Running to the Edge Page 6
Then I notice a runner coming toward me. He’s moving at a pretty good clip, but nothing crazy. It’s my first hint that there is an end to this. Then there is another one coming at me. That can only mean one thing. There is a turnaround somewhere up there. But how far? I swore I studied the course map closely last night. Wait, now it looks not all that far at all. Just up at the 11-mile mark. We’re dead into the wind for a mile, and then it’s at my back for a mile. An even trade. Maybe in marathons and in life, if we are lucky, eventually everything evens out.
*1 Yes, you can get a number for Boston through a charity that requires minimum fundraising of $7,500, which is wonderful. It’s just not the way countless runners, both the serious and dilettante, dream of making it to the starting line in Hopkinton.
*2 The age-based qualifying standards for the Boston Marathon can be deceiving. There are more people who meet the standards than there are spots in the race. So the Boston Athletic Association has set up a fastest-to-slowest system for registration. The result is that to get a spot in the race, you usually have to run between one and four minutes faster than the qualifying time for your age. With more people pursuing running seriously each year, the time needed to actually get a spot in the race keeps dropping.
The First Horse: Ed Mendoza
The best part of the day for most kids in the South Park neighborhood of downtown San Diego is the worst part for Ed Mendoza. It’s the moment in the afternoon when word spreads through the streets that sports are happening. Could be baseball, could be basketball, could be football. Sometimes they are heading over to Balboa Park, sometimes it’s just at one of the local schoolyards down the street.
Theirs is a comfortable working-class neighborhood, packed with factory workers, plenty of Mexican descent like Ed’s family. It’s not fancy, sort of no-frills, with rows of low, stucco houses crammed next to each other. As long as they keep clear of the roughest part of town, Logan Heights, which is about a mile south, they are just fine on the streets alone. Wherever they end up, bodies are needed and everyone in possession of an able one is expected to show, girl or boy.
Ed usually goes, but grudgingly. Ed is twelve years old. He’s not much of a sports guy. The big problem is he’s smaller than darn near everyone. Always has been. It’s taking him forever to get to five feet, and it’s pretty clear from the size of his parents and uncles and cousins that the growing is going to stall out pretty soon after that. He’s little more than a twig, and he’s not one of these quick little spark plugs either, a kid who can dart around the basepaths or spring free on a passing route. His legs just don’t turn over very quickly. As for the rest of his body, his arms and hands don’t seem to coordinate like the other kids. Every time a baseball or a football flies at him is an adventure. His hands shoot out to meet it. Other boys seem to let it settle effortlessly into their control. There is no part of any sport that has ever happened effortlessly for Ed. Hitting a baseball is nearly hopeless. On the basketball court, at his size, just getting the ball up to the rim is a challenge, and plenty of those shots end up getting smacked right down into his face.
The worst part though is when the teams are picked. All the kids in the neighborhood stand in a clump. Two claim captain-hood, then set out to divide the group one by one. Ed hates this part more than anything, not because he is always the last one picked. He won’t be, though sometimes it’s close. He hates it because his kid sister, Evelyn, usually tags along with him. She’s four years younger, but she’s the kid who has yet to find a sport she can’t do. She’s the one who can smack a baseball and catch any orb flying toward her like it’s a crystal egg. Her arm is a gun. Every time the captains for the day in South Park begin to choose teams, Evelyn Mendoza is going to get picked before Ed does. Getting picked after your little sister who is four years younger than you are is really about as miserable as it gets.
Things aren’t much better at Rolondo Elementary School, where Ed dreads the annual Presidential Physical Fitness Test, a series of runs, jumps, throws, and exercises that get measured and, depending on your performance, reward you with either a patch for a silver or a gold award, or, for the best performers, a faux-fancy certificate with LBJ’s signature on it. Ed does all right on the push-up and sit-up test, but he’s slow as molasses in the 50-yard sprint. He has no strength or power. Pull-ups are a struggle. As for the shot put, that heavy little ball, plenty of girls can put a shot farther than he can.
The idea that Ed will one day become one of the great natural runners to emerge from California, and Bob Larsen’s first Olympian, isn’t even a kernel of a thought at the moment. It’s not even worth the dream. Ed wouldn’t know how to create that dream at this point.
The experiences are enough to turn Ed off to sports for a couple years—what he thinks is a lifetime. That is fine with his parents and aunts and uncles and cousins. They spend most weekends barbecuing and drinking anyway. Everyone smokes cigarettes as they recount the family legends that have landed the Mendozas in San Diego, in the booming middle of the twentieth century, in the richest, most powerful country that has ever existed. They talk of how his grandfather, Aurelio, spent his formative years riding a donkey from Michoacán, on Mexico’s central coast, to the fields of southern California. There he picked fruits and vegetables and somehow made enough money to buy a zoot suit and a convertible. Citrus, watermelon, lettuce, there was always some crop in season. Ed’s father, Eugene, became one of the few from the Mendoza clan to graduate from high school. Then he lied to the military, claiming he was already eighteen, so he could ship off to Europe to fight in World War II. That’s the story he hears over and over.
Before Ed starts eighth grade, his parents tell him and his sisters, Evelyn and Lorraine, they are moving to the suburbs, La Mesa, fifteen miles east of downtown. More space, a bigger yard. Room for a backyard pool in a land of seemingly endless possibility.
Ed rolls with the move just fine, and the next year, in the fall of 1967, he enters Helix High School. There’s a big redheaded kid there a year older than Ed. He’s nearly seven feet tall and his name is Bill Walton. Everyone says he’s the best basketball player in the country, the next Lew Alcindor, the star center for UCLA, who will later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabar. Ed only has the vaguest idea who Lew Alcindor is but he gets the message that because of Bill Walton, basketball is about the biggest thing going at Helix High School. Ed is a few inches over five feet. So much for that.
Early in the year though, in gym class, his teacher lines the boys up on the track and tells them they are going to be tested on how fast they can run 600 yards. Ed tells the teacher that sounds really far, he’s not sure he can make it. Ed feels himself slowing down in the final 10 yards of a 50. The gym teacher laughs, tells him it’s one and a half times around the track. Anyone can do that he says, just don’t kill yourself at the beginning and keep breathing.
Ed does what the teacher says, starts out steady and lets the air pass gently in and out of his lungs. Halfway around the track he actually feels pretty good, so he pushes. One by one, the other kids begin to come back to him. Then with a couple hundred yards to go, there is just one lead pack with a few kids struggling to get to the finish. Ed motors by them and is barely breathing hard when he crosses the finish line. Funny, he thinks, I was more tired after those 50-yard sprints in the Presidential test back at Rolondo Elementary. Then it’s on to the rest of his day.
When the school bell rings, he gets called into the gym teacher’s office. Turns out this gym teacher, Mike Muirhead is his name, is also the school’s track and field coach. There’s another kid there, too. A senior who’s got stringy blond hair down to the middle of his back. Muirhead tells the boys he has brought them in because they tied for the fastest times in the school in the 600-yard run. Ed doesn’t quite get that. There’s a couple thousand kids at Helix. He figures this school must have the slowest collection of boys in southern California. The coach says th
ey are actually pretty fast. He wants them to join the track team.
The boy with the long hair looks up at Muirhead and says, “I like to smoke, Coach.”
Muirhead tells him he probably won’t fit in with the team, that track probably isn’t for him. With that, the senior with the long hair heads on his way.
Ed stays. Muirhead asks him what he thinks. Ed tells him there are two problems. “I’m slow,” he says, “and I hate running.”
This is when Muirhead realizes Ed doesn’t really have a clue about how track and field works. He doesn’t know that boys race at different distances, that there are 100-yard races and two-mile races, that the entire fall season is dedicated to something called “cross country,” where the boys run over hills and trails for 1.5 miles as freshmen and then longer as they grow older. He tells Ed he’ll never have to worry about sprints, or about losing, that with his natural talent, he might even be able to get a varsity letter as a freshman, the same letter that Bill Walton has on his jacket for being the best high school basketball player in the country.
“You’re not slow, Ed,” Muirhead tells him. “You’re fast.”
Ed has never heard anything like this before. He’s not sure he believes Muirhead. It all sounds kind of crazy but the guy does seem to know what he is talking about.
The next day after school Ed heads to his first cross country practice. He does a series of laps around the track with the rest of the boys. There are short periods of rest between each lap. It’s not easy to keep up at first, but the more laps they do, the easier it becomes. On the third day Muirhead tells the freshmen they need to run a one-mile time trial. If they can break six minutes, they will run in the next day’s race. Ed runs hard but it’s his first time running this far. He has no idea how to pace himself, or when to kick. He finishes in 6:04 and isn’t all that tired. Only one freshman finishes ahead of him, in 6:01. Ed hears Muirhead tell the other freshman he will run the race the next day. He tells Ed he won’t. Muirhead says the other kid has broken six minutes in the past. Ed tells his coach he is as sure as he has ever been about anything that he will beat that other boy. The other kid has been out here since the beginning of the season training for at least three weeks. Ed’s been training for three days. Muirhead thinks for a second. The kid is right. From the looks of it, he’s a special case, a little fireball, with these deep dark eyes that get this laser beam focus when a competition begins. He also has a natural motor like nothing Muirhead has ever seen. The engine takes a little time to rev, but once it turns on it doesn’t seem to stop.
Muirhead tells Ed, fine, he can run the race the next day, just don’t tell anyone he bent his six-minute rule. One other thing, Muirhead says, you might want to get some decent shoes.
That night Ed and his mother head to the closest shoe store, where they realize they don’t know what they are looking for. Running shoes don’t really exist in 1967. Some brand called Asics sells something called Tigers. New Balance has something called a Trackster, but those are mainly just available in specialty stores, not in the neighborhood shoe store where Ed and his mother are. Ed spots something made by Keds. To him, it looks like a fast shoe. Soft sole, nice fit around the top part of his foot. He’ll take them.
* * *
—
The next afternoon, Ed heads out to the track for his first race. A few minutes before the start, he approaches Muirhead with a question. “How do I do this?” he asks.
Muirhead tells him it’s pretty simple. One lap around the track, then the one-mile trail around the outside of the school, and then back to the track for one more lap. And since it’s your first race, Muirhead says, how about you start at the back and then see how many people you can pass. Simple enough?
It is.
Ed hangs back on that first lap around the track but as they head out onto the trail around the school, he starts running the other boys down. He goes by them with little effort. It seems like they are suddenly standing still and he is not. He’s cruising. The other guys sound like they are being tortured, huffing and wheezing through the course. As they head around the bend and re-enter the track there is just one boy left in front of him. Ed tries to push up but the kid keeps getting away from him. He tries again to reel him in. He inches closer, and then he notices the varsity runners begin to wander out to the edge of the track to see how this all is going to end up. Then he starts to hear them.
“Go kid, come on Helix,” they are saying. He realizes they are actually cheering for him. They yell “Helix” because they don’t know his name. In fact they have no idea who he is, but he’s wearing their uniform. The code says you cheer for the guy wearing your uniform. Ed wants to give them what they want, that last burst that will send him past the only competition left. He searches for one last gear but just doesn’t quite have it. He runs out of track and the race is over. A few of the varsity boys stroll over and pat him on the shoulder, tell him he ran a good race. Then he sees Muirhead.
“Do you have any idea how good you are?” he asks.
Ed gives him a shrug of the shoulders. Muirhead tells him he is going to run this race every week for the rest of the season. Then the coach says something else. “I’m pretty sure you are not going to come in second again,” he says.
Muirhead turns out to be right. Ed runs the table the rest of his freshman season. He’s plenty fast. This little twig of a body he has, this contraption that seemed like it was never any good for anything athletic, it turns out there is something it can do very well. It can run farther, faster than most of the other bodies the other kids Ed’s age have, even the ones far bigger than his, and even many of the ones that are older. Ed doesn’t really know why, but he doesn’t much care. For the first time in his life, he feels like there is a physical purpose to his existence, a use for the skin and the bones that nature has given him. He is here to run.
By the end of the season, Ed is at least the third-best kid on the team. Everyone knows before long he’s going to be the best. Muirhead bumps him up to varsity for the final race, and he nearly wins that. It’s a two-mile race and it turns out he’s better at two miles than he is at the freshman distance of a mile and a half. The farther you go, the better you are going to be, Muirhead tells him. He finishes in third place, a little disappointing since he’s used to winning, but he doesn’t mind because he’s on the varsity now and is pretty sure he’s going to get one of those letters everyone in the school covets.
Only he doesn’t. He gets a freshman certificate, and he’s pissed. Muirhead tells him he’s got to be in the top seven for 75 percent of the races to get the letter and he wasn’t. Ed tells him if you look at his times, look at how he did in all those practice runs, he actually was in the top seven, but the coach kept him in the freshman races.
Again, the kid is right. He was better than just about everyone on the team, but this time Muirhead isn’t giving in. Come back next year, or even in the spring, and you’ll get your letter. Ed says this isn’t fair. Here he had finally found a sport he was halfway decent at, and the coach is giving him a hard time about giving him a letter he’s pretty sure he deserves. He’s fifteen years old and doesn’t really have the capacity to understand how to play the long game, or much interest in putting up with adults and their stringent rules. As far as he’s concerned, he’s done with running.
Maybe there are other sports he can try. Like wrestling, where you only battle against kids your own size. Only, as it turns out, Ed is a terrible wrestler, forever in chokeholds and cradles and getting thrown to the mat. It hurts. A lot. He quits after a few weeks.
Muirhead gets wind of this. Coaches in the same school talk to each other—especially when a kid who might be the most gifted runner the school has ever seen spends the first two weeks of the winter season rolling around a wrestling mat.
He catches up to Ed in the hallway the next day. “Ed,” he says, “you really ought to think abou
t coming back to running. I know you wanted that letter, I know you are upset, but I guarantee if you run for the team in the spring you are going to get that letter and a lot more.”
Ed asks him how he knows. “What if I’m not good enough?” he says.
“Ed,” Muirhead says, “you are definitely good enough.”
And so it begins—Ed Mendoza’s life as a runner. Like nearly everyone else in that era, Muirhead is an interval person through and through. He believes in the sanctity of the 400- and 800-meter repeat as though it is the word of the Lord. Every Monday is 400-meter repeat day. The schedule, like his rules, rarely shifts. His boys head for the hard dirt track of Helix High School after school for sixteen 400-meter intervals. At the beginning of the season, the pace is 75 seconds per lap with 90 seconds of rest between each one. By the end they are running 65-second laps with 50 seconds of rest. The fastest boys can sometimes inch down toward 62 when they are really pushing. Tuesdays the workout is thirty-two 200s to work on speed. Wednesday is for dual meets against other schools, Thursdays it’s eight 800s. Friday is rest day. Saturdays are for larger invitational meets.
One night Ed reads in a magazine about Jim Ryun, the Kansas boy who became the first high schooler to break the four-minute mile. Ryun does twenty 400s each day. Ed tells Muirhead he wants to try it. When he finishes, his legs feel as though they are going to buckle. Muirhead asks him how it went. Ed tells him he is glad he did it because now he knows he never wants to do it again.