“I
prayed, and I felt like the Lord wanted me to get back into a
public-school system,” Mickey recalled recently. “I went home and told
my wife, and told her to think about it, to pray on it. And after a
couple of weeks she said, ‘I don’t want to move, but I think you’re
right—I think we’re supposed to.’ ”
Mickey quit his job and moved
the family to Los Angeles. For ten months he worked in construction,
and finally he was offered a position teaching special education at Big
Bear High School. The Hall family moved again, and Mickey found an
empty lot and built a house himself. He had always been skilled with
his hands, and he was athletic. At Pepperdine University, he’d played
varsity baseball, and had been drafted by the Baltimore Orioles,
although he didn’t sign. In Big Bear Lake, he started training for
triathlons as a hobby. In addition to teaching special ed, he coached
baseball and volleyball, and all the Hall kids were good athletes. But
Ryan, who was the third child, had a different idea about sports.
“One
year in middle school, I got this vision that I wanted to run,” Ryan
told me. “I think it came from God. I was on my way to a basketball
game—it was just this crazy idea that comes into your head, and the
desire to act on it. The next weekend, my dad and I ran around the
lake, fifteen miles. After that, I decided to start training.”
The
high school didn’t have a track or a running program. But Mickey
volunteered to coach, and he studied training guides about the sport.
In the beginning he had only one athlete, Ryan. As a tenth grader, Hall
ran the sixteen hundred metres (a distance that’s close to the mile) in
four minutes and twenty-two seconds. Hall had a natural stride, and he
also had the obsession that characterizes top runners. He posted
photographs of world-class milers in his bedroom, and he listened to
the Olympic anthem repeatedly. On Halloween, when he was fifteen years
old, he carved out a jack-o’-lantern with the five rings and “2008,”
because that was the year he planned to run in the Games. Before
eleventh grade he got a notion about the numbers 4:05. He inscribed
“4:05” into wet cement outside the house, and he wrote “4:05” all over
his school notebooks. When it snowed, he scratched “4:05” onto the
window of the family car. The following spring, in 2000, he ran the
sixteen hundred metres in exactly four minutes and five seconds.
By
that year it seemed likely that some American schoolboy was going to
break the four-minute mile. Two other juniors were also close: in
Virginia, Alan Webb ran 4:03, and a Michigan boy named Dathan
Ritzenhein clocked 4:05 in the sixteen hundred metres. The last time a
high-school student had broken the barrier was in 1967, and many prep
records from that decade still stood. This was a mystery of the running
boom: the movement had produced few élite athletes, despite the fact
that initially it had been inspired by Frank Shorter’s victory in the
marathon at the Munich Olympics of 1972. Apart from Shorter, no
American man had won a medal in distance events since 1968. In 2000,
the nation’s marathoners were so weak that they couldn’t even send a
full team to Sydney. At both the men’s and women’s Olympic trials, the
top American marathoners didn’t make the Olympic time standard, which
limited each team to one athlete.
For
serious fans of the sport, the American performance in Sydney was less
interesting than what was going on in the nation’s high schools. As
Hall, Webb, and Ritzenhein each won their respective state
cross-country championships, people began to talk of a resurgence in
competitive running led by “the Big Three.” In December, 2000, they
finally met in the five thousand metres at the Foot Locker Cross
Country Championship in Orlando. Ritzenhein, who excelled at
cross-country, finished first, followed by Webb and then Hall. The next
month, Webb ran a mile in under four minutes, and later that spring he
broke the high-school record set by Jim Ryun, which had stood for
thirty-seven years. In April, Webb and Hall faced off for a mile race
in Arcadia, California. Webb won easily, and Hall was so upset that
after the finish he took off his singlet and spikes, threw them onto
the track, and ran hard three miles through town, barefoot and
shirtless. By the time he returned, somebody had stolen his uniform.
Hall
had always been intensely competitive, and in the spring of 2001 he
began to suffer nosebleeds before races, probably from stress. He
accepted a running scholarship to Stanford, but for much of his time
there he struggled. After years of solitary training, it was hard to
adjust to being on a team. “We’d go for a run, and Ryan would just hit
it hard,” Ian Dobson, a former Stanford teammate, told me. “He would
just hammer everybody. It seemed like he wanted to beat everybody, and
it created a lot of animosity.” Dobson said that Hall’s Christianity
was initially another source of tension. “Stanford’s a whole different
world. Most of us weren’t religious. I’m not religious at all, and I
felt threatened. What’s this guy going to do? Is he going to try to
convert me? Is he judging me?” Dobson said. “It was partly my problem,
of course,” he added. “He’s one of the few Christians I know who aren’t
judgmental.”
Over time, Dobson and Hall became close friends, and in 2003 they
led Stanford to a national championship in cross-country. Hall also met
his future wife, Sara Bei, at the university, where she was one of the
top women runners. But being part of a college team never felt
completely natural to Hall. He told me that competitiveness was the
quality he disliked most in himself. “I just have a hard time seeing
Christ being competitive,” he said. “I think it’s my immaturity that
prevents me from working out with other people. I just don’t like how
it feels in my heart, to be honest. I hate how I feel inside.”
After
college, he turned professional, and he initially didn’t perform well
in the five thousand metres at high-level track races in Europe. But in
2007, in Houston, he entered his first half-marathon and broke the
American record by more than a minute. Three months later, at the Flora
London Marathon, he surprised the best runners in the world by taking
the lead late in the race. He faded to seventh, but finished in
2:08:24, the fastest début marathon ever by an American runner. Since
then, he has run two more excellent marathons, proving that he’s
already among the best in the world.
His coach, Terrence Mahon,
told me that with any great athlete it’s a matter of matching physical
and mental gifts, and sometimes the environment plays a role. The
marathon allows Hall to race less often, and the solitary training
brings him back to the mountains, where he channels his
competitiveness. “He grew up in a small town where he didn’t have any
competition,” Mahon explained. “He lived on top of a mountain. They
didn’t have a track program until his dad started it for him. That’s
the habit—he never understood what it was to share the pace. For his
survival, he had to be internally motivated.”
Before 1972, when Frank Shorter won the marathon
at Munich, long-distance running was a fringe sport in the United
States, and élite athletes were often loners who had been surprised to
discover their natural talent. Billy Mills, an orphan who grew up on a
Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota, originally tried to become a
boxer but realized that he was better at running. In 1964, at the Tokyo
Olympics, Mills won the gold medal in the ten thousand metres. One of
his peers, a skinny misfit from Spokane, Washington, named Gerry
Lindgren, trained on the verge of insanity—he ran between twenty-five
and thirty-five miles every day—and, in 1964, while still in high
school, he beat the top Soviet athletes. (Lindgren later abandoned his
wife and children, quit racing at the élite level, and absconded to
Hawaii.) Other runners, like Jim Ryun and Frank Shorter, were fortunate
to encounter gifted coaches early in their careers. But they had few
resources at their disposal, especially for the marathon. Shoes were so
bad that Shorter had a pair of track spikes customized with flat soles
for the race in Munich. (He got blisters within the first six miles.)
Along with some other runners, he arranged to have U.S.A. printed on
his own uniform, because the standard team issue was made of heavy
material that was terrible for an endurance athlete. During the race he
drank flat Coca-Cola at every aid station. Olympic marathoners prepare
their own bottles, but sports drinks were still in the early stages of
development, so Shorter shook up the Coke until it was de-fizzed.
Back
then, it was rare for an American city to host a marathon. In 1971, my
family moved to Columbia, Missouri, one of the few towns in the Midwest
that sponsored a 26.2-mile race. A local boxing trainer had founded the
Heart of America Marathon in 1960, as a way of forcing his fighters to
get in shape. None of that trainer’s athletes actually finished the
inaugural race, but somehow the event survived, and a small community
of diehards trained for it every year. My father became fascinated by
the challenge, and as a professor of sociology he liked the weirdness.
His training partners included Vietnam vets and religious fanatics and
oddball academics; the only thing they had in common was a desire to
run as fast as possible. They competed in local races, which tended to
be poorly organized. Before the start, they’d give the stopwatch to
whoever was expected to be the best runner. If he got passed, he handed
over the watch to the new leader. They left a clipboard at the finish
line, and it was the winner’s responsibility to pick it up and record
the times for everybody who followed.
“Nobody knew what the heck
we were doing,” my father told me recently. “But after Shorter, that
changed everything. It became a whole lot easier, with equipment and
everything.” Shorter came out with a line of specialty clothing,
building on his experience of Olympic improvisation. Many of the early
runners were tinkerers. Ron Hill, a British marathoner who finished
sixth at Munich, was a textile chemist who experimented with mesh
shirts and reflective materials. Bill Bowerman, the track coach at the
University of Oregon, messed around with a waffle iron and created a
new type of shoe sole. Soon, the company he co-founded, Nike, was
selling models specifically designed for the marathon. Races became
better organized, and publications like Runner’s World
taught people about élite training methods. In distance running, an
athlete with some natural talent can improve quickly if he trains
right, and by 1976 my father had come close to qualifying for the
Olympic trials in the marathon.
Health had little to do with this
initial wave of runners. “I didn’t know anybody who did it for health,”
my father said. “You became intensely aware of your body, but it wasn’t
like, I want to live a long life. It was more like, What can I get out
of this machine? It was very competitive.”
For a marathoner,
though, competitiveness tends to be directed inward. In training, the
long buildup to a race may be similar to what a boxer goes through, but
the focus is completely different. A boxer prepares for a specific
opponent; a marathoner prepares to push his body to the limits of
endurance. At the élite level, marathoners are well aware of their
competition, and tactics are important; but everything begins and ends
with individual fitness. The most crucial opponents are found within:
the accumulation of lactic acid in muscles, the depletion of glycogen.
A marathoner worries about hitting “the wall”—the moment at which
glycogen stores are so low that an athlete can become disoriented.
During
the seventies, runners became obsessed with learning about such
physical limitations. In Dallas, a doctor named Kenneth H. Cooper
conducted a test in which he put athletes on treadmills, connected
tubes to their mouths, and ran them to the point of exhaustion. By
collecting all the expelled air, Cooper calculated the volume of oxygen
consumed, in relation to body weight. This figure, known as the VO2
max, quantified cardiovascular fitness. Cooper tested élite athletes
like Frank Shorter, and the results became well known in the running
community. Even today, in the airport of Eugene, Oregon, a town famous
for its track tradition, a small display notes that the Oregon native
Steve Prefontaine had the highest VO2 max ever recorded in Cooper’s lab.
Periodically
my father participated in such experiments. In those days, serious
runners imitated whatever the élites were doing, even in the lab. One
of my father’s running buddies had a Ph.D. in cardiac physiology, and
at the University of Missouri he and his colleagues conducted tests on
top local runners. My father was an ideal subject: he ran a hundred
miles a week, and he had an inquisitive streak. He also had an appetite
for pain. They tested his VO2 max, and they conducted lactic-acid
experiments, which involved running him hard and then drawing large
amounts of blood. They did a muscle-fibre test in which they extracted
a chunk of my father’s thigh. The moment they snipped the tissue, the
muscle contracted so violently that the doctor had to stand on my
father’s leg in order to yank out the sample. “And then they said,
‘You’re ninety per cent slow-twitch muscle fibres,’ ” my father
recalled. “Well, brilliant—so what?”
One year, physiologists
designed an experiment to test whether it was best for a marathoner to
wear a mesh shirt, a solid shirt, or no shirt. In order to discover
this elusive truth, they put my father and other runners on a treadmill
for an hour at a fast pace, in a laboratory with a controlled
temperature of ninety degrees Fahrenheit and ninety per cent humidity.
They weighed each athlete before and after, to calculate lost sweat.
They also tracked body temperature with a rectal thermometer. They
didn’t anticipate, however, that a human being running at a pace of ten
and a half miles an hour naturally expels a rectal thermometer. Taping
it in place didn’t work. Finally, my father had to reach behind him and
hold the thermometer while running at full speed. He did this a total
of seven times, always for an hour, sometimes with a mesh shirt,
sometimes with a solid shirt, sometimes with no shirt. Recently, I
asked him why he had agreed to participate in such a study.
“I
figured what the hell, I want to know what’s better,” he said. “I
wanted to get my time down.” The results indicated that a mesh shirt
was best, followed by a solid shirt, then no shirt. (“It’s like a
radiator,” my father explained.) Nowadays, at the age of sixty-six, my
father runs ten miles a day, six times a week. He still has a scar on
his thigh from the muscle-fibre test. He says that if a doctor told him
that running would shorten his life he’d keep doing it.
One sunny morning in Big Bear Lake, Ryan Hall set
off on a fast ten-miler. Typically, he did such a workout once a week,
to increase speed; he complemented this with a weekly run of twenty or
more miles that was designed to prepare him for the latter stages of a
marathon. Today he started on the north shore of the lake, where steep
mountains drop to rocky banks, and he followed Highway 38 back toward
town. There was a slight tailwind; he flashed through the first mile in
well under five minutes. Out on the lake, fifty yards from shore, a
fisherman in a boat stood up and shouted, “Go, Ryan!”
Two of us
accompanied Hall on bikes: his brother Steve took the lead, and I
followed. At thirty, Steve is the oldest of the Hall siblings, and for
the past few years he has worked construction in Big Bear Lake.
Recently he quit his job in order to spend these pre-Olympic months as
his younger brother’s assistant. One of Steve’s main tasks was to bike
alongside Ryan on hard days, handing him energy drinks every fifteen
minutes. That was preparation for the heat of Beijing—Hall was training
his body to process more fluids than usual.
When he hit the
second mile, Steve called out the time: “Four-fifty-nine!” Hall was
still relaxed: I could see that from the muscles of his back. He was
shirtless, and he wore sunglasses and headphones; he listened to
Christian praise music on his iPod Shuffle. Later in the run, when he
fought the hills on the far side of the lake, he switched to techno.
His head was so steady that he could have been on wheels like the rest
of us. No bobbing, no weaving—no wasted motion at all. He kept his
hands low, and his arms swung on a straight line from front to back.
That was, in part, a Moroccan touch: when Ryan was in high school, he
and his father watched tapes of Hicham El Guerrouj, the greatest miler
of his generation, and they changed Ryan’s arm carriage accordingly.
But nobody had ever had to tinker with Ryan Hall’s legs. “All the
things you try to teach in drills, Ryan already had them,” Vin Lananna,
his first coach at Stanford, told me. “When you say, ‘This is what
somebody should look like while running,’ that’s Ryan Hall.” Mahon, his
current coach, had a simpler assessment: “He looks like a white Kenyan.”
For
the past two years, the Flora London Marathon has been the most
competitive race in the world, and spectators have been shocked to see
Ryan Hall with the lead pack of African runners. His looks cause him to
stand out, but when it comes to the qualities that actually matter he
has a great deal in common with his competition. Top African
marathoners tend to come from high-altitude parts of the continent,
especially the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and the countries that run
along the Rift Valley, including Kenya, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. But
scientific studies have shown that there’s no significant difference in
the VO2 max rates of élite Kenyan and European runners. Instead, the
Africans’ advantage seems to come from running efficiency, body-mass
index, and leg shape. Some of this may be genetic, but mostly it’s a
matter of training. From the time they are children, the Kenyans run
more miles, and they run them faster. Hall had also been putting in
high miles since he was a teen-ager, and over time he had honed his
natural runner’s build—high waist, big muscular thighs, long
whippet-thin calves. It’s simple physics: the leg is a lever, and you
want power at the top and lightness at the bottom, and then you can fly.
After
three miles around the lake, Hall raced through the town of Fawnskin.
It was a tiny place, shaded by Jeffrey pines, and beside the road the
North Shore Trading Company had posted two banners that said, “Run Ryan
Run!” A sandwich shop had another banner, and so did the local
real-estate agent. At twelve miles an hour, the signs around Fawnskin
Market seemed to blur:
BEER—WINE—BAIT
RUN RYAN RUN!
The
banners were everywhere in Big Bear Lake. An organization called the
Lighthouse Project had printed them up, as a way of supporting the
home-town Olympian. They had also started a local fitness campaign in
which people kept track of any distance they ran or walked or biked.
They logged their workouts on a Web site, with the goal of contributing
a million community miles to Ryan Hall’s Olympic training. Even Camp
Rampage had pitched in: so far, the Ultimate Fighter’s team had donated
eight hundred and fifty miles from its morning runs. The schoolchildren
took it seriously—Ryan had videotaped a message in which he explained
that their training would give him a unique advantage in Beijing. One
day, I went for an easy run with Ryan and his brother, and we were
stopped on the road by a first grader named Sheyne Elrod. The boy wore
a red “Fire Safety” ribbon pinned to his T-shirt, and he had a “Run
Ryan Run” baseball cap. He asked Hall to sign it.
“How many miles have you run for me, Sheyne?” Hall asked.
“Fifteen,” the boy said.
“That’s great!”
Usually,
Hall trained in Mammoth Lakes, another California mountain town, where
his coach and other top American runners are based, composing a group
called Team Running USA. But Hall had returned to his home town for
this period because of the local support, and he also wanted to be
closer to Chula Vista, the San Diego suburb where his wife, Sara, was
training. Sara hoped to make the Olympic team in the fifteen hundred
metres, and for such a short distance most athletes prepare at sea
level. There’s a tradeoff to high-altitude work: in thin air, blood
becomes more efficient at carrying oxygen, but it’s harder to run fast
for long periods of time, which means that muscle efficiency suffers.
“You need the rhythm of the track,” Sara told me, when I visited her in
Chula Vista. “And the altitude is harder on me. I have asthma, and I
don’t sleep well up there.”
Even today, nobody is certain about
the effectiveness of altitude training. There has never been a
conclusive long-term study, because it’s impossible to persuade élite
athletes to alternate between years at sea level and years at altitude,
all for the sake of science. The only published research has involved
periods of a few months, which is too short a time to produce
consistent results. But marathoners are particularly inclined to train
at elevation, because they don’t need track speed. In thin air, the
liver and the kidneys respond by making more erythropoietin, a hormone
that stimulates the production of red blood cells. “It’s basically the
same as taking EPO,” Joe Vigil, an Olympic coach for the U.S. team,
told me. He was referring to the injection of synthetic erythropoietin,
which is the blood-doping method of choice among many endurance
athletes. When somebody gets an injection of EPO, he essentially gains
the benefits of high altitude without actually having to live in the
mountains. Such injections are banned, and they’re also risky: blood
can become so thick that it stops the heart. Another sea-level option
is to sleep in a sealed tent that circulates thin air. Even this is
shadowy territory—Italy has banned altitude tents as an unfair
advantage, and athletes can’t use them in the Olympic Village. The
World Anti-Doping Agency considered banning them but finally relented.
“What are they going to do, ban altitude?” Hall told me.
He was a
firm believer in mountain training, but it had drawbacks. In many ways,
Ryan and Sara Hall are the ideal running couple—they even have similar
all-American good looks, as Sara is also fair and long-limbed. She’s
religious, too; she first noticed Ryan at a high-school cross-country
meet because he was signing his autographs with a Bible verse, the same
way she did. But if both are preparing for important races, they can’t
breathe the same air—they have to be separated by seven thousand
vertical feet. They try to see each other once a week, but they rarely
spend more than two days together. “Living at altitude, you sacrifice a
lot,” Meb Keflezighi, another top American runner who trains with Team
Running USA, told me. He met his wife, Yordanos Asgedom, in July of
2004, while he was preparing for the Athens Olympics. Keflezighi is an
Eritrean émigré—he came to the United States at the age of twelve,
eventually becoming a citizen. Asgedom shared this heritage, but she
was living in the lowlands of Tampa, Florida.
“I invited her to
come to Mammoth to visit,” Keflezighi told me. “She said, ‘Why don’t
you come to Tampa?’ I said I couldn’t do that—I needed to be at
altitude. But when I asked her to come she said, ‘No, the man has to
come first.’ She is a traditional woman.”
In Athens, the men’s
marathon was held in the evening, and Keflezighi ran a nearly perfect
race, winning the silver medal. Afterward, he didn’t sleep, and at 4:50
A.M. he flew out of Greece, bound for
Florida. “The flowers that I got from the medal ceremony were the
flowers that I brought for our first date,” he said. Four years later,
the couple have two children, and they live happily in Mammoth Lakes,
at seventy-eight hundred feet.
Keflezighi’s silver was a breakthrough—the first
time an American male marathoner had stood on the Olympic victory stand
since Frank Shorter. Also in Athens, Deena Kastor, another Mammoth
Lakes resident and member of Team Running USA, took the bronze in the
women’s race. Their performances suggested that, finally, after three
decades, the nation was learning how to tap into its running boom.
Since
1972, there has been no shortage of American runners. In the old days,
the sport attracted primarily oddballs and obsessives, but that changed
steadily in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Kenneth Cooper, the
man behind the VO2 max tests of élite athletes, coined the term
“aerobics,” and he published books that emphasized the benefits of
exercising for health. People became more likely to run for rational
reasons, and they trained accordingly; the hard-core competitiveness of
my father’s generation slipped away. Mileage dropped for high-school
and college runners, because of fear of injury and burnout. These days,
recreational runners tend to be educated people with good jobs. The
average participant in the ING New York City Marathon has an annual
household income of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. The people
who read Runner’s World have a median income virtually the same as that of the readers of Forbes.
When I talked to Cliff Bosley, the director of the Bolder Boulder, one
of the largest road races in America, he said, “Running has
demographics that are comparable to golf.” Charity has become a major
part of marathons, as runners claim limited entry spots by raising
money for worthy causes. Mary Wittenberg, the president of the New York
Road Runners, the nonprofit that organizes the city’s marathon, told me
that participants tend to be type-A overachievers who are attractive to
advertisers. “Why are ING and the Bank of America involved?” she said,
referring to the title sponsors of the races in New York and Chicago.
“You want a customer that’s in it for the long run, somebody who is
going to look to retirement. That’s a goal-oriented, driven person.
It’s all about the quest.”
It’s not, however, about the time.
Today, most marathoners simply want to finish, and races have become
dramatically slower, at least after the top runners. In 1982, the
hundredth finisher in New York ran 2:25:45. Last year, in a race with
nearly three times as many participants, the hundredth runner crossed
the line at 2:39:26. It was also in 1982 that an American last won the
New York marathon. Since then, the men’s races have been dominated by
African runners, who have gravitated toward the longer distance. For
élite athletes, it’s smart to focus on the marathon, because races are
wealthy enough to offer appearance fees and prize money in amounts that
are extremely unusual at track events. In the United States, track has
never drawn significant income from television, and neither has the
marathon—but American marathons don’t rely on TV money. Nor do they
need to sell tickets to spectators. Instead, the participants raise the
cash, because they can afford to pay high entry fees and their
demographic appeals to advertisers. Marathoning may be the only sport
in which sponsors target the losers, and the losers pay for the
winners. That’s how the running boom played out for the Kenyans and the
Ethiopians: it created a lot of slow, rich American marathoners willing
to pay big money to get beat.
For many years there was a sense
that even the best American runners couldn’t compete with the Africans.
Recently, though, coaches have realized that athletes simply need to
train harder. The “Big Three” high-school class of 2001—Ryan Hall, Alan
Webb, and Dathan Ritzenhein—trained seriously at a young age, and all
have become professionals capable of challenging the top runners in the
world. In 2004, an Oregon boy named Galen Rupp finally broke the
high-school record in the five thousand metres, set by Gerry Lindgren,
in 1964. (Rupp made this year’s Olympic team in the ten thousand
metres.) Meanwhile, the big-city marathons have started using some of
their wealth to support élite training groups. Each year, the ING New
York City Marathon helps pay for the Team Running USA camp in Mammoth
Lakes, which has already produced two Olympic medallists. In Oregon,
Nike sponsors another top group. Shoe contracts have become a prime
source of income for many track runners; athletes are valuable
marketers for the hordes of affluent recreational runners.
When
Ryan Hall won the Olympic Trials marathon in 2007, he dominated the
strongest field in Trials history. Keflezighi, the defending silver
medallist, finished eighth—during training he had struggled with
injuries, but even in good health he would have had to run well to make
the team. Dathan Ritzenhein took second, and he told me that top
American talent is increasingly drawn to the marathon, partly because
of the payouts. “If I was to say that the money doesn’t mean anything
to me, I’d be lying,” he said. “But it’s not about that at the end. You
can’t fake it at twenty-four miles.”
The best runners still have
that quality—they’re driven by obsessions other than wealth. Ryan Hall
has quickly become one of the most marketable distance runners in the
world, drawing big appearance fees from races. Mary Wittenberg, of the
Road Runners, told me that she expected to pay two hundred thousand
dollars just to get him on the starting line of the New York marathon
in 2009. But he was still in his home town, running the old routes, and
his life style had hardly changed. He drove a three-year-old Honda, and
his and Sara’s modest house in Big Bear Lake had a “For Rent” sign in
front, because they leased it out to vacationers whenever they trained
elsewhere. In Mammoth Lakes, they lived in a mobile home. “We kind of
see the money we have as God’s money,” Sara told me. They supported a
Christian charity called Team World Vision, which gets entrants to the
country’s major marathons to raise money for development projects in
Africa. Once, when I was at lunch with Ryan and Team World Vision
organizers, somebody mentioned that marathoners tend to have high
incomes. “Really?” Ryan said, his eyes wide. “I didn’t know that!”
Few
professional runners seemed to realize that their paychecks came from
the guys at the back of the pack. Ian Dobson, an Olympian in the five
thousand metres who lived mostly on the earnings of a shoe contract,
told me that he was under the impression that it was a tax writeoff for
somebody. “I don’t understand the economics,” he said. “I don’t
understand how it could be worth it for Adidas to pay me.” In a way,
the sport creates an unusual intimacy between the recreational and the
élite: in a marathon, they all gather together on the same starting
line. But in truth the top guys are still on the fringes, isolated,
pounding out the miles as in the old days. And from the African
perspective it couldn’t be stranger. Michael Chitwood, the director of
Team World Vision, told me that when he went overseas he had trouble
explaining his funding. “I go to Africa and say, ‘Well, I work with
marathoners and we raise money for these projects,’ ” he said. “They’re
like, ‘What do you mean? You guys don’t have that many good runners in
America!’ I say, ‘No, no, no, they’re not good runners!’ ”
On the way to dinner at his parents’ home in Big
Bear Lake, Ryan Hall asked, “Are you ready to go to the Olympic
Village?” His mother, he said, had “gone kinda crazy with the Olympics
stuff.” An American flag hung in front of the house, and the porch was
draped with red-white-and-blue bunting. A banner from the “Run Ryan
Run” campaign hung above the front door. Susie Hall had recently
tracked down an Olympics flag with the five rings, and she planned to
display that, too. The whole Hall clan was going to Beijing in August,
along with their pastor and his wife, and Sara’s family, for a total
entourage of seventeen.
“I told Ryan that he couldn’t run the
marathon until he was twenty-seven,” Susie Hall said at dinner. “Shows
how much he listens to me.”
I asked her why she had such reservations.
“I don’t know if it’s good for him,” she said. “I worry about him running that far.”
“There’s absolutely no evidence that running a marathon is bad for a person,” Mickey Hall said.
“At least he’s not skateboarding,” Susie said.
The
Hall siblings had all grown up and left home, but they still had
regular places at the dinner table. Ryan sat in his childhood seat,
right in the middle. Nearby, the hands of the kitchen clock were
frozen—years ago he had stopped them at 3:35, because he had been
obsessed with running fifteen hundred metres in that time. He never
came close, and gravity won that race: the hands had slipped to 4:36.
He
no longer fixated on numbers and times; at Stanford he had been humbled
often enough. And he knew that, on any given day, any number of things
could go wrong for a distance runner. The most impressive performance
of his career had been at the Olympic Trials, but shortly after the
victory he was stunned to learn that Ryan Shay, a fellow competitor,
had collapsed and died in the early miles. It’s extremely rare for an
élite marathoner to die during a race, but Shay had suffered from an
enlarged and scarred heart. The day before the Trials, Shay and Hall
had gone for a run together, and their wives are close friends and
former Stanford teammates.
July would turn out to be a rough
month for the Halls, as Sara finished ninth in the Olympic Trials
fifteen hundred metres, failing to make the team. The morning after the
race, I saw Ryan, who looked tired. “It’s a tough thing—what do you
say?” he remarked. “I just told her that I love her and I support her.
I told her to walk away with her head high. She did everything she
possibly could have done.” In the men’s fifteen hundred metres, Alan
Webb also failed to make the team, despite having run some of the best
times in the world a year earlier. Even the Ultimate Fighter’s camp had
a hard weekend—the day before Sara’s race, Rampage lost a five-round
unanimous decision to Forrest Griffin.
Hall told me that at least
his training was going well. The fast runs had been stretched to twelve
miles, and often he ran them at the sunniest time of day. Before and
after workouts, he tested urine samples with a refractometer to monitor
how he coped with dehydration in the buildup to Beijing. In August, the
Chinese city’s temperature is usually in the mid-eighties, with high
humidity, and the men’s race isn’t scheduled to start until 7:30 A.M.
All of China is in a single time zone, so the sun rises early in the
east: seven-thirty in Beijing feels more like midmorning. Haile
Gebrselassie, the Ethiopian who holds the world record in the marathon,
had announced that he wouldn’t run the marathon, citing concerns about
pollution. Gebrselassie subsequently petitioned the Olympic Committee
for changes to the route and the start time, but it declined.
In
Beijing, the favorite will be Martin Lel, a Kenyan who has won the New
York City Marathon twice and the London Marathon three times. But heat
tends to equalize competitors in a long race, and Olympic marathons are
notoriously unpredictable. It’s the only distance event that’s never
been won by a Kenyan, and African marathoners often seem to
underperform in the Games. It’s unusual to hold such an important race
during the summer; all the big-city marathons are scheduled for spring
or fall. Most Ethiopian and Kenyan runners come from cool mountain
regions, and coaches told me that in the past they’ve seemed less
likely to adjust their training for summer conditions.
In 2004,
Meb Keflezighi and Deena Kastor prepared for Athens, where the summer
heat can also be brutal, by wearing additional clothing on practice
runs at Mammoth Lakes. Their coaches mapped out a route there that
mimicked the climbs and descents of the Greek course, so the athletes
essentially ran the Athenian hills in the thin air of the Sierra
Nevada. This year, Deena Kastor had made the team again, and she and
Hall were following many of the same strategies. They had acquired ice
vests that would lower the body’s temperature immediately before the
start of the race. The U.S. Olympic team had given each athlete two
different filtering masks to wear at the Olympic Village if pollution
was bad. (“One for training and one for kicking around,” Ryan said.)
The course in Beijing is completely flat, and many sections are
exposed, so this time the coaches had mapped out a route in Bishop,
California, a high-desert town at the edge of the Sierra Nevada. Bishop
is flat and sunny: exactly like Beijing if all the people and cars and
buildings were replaced by scrubland.
In Big Bear Lake, after we
had dinner at his parents’ home, Ryan played a DVD of the Beijing
course. An official with the U.S. team had recently travelled to China
to record it with a handheld camera. The video began with a shot of
Tiananmen Square: throngs of tourists, the portrait of Mao Zedong. That
was where the starting line would be. Then the cameraman headed south
past the Qianmen intersection. For much of the route he travelled on
foot; sometimes he caught a cab. Traffic was everywhere: buses and
cars, mopeds and bicycles. Kids grinned at the camera; people stopped
to stare. In Tiantan Park, a tout pulled out a box of fake Rolexes.
Ryan
watched the video intently. “Meb cut his shirt in Athens,” he said. “He
cut it off at his stomach, because otherwise the sweat will pool there.”
More
than thirty years after Frank Shorter, marathoners were still tinkering
with their uniforms, looking for that slight advantage, mesh or no mesh.
“That’s what I ran in for the Ironman,” Mickey Hall said.
“If I’m running with the midriff, it’ll be the supreme sacrifice.”
“You know, Ryan, I think you get in there and you’re in the thick of it, and that’s all that matters.”
“Definitely,” he said, in that slow California way, and then he grinned. “I just hate the look.” ♦
