In the Grizzly Manor Café, a man with a broken right hand sat alone eating eggs. He had tired eyes and graying hair and a nose that looked deflated. The town of Big Bear Lake is small—fewer than seven thousand people—and athletes stand out. It didn’t take long for a woman to ask, “Are you with Rampage?”
The man had been eating awkwardly with his left hand. He said yes, he was in town with Quinton Jackson, better known as Rampage, the current light-heavyweight titleholder of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
“I knew I saw you on TV! Are you training him?”
“Yeah, he’s up here now.”
The woman said that the challenger, Forrest Griffin, didn’t stand a chance in their upcoming fight.
“We all like Forrest, but he’s not ready for Rampage,” the trainer agreed. “This is the most relaxed camp we’ve had, because nobody thinks he’s going to beat Rampage.”
“I saw Rampage in Kmart,” the woman said. She was heavyset and her tank top showed off her tattoos. Other diners picked up on the conversation, and somebody mentioned the boxer Tito Ortiz, who owned a house in town.
“He’s made more money coaching than he did fighting. That’s when you step out of it.”
“Nobody beats the clock.”
“Nobody.”
Big Bear Lake sits at an altitude of seven thousand feet, in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. In the winter, it’s a ski town; in the summer people come to escape the crowds of Los Angeles and San Diego. For athletes, late spring is a good time to open a training camp, and during the first week in June I’d driven up from the coast to see Ryan Hall. At the age of twenty-five, Hall has already run the fastest marathon ever by an American-born athlete, and he’s expected to contend for a medal in this summer’s Olympics. Hall grew up in Big Bear Lake, and just the weekend before he had returned to begin preparing for the Games. Given the heat and pollution of Beijing, this year’s marathon could be one of the toughest races in Olympic history.
In the café, I listened to the conversation for a while and then I introduced myself to the trainer. His name was Chris Reilly, and he specialized in Thai boxing; he’d broken his hand while sparring. “Oh, I’ve seen the signs around town,” he said, when I mentioned Ryan Hall. Across the street hung a thirty-one-foot-tall banner with a photograph of Hall winning last November’s Olympic Trials Marathon, in New York. “We’re here for the same reason,” the trainer continued. “Mainly it’s the altitude. You’re getting half the oxygen. And it’s also getting away from the distractions in L.A.”
When we finished talking, Reilly gave me a left-handed shake. “Tell Ryan I said good luck in Beijing,” he said.
It seemed appropriate to send best wishes to Rampage, so I did. Later, I saw one of the cooks outside the café, on a cigarette break.
“Everybody here knows Ryan Hall,” the cook said. He took a puff and grinned. “Run, Ryan, run!”
Ryan Hall stands five feet eleven inches tall, and he weighs a hundred and forty pounds, and in most parts of the country he wouldn’t be recognized as an athlete. He has slender shoulders, slight arms, and narrow hips. Sleepy eyes—this is the look of a man who runs so much that he takes a nap most days. His hair is sun-bleached blond and shaggy; his mother still serves as his barber. When he walks somewhere, he takes his time, and he has the California habit of speaking slowly and letting his words hang in the air. Some distance runners have a nervous, sparrowlike quality—this seems particularly common among milers. But Ryan Hall’s intensity is beneath the surface, like a lizard lying in the sun. He can move when he has to, but until that time comes he can wait.
As a boy, he admired the boxers around town. Oscar de la Hoya kept a house in Big Bear Lake, and Sugar Shane Mosley trained there as well. Once, when Hall was working part time at the local movie theatre, he sold some licorice to Sugar Shane. Hall told me that the marathon reminds him of boxing, at least in the preparation. A marathoner becomes accustomed to isolation, and during a training cycle there are no tune-up events, no preliminary races. Afterward it takes weeks to recover. Patience is key, and so is faith. “I love the boxer mentality,” Hall said. “You go Rocky style, you train for months, and then you’ve got two hours where it’s all on the line. I feel like I have that same mentality.” He went on, “Growing up in the mountains, and being in the middle of five kids, and living off a teacher’s salary—we weren’t poor, but it was the simple things that we did. We’d go out and cut wood or do something like that.”
The Hall family is deeply religious, and they had originally come to Big Bear Lake as an act of faith. Ryan was born in Seattle, where his father, Mickey, taught in a Christian private school. Partly to get some exercise, and partly to save money, Mickey often ran home from his job. One day, in the middle of a run, he had a sudden urge to stop and pray.
“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.” ♦
