14 Minutes: A Running Legend's Life and Death and Life - Softcover

Salazar, Alberto; Brant, John

 
9781609619985: 14 Minutes: A Running Legend's Life and Death and Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1609619986 ISBN 13: 9781609619985
Verlag: Rodale Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

In 2007, after collapsing on a practice field at the Nike campus, champion marathoner Alberto Salazar's heart stopped beating for 14 minutes. Over the crucial moments that followed, rescuers administered CPR to feed oxygen to his brain and EMTs shocked his heart eight times with defibrillator paddles. He was clinically dead. But miraculously, Salazar was back at the Nike campus coaching his runners just nine days later.

Salazar had faced death before, but he survived that and numerous other harrowing episodes thanks to his raw physical talent, maniacal training habits, and sheer will, as well as—he strongly believes—divine grace.

In 14 Minutes, Salazar chronicles in spellbinding detail how a shy, skinny Cuban-American kid from the suburbs of Boston was transformed into the greatest marathon runner of his era. For the first time, he reveals his tempestuous relationship with his father, a former ally of Fidel Castro; his early running life in high school with the Greater Boston Track Club; his unhealthy obsession to train through pain; the dramatic wins in New York, Boston, and South Africa; and how surviving 14 minutes of death taught him to live again.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alberto Salazar was the premier American marathoner of the early- to mid-80s. After a top-flight career as a distance runner at the University of Oregon, winning 1978 NCAA cross-country race, Salazar made his marathon début at the 1980 New York Marathon. He won the race again in 1981-82, and in 1981 his time of 2-08:13 was thought to be a world marathon record, but after re-measurement, the course was found to be slightly short. Salazar also won the 1982 Boston Marathon in a dramatic duel with Dick Beardsley, called the "Duel in the Sun". On the track he was TAC 10K champion in 1981 and 1983, and on the roads, he won numerous races short of the marathon distance. His attempt at Olympic honors in 1984 was hampered by injury, which also likely prevented him from making the 1988 Olympic Team. In the early 90s, Salazar began running some ultra-distance events and won the 1994 Comrades Marathon in South Africa, over 90 km, (56 miles). Salazar has worked as a consultant to Nike and a personal coach to many distance runners.

John Brant has written regularly for Runner's World and Outside magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and National Geographic Adventure among other publications. Duel in the Sun, on which this book is based, is Brant's first book.

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PART 1

It seems fitting that my earliest childhood memory entails strife, conflict, and intense emotion. It also seems appropriate that the Roman Catholic Church was involved. I was 5 or 6 years old. My family was out in Michigan visiting during a summer vacation. I attended a day camp run by a Catholic order, a sort of Bible day camp. I recall the presence of nuns. Another little boy started teasing me. He hit me with a vine, using it in the manner of a whip. This infuriated me. I fought back with a ferocity far beyond the pain I'd absorbed and beyond the bounds of a little boy trying to defend himself.

I jumped on the kid and started £ding him with my fists. When he escaped my grasp, I chased the terrified boy around some picnic tables. The nuns stopped me, but they couldn't staunch my rage, which kept flooding out of me, a deep volcanic upswelling at the injustice of the boy's attack. I wept and thrashed and couldn't be consoled. Eventually the nuns, who despite their experience had never encountered this sort of emotional intensity from a child, had to call my mother to come get me.

I remember that day: the stinging thrash of the vine; the deep green of the grass and trees; the startled white faces of the sisters under their habits; and my outpouring of rage that, even at that young age, I felt coming through me rather than from me. I sensed that I was a conduit of forces beyond my understanding and perhaps beyond my control.

My boyhood passed in a similarly tumultuous key. Our house was characterized by yelling and screaming. We argued about the same things as other American families—time in the bathroom, use of the car, who would claim the last slice of pizza—but the intensity we brought to these disputes was unlike that of other American families. Years later, when we were courting, I brought Molly to visit my family at my boyhood home in Wayland, Massachusetts. Molly is a smart, kind, sweet, blue-eyed and blonde- haired Oregon girl, and her early family life was as orderly and tranquil as the ones that I jealously watched on '70s TV sitcoms. Now Molly endured her first thunderous Salazar family dinner.

I can't recall what the issue was that evening—whether a movie was worth seeing? who was the better all-around ballplayer, George Brett or Mike Schmidt?—but, as was our habit, my brothers and father and I soon escalated the dispute to seemingly life-and-death stakes. We went for each other's throat, shouting bitter personal curses that to Molly's ears seemed beyond forgetting or forgiving. But the next moment, it was all gone. It was, "Pass the salt, please." Molly couldn't believe it. She thought the Salazars came from another planet.

And we did come from another planet. We came from Cuba. We came from the actual island nation itself, but also from a separate Cuba, a sort of virtual state, the one fashioned by the Cuban exile community in the United States. And my family occupied still another realm of Cuba: the one created by my father, Jose Salazar.

My father was the primary spokesman for the Cuban exile community in New England. Anything involved with Cuba, my dad was the man you saw talking about it. Politicians consulted with my father. He led public demonstrations. You drove past busy intersections and there would be my father, holding up a sign, shouting into a reporter's microphone, the veins sticking out on his neck. He appeared on televised panel discussions with Senator Edward Kennedy, his political nemesis, whose brother John F. Kennedy had—in my father's opinion—bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion, in which my father had participated (although on a personal level, the two men respected, and even liked, one another; years later, after I won the 1982 Boston Marathon, Senator Kennedy sent my father a personal note of congratulation).

There were constant meetings at our house, often running late into the night. Angry men shouted in Spanish. My brother Jose and I could hear them up in our bedroom after the lights were out. Jose, who is 2 years older than me, didn't seem as bothered by the turmoil as I was. He was wired like my father; absolutely sure of himself. Jose fell asleep easier than I did. Long after he was breathing rhythmically, I'd hear the voices swelling and receding, the deep impassioned vow that these men lived by: El ano proximo en La Habana! Next year in Havana.

One night I wandered downstairs, semisleepwalking. Strange men filled our dining room. The air was blue with cigarette and cigar smoke. More than 40 years later, I clearly remember seeing a man stalk out of the house and come back in carrying a machine gun.

I didn't realize at the time, of course—in fact, I wouldn't put it together until I was well into my own adulthood—that a sense of deep, visceral betrayal lay at the heart of this intrigue and of my father's rage. I'm not talking about the pallid kind of political betrayal common here in the United States; the disappointment you feel when the candidate you ardently supported gets into office and turns out to be just another cynical, deal-making politician. I'm talking about the head-butting fury of a deceived lover. I'm talking about the soul sickness that comes from your dearest friend violating your deepest trust.

For my father, Fidel Castro wasn't just a picture in the newspaper or a fatigues-clad, cigar-chomping figure strutting on the TV news. My father had been a friend and comrade of Castro's. My father's father had given Castro work when he was a struggling young attorney in the Cuban provinces. Castro and my father shared a dream of justice, along with nights under fire. For hours one harrowing afternoon, they'd breathed the same stale air in a cramped office, waiting to hear soldiers' footsteps coming for them.

And for my father, Che Guevara wasn't just an image silk-screened on a college kid's T-shirt. My father had fought beside Che. He had watched enemies die by Che's hand and had battled enemies himself under Che's orders. Later, my father worked under Che's direction in the revolutionary government. My father gave himself body and soul to the original, democratic vision of the Castro-led revolution, pledging a loyalty that doesn't seem in tune with our times, that is hard for an American living under comfortable, secure circumstances to comprehend.

Maybe you remember the scene from the movie The Godfather: Part II: Havana in the 1950s, a city under thrall to the American mobster Meyer Lansky; a playground for wealthy Americans sporting in casinos and brothels. The American mafia, along with US sugar, fruit, and mining interests, enriched to obscene levels the US-backed Cuban president Fulgencio Batista and his cronies, while leaving the rest of the nation destitute. Vibrant music, beautiful women, strong rum, a glowing Havana moon: It all sounds romantic, but for the vast majority of Cubans, the scene represented misery and humiliation.

My father was the scion of a family with a long and accomplished history straddling both Cuba and the United States, a line of engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs, soldiers, and priests. The family home in Havana was of sufficient grandeur that, after the revolution, the Soviet government employed it as part of their embassy complex. My father could have been one of the fortunate ones, exploiting his education and family connections to claim a prime feeding spot at the Batista trough. But instead, he chose the harder and more virtuous path. Along with a growing number of patriotic, idealistic young people, my father followed the opposition movement led by a young law student named Fidel Castro.

In 1950, the University of Havana formed the heart of the movement. Castro, who would graduate that year from the university's law school, was active in student politics, and my father headed the...

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Verlag
Rodale Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1609619986
ISBN 13 
9781609619985
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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