Running to the Edge Page 7
He is getting faster though, much faster. By the end of the season Ed cracks 10 minutes for the two-mile race. He’s the best kid on the team already as a freshman. He gets that letter, and as school comes to an end, Muirhead tells him to make sure he gets out and runs four times a week in the summer. The rules prohibit Muirhead from supervising any practices, but he wants his boys to stay in shape, so they will be ready to go when cross country season rolls around in the fall.
Ed isn’t sure exactly what this all means. Run over the summer? Where? With whom? It is 1968. He’s not sure he’s ever seen someone running on the streets. Is he supposed to come to the school track and do laps on his own when no one is there? That sounds pretty miserable to him. What will he say to his parents, his cousins? To them, summers are party time. Long lazy nights sitting outside, smoking cigarettes and passing bottles and listening to music. No one he knows has ever just upped and gone running in the morning or the middle of the afternoon or the evening.
That summer Ed has a job washing cars down near the beach. He vacuums the cars before they get run through the machines, and he wipes them dry after they emerge. He collects the nickel or dime or quarter from the driver, tosses it in the tip jar and it’s on to the next car. Over and over, for eight hours. There are worse jobs. He knows that. But this one is utterly exhausting. His body feels like he has been tumbled through a dryer by the end of each day. He’s glad he spent the spring training with the track team. He feels like that training has gotten him in shape for this job, but he sure doesn’t have any energy to run when his days end. And weekends, well, running somehow just doesn’t happen. He’ll figure it out once the season comes. He knows he’s as fast as anyone in the school at this point anyway. What does he have to train for?
* * *
—
The season begins with something called “hell weeks”—two weeks of preseason practices, two practices a day. Muirhead doesn’t screw around. At the first practice, he says, let’s see who did some running over the summer. He runs the boys through sixteen 400s on that hard dirt track at Helix High. Ed’s legs nearly fall off by the end, but he forces himself to make it through, then comes back for more in the afternoon.
By the time school starts, whenever Ed starts running on the track, he feels like there are thumbtacks sticking into the inside edges of his shin bones, up and down the crevice where the muscle connects to the bones. As the weeks pass, the pain mounts, the thumbtacks begin to feel like small nails. By October, it feels like someone is twisting a screw into his tibias with each step. This little body of his, the body he had begun to think had been blessed with this one special skill, the ability to run far fast, is letting him down.
He begins to think maybe he had been right all along. Just as he wasn’t put on this earth to play sports with sticks and balls, perhaps he wasn’t meant to run either. For those precious moments last fall when he was breaking tapes at the finish line, or beating everyone else in the two-mile time trials in practice last spring, the running had given him a kind of stature and confidence he had never felt before. He was no longer the little twig getting picked after his sister down at the park or mauled on the wrestling mat. He was as big as anyone at the school—well, maybe not that big redhead Bill Walton, but everyone else. Now this is going away.
He tells Muirhead about the pain, and Muirhead tells him he has to go to a doctor. The doctor examines him and takes some X-rays and tells him he has a series of hairline fractures in his tibias. The only way they will heal is with rest. His cross country season is over. Take it easy, Muirhead tells him. There’s another track season in the spring.
The winter is long. The only running Ed does is in his mind. He imagines his legs turning over effortlessly, sending him around the track as fast as he knows he can go when he can run without pain. Bored in classes, his grades slip—though he never was much of a student. He watches the clock tick through each day. He gets one C after another. Good enough, he figures. Then finally, spring comes and he is cleared to run again, time to get back to the track and Muirhead’s weeks of 400s and 800s and 200s. At the first race of the season, he runs alone, finishes the two-mile distance in 9:51. It’s as fast as he has ever run and he hasn’t trained for months. Maybe this body isn’t cursed after all, he thinks. But then, a few weeks into the season, the thumbtacks return. A few days later, so do the nails. Before they turn to screws, he tells Muirhead he needs to back off, rest a bit, even if it means losing some fitness. Muirhead agrees.
This is how it goes for the rest of Ed Mendoza’s high school running career. His running life becomes a frustrating experiment about how fast a gifted runner can go on so little training. He wretches and dry heaves after one race, barely runs for the next two weeks, then drops his two-mile time to 9:36, and then 9:25.
In Muirhead’s eyes, Ed is officially becoming a freak. He’s barely training and yet the seconds are falling away. Muirhead is hardly a student of the physiology of the sport. He has no earthly idea what is going on, only that Ed seems to have this freakish motor that needs just the slightest hint of what he wants it to do. Then it downshifts and powers up, and then it just goes.
Ed comes in second at the section finals, earning himself a place at the state championships. Again after little training, he opens with a 4:30 mile and his final time drops to a blistering 9:09, making Ed the best two-miler in the San Diego region. He is only halfway done with high school.
“You are going to be the best runner our school has ever had,” Muirhead says. Then comes the message he has delivered time and again. “The farther you go, the better you will be.”
Farther? Did he really say farther again? Ed wonders. He tells Muirhead about his mile split. He was at 4:30 and on cruise control. I’m going to be a miler, he tells Muirhead.
A miler, Muirhead asks? Why a miler?
“I’m going to be like Jim Ryun,” Ed tells him.
* * *
—
Over the summer, Muirhead gets up to speed on how to handle runners with a proclivity for shin splints and stress fractures. He doesn’t have much experience with guys like this. Muirhead tells Ed he is consulting with the smartest running coaches he knows, including the coach at Grossmont Junior College, Bob Larsen. Larsen agrees with Muirhead that he’s got to put Ed on grass and keep him there, because God has played a cruel joke on Ed, giving him nearly everything a distance runner could dream of having except bones that splinter under the kind of stress that any decent runner should be able to handle.
In the fall, Ed and the cross country team spend all season training on grass at San Diego State University. Ed stays healthy, goes undefeated, and finishes third in the regional championships.
The third-place finish comes with a useful lesson. Ed was leading with 200 yards to go but got caught at the end and finishes third. Now Ed is beginning to learn who he is as a runner; it’s not so far off from the runner he thought he was when he was getting pasted in 50-yard dashes in elementary school. On the spectrum of freakishly fast distance runners, he is, in fact, slow. To win, he’s going to need a healthy lead before the breakaway in the final sprint. He isn’t going to beat people at the end of races. He is going to be a front-runner, the guy who gets a lead, pushes the pace, dares you to keep up, then finds a way to hang on because you realize too late how he made you spend your last reserves when you didn’t even realize it.
But when the spring season rolls around, Ed has to train alone, since the rest of the team needs time on the track. Training becomes drudgery. He begins to skimp on the workouts. The hesitance, the doubt, the memories of being that boy who wasn’t much for sports, creep back slowly.
One day, Muirhead hands him the workout before he heads off to the grass—twelve 400s at 64 seconds each, with one minute of rest in between. Ed does seven and gets bored. On another day, the minute rest becomes two. On yet another he feels his lungs cinching and his quads turning to
rubber in the final stretches of the quarter miles. Instead of fighting, he fades.
None of this is his fault, though he doesn’t realize it. He will before too long, when he learns that to train alone is to set oneself up—not specifically for failure, but for a failure to get everything out of a run that you can. When your teammates make you push on, challenge you not to fade, they convince you to ignore the cinching in the lungs and the rubberizing of your quads so you can stay with the group. Suffering becomes a brotherhood, and when women start competing at these distances, it will be a sisterhood, a family that is always with you.
Without the necessary work, his strength wanes. Three races into the cross country season, the nails in his shins return. It lingers for months. The doctor for the San Diego Chargers tells him to ride a bicycle and swim to maintain his fitness, and when he is pain-free to go back to the grass. He grinds his way back to the state championship for the two-mile. The main competition is a kid from the other side of the county named Dale Fleet, who was nothing a year ago. He puts up an eye-popping 8:53. Ed finishes eight seconds back. It’s enough to allow him to see once again the person he wants to be. But how can he get there?
When he gets home, he pulls out all those letters he has from all those colleges across the country offering him a spot on their track teams. He’s thinking about Oregon. Steve Prefontaine, the golden boy, is there. Or UCLA, he likes that track. Or Kansas, alma mater of his hero, Jim Ryun, even if Muirhead is right and he never will be a miler.
At school, he brings up the letters with Muirhead. The coach shakes his head. Ed, he says, what kind of grades do you have? Ed is a C student, passable, but not much more than that. Do you like schoolwork, Muirhead asks? He knows the answer. Not much, Ed says. Then Muirhead tells Ed about the plan he worked out for his star runner months ago. He explains why the coach from the nearby junior college has been showing up at so many of the Helix races lately. Of course Larsen has been watching, dreaming of putting together a group that can help him figure out what happens when a team runs as a collective on that edge, and what that might say about this most primal of activities.
Muirhead lays it on the line. Ed, you wouldn’t last a semester at a four-year school. You are going to Grossmont, and you are going to get your grades up and learn how to be a student, and you are going to run for Bob Larsen.
Ed has one question. Who is Bob Larsen?
* * *
—
It takes just one race for Larsen to decide Ed Mendoza is the most talented runner he has ever seen. He thinks he’s probably the most talented young runner around, probably the best one ever to come out of San Diego. Ed is small for sure, but he has the build of a thoroughbred. His lower body is packed with the power muscles where it counts, in the gluteus maximus. Yet his legs become toothpicks below the knees, so light and easy to turn over. And that motor. Perfect, Larsen thinks. For crying out loud, the kid was practically the state champion and he has basically been injured for the better part of three years. He’s very nearly beaten everyone from the Oregon border to Mexico and he’s barely trained. Larsen knows he will need to keep him healthy. And Larsen is pretty sure he, more than anyone, knows how to do that. The truth is becoming clearer to him, and Larsen thinks he knows how to push Ed to the edge without pushing him over it.
A few nights after Muirhead talks to Ed, Larsen arrives in Ed’s living room. He explains what is happening at Grossmont, how he is gathering the best runners in San Diego’s East County on his team. Larsen knows Ed is thinking about that sensation of nails driving into the bones of his lower legs when he wants something too much. Larsen tells him not to worry about injuries. On the edge of the Grossmont track, Larsen is going to build a soft trail for Ed. He’s going to cover it with sawdust. That’s where Ed will do his work, right alongside the rest of the boys on the team. His runners always stick together, always run in a group, whether they are running for Grossmont or the Jamul Athletic Club that Bob has going in the off-season. They are together every weekend, when they gather in Bob’s front yard, head out, and push each other to the edge, then race back to Bob’s front porch, where his wife, Sue, is waiting with a pitcher of lemonade.
It’s going to take a little time, he says. Becoming the runner you want to be, the person you want to be, can take years, but this is what it means to run for him, Bob says, to be a part of the team. Sometimes you might find yourself out there on the roads by yourself, but you will never run alone again.
Ed likes the sound of that. And Larsen has his first true horse.
Larchmont and Mamaroneck, New York, November 1979, September 1985
I remember the rain. And I remember the pancakes.
The running boom has officially arrived in my seaside town of Larchmont, New York. The town has organized its own five-mile race. If the big city twenty-one miles to the southwest, visible from the park along Long Island Sound, can hold a five-borough marathon, one-square-mile Larchmont can figure out a way to cram a five-miler zigzagging through its streets. I am ten years old, the youngest of three brothers. My oldest brother, David, who is fourteen, mentions at dinner one night his intention to run the race. This is roughly ten days before race day. By the end of dinner, David’s two little brothers, Danny, who is twelve, and I, have taken up the challenge. We are running, too. We train some, running a mile or three through the neighborhood in late afternoons a couple of times. We declare ourselves fit.
The day before the race, my plans change. My soccer team wins a playoff game. We advance to the next round. Our game is scheduled for the following morning. It overlaps with the start of the race. I can’t do both. I’m going to play soccer. The team comes first.
Then comes the rain, maybe about forty-five minutes before the start of my soccer game. We are down at the fields warming up in a downpour. By the opening whistle, the skies are dumping on us. By the end of the first quarter it’s a torrent.* The field floods. The game is called. I head home, five blocks away.
By the time I arrive back at 17 Cherry Avenue, the rain has eased. David and Danny are loading into the car to head to the race. I ask if I can come. Sure, my dad says. But we have to go now. I run into the house and put on a dry pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I change out of my cleats and into the classic royal blue Nikes with a yellow stripe that are required footwear in 1979. Then I am out.
In the car, on the way to the race, I find out what I missed while I was attempting to play soccer. Pancakes. My mother decided that her boys need a nice big breakfast before they run five miles.
At the start line, I edge up to the front with the fast guys, even if I don’t belong there, because that’s just sort of the kid I am at that age. The rain has slowed to a steady drizzle. It’s not warm, but not cold. I have no plan other than to get from the start to the finish as quickly as I can. When the gun sounds I go.
I have no idea where my brothers are until the race is nearly over. Around the four-mile mark, my brother Danny passes me. He’s friendly about it, tapping me on the arm to say hello as he runs a few steps ahead, then heads to the end. I crank away for another few minutes, nearly keeping up. I cross the finish line in 40:15 a few seconds behind Danny. It’s not a great time, but not a bad one either, especially for a first race, especially for ten years old. But I have felt something—or rather, I have NOT felt something, which is overwhelming fatigue. I felt something much closer to the opposite. I did not actually get tired. I had many more miles in me. Of course I have no idea what this is. Only later will I understand it as a kind of beckoning to experience a state of fullness that I will seek again and again.
We wait several minutes, until finally, David, the eldest, makes his way to the chute. He’s had a bad trip. Danny isn’t feeling great either, both of them are on the verge of puking. I’m fresh as a daisy. Now we know. Pancakes, just before a race. Not a good idea. Dodged a bullet with that one. I make a note to remember it. I have also slaughtered my
oldest brother. I will remember that, too. Good thing; six years later, I will need the memory.
* * *
—
It’s almost evening, the end of the second soccer practice of the day, on the last day of the second week of preseason for my high school soccer team. All summer I’ve trained alone on a field across the street from my house, juggling, making up moves, shooting with my right foot and my left against the fence until they are nearly equal. I’m working so hard because I need to. I spent sophomore year substituting on the junior varsity. Now I have to try out for varsity, so I can play fearlessly on the varsity the way my older brother did, because I love to play and because I desperately need to keep struggling to match those older siblings.
The final scrimmage is winding down. I’ve had a good two weeks. Not perfect, but good enough to make it, I think. I may not get much playing time as a junior, but this is a senior-heavy team. Keeping me on it will build depth for the next year when they are gone. Plus I’m scrappy. I don’t get tired, or at least I don’t show it. Not even on that night the first week when coach calls us back for a third training session and says to leave the balls at home and just wear a comfortable pair of running shoes. We run for the better part of an hour. Sprints and Indian Runs, where the last guy in the line has to overtake the first guy as the line circles the field over and over. And then we do an all-out three-miler. By the end most of the team is walking. I’m not.
But now I’m trying to get through this scrimmage without doing anything stupid. I’m the right defender. Our superstar, the kid who is deciding between college offers, is in the central defense, and when he gets the ball about 40 yards from our goal and starts dribbling fast toward me, I know I am supposed to make space for him. I’m going to make this run the coach had us working on in training the other morning. I’m going to run at him and pass him just off his back shoulder. He can leave me the ball to take it to the other side of the field, or keep carrying it to the right sideline, into the open space I have left for him. I’m going to look smart and coachable here. I think this move will help me clinch a spot on the team and launch my varsity career. Really, that career has about two and a half seconds left.