Marathon Man Read Online Free

nickname, “the Rookie”). He described us as “oddball hippie outcasts” and me in particular as a “sweet, friendly ragamuffin guy; a hippie with a dirty-blond ponytail.”
    We might have been a bunch of rogue runners with our long hair and free-spirited lifestyle, but good luck finding a more hardcore group of athletes in 1975. We ran more miles in a week than most people drive in their cars. Day in and day out, we trained to the point of exhaustion, through bone-chilling New England winters and sticky-hot Boston summers.
    None of us made any money road racing because there wasn’t any to be made—if you won a race, you were thrilled to come home with a new blender. It was an amateur, Chariots of Fire –style situation: We ran for the love of the sport and the thrill of pushing the boundaries of what could be done in that day and age. Roger Bannister, the Oxford medical student who became the first man to break the four-minute mile in 1954, a feat previously thought to be humanly impossible, called it “a challenge of the human spirit.” That’s exactly how we saw it. (Coincidentally, 1975 was the year Bannister would suffer a near-fatal car accident that forced him to give up running.)
    I parted my hair out of the way so I could see again. Tom was staring back at me with a cocky grin
    â€œLooking good,” Tom said. He held for a couple more seconds, then took off toward the high school, which had been turned into a makeshift staging area for the top runners. As I watched him disappear into the crowd, Charlie returned with a pair of white gardening gloves.
    â€œTry these on for size,” he said.
    I slid on the gloves. Almost instantly, my hands started to warm up. I was lucky to have Charlie there to support me. It was nice to have the company. Kept the nerves calmer.
    As for my girlfriend, Ellen, she’d camped out somewhere along the second half of the route. She had the idea to write BOSTON—GBTC in black marker on the front of my singlet the night before in our apartment. She felt, even though the crowds lining the course had no clue who I was, they’d be moved to cheer for me once they saw I was a local kid. I thought it was worth a shot. Besides, I took pride in representing my team and my city in the world’s most famous footrace.
    I had found my mesh singlet a month earlier in a Dumpster outside our housing complex in Jamaica Plain. I loved that it was so lightweight—it felt like I was wearing nothing—and it didn’t chafe while I ran. What in the world a perfectly good shirt was doing in the trash, I have no idea, but I’ve always had an eye for finding treasure among the discarded.
    I found my shirt in a Dumpster, my water bottle was an old shampoo bottle, and my racing gloves came from the gardening aisle. As for my footwear, I assumed I would be running the marathon in my beat-up Asics with the holes and rips and broken-down arches. But a week or so before the race I received a mysterious package at my apartment with this letter attached:
    April 9, 1975
    Mr. Bill Rodgers
    Jamaica Plain, Mass. 02130

    Dear Bill,
    First of all congratulations on a fine race in Rabat. You have really improved this last year and hopefully will continue to until the Olympic games.
    The reason I’m writing is because Jeff Galloway told me you were interested in training in our shoes. I’m sending you a pair of Boston ’73s and a training shoe. Any comments would be greatly appreciated. Just feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.
    Wishing you continued success for ’75.

    Sincerely,
    Steve Prefontaine
    I was awestruck to get a personal letter from Prefontaine, then America’s biggest track and field sensation. While I had never met the middle-distance rock star runner from Oregon, I felt a kinship with him. Maybe because we were both skinny scrappers, each with one leg longer than the other. Like me, you