This article is partially reprinted here with permission from the RRCA. The full story can be found here.
As he shuffled modestly along the sun-drenched streets of Alamosa, Colorado, with his training partner, Billy Mills, George Young felt smooth and strong. No reason why he shouldn’t. In his mind, he was simply logging another long run with his good friend. Young, 31, had already competed twice in the Olympic 3000-meter steeplechase (1960 and 1964), and was focused on the same distance this year, 1968.
He had never before entered a marathon, and seemed a bit confused about the substantial gaps between runners. “The leaders are pretty far ahead of us,” he noted to Mills after 5 miles. Thirty minutes later, the outlook hadn’t improved. “The leaders are even farther ahead now,” Young reported. Next: “I can’t even see them anymore.”
“Don’t worry,” said Mills. “They’ll come back to us.”
Those leaders included Kenny Moore, 24, a Bill-Bowerman inspired Oregon “duck” who had spent five months altitude-training in Los Alamos, New Mexico. They included Minnesotan Ron Daws, 31, who had earlier run 10 repeat miles on the marathon course to “groove” his goal pace.
They did not include Bob Deines, who was on LSD.
These runners and roughly 100 others were competing in the historic, first-ever U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. Only 63 would finish. There was no qualifying time; anyone who could get to Alamosa could run. Previous U.S. Olympic marathon runners had been chosen by committee from their performances in a select group of existing, established races–Boston, Yonkers, Culver City, and so on.
However, on August 18, 1968, the racers would self-select in do-or-die fashion, previewing what we now consider the traditional Marathon Trials test.
The first three would qualify for the Mexico City Olympic Marathon in mid-October. The others would limp home with massive glycogen deficits.
After the first of five 5.2-mile loops–the Ted Corbitt-certified course ended with an additional .2 mile dogleg to the finish–Deines lagged far behind even Young and Mills. He figured he was in about 30th place, right where you’d expect to find a 21-year-old who believed in Long Slow Distance training. Deines had switched from traditional mixed-pace running midway through his four years at Occidental College. He slowed down, ran more, and raced far better. He also raced often, 67 times in 1968, at distances from 800 meters to the marathon.
Alamosa was Deines’s third marathon in four months. He had finished sixth at Boston (2:30:13), and then improved his PR to 2:20:48 three weeks later in Culver City. Still, he didn’t expect a top-three finish in Alamosa. “I was getting stronger and improving, but I didn’t consider myself in the same class as the best Americans,” he says. “I thought I needed another year or so to reach their level. That’s why I started so slow. Plus, I always ran my best with negative-split races.”
By contrast, Moore could hardly have been more confident, in part because he had great track credentials, in part because he was the reigning National Cross Country champion, but mainly because he believed everyone else had underestimated how much altitude training they needed. The previous year, Moore had spent three weeks training in Los Alamos, New Mexico–altitude, 7,350 feet. It was no picnic. On day one, he ran a 3-mile time trial 80 seconds slower than a recent sea level effort. After three weeks in Los Alamos, he still couldn’t complete a decent 10-miler without feeling nauseous.
That’s why Moore returned to Los Alamos again in March of the next year. He spent his time there wondering why the town had the world’s highest incidence of twin births, and extending the length of his long runs. On his last, he covered the distance from the final stoplight in Los Alamos to the first light in Santa Fe: 35.4 miles. He didn’t show up in Alamosa until the day before the Trials race, calling himself a “stealth entrant.”
Once the marathon was underway, Moore decided that his altitude-training advantage would serve him best with an honest-pace race, so he stuck close to the early leaders. “Bowerman believed in a relatively slow start–you don’t win mile races in the first lap,” Moore says of his famous University of Oregon mentor and coach. “But he also trained me to react–to make the right decisions as a race unfolded.”
Moore completed the first lap in 29:23. Deines was nearly two minutes back already. Ron Daws and George Young were in the middle.
Daws was widely known as the country’s best no-talent marathoner. Never a top high school or college runner, he graduated from the University of Minnesota with a 3-mile best of 15:22. Many of his competitors in Alamosa were running 90 seconds faster at the same age.
But Daws analyzed every aspect of the sport, and idolized Emil Zatopek for both his work ethic and his innovative training. Indeed, he mimicked these Zatopek traits, and became a sort of marathon savant at producing epic performances in the most difficult conditions. In 1967, he won the National Marathon Championships in Holyoke, Massachusetts, by almost 4 minutes in steambath 92-degree heat. He was wearing a cap with a neck-shoulder drape and a shirt that read, “Adams State College, Alamosa, Colorado.”
The next year, he arrived in Alamosa six weeks before the Trials to prepare the best he could for the altitude challenge. He ran carefully calculated time trials on the course: two laps (10.4 miles) one week, and three laps the next. On the three-lap trial, he passed 10.4 faster than he had run it earlier, feeling quite satisfied.
Then Daws crashed. “The pace was too fast, and I got sick in a gas station men’s room,” he wrote in The Self-Made Olympian. “I realized that I had to run even pace in the Trials.” To hone this strategy, he devised a plan to run 10 x 1 mile over the first mile of the marathon course. He ran hard from the start to the mile-mark, jogged 200 meters, and then hard again back to the start line. He repeated the sequence five times, aiming to hit 5:45 for each mile segment. Daws completed this workout 12 days before the Trials. (Ed Winrow ran the three-lap time trial with Daws, finishing in 1:27:10. He concluded that he could run the full marathon in 2:30 on race day.)
Like Moore, Young and Mills arrived in Alamosa the day before the Trials. They had been training together in Flagstaff, Arizona, including a weekly 16-miler up and over a mountain pass higher than 8000 feet. “It wasn’t too bad,” Young recalls. “Billy and I had a good-ole-buddy system going on. We supported each other.” Mills was trying to push through injuries to reclaim his 1964 fitness.
The buddies decided to enter the Trials only because weeks of 100-mile training in Flagstaff had turned to drudgery. “Billy said, ‘Let’s do something to get away from the daily grind,” Young remembers. They took two days to drive the 500 miles from northern Arizona to southern Colorado. “It was fun, like a field trip,” says Young.
He says he received just one marathon tip from Mills, who had finished 14th in the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Marathon a week after his surprise victory in the 10,000 meters. Mills told Young to stay hydrated.
On the first lap, Young grabbed a cup of Gatorade and splashed it directly into his eyes. He had to slow and dab them dry with his singlet. “I didn’t know anything about running and drinking at the same time,” he admits.
The first lap was led by Australian Kerry Pearce and Irishman Pat McMahon. Both were preparing for Mexico City in Alamosa, and were allowed to run the Trials race. Moore followed close behind them. Pearce eventually dropped out at 17 miles and McMahon at 22. “I was out too fast for the altitude, and was dying when George Young passed me on the last lap, so I stopped,” recalls McMahon, then 26. “But I learned an important lesson that helped me at the Olympics.” He placed 12th in Mexico City.
With one lap completed, the Trials race had settled into a psycho-physiological battle between fast starters, medium pacers, and slow starters. No one knew which strategy would prove successful. But everyone knew that the pressure, the sunny desert environment (Moore called the conditions “dessicating”), and especially the high altitude would produce unforeseeable results. Not to mention the unpredictable twists that every marathon serves up in the last 10 miles.
ALAMOSA WAS AN UNLIKELY PLACE FOR A U.S. OLYMPIC EVENT.
It sits 200 miles north of Albuquerque and 230 south of Denver, with no major Interstate highway nearby. “The running culture in Alamosa was just about nonexistent in 1968,” notes Joe Vigil. “It was an agricultural and ranch community fifty years ago, and it still is today.”
But a sort of spontaneous combustion occurred in the fall of 1965 when Vigil, 35, joined the faculty at Adams State College at the same time that Buddy Edelen, 28, began his master’s degree studies in psychology there. Edelen had attended high school and college in Minnesota before moving to England to focus on his marathon training. In 1963, he set a world and American marathon record, running 2:14:28. The next year, he finished sixth in the Tokyo Olympic Marathon.
For three years, Vigil and Edelen pursued the AAU, hoping to bring the Marathon Trials to Alamosa, which had nearly the same altitude (7500 feet) as Mexico City (7400). In midsummer, 1967, they staged a demonstration marathon in Alamosa, inviting two-time Olympic marathon champ Abebe Bikila. Bikila didn’t come, but Mamo Wolde showed up to represent Ethiopia. He ran off course in the marathon, and never finished. Winner Wayne Van Dellen ran 2:39:13 in 90-degree heat to win. A year and two months later, Wolde captured the marathon gold medal in Mexico City.
In late 1967, at the AAU annual meeting in Chicago, the Trials race was awarded to Alamosa. That was the good news. The bad news: Vigil and Edelen had little organizational help and essentially no budget. “Buddy and I had to do everything,” Vigil remembers. “We were running around ragged. I remember one time we looked up at each other, and just about started crying.”
Late in the game, the AAU demanded that Alamosa conduct pre-marathon medical exams of all entrants. Vigil asked a local physician association to volunteer pro bono. Nope. Winrow suggested that Vigil telephone physiologist David Costill at Ball State University in Indiana. Costill said he and several physician friends would come to Alamosa to conduct the exams as long as Vigil helped them collect noninvasive data on the Trials runners.
Twenty top American marathoners were afforded a month of room and board at Adams State pre-Trials to prepare for the marathon. In the weeks leading up to August 18, several drifted into Vigil’s office to ask if the raceday fluid stations would offer the new sports beverage, Gatorade. Vigil knew nothing about the green drink, but phoned the company, and talked them into sending 200 cases to Alamosa. On race day, it was provided with water twice each lap.
This proved a mixed blessing. Early versions of Gatorade were formulated for out-of-shape football players. Superfit runners didn’t need such a concentrated brew. “After the marathon, we heard that quite a few of our athletes got sick from the Gatorade,” Vigil notes.
The Trials marathon started at an unusual time, 3 p.m. Why? To mimic the start of the upcoming Mexico City Olympic Marathon, yes. But even more important, Vigil needed a two-way radio team to spread out along the course, and report back to the start. Especially if there were any medical emergencies. Only one local group was willing to perform this service for free. They already had a morning commitment in Pueblo, Colorado, 120 miles to the north. But they said they could comfortably reach Alamosa by 3 p.m. Game on.
To read the full article, please visit the RRCA website here.