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Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed - Hardcover

Futterman, Matthew

 
9780385543743: Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385543743 ISBN 13: 9780385543743
Verlag: Doubleday, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

"Gripping . . . the narrative is smooth and immediate, almost effortless in its detail, if occasionally breathless, like a good fast run . . ." --The New York Times Book Review

Visionary American running coach Bob Larsen assembled a mismatched team of elite California runners . . . the start of his decades-long quest for championships, Olympic glory, and pursuit of "the epic run."

In the dusty hills above San Diego, Bob Larsen became America's greatest running coach. Starting with a ragtag group of high school cross country and track runners, Larsen set out on a decades-long quest to find the secret of running impossibly fast, for longer distances than anyone thought possible. Himself a former farm boy who fell into his track career by accident, Larsen worked through coaching high school, junior college, and college, coaxing talented runners away from more traditional sports as the running craze was in its infancy in the 60's and 70's. On the arid trails and windy roads of California, Larsen relentlessly sought the 'secret sauce' of speed and endurance that would catapult American running onto the national stage.
     Running to the Edge is a riveting account of Larsen's journey, and his quest to discover the unorthodox training secrets that would lead American runners (elite and recreational) to breakthroughs never imagined. New York Times Deputy Sports Editor Matthew Futterman interweaves the dramatic stories of Larsen's runners with a fascinating discourse of the science behind human running, as well as a personal running narrative that follows Futterman's own checkered love-affair with the sport. The result is a narrative that will speak to every runner, a story of Larsen's triumphs--from high school cross-country meets to the founding of the cult-favorite 70's running group, the Jamul Toads, from national championships to his long tenure as head coach at UCLA, and from the secret training regimen of world champion athletes like Larsen's protégé, American Meb Keflezighi, to victories at the New York and Boston Marathons as well as the Olympics. Running to the Edge is a page-turner . . . a relentless crusade to run faster, farther.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MATTHEW FUTTERMAN is Deputy Sports Editor of the New York Times. He has previously worked for The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Star-Ledger of New Jersey, where he was a part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2005. Like a lot of sportswriters, he is something of a frustrated athlete, who is still smarting from going 0-8 in singles his senior year at Union College. He blames a formerly weak psyche and sub-optimal serve. He grew up in Larchmont, New York, and graduated from Mamaroneck High School, Union College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He also attended the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas. He lives in New York with his wife and children. In his spare time he runs marathons. He is not sure why.

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ONE

Bobcat

Central Minnesota, 1951

Bob Larsen can’t remember a time when he didn’t run.

During the first dozen years of his life, a life on the farm in the lake country of Minnesota, he runs because he has to. Here, much of Bob’s life involves figuring out the fastest way to get from point A—­his home in the woods—­to point B. More often than not, he arrives at the same answer—­running. He runs to school. He runs to his friends’ houses. He runs because his family’s log cabin and farm are a two-­mile trek on a narrow lane to the closest road. That road is a dirt road. So is the 15-­mile route to Detroit Lakes, the closest town. Down that road is the rest of the world—­school, and friends, the closest stores, none of which are very close at all.

The nearest friends are three miles away. His one-­room school, with one teacher for all eight grades, heated with a wood stove, is two and a half miles from the cabin. A general store is even farther. When Bob is nine, his mother teaches school a few miles into the hinterlands. She brings Bob and his sister, LaDonna, with her in the family coupe. On the way, they pick up a few Native American kids from the White Earth Reservation who only rarely attended school in the past. They are older and bigger than Bob and LaDonna but in the same grade. Everyone wedges into the coupe and bounces along the dirt road to the schoolhouse.

At recess, the children run through the woods playing cowboys and Indians, climbing trees and hiding in the branches, covering long distances by moving as quickly as they can, then trekking back when the school bell rings. Bob almost always chooses to be an Indian. The Native American kids usually play the cowboys. They chase each other all around the land near the school. No one can catch Bob.

The next year Bob and LaDonna return to their regular school. In the afternoons, they often hustle home on a shortcut through the woods along the shores of the lake and streams on the edge of the neighboring game refuge. There are deer and foxes and turtles. If they get hungry they stop to pick wild berries and chokecherries.

Their farm is roughly 600 acres, with decent farming conditions, though not as good as the pricier land farther to the south. The soil is rich, and there are wide, level expanses. Half the land remains wooded, but there is still plenty of space to grow alfalfa, corn, and wheat every summer, and occasionally potatoes and other crops. Bob’s mother has a large vegetable garden. In the fall, she cans the vegetables so her family can eat them through the long winter. They raise cattle—­milk cows and calves, bulls and steers. They also have pigs, sheep, chickens, and a few turkeys kicking around. One gets slaughtered for Thanksgiving, another a few weeks later for Christmas. They have horses to ride and horses to plow. Bob owns a horse. He pays $90 of his own money for it, money he earned selling baby pigs at the county fair. With the exception of the milk cows, the number of animals they raise depends on the expected price of the meat at the market in Detroit Lakes, where they rent space in a freezer, store some of their meat for sale and some for personal use. On the farm all they have is an icebox. They cut the ice for the icebox out of the lake using hand saws during the winter. The plow horses pull the ice cakes onto the shore and up to the barn. They cover the ice with sawdust, which keeps it for the summer.

When Bob was young he helped milk the cows by hand twice a day. Eventually, his family gets a milking machine. They drink this milk, raw. It is rich and thick. So is the butter they churn from it, and the ice cream his grandfather makes with the hand crank during the summer.

Their cabin sits about thirty meters from Buffalo Lake, which is almost entirely surrounded by woods, creating an intense sense of a family alone in the wilderness. There is also a pond in the middle of the property. Run to the other side of the farm and the shoreline of another lake appears. Minnesota.

Bob runs to get from the cabin to the barn, to round up the cows for milking twice a day. He runs to get to the fields, and sometimes to go into the woods to explore and to find wild berries. Every day he shovels manure, and during the winter, snow. Muscles take root in his upper back. When he was eight years old, he learned to drive the team of horses pulling a wagon or a sled. None of this is easy, but it is the only life he knows—­all farm kids do this sort of physical work daily, the kind that pushes them to the edge of exhaustion. And there is a payoff. They get strong from it. The strength makes them confident, and when they are challenged they believe they will have an advantage over kids who don’t grow up on farms.

For Bob Larsen, this sense of physical superiority drawn from hard work will never go away. He will learn how to use it for himself and to pass it down to runners he turns into champions. He will feel it when he runs with the bulls in Pamplona. He understands bulls, he understands work, he understands self-­reliance, and he understands how to move quickly using only the power of his legs.

He doesn’t yet know how important these ideas will be to a truth that he will spend a lifetime searching for, or that he will come as close as anyone to finding it. He doesn’t know that he will understand the secrets to the East African domination of long distance running before even the Kenyans and Ethiopians do. He doesn’t know that he will write the blueprints of training for an activity that will become a worldwide movement, and he will impart this knowledge to two generations of star long distance runners, that they will include collegiate and national champions and Olympic medalists, that one of them will pull off perhaps the most inspirational triumph in distance running history, and that he will do all this in relative obscurity during the next half century.

For now, Bob Larsen is still on a remote farm in the middle of Minnesota, happy as can be, until suddenly it all ends. Life on the farm comes to an abrupt completion on a spring afternoon in 1951 with a freak accident. Bob’s father falls out of the haymow on the second floor of the barn. It’s one of those hazards that make farm life among the most dangerous existences on the planet.

His father’s injuries aren’t fatal, but his back is wrecked, not catastrophically, but the farming days are over. There is simply no way to haul bales of hay or milk cows or drive the plow horses or drag the slop out to the pigs.

In the summer Bob’s parents will head south and west. They will need money for the journey. Bob will collect the few hundred dollars he has earned through the sale of nine pigs birthed by the sow his father had given to him. He will give it to his parents. They promise to pay him back. Then they leave. Bob and his sister stay behind in Minnesota with their grandmother until his parents figure out where they are going to end up. They pause in Las Vegas to consider making a life in the desert. It is 104 degrees in the shade. They push on to San Diego, where a new life, warmer than Minnesota, cooler than Las Vegas, begins.

San Diego, Fall 1954

There are moments when the boy from northern Minnesota does not like high school, when he misses the family farm and the one-­room schoolhouse, the simplicity of life far, far away from the big city. He misses the horses and the cows, even the smelly chickens and all the work the farm required. There are times when he feels alone. These people out here on the coast of southern California he has gotten to know the past few years are a little different, which could make any teenager slightly...

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Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385543743
ISBN 13 
9780385543743
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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