases their sports teams, especially the track teams, are very, very good, often far better than the state’s four-year schools. The four-year college education explosion, the idea that it is essential for success, has yet to occur in the U.S. So every year there are any number of very fast graduating high school seniors who opt for the two-year, local college route.

  A couple hours north, László Tábori, a Hungarian former world record holder in the 1,500 meters, is guiding one of the country’s best track teams at Los Angeles Valley College. Tábori is a protégé of Mihály Iglói, another Hungarian, who, like Tábori, is in the first ring of running royalty. If a junior college is good enough for Tábori, it’s plenty good for Bob Larsen. And once again, there is that underdog advantage that Larsen is drawn to. No one would ever predict that Grossmont Community College will ever become a running superpower. Larsen is going to be coming almost from nowhere again, which is the place he really likes to come from.

  Plus, the Grossmont post comes with a job teaching physical education and a $20,000 a year salary, significant money at the time. Regulations will limit his recruiting to a small region of San Diego, but he isn’t worried. He’s in the middle of a puzzle and he’s pretty sure he’s going to solve it.

  * * *

  —

  Now Larsen needs a plan.

  There are two prevailing schools of thought in distance training. There are the disciples of Lydiard, the Kiwi, who don’t think much about pace and instead focus on volume—a minimum of 100 miles each week. “Train don’t strain.” Avoid injury by not going too hard. In the other school are runners and coaches obsessed with intervals—Zátopek and his scores of 400s, and Iglói and his twice-daily interval sessions. Avoid injury by not adding on unnecessary mileage, they say. Both have little science backing them up. Larsen thinks he can create a third way, by marrying the two. Then he will back it up with numbers and trophies to make it last.

  The miles Larsen envisions are on the roads and trails, off the track. The question Larsen really wants to answer, the one he thinks he might discover in this next level of competition, is this—how long can you stay away from the intervals, stay off the dangers of the track, and still compete successfully? Larsen is sure of one thing, that eventually the track becomes the enemy.

  It’s a strange thing about a track. There is something about those eight lanes and that quarter-mile oval, the scattering of curiosity-seekers who always seem to pause as they wander by. From the first moment a spike hits the dirt (or the cinders, or eventually the rubber) a runner on a track wants to be great in that moment. He wants to win every lap, every interval, wants the stopwatch always to read a split second less than it did the lap before. The best runners crave competition, no matter who it is—a rival or a teammate—to be one step farther ahead or one step closer to the front than he was the previous day. But do that on a track day after day, month after month, and the breakdown will come. The oval shifts the mind’s frame of reference in some mysterious way, and the psychological toll is simply too taxing.

  Larsen has learned that roads and trails are different. Out there, the mind expands beyond 400- and 800-meter intervals, referred to by runners as “splits.” A runner can explore and conquer the barriers and limits that everyone who has never done this sort of thing assumes exist. At some point, on nearly every run, the runner begins to believe that, yes, you can keep doing this, at this pace, maybe forever. Larsen’s goal is to rewire his runners’ brains to experience competition in a different way, to enjoy the push of body and speed as they have never done before, and to want to search for each new limit again and again.

  So this is what Bob Larsen tells that first collection of Grossmont runners as he gathers them in the summer before school begins. He says he knows what their old teammates and high school competitors who have ventured elsewhere are likely doing right now. He knows they are going to be hearing about it. It’s what runners do, after all—they talk about running, the way golfers talk about irons and drivers and the latest technological innovation, or the hip turn that might give them an extra 10 yards off the tee. Pitchers in baseball trade secrets about how they grip a ball, where each fingertip touches each seam, and the angle at which the arm powers through the slot. Runners talk workouts. Interval patterns. Weekly mileage.

  Larsen tells his boys they are never going to match what the other guys are doing on the track. Those other teams are going to do so many more quarter and half and mile repeats than we will ever think about doing, he says. He tells them not to worry. He is going to make sure the boys of Grossmont run themselves into the shape of their lives, not by next week, or for the first race of the season, but for when it counts, at the end of the season, when the championships are won.

  The summer, he says, will be all about building the base, putting in the miles on roads, and on trails, and at the beach, up hills and down, 60, 70, 80, 100 miles a week, whatever their legs can take. Each runner will find his limit. His body will tell him where it is.

  Then, after several weeks, when the fitness is there, they will begin in the middle of those runs on the roads and through the canyons to chase the edge, to find that spot where one click more is too fast to maintain, and one click less feels just slightly too comfortable. They will hold it there, for five miles, and then six and seven, as long as they can. For some of them, that pace will be sub-five-minute miles. For others, it will be slower. They will try to hang with the pack as long as they can. This is not about high mileage or low mileage, it’s not about 65-second quarters, or 2:10 halfs, or 4:30 or 5:20 miles. It’s about the search for the edge. They won’t search for it every day, but several times each week. Then, when the big meets approach toward the end of the season, they will back off the search and increase their time on the track, to find that short burst of speed they will need to bring the finish line close.

  The boys trust Larsen, trust the man they call “CBL” and what he tells them. The trust equation is unspoken but perfectly conveyed. They trust him when he starts out on the runs with them, and he orders them to stay behind him for the first 15 minutes, and then 20, and 25, so they get into the warm groove. They know eventually he will let them go. Then he will take a shortcut to the latter stages of the loop and wait. There, Larsen will give them those few words they need to hear to get to the end. He limits these to simple phrases that remind them to stay relaxed but not let up.

  Out there on the roads and trails, away from the track, the boys stick together but always end up in something that looks like a race, pushing each other to get the pace up a few clicks faster, to get back to that hilltop track, high above their heavenly city where each run begins. He checks their heart rates when they get there and between intervals, and this is what the numbers say: the longer they stretch out the threshold runs, the longer they can run intensely without pushing their heart rates to that maximum pumping level of roughly 180 beats per minute, which means their bodies are becoming more efficient. This is what he knows to be the definition
of fitness. He knows the numbers can only mean one thing, that their bodies can do more while using less energy. If they can keep getting better at that, they will have more gas in the tank to push the pace as a race moves into its last miles.

  As a team, they can’t win the big meets at first, can’t challenge for a state championship. They don’t have the depth yet. But Larsen can see the progress, especially among his better runners. They show up at the big invitationals in Long Beach and at Mt. San Antonio College and score with the best runners from the biggest schools in California.

  Bob Larsen knows why this is happening. He believes his search for the edge is making them as fast as they can possibly be, faster than they ever imagined. He believes in their hearts, that his way is getting them all closer to the truth—that marriage between having the strongest engine and the healthiest legs that gives the elite runners the belief that they can run fast forever. Now he just needs to find some more of them. If he can find the right runners, he believes he can win anything.

  And so the hunt begins.

  *1 Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, lays all this out extensively in Chris McDougall’s Born to Run, and did so for me during interviews about “Running Man” I have conducted with him.

  *2 For a terrific and deeper explanation of these methods and others, see Neal Bascomb’s The Perfect Mile, from which these practices are taken.

  East Hampton, New York, September 2015

  This race I run, the Hamptons Marathon, starts this year in the woods in an area called The Springs, several miles away from some of the most expensive beachfront property on the eastern seaboard. The race winds for eight miles by farms, summer home developments, a tennis club, a fruit and vegetable stand, along roads with substantial names—Accabonac, Old Stone Highway, Abraham’s Landing. Then it jags sharply south and east, through the preserved acres of Napeague State Park. There, Long Island, some twenty-five miles wide at its widest, can be measured in yards. The briny air of Napeague Bay to the north, the pounding surf of the Atlantic to the south, both visible with a swivel of my head.

  Here, approaching the 10-mile mark of the race, the wind begins to pick up for the first time on this late September morning. It’s coming off the ocean, from the southeast. Through the first nine miles, the stands of trees beside the road provide the occasional protection. There is no rhyme or reason to when they are there and when there is a clearing. When there are trees, the air is mostly still. When they disappear, it whips across Cranberry Hole Road like someone giving you a little shove to the hips.

  The landscape is dead flat out here, which is the point. I like the flats. I can run fast in the flats for hours, barely getting tired. Today I need to go faster than I have ever gone before if I am going to run fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon, the only major U.S. marathon that requires a qualifying time. I am now forty-six years old, and I have been at this marathoning game, and trying to qualify for Boston, for nearly a quarter century.

  The downside is the flats also allow me to see what’s ahead. The sun is still on its way up, dead in my face and almost blinding if I don’t squint, but I can see. I’m not wearing sunglasses. Stupid mistake. A squinting face is a tight face. Tight face, tight body. Shaded, relaxed face makes for a loose, relaxed body. That’s one of many reasons marathoners pray for cloud cover. I have a nylon baseball cap on to keep the sun off the top of my head, but the sun isn’t high enough for the cap to do the job yet. So there is blinding sun. It’s manageable, but uncomfortable.

  The September air is crisp. I started the race with an old pair of socks on my hands to keep my fingers warm. They’re tucked into my shorts now, navy blue short running shorts, with zip pockets to hold the gel packs I eat every seven miles. The last one, the one that is supposed to get me through the final five miles, inevitably turns my stomach. I might skip it.

  I’m also wearing a white running shirt with a Butch Cassidy cartoon on it. It’s the shirt of the charity team I run with named Hole in the Wall Gang. The charity supports a camp by the same name for kids with cancer, HIV, and other miseries. The Hole in the Wall was the hangout of the outlaw Butch Cassidy and his gang, the place where they felt safe. The camp is where these hard-luck kids are supposed to feel safe, where they can play ball, and fish and swim and climb treehouses without a parent four steps behind worrying about what catastrophe might await. I often run marathons in Hole in the Wall shirts or bandannas or sweatbands. When I am hurting or dreading the next miles, I look at the Butch Cassidy cartoon and I think of those kids. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes I’m helpless.

  I should probably think of them now, because what I am thinking about is what I am seeing off in the distance, maybe a half mile ahead. There, Cranberry Hole hits Lazy Point Road and the course takes a hard right, due south into the Napeague meadow—dead into a 20-mile-an-hour wind off the ocean. This is what I have been worried about the past twenty-four hours.

  No, the past ten months.

  I am not an elite runner. Never have been. I try to train the way they do, though, the way Bob Larsen taught them to, only slower, of course. I only recently realized I run this way because of him. I chase seconds, trying to cheat time.

  There is a simple reason why I am running here today. The reason is the wind. Not this wind, but the wind of November 2, 2014—the day of the New York Marathon, almost a year earlier. I was injury free and in the best marathon shape of my life that day. I was ready to climb the mountain that every workaday marathoner wants to climb. I was ready to run fast enough in New York to qualify for Boston, the holy grail for long distance runners. Every other marathon in the world has a very simple formula for building a field of runners. Sign up, pay an entry fee, show up on the starting line. Run when the gun sounds.

  Boston, uniquely, is for the elite, or rather, the elite in each age group.*1 The younger you are, the faster you have to run to qualify for the field of the country’s oldest and grandest marathon. On that day in New York I had just turned 45, which put me in the 45–49-year-old age group. This gave me an extra 10 minutes to play with. Now I could run a 3:25 and make it to Boston, rather than the 3:15 I had to run when I was 44. A month before the race, I did a 24-mile training run in just over three hours. In other words, I almost could have walked the last two miles that day and likely still finished under the wire. I was going to get a time that was going to put me into the top 10 percent of marathoners in my age group in the most populous country in the world where running is a big, competitive deal. I was on the edge of elite (for my age group). Athletically, I have never been elite. But finally, on November 2 in New York, this was going to happen.

  Then came the forecast—20–25-mile-per-hour winds from the north. The first 19 miles of New York head due north. Steeling myself in my living room the night before the race, I got a text from Meb Keflezighi, who won the race in 2009. Through my job as a sports journalist, I had gotten to know Meb from writing about him. He and I understand my version of a marathon is nothing like his, but sending words of encouragement to a fellow runner the night before what figures to be an ugly race is the sort of thing he does.

  “Pain is in the forecast for all of us tomorrow,” Meb wrote. “Good luck.”

  This is what running does. It draws together me and Meb, two people who could not be more disparate in talent and potential. Yet we race on the same course, cross the same start and finish, train with the same framework of training designed by the same coach, only at far different speeds. There will be pain for Meb and a different, though not entirely separate, pain for me. There always is.

  On that day, we ran with the feeling of someone’s hand on our chests pushing us in the other direction for 19 miles. Impossible. There went five months of training, gone with the wind.

  It was just like the wind that was about to whack me in the eleventh mile of this mostly flat Hamptons race. On all the topographical maps and elevation c
harts and marathon guides, this course looks like the perfect place to finally get under 3:25, to finally get an ounce of revenge on the twenty-two boys who made my high school’s varsity soccer team in 1985 when I did not, and all those college tennis players who, unlike me, knew how not to choke away second set leads. Unfortunately for me, topographical maps do not show the wind.

  I’ve put New York behind me, but as I turn into Napeague Meadow, my eyes squint. I’m trying desperately to qualify for Boston again, to get to the finish under 3:25. Out there is the ocean. Here, upon me, is a wall of wind as hard as anything I have felt in nearly a year.

  There are plenty of strategies for running into the wind in the middle of a race.

  Go harder, get through it fast, and don’t let it knock you off your pace. That way, when the course turns or the wind shifts, it feels like you are running downhill.

  Or, ease up, don’t waste precious energy fighting, know that everything is temporary.

  Or, believe there is a narrow corridor, a passageway through that wall of air. Find it, and run free.

  I try all three of these within a half-mile span as I head south through the meadow in mile 11. I keep my eyes up. I try to think not of the wind but of the horizon on the ocean that I can just barely make out. The scenic beauty is all that you have during a tiny marathon like this with just a few hundred participants and even fewer spectators. Mile after mile passes with no one cheering you on, no roars of support or DJs or marching bands or any of the other pomp that big-city races offer. It’s just you, often running hundreds of yards away from the closest competitor, and the trees and the sky and whatever else fills the landscape. You take it in. You remind yourself how lucky you are to be able to be doing this, and you take another step, and then another.

  Right now though I feel far more snakebit than lucky. My race plan—1:38 for the first half, 1:42 for the second, has a five-minute cushion. I can have a few subpar miles along the way and still get under 3:25 and get to Boston.*2 Those slow miles aren’t supposed to happen until the final 10 kilometers of the race, when I generally begin to slow down, no matter how hard I train or how good I feel through the first 20 miles. A gust kicks up. Did I just take a step backwards?