Marathon Man by Bill Rodgers

to simulate the big race coming up, which is why he ran those final two miles back to campus with all his might. Or maybe my roommate needed to teach me one last lesson. He had to show me that I had a natural gift for distance running, a gift that he himself had been denied. But that unlike me, he was willing to put in the long, hard miles, to endure the pain, to make the sacrifices, to test the limits of his heart. For this reason, he was on the road to becoming a marathon champion, while I was on the road to nowhere. His story would be one of hard-thought victory. Mine would forever be one of squandered talent.

 
    THREE
    Blown off Course
    A PRIL 21, 1975
    A SHLAND, M ASSACHUSETTS
    Perhaps the only thing more difficult than winning the Boston Marathon is describing the journey—what you see at this or that mile. It’s like asking a Kentucky Derby jockey to describe everything he sees outside the rails while he’s racing around the track. “The only time you can be with God is in the immediate moment,” a pastor once told legendary jockey Pat Day. “You can’t be with him five minutes ago, or five minutes from now. Only now, this instant.” I would add: The only time you can run your best race is in the immediate moment. The trick is staying in that present state of mind over two hours and 26.2 miles. Few succeed.
    No doubt I passed by thousands of spectators, historic clock towers, railroad stations, storefronts, factories, homes, farms, but my eyes zeroed in on something far more crucial. The man running silently in my shadow.
    I couldn’t read his eyes—he wore dark sunglasses that hid them. I couldn’t read his face—he wore a mask of emotionless stone. Even his thin, black mustache was inscrutable. All I knew was that he was a Canadian. He wore a giant maple leaf on his singlet. After the race, I would learn his name: Jerome Drayton. To this day he is Canada’s greatest marathon runner—incredibly, he still holds the national marathon record he set thirty-eight years ago.
    I glanced over my shoulder again. Drayton was no longer shadowing me. While I sensed I hadn’t heard the last of the cryptic man in shades, my immediate concern was the man pulling even with me. I instantly recognized him: Britain’s greatest marathoner, Ron Hill. The 1969 European champion. The 1970 Commonwealth champion. The man who zapped me in the San Blas Half Marathon in Puerto Rico. The man who hasn’t missed a day of running since December 20, 1964. That kind of personal commitment is what his fellow British runner Roger Bannister meant when he spoke of “the challenge of the human spirit.”
    In 1970, the people of his tiny hometown of Accrington, England, passed around a collection cup and raised enough money to send Hill to Boston to compete. Running in a 40-degree downpour and nasty headwind, Hill won the race in a course record time of 2:10:30, becoming only the second man ever to break the 2:10 barrier. “I had no idea what time I was running—I didn’t have a watch and the mile markers were weird, like the one that said ‘4¾ miles to go.’ I couldn’t believe it when I found I’d run a 2:10 personal best. For winning, I got a medal and a bowl of beef stew.” That’s right. No prize money at Boston. To be fair, it was delicious stew.
    I greeted Hill’s arrival with silence. Our shoulders were practically rubbing, but I let my ground-devouring strides do my talking. He was hard to miss as he ran. He was shorter than the other racers with his stout legs, coal black hair, handlebar mustache, and cheeky shorts emblazoned with the Union Jack, which he had designed himself. It irked me that he owned the course record. I felt an American should hold the course record. It irked me that foreign runners had dominated the event since the 1930s and the days of American champions like Clarence DeMar, Les Pawson, Tarzan Brown, and