Running to the Edge Read online

  I don’t notice that as I sprint at our superstar, a defender has moved up to challenge him. I don’t see the defender lunge at the ball at the last second, just as I am about to pass that back shoulder. I don’t see the superstar take a half step back, putting his shoulder right in line with the spot where my cheekbone meets my nose. I feel it though, the crushing impact of shoulder meeting face. I crumple to the ground in a bloody mess.

  I’m not sure who helps me to the sideline, or who fetches the ice pack for me, one of those white plastic things that freeze up when you punch and shake it. I do know that within a few minutes, with blood still dribbling down my face and nose and my cheekbone still feeling like someone slammed a hammer into my face, the coach is sitting next to me and starting to talk. He tells me that while I am much improved, I’m just not physically strong enough. The move I thought would prove that I possessed a high soccer IQ has proven that I’m too weak to play with the big boys. Maybe spend another year on junior varsity, he suggests. Maybe you will grow a little more, get stronger, maybe you will be ready next year. I take the ice pack away from my face and glance over at the coach, to make sure that this isn’t some kind of hallucination, that he really has chosen to cut a kid while his blood is still making an ugly mess of an ice pack. Indeed he has.

  When the school year begins the next day, I walk into the track coach’s office.

  I think I want to run cross country, I tell him. See you at 3:15, he says.

  The rest of my life begins then, though I’m not all that good at it. I spend that first season struggling to get under 20 minutes for 3.1 miles, the distance we race. I can’t run a six-minute mile. I can stick with my closest friend on the team, our best runner, when he slows up for the seven- and eight-mile runs in practice, but when race time comes he’s running 15:45 and I’m a half mile back hoping not to finish last.

  But there’s a thing I begin to know, when I am scampering through the woods on the Leatherstocking Trail, making my way across one village border and then another, covering distances that most people only travel in cars. As the miles pile up and I bump up against the occasional wall, drifting toward frustration or defeat, I end up finding the crack in the wall and pushing through, becoming a part of this activity in a way I have never been a part of something before. My runs to the edge are about suffering, and about emerging from a shadow, as the foot finds the next turnover and then the next, pushing off a rock, hopping over a tree root, and on and on. To flirt with the edge is about pain, but also the pure exaltation that comes with flying through the woods. I know that my brothers have never done this before.

  * Yes, in 1979 we are still too clueless about the beautiful game to know there are no “quarters” in soccer, only halfs.

  Another Piece for CBL: Tom Lux

  Larry Lux is pissed.

  He’s got this little brother, Tom, eight years younger. Good kid at heart. Always has been. Scrawny little guy. Scraggly mop of dirty blond hair. But seventh grade Tom can be kind of a wiseass these days. He thinks he’s a big shot. He’s spending his afternoons with a new group of friends, a bunch of mini-greaseballs, smoking cigarettes, planning all kinds of minor dereliction. It’s nothing dangerous yet. Just punk stuff, stuff that pisses off an older brother like Larry Lux.

  Larry’s not worried his little brother is going to end up in San Quentin. Not yet anyway. He’d just rather not see Tom piss away his teenage years with a bunch of kids who don’t look like they want to make much of their lives.

  Larry is pretty sure the bright-eyed kid brother he knew before Tom became the kid he is right now is still in there somewhere. That kid had this innocent exuberance for life. He’d come home from school bragging about how he’d beaten everyone in gym in some race. The kid was fast, always had been; even when he was little he had this natural way of making his body move, everything flowing together, circling around in sync. Winning races down at the park or at school used to happen so often that Larry and the rest of the family just took it for granted. That’s who his little brother was and it lit him up. The fast kid.

  But just the day before Tom came home to the family’s simple, clapboard ranch house in Spring Valley, out on the edge of the arid hills of the East County. Your basic middle-class neighborhood in nearly idyllic 1960s San Diego. Tom was griping about the 660-yard race the gym teacher put them through. He finished with the last clump of boys. Said he didn’t give a crap about it, that it was for losers and dorks anyway. Larry is pretty sure this is pure bullshit, but it annoys the hell out of him to have to listen to it.

  It’s a Saturday afternoon, and Tom is hanging around the house, not up to much. Larry figures it’s just a matter of time before Tom and his crew head off to nothing good. Larry is athletic and he’s done a reasonably long cycling ride that morning, and he doesn’t have much to do himself. He finds Tom on the edge of the front porch, tossing pebbles, maybe in the direction of some squirrel that’s now run off, maybe at nothing at all.

  “Hey,” Larry says to Tom, “you didn’t like coming in last place in that race the other day, did you?”

  Tom turns to his brother, and in that moment the kid headed for low-scale delinquency disappears. The boy who doesn’t do much but grunt at anyone over the age of sixteen looks up at his brother and shakes his head.

  I can fix it, Larry tells him. Then he tells Tom to get in his car. They are going to play basketball. In the way that little brothers are wont to do, he unquestioningly follows his brother to the car.

  They drive several miles away, to a park near San Diego State University. Larry kills the engine. “We’re here,” he says to Tom.

  Tom is a little curious. They’ve never come here to play basketball before. On the way they passed several other basketball courts between Spring Valley and this court in College Heights. Whatever, if this is the court where his big brother wants to play basketball, this is where they will play. He sees Larry begin to open his driver’s side door, so Tom opens his and gets out of the car. He begins to walk toward the courts, his eyes staring at the ground. He has no idea Larry isn’t behind him. When Tom is far enough away, Larry yells through the open car window to his little brother. Holding out a stopwatch, he tells Tom there is only one way to get home, and only one way to become a good runner. He starts the car and starts the watch. Tom doesn’t understand exactly what’s happening until Larry pulls out of the parking lot. Then he gets it. “Bastard,” he thinks.

  Then Tom begins to run.

  When he gets home a little less than an hour later, Larry is sitting on the front steps with the stopwatch. He hits the button and stops it. He shows it to his little brother. “Pretty good,” he says.

  Larry tells Tom he is a natural. He just needs to train. “I’m going to turn you into a runner,” he says.

  Larry has reached the little kid inside Tom, the kid he was before junior high school and cigarettes and trying to act cool and impress people by doing things that aren’t especially impressive at all. It’s just what Tom needs to get shaken off the idiot path—that and, eventually, Bob Larsen.

  * * *

  —

  Larry has said Tom Lux is going to be a runner, and because Larry is the big brother, he gets special dispensation from Tom, so that’s what Tom is going to do.

  There is a steep incline out their back gate. The path rises sharply for a few hundred yards. It’s called Dune Buggy Hill. They start running it together several afternoons a week. It’s pretty brutal. It makes your knees feel like they are going to buckle and your chest feel like someone is stepping on it. But every time Larry says it’s time to run Dune Buggy Hill again, Tom listens.

  He listens as Larry talks about high school and college championships, the Olympic Games, the four-minute mile. He tells Tom he can achieve whatever he wants if he works at it. They run all spring and summer, often on the hill. Sometimes they leave their shoes on the front porch and run b
arefoot on the dusty trails through the low hills of the valley. Larry and Tom never talk about who to hang out with at school, or that smoking cigarettes and whatever comes after that won’t do your brain much good over the long haul. They don’t have to. They run.

  Tom doesn’t finish in the back of the pack in gym class for the rest of seventh grade. When eighth grade begins there is another classwide race. Three laps around the 220-yard chalk-line track in the schoolyard. Tom Lux laps the field and wins. The coach at the local high school, Monte Vista—a guy named Bob Larsen—is watching. He does this every year to see what talent might be on the way to the high school, which boys he might be able to keep off the football field or the baseball diamond. Larsen heads right for the boy who beat everyone else by an eighth of a mile in a race only slightly longer than a third of a mile. He tells him to keep running and to try out for the track team when he gets to high school. Tom Lux listens to him. He always will. A half century later he will say there are two people who saved his life—his brother, Larry, and Bob Larsen.

  * * *

  —

  Unfortunately for Tom Lux, by the time he shows up at Monte Vista the next fall, Bob Larsen is gone, off to Grossmont College for the next chapter of his life. But the boys who trained under Bob before he left for Grossmont still follow those same regimens. They hammer those four- and five-mile tempo runs, where they search for that precipice of unsustainable fatigue and stay just short of it from start to finish nearly every afternoon. Lux follows along until he becomes one of the kids leading those tempo runs. By the time he’s done at Monte Vista he’s one of the best runners in the region. His mile time drops to 4:28. He can click off two miles in 9:30. There are a few better guys out there. But when Ed Mendoza is too hurt to run, when Dave Harper and Dale Fleet, these two horses from Clairemont High School in the western suburbs of San Diego County, are racing somewhere else or having an off day, Lux can win.

  By the end of his senior year he’s talking to Bob Larsen again, this time in Tom’s living room. Larsen has had his eye on Tom Lux for a while, thinking he may help him turn Grossmont into something real. Tom would let him inch closer to having five runners who can win any race on any day. Better yet, Tom can be another of his lab rats, and let Bob, who is three years into his Grossmont coaching venture, take the next step of his quest. His distance teams were undefeated locally through 1969 and 1970. The results are sweet, but Bob Larsen is still searching for that larger truth, and he feels that winning on a bigger stage will come along with it.

  * * *

  —

  Bob Larsen’s runners win because he has taught them to run differently than nearly everyone else. He isn’t sure what the exact ingredients of the methods are, but there are elements he knows are essential. Long hard runs that are more about quality than volume. Intervals as the races approach to find speed, preferably on a soft track. Barefoot jaunts. It’s coming together. The flashes of success and constant progress make him feel more right than wrong.

  And yet the naysayers are still out there, still wondering why Bob Larsen is working his tail off trying to turn this little college team called the Griffins into something they were never supposed to be, and probably never will be. Why does he care so much? Doesn’t he have anything better to do? Does he really think this is going to lead to anything? He can’t recruit from outside his little district. Does he actually think anyone in running’s first tier will ever trust anything that some junior college coach has to say?

  To his runners, Larsen’s secret sauce reveals itself subtly, especially to younger runners. He comes across as a simple, happy man with plain tastes and an even tone. During training or races he stands in the infield with a stopwatch, making sure his runners know their pace. But he doesn’t bark those numbers the way other coaches do, or try to rouse more speed with hollers from the grass. It might just be a suggestive three or four or five words—“maybe pick it up here” or “relax those shoulders,” “use those arms.” He isn’t Vince Lombardi, and he isn’t a mad scientist or a masochist. He is himself.

  His methods, still evolving but almost revolutionary for their time, don’t require huge leaps of faith. Rather, his runners must have faith in themselves, in their ability to run faster when they are most tired. Also, running is a sport that celebrates solitude. It is the essence of individual pursuit, but his runners will almost never train alone. Like a peloton in a cycling race, the group is always stronger than the individual. The lone runner, training by himself, can slack off and slow with little consequence. But the group pushes together. Whoever is having an off day inevitably reaches deeper to keep up. If he can’t, he steels himself not to let it happen again, to lead the group next day. His betterment, everyone’s betterment, becomes the purpose. We run on our own, but always together.

  Another cornerstone—when you think you are running hard, run harder. Try to keep running harder for longer than you think you can, bringing your body and your mind closer to the edge, that moment when the ritual becomes the revelation. This is the origin of what eventually everyone will refer to as the tempo run. The tempo run doesn’t have to be very long, but it shouldn’t be short. Also, it must be fast, not faster than you might go in a race, though perhaps farther.

  The tempo run cuts against two pieces of conventional wisdom, to the extent that in this pre-boom era of running such a thing even exists. The conventional wisdom holds that if your race distance is 10,000 meters, or 6.2 miles, then you need to train at a longer distance than that. But you will likely run a little slower than your race pace for 8 or 10 miles or even longer. Larsen wants his troops to do that sometimes, too. That’s why they gather at his house on Saturday and Sunday mornings for the start of those 18- and 20-mile runs that sometimes loop back around to the Larsen home and the pitchers of lemonade that Sue Larsen always has waiting. Sometimes they punish themselves running as hard as they can up the five miles of switchbacks on Mt. San Miguel. At the top they pause for a moment to gaze out to the Mexican countryside. He lets them love the run and the running. Then they sprint back down.

  Sometimes Sue drives the Larsen van out to the beach with the lemonade. She meets the team there, watches them finish those long runs with hard sprints across the sand from the jetty to the pier. Then, when they can hardly stand, she drives them back to the east county.

  But Larsen also wants his boys to hammer four- and five- and eight-mile runs at a pace they might hold for the race. (“At tempo.”) How fast? Enough so that it hurts, because eventually it starts to hurt less, which means it’s time to go even faster.

  The tempo run also doesn’t have to exist on its own. It can exist as miles five through eight of a 10-mile run, or miles 13–19 of a 20-miler. The group works this out. It is an extension of Zátopek’s absurd regimen of 20 or 30 or 70 quarter-mile bursts, the so-called intervals. The shorter distances harden his heart and lungs for the longer ones. This makes some sense to Larsen. The intervals have their place in the life of any runner. So why not press the cardiovascular system for as long as it can be pressed? Press it too hard, at a pace that the interval obsessives are always shooting for, and you can’t go far enough to get a good workout. But press it just hard enough to reach that moment when you believe you can run fast forever, when you have reached the perfect edge, that is the essence of the tempo run. That is how you transform the internal engine, adding the extra cylinders with new capacity, making it possible for the runner to transform an everyday training session into something that can truly be epic, running to the very edge of what feels possible.

  Larsen may not yet fully understand the biology of why this works. That will come later, when the sports scientists start to study the physiology of training. He will learn that what his regimen is doing is training the body to deal more efficiently with the stress of lactic acid. When his runners begin to run for him, their systems are like the kid driving a car for the first time, squeezing the steering whee
l with both hands, shoulders tense, eyes darting all around, struggling to deal with the stress. With practice though, that kid can drive a car while listening to the radio and eating a sandwich.

  When a body trains hard, it has to break down carbohydrates and glycogen to use them for energy. The process produces lactic acid, which then becomes lactate, though that process creates more hydrogen than a body not used to dealing with the stress can easily manage. Too much hydrogen makes the body too acidic. The human body prefers to have a nice balance between acid and base. The tempo runs train the body to get better at using the lactate as a source of energy, of converting the lactic acid to a new form of glucose.

  Think of the assembly line worker trying to manufacture a machine using parts on a conveyor belt. Speed up the belt, and the worker will struggle to keep up. But over time the worker improves to maximum efficiency. This doesn’t happen with quick bursts of speed (think intervals). It only happens if the conveyor belt steadily gets faster and then maintains its speed for longer and longer periods, or, in distance running terms, if the body can efficiently produce and use glycogen for a longer and longer time.

  Larsen has ways of lifting his foot off the gas pedal, too. His boys always want to go longer. The age of volume is dawning. They hear stories of marathon champions, some not much older than they are, logging 160-, 180-mile weeks. There is a certain machismo in big numbers, a certain security. This is the way the mind of a gifted young distance runner works—if 10 miles is a great workout, then 20 miles must be doubly great. Then the almost inevitable breakdown occurs, even in the bodies that crave the otherworldly high from the 15th or 17th 5:30 mile the way a heroin addict craves that next rush. Run a little less, Larsen tells them, just make sure you are going hard, making every mile count. Then, when you are ready, boost the volume. At a certain point, and this is the magical point he searches for with each runner, intensity and volume are in equilibrium. Run as intensely as you can for as long as you can, each week and month during the season and then no more, because more is not necessarily better.