Running to the Edge Read online

  Unlike the competition, his runners do things others don’t. They are on the beach nearly every week, cruising barefoot across the sand to build up the muscles in their feet and ease the pounding in the bones and joints. In this way they learn to run the way God wants a human to run, how to land on the middle of the foot, and lead with the knee, and keep their feet under their bodies, rather than stretching for every yard on every step, and reduce the contact time between the foot and the ground.

  Larsen’s ideas aren’t fully formed, but they are starting to come together. Liberate the run from the track, and even from the paved road. Make the hard runs even longer. Seek the edge, except in those moments when your body honestly tells you not to.

  As the Grossmont Griffins push each other to the limit each day, running in a small pack on the hot streets around campus, or across the open, rolling arid valley, dodging the chaparral with a hop here, a sidestep there, they play a running version of follow the leader, taking turns setting the pace for the pack. The only rule is everyone has to keep up with the leader. No one knows when or for how long the leader will push the pace. It might be for 100 yards or it might be for a mile. Just keep up, for as long as you have to, or for as long as you can. That’s how the game works.

  All Larsen needs now is some pure talent. And that is about to come.

  * * *

  —

  After Tom Lux commits to Grossmont in the spring of 1971, Larsen returns to the Lux home one evening carrying a notebook. Now it’s time for you to become a real runner, he tells Tom. He hands the notebook to him and tells Tom to start running every day and to write down the speed and distance of each run when he finishes. He tells Lux he is going to get a call from one of his teammates, a guy named Neil Branson who has run for Larsen this past year. Run with Branson this summer, Larsen says. He knows what to do.

  Larsen had never seen Branson until he walked into his office the previous summer to introduce himself and tell the coach he wanted to run for him. Branson was twenty-three years old, just starting college after a long stint in the Coast Guard. Larsen gave him a once-over and figured he was a good twenty-five pounds overweight, maybe more. He was pretty sure this wasn’t going to work. But he decided to give Branson a notebook and tell him to run every day for two weeks. Log your runs, he said. Then come back.

  Larsen assumed he would never see Branson again. When Branson returned two weeks later, several pounds lighter but still a long way from a decent fighting weight, Larsen told him to do it again, for another two weeks. Branson did that, too. Finally Larsen let him on the team. By the end of the season, Branson was in Grossmont’s top five, helping the Griffins to three straight blowouts against San Bernardino, Chaffey, and Riverside City to finish the season undefeated. Now Branson had a summer job—getting Tom Lux in shape to compete at the college level.

  Lux and Branson spend the summer running up and down the dusty hills of eastern San Diego County. Occasionally Ed comes, too. Tom and Neil know Ed the way everyone else does—by his reputation as one of the greatest natural runners southern California has ever produced. So they are more than a little puzzled when they hit the roads with Ed and he is barely clicking off six-minute miles. Ed mentions the trouble with the stress fractures, how he wants to make sure he’s healthy in August when the Balboa 8 rolls around and the season gets started. What he doesn’t mention to them or to Larsen is that he is in the midst of his summer slowdown. He’s at the car wash all day. That still wears him out. Put him on a starting line and fire a gun and Ed can go like few others in the country his age. But ask him to drag himself onto the roads or down to a track in the summer heat and he’s probably going to take a pass. He will learn soon enough.

  * * *

  —

  On Ed Mendoza’s first day at Grossmont in August of 1971, he finds one of the lanes of the track covered with sawdust, just as Larsen told him he would. With the sawdust lane available, Ed really does never run alone. Tom or Neil or one or two of the other local studs, Larry Stone or Joe Stubbs, are always next to him when he needs to do his track work, or when he is warming up or cooling down from an afternoon of running the trails and empty dirt roads with his teammates. Now that he is with a coach who knows how to take care of his legs, Ed feels almost no pain.

  Larsen also has these sheets of rippled rubber. He traces the soles of his runners’ training shoes onto the sheets, cuts out matching pieces and has a cobbler glue them onto their shoes for extra cushioning. They’re all wearing first-generation running shoes made of stiff leather and stiffer rubber. The added padding softens the pounding and cushions the impact. Ed increases his mileage, from about 35 miles a week to 70. Most of the rest of the crew is doing up to 100, beginning their mornings with four miles on the local roads. They are training for college races now, which are four miles on often rolling terrain, double the high school distance. Ed often skips this morning session for fear of another injury. He has never felt stronger. He feels like a real runner, especially as the wins start to pile up.

  The Griffins roll through their season just like Larsen figured they would. Grossmont has seven dual meets in the Mission Conference and scores a perfect 15 points (taking the top five places) in all but one of them. Ed wins nearly every race. He takes first in the conference finals. Then, at the invitational competitions, the real races with all those top runners from all over the state, Ed emerges as a star. He takes first in the Hancock Invitational and first in the Mt. San Antonio College Invitational, known as “Mt. SAC.” Branson is second at Mt. SAC and Tom is fourth. At Long Beach, Neil is third, with the rest of the team scoring high, too, making the Griffins largely untouchable. They are first at the Long Beach Invitational, and the Hancock, and Mt. SAC. Two more wins, at the Southern California Championship and the State Championship, and Larsen will have the titles he always believed his methods could produce—so long as he could find the right horses.

  The Southern California Championship is set for Grossmont’s home course in Santee, the fast, mostly flat trail through Santee Lakes. The planets are aligned. The team to beat is going to be László Tábori’s crew from Los Angeles Valley College. Their district is massive compared with Grossmont’s, and Tábori, the Hungarian who held the world record in the 1,500 meters during the 1950s, has been pulling local gazelles onto his squad for years on the strength of his sterling reputation.

  When the gun sounds, though, the Griffins take off. Tábori’s crew from Los Angeles Valley knows almost instantly this will not be their day. A better team is going to beat them. And that is exactly what happens.

  Now Bob Larsen really does have a state championship in his sights. He knows he has the best team, because of who they are and how they train. He just has to keep them from getting complacent during the two-week layover before the state championships, from believing that because they beat Tábori’s boys in the Southern California Championship they can just show up at the state championships and pick up the trophy. He needs to find a way to keep the Griffins under pressure, to make them understand that whatever they have accomplished so far won’t mean anything unless they win this last race.

  When the Griffins gather for training the day after the Southern California Championship, he sits the boys down and makes sure they understand this is the most important race they have ever run. He tells them they can’t just know that in their minds, they have to live it, to make each minute in training point toward those 20 minutes of racing that will happen in less than fourteen days at American River College near Sacramento.

  Two days before the race the team boards a plane for Sacramento. If Tom Lux needed to feel any more gravity, he does now. He’s never been on a plane before. When they arrive in Sacramento and check into a hotel, it’s the first time Tom has ever checked into a hotel. This really is a pretty big deal, he thinks.

  Like every other team they head out to the course the next day to study it, learn its contou
rs, understand where the hills come. They search for the most likely spot for the break, that moment when the boys out front will decide it’s time to go, where one of them, or maybe two, or three, but never more than that, will decide to take off.

  They head back to the hotel, have a team dinner, then gather once more for one last team meeting. One last time they review the land mines that might await. He goes through all the nightmare scenarios that might mess up this important day.

  The following morning, Larsen watches all those singlets stream by in a Technicolor blur. The four-mile race is maybe half over when Bob starts to do that thing that only veteran distance coaches can do. He is looking at the blur and counting, with frightening accuracy, where his boys are in relation to every other team. He has seen so many of these races he needs only to look for a moment or two before he can see the future. He can know how this will go.

  For everyone but Ed, this will not end well. Ed is just off the lead. Well, a little more than just off the lead. More like 20 seconds back. But the leader, a horse from L.A. Valley named Dave Babirack, has opened it in just over nine minutes. Larsen knows there is no way he can keep that up. Ed, the natural, is doing just what he needs to do, running his own race, and he is going to be just fine. Three miles in, Ed is right on the leader’s tail, and with a half mile to go he takes over the lead so quickly that the L.A. Valley horse won’t think for a second that he will have a chance to catch Ed in the stretch. Ed Mendoza is the 1971 California cross country champion. No one else on the team is though. The rest of the Griffins lagged early. They fought to stay in the top 10, but slipped through the teens as they searched for the extra gear and couldn’t find it. They finish in third place, behind both L.A. Valley and El Camino. Bob Larsen is sure this is all his fault.

  The previous two days run through his mind. How different they were than anything else he has been through, so unlike the weeks leading up to any other big race, when Bob Larsen did everything he could to dial down the pressure on his runners. Somewhere along the line he forgot how exhausting it is for a distance runner to have to think for 20 straight minutes, while pushing his body to the edge and keeping it there. There are no timeouts in track, no chance to step out of the batter’s box and think through the next pitch, no huddle after every four yards. He made his boys run this race while imagining every possible catastrophe every day for nearly two days. No wonder their tanks are empty. He has always had perspective, and he has long sought to pass that on to his runners, releasing tension instead of boosting it.

  He has lost plenty of races and meets before, and made plenty of mistakes. All coaches do. But this is something new—blowing a championship, letting his boys down in such a monumental way. The boys are devastated, silent in the van after the race. Even Ed, as thrilled as he is to be the state champion, feels a strange emptiness. Bob Larsen will lose more races eventually, but he will never let it happen the way it did at this 1971 state championship again.

  And certainly not with the most astonishing young runner he has ever seen on the way to Grossmont in a matter of months.

  Schenectady, New York, 1991

  Schenectady is a sad town. General Electric built manufacturing plants and turned it into a boomtown in the 1940s and 1950s. Then the company began abandoning the place in the 1960s, shipping jobs to cheaper locales. By the time I show up in 1987 to attend Union College, the city has all the trappings of twentieth-century misery—a mostly shuttered downtown, blocks of crack houses, frighteningly high rates of unemployment, poverty, and substance abuse.*

  When I started running here in college, in the gray afternoons, after classes ended and before dinner began, I said I was playing defense against the beer, and the pizza, and all the other indulgences of undergraduate life. I am not nearly fast enough to run with the college team, which is fine. I get plenty of humiliation on the tennis team, where I regularly get smacked around by better players from Williams and Hamilton and Colgate. For a while I do this two-mile campus loop twice. Then I get bored and I venture to see what else is out there.

  Head east from Union’s hilltop campus and there is a neighborhood of stately homes known as the “GE Plots,” because that’s where General Electric acquired land and built houses for its executives. It makes for a good and safe area for running, even as the plots give way to the middle-class neighborhood that surrounds the local high school.

  I’m there every day, sometime between three and seven. There’s a loop I do that I can stretch from four to five to six miles, depending where I cut north for the trek back to campus. I’m there in the brittle cold, when the streets freeze over and don’t unfreeze for weeks on end. I’m there on days when my friends are still sleeping off nights they don’t want to remember even if they could. I’m there after tennis practices, or one of the too many defeats, or even on the day once in a blue moon when I win. A run can be solace or a celebration.

  Did I see you running the other day? a professor asks me one afternoon during her office hours. Probably, I say. Are you training for something? she asks. No, I say. I just like to run. Impressive, she says.

  Maybe it is. I don’t know when it became essential for me to be there, alone, every day. I just know that it is. On those roads, no one ever serves at match point against me. No professor tells me my paper is decent, but not “A” material. No girls tell me they just want to be friends.

  I am not entirely alone, there’s a girl I pass nearly every day. She runs the same loop but in the opposite direction. She’s a year behind me. She’s small, with short blond hair. She runs a bit like a medium-fast version of the Energizer Bunny. She looks like she will never stop. I don’t know her name. She’s friendly with some girls I’m friends with, but we have no classes together. We are never at the same parties. We only see each other on these streets. If we are on the same side of the street as we pass, we trade smiles, acknowledging our odd allegiance to this daily habit. I’m pretty sure she does not know my name either.

  And then, I do see her one night. She’s in the basement barroom of my fraternity house. I’m a few beers in and I’ve got a cigarette between two fingers. Smoking is something I do occasionally, especially when I am a few beers in and my friends are doing it, and because it’s 1991 and I’m twenty-one years old and a college senior and it just feels good to stand around with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other at this moment in my life. There is a group of people around us, and then they are gone. It’s just her and I, not passing on a frigid street in mid-stride but standing there face-to-face.

  “You’re a runner,” she says. “How could you possibly be smoking?”

  There is no good response here, other than to tell her she’s right and to stub out my cigarette.

  It’s the first time anyone has ever called me “a runner.” I like the sound of it.

  * Schenectady has made an attempt at a comeback in the twenty-first century. The downtown has been revived substantially, though unemployment remains high, as GE never brought its jobs back. Upstate New York needs tremendous help.

  The Outlier: Terry Cotton

  The first time Bob Larsen sees Terry Cotton, he thinks the boy looks like he should be jumping off the pier at Pacific Beach. He is not. He is running. This is the fall of 1970. Larsen is thirty. He thinks he has seen just about everything that could happen in a running race. Then Terry Cotton takes a wrong turn down the stretch in Balboa Park.

  Larsen is at Balboa Park that afternoon because word has made its way through San Diego’s running circles that there’s a special kid suddenly running for El Cajon High. No one knows all that much about him because Terry Cotton spent his formative years somewhere in northern California. Terry doesn’t talk much, but among the folks Terry does speak to, and there aren’t many, he’s never very specific about where home was before he and his mother moved down the coast and settled in east San Diego County. She works odd jobs. He tries to do a little of th
at, too, to help make ends meet. There doesn’t seem to be a father in the picture. There isn’t much money either. Everyone knows only one thing about Terry Cotton—he sure can run.

  Teammates, the ones he drives crazy by pushing the pace to turn every training run into a race, are the only people who come close to knowing Terry, because Terry only really talks when he is running, and he doesn’t say all that much even then. Terry reveals himself in two ways. The first is through his art. He can turn doors and window frames into masterworks. He carves and etches and paints them with a complexity that removes all sense of them as normal, utilitarian objects. His specialty though is the three-dimensional works he creates with a piece of wood, finishing nails, and different color threads. He winds the thread around the nails in a way that evolves into rainbow-like beauty. When he is done with one of these, it looks as though the thread could not have been wound around those nails in any other way. It’s as if nature had designed each piece. Friends and teammates go weeks and only hear a few words from Terry. Then he presents them with one of these works of art. There is nothing more he needs to say.