The Purity of the Long-Distance Runner

The long Iowa highway is empty. Beside it, quarter-ton pigs doze in blazing green pastures; the sun has burned a hole in the sky and is hanging near the fields. The temperature is climbing toward 96 degrees.

In the distance, on a crest of the highway, is a bobbing speck. With its even speed and its hard-rubber movement, it descends a hill, moves along a flat stretch, starts a new hill that curves two miles toward the hot glass of the sky.

The speck becomes a running man. He is a thin six-footer in a track suit, focusing with angry concentration on the road before his feet. He has a swinging muscular gait and runs in the middle of the oncoming-traffic lane. A car cruises toward him; he glances up, dismisses it, returns his attention to the road. The car slows, hesitates, stops, then pulls around him while a startled girl's face stares at this apparition from behind the wheel.

The apparition is Ron Daws, running second in the 1970 A. A. U. National Marathon Championship. "Ron would never move out of the road," says his wife. "He'd run into the car first." A tall, almost lanky girl, she is standing near the pumps of a country gas station, holding a Hilex bottle full of ice and water. Nearby, a knot of brown Iowans watches her, watches her approaching husband. Each time they move, they break out in a fine mist of sweat. On their faces is a blend of sympathy, amusement and awe. So far this morning, Daws has run 20 miles. He is wearing a white painter's cap with a white dishrag pinned on to protect his neck; in the cap and his track suit, he has a weird resemblance to a Foreign Legionnaire galloping purposefully in his underwear.

His footsteps become audible over the noise of the crickets and the breeze ... a slapping punch-punch-punch. Then the group can hear his breathing--Shish-ah! Shish-ah! Shish-ah!

Daws's wife pours water into a milk-shake cup, hands it to a middle-aged man in shorts. The man swings out and almost sprints to keep up with Daws. Taking the cup, Daws drinks half the water, tosses the rest over his face and shoulders, giving out an involuntary "Huh!" as the iciness hits him. He hands the cup back, asking abruptly, "Where's third place?" He is irritated with his pit crew; they spent the first third of the race driving back roads searching for him; then they led him a block off course in a small town. He is also irritated by the stride of the third-place runner. His own stride is a sprawling gallop--like that of a puppet with all the strings being jerked--while the third-place man's is classic for a marathoner: a tiny, almost mincing pit-pit-pit. "I get listening to it," says Daws, "and it screws up my pace."

"Third place isn't even in sight!" says the middle-aged man. Daws returns his attention, grimly, to the ground. The middle-aged man stops. Within three minutes, Daws is again a speck bobbing down the long emptiness of the road.

Six miles later, he finishes, still second, winning a trip to Czechoslovakia and an A. A. U. national team championship for the Twin Cities Track Club of Minneapolis and St. Paul. As he and the other runners cross the line--nearly all of them alone, most of them five and ten and fifteen minutes apart--a small crowd of Iowans gives them a sprinkle of applause. With stiff brown faces, the Iowans watch the most unlikely concentration of will and energy they have ever seen. Were the finishing runners to cry, "For God and Saint George!" not one Iowan would change expression.

The faces of the runners are rich in bones, hollows, angles, ridges; their expressions are intense, spare, private, undemonstrative, stoic. The sturdy brown farmers clapping them across the line have oddly similar faces, oddly similar expressions. "It was a wonderful experience on our part to get acquainted with these athletes and their way of life," wrote the Herman Spreckelmeyers to the Dexfield Review Sentinel. "They live such a clean life.... Seeing these sort of young people makes us more confident of those who will take over when we are gone from the scene."

The first marathon runner, a Greek messenger who ran 24 and a half miles from the Plain of Marathon to Athens, cried, "Rejoice, we conquer!" at the end, then died. When Ron Daws, going almost a mile and a half farther, finished his run through the plains of Iowa, he took a drink of water and strolled over to shake hands with the winner. "All this pain-of-running business is overdone," he says. "Still, it's hard work to run a marathon."

Roger Bannister, the first four-minute-miler, considered the marathon a "long-drawn-out agony" and wondered "how marathon runners inure themselves to the demands their sport makes upon them." Bannister ran a quarter of a mile every minute for the four minutes of his run. After it, he said, "I felt like an exploded flashlight, with no will to live." A champion marathoner will take about 15 seconds longer to run each quarter mile, but he will keep it up for over 104 quarter miles and two hours.

An aging athlete of 35, Daws has spent more than 15 years and 75,000 miles inuring himself to the demands of his sport. Running twice almost every day; running in obscure races like the Anoka Pumpkin Festival six-mile open, the Shakopee to Bloomington Stage Coach Run, the Mud Ball four-and-one-half-miler in the Eloise Butler Flower Gardens near his house; running in major races like the annual A. A. U. Marathon Championship and the Boston Marathon, he has forced his body to change in ways more basic than the enlarged muscles and perfected nervous-system patterns of most athletes. The biggest change was cardiovascular: Ordinarily, his heart beats about half as fast as most people's; then, when he pushes himself, he can work for over two hours with his heart pounding at 170 beats a minute. (Said a doctor examining marathoners before a race, "It's the strangest thing. These runners trot in place and their heart rates get about up to normal. Then when I start to take their pulse, I don't quite count to ten when the rate suddenly drops right back to what it was at rest.") Daws either tolerates tremendously high concentrations of fatigue products in his blood or disposes of them by mechanisms no one understands; his digestive system is like a goat's: He regularly eats six big sticky breakfast rolls an hour and a half before a race. And he can throw off heat like an air conditioner.

Were he as dedicated to golf or baseball or auto racing as he is to distance running, he would probably be prosperous and his face would be known to sports consumers all over the country. But marathon running is an amateur sport. Daws makes a mediocre income as a state data analyst, and to race he must affirm that he has never:

Sold or pawned an athletic prize

Raced against a professional

Been paid for coaching

Been paid for appearing on radio or TV

Allowed his photograph to be used in an ad

Capitalized on his athletic fame.

Capitalizing on his athletic fame would not gain Daws much. "America's" most obscure athlete," one runner called him. When he (continued on page 164)Long-Distance Runner(continued from page 134) was the first American finisher in the 1969 Boston Marathon (behind a Japanese and two Mexicans), runners in the middle of the pack, listening to transistor-radio reports of the race, said to other runners, "Ron Daws just came in, Ron Daws of Minneapolis."

"Who?" asked the other runners. "Who's that?"

In 1967, when he won the National Marathon Championship (in 90-degree heat), his name was not even on the official program. "Who's that?" asked the few spectators a marathon draws. "Who's that crossing the line?"

Months later, in the 1968 Olympic-team selection trials, he was ranked 19th out of 20 expense-paid contenders (and he made that top 20 only because he placed in a preliminary race in Minnesota, where international-quality marathoners are as rare as auks). When he qualified for the 1968 team, the Olympic edition of Track and Field News ran a small headline: "Daws Finds Persistence

Plus Smart Pacing Pay Off." It's the story of his life.

• • •

"My kids know what a daddy does," Daws says. "A daddy comes home from work, puts on his track clothes and goes running." One of his regular paths loops 20 miles around three Minneapolis lakes. After October, the path is dark in the evening and as bleak and empty as a path across Siberia. "My wife worries that I'll break a leg and freeze before anyone finds me," he says. "But somehow my feet find their way in the dark." One of his favorite memories is of a night when snow was banked far higher than his head on both sides of the path. "Everything was pitch-black but a strip of sky. The sky was glittering with stars. There must have been twice as many stars out as usual that night."

One winter Sunday morning, a reporter--riding a bicycle--followed Daws on his training run. The run was to be short, 20 miles around the lakes, instead of the 30 Daws usually runs on Sundays. With his characteristic mix of self-deprecation, pride and chatty good cheer, Daws showed his trophies before they left his small house to go out into the snow. There were cups and plaques and medals and ribbons--dozens of ribbons, fixed like butterflies in cases. "The trophies get pretty nice when you start finishing up front," Daws said. But the reporter thought of the silver urns, the towering rich goblets given out at the various Twin Cities yacht clubs, and Daws's trophies seemed like the prizes any assiduous bowler could collect.

(Later, in the spring, back from a marathon in Las Vegas, where he came in third, Daws said, "The first three finishers got something really nice--a big photograph of themselves going over the finish line." The reporter looked for some hidden bitterness, some pressed-down sarcasm in his tone. But he could find none.)

Daws and the reporter drove through the morning snowstorm to the path that circled the lakes. It was dark enough to have to use the car headlights. The reporter hauled his bike out of the trunk and Daws set off. He talked about his running, giving out little white puffs with his words. He talked as easily as if he were sitting on a porch. His feet made no sound and his voice was quiet.

"I was a miler for the University of Minnesota, but I was so bad I didn't even go on road trips. We had a great runner there then: Buddy Edelen. In the early Sixties, he ran the fastest marathon in history."

"I'm sorry," said the reporter, "I was going to the U then, but I've never heard of him."

"Nobody in America has," said Daws. "Americans aren't interested in distance running. When I went to the '68 Olympics, KSTP asked me to call if anything interesting happened. But they weren't interested in the real Olympics--the running and the games. All they cared about hearing was if one of the Russians socked a Czech. Buddy Edelen finally moved to England. 'I became a real runner when I set foot on English soil,' he said." (When Daws placed second in the Iowa marathon, the man at the sports desk of the St. Paul Dispatch, when asked why his paper had printed nothing about Daws or the Twin Cities Track Club win, answered, "A marathon? Is that some sort of race?")

"One day I was going to run some laps with Buddy," Daws went on, "when the coach shouted, 'Daws, get off the track!' like I wasn't good enough to be running at the same time. That coach was a pathetic old man waiting for retirement. He had us training in the Fifties the way they'd trained in the Twenties. I saw him again years later, when I carried in the torch at the Pan-American Games. You should have seen his eyes bug out!

"At the U, I was running such junk that I quit the team in my senior year. But I didn't want to quit running; I hadn't accomplished anything yet. I moved outside and upped the puny 30 or 40 miles a week I'd been running to 100 miles and more. The university runners thought I was crazy, running outside at night at 20 below, but I was enjoying it." (In Daws's scrapbook is a photograph of him back from a 28-mile below-zero run; an icicle a foot long hangs from his arctic face mask and the breath blown upward from the mask's edges has settled in thick frosty ledges on his brows.)

As Daws cantered without effort into the snow, he now and then broke off his narrative to ask, "Isn't this a nice day? ... Isn't this a pretty place?"

It was a haunting day and place. The lake shore was deserted and, beyond the trees, the sky--which usually shows the prosperous, blunt and modest towers of Minneapolis--was opaque with snow. The near-frozen water rolled thickly beneath clucks, which appeared suddenly, paddling cheerily and wukking to themselves. Daws came upon a jogger, swung out and passed. The jogger hopped in surprise, became an indistinct shadow and was gone behind the sleety, white-powder wall. Daws ran without friction, without weight, like those polished, balanced oiled-walnut machines that spin endlessly with one push.

Around him was a city breathing--most of its half-million people hunched in blue light in front of TV sets, watching the ghosts of athletes compete. But Daws might have been moving beside some Alaskan lake or around a flooded crater in the Andes. He had the solitude, the spaciousness, the sense of weather and the animal movement that the ghostly hawkers on TV--selling their cigarettes, their deodorants, their race-car-engined station wagons--were pretending to dispense.

"From a young athlete," wrote a researcher in creativity, "I learned that a perfect tackle could be as aesthetic a product as a sonnet." And marathon runners, too, are a variety of artist. There are artists of the beautiful, artists of the useful.... Marathon runners are artists of ... what?

"What do you think about when you run?" the reporter asked.

Daws laughed, with a soft hint of exasperation. "Everybody asks me that." But he answered carefully. "On training runs, I watch people go by. I wonder about their lives. I think about my competitors--about them going out the door and beginning to run in England or Ethiopia or New Zealand...." He mulled over old angers, dissolving them with exertion. He told about a time some neighbors had knocked him into a snowbank with a car door. "They drove off laughing and drinking something out of a bottle. I called the police, but they wouldn't do a thing." He remembered a time some blacks had thrown a bottle at him, a time a teenager had punched another runner from a car. "In races, I just think about the next few steps. They tell me the Olympic course was beautiful, coming down the boulevards by Mexico City's flowers and statues and lakes. But I might as well have been running down a Minneapolis alley. Then, toward the end of a race, I don't think at all. I don't hear; I just run. There's a marathoners' saying, 'At 20 miles you're halfway there.' "

After a time, the parked car appeared out of the snow. "Twenty miles," Daws said. Stopping by the trunk, pleasantly ready to help lift and stow the bike, he again checked his watch. "Two hours and 20 minutes. Well, that's not really so bad for a social run, I guess."

Outside his house, he sat with the reporter a few minutes, talking. The engine and the heater were off, yet he steamed in the barely freezing air. Steam rose from his thin jacket, from his sweat pants, from his hair. Then he began to shiver.

As he got out, the reporter called, "The Olympics, that last night--was it as great as it looked on TV?"

(On that last night, the reporter had watched the athletes pour over the barriers, flood past the passively resisting officials, swirl in sturdy, happy patterns on the grass--while the crowd chanted, "May! He! Co! May! He! Co!" and tinny gay mariachi music spouted from the band. The reporter had found himself laughing--happy at the gaiety of hundreds of athletes dancing in a stadium 1800 miles away.)

"I was one of the first over the barriers," said Daws. "It couldn't have looked as great as it really was!"

In late winter there were tremendous snowfalls. The reporter called Daws the day after a blizzard--the heaviest blizzard in years, with the sounds of cars muffled to soft hums and the silence so thick he could hear the tiny clicks of snowflakes--and asked if he had run. "I ran 20 miles," Daws said. "It was pretty hard. There was only a rut; the cars wanted it and I wanted it. We've begun calling this snow Greasy Skid Stuff; it's almost impossible to get any traction in it. It's going to be a long winter."

After that, on nights when the bare trees thrashed ferociously against the moon or snow blurred the street lamp 15 feet from the porch, the reporter would say to friends, "Ron Daws is out running now." They'd take a quick glance out the window and make shuddery noises of disapproval and disbelief.

"Ron gets lonely running sometimes," his wife says. "He likes weekends; he can find people to run with him then. Spring is his worst season; his feet get frozen running in the slush. Sometimes he complains about being physically tired, but he really loves to run."

In early summer, he runs in double sweat suits. "Runners laugh at me," he says, "coming from Minnesota and running my best races on hot days, but I make my own hot weather to train in." Other runners are awed--with the distance runner's CIA-agent awe of people who stand up well to torture--seeing him come back in his double sweat suit from a 30-mile summer-Sunday run, staggering through the alleys with the heat. During a summer workout, he and a friend ran into an industrial district. All the businesses were closed and they couldn't find water. "Then we spotted a car that was beaded with rain from the night before," Daws says. "I went to one side, my friend went to the other, and we licked the water off. People don't understand when I tell them about it; they recoil a little. They can't understand being that thirsty."

At six feet and 150 pounds, Daws is bulky for his sport. While the faces of some runners look sunken, as if the skin were being sucked between the sharp bones, Daws has some padding, even a touch of apple coloring, to his cheeks.

One of the arguments against exercising to lose weight is that you have to run 36 miles to really lose a pound. Daws runs 5000 miles a year. This time next year, he should weigh 11 pounds. Since college, he has run off nearly a ton of flesh. To counteract vanishing, he eats--hamburgers, tacos, pizzas; milk shakes. He eats like a caricature of a teenager. "It's embarrassing to go out to dinner with him," says his father-in-law. "He doesn't just go back for seconds; he goes back for thirds. Sometimes I go out and hide in the car until he's done."

Says Daws, "You can look at runners before a race and tell who's going to win. It's always the palest, skinniest, weakest, most wretched-looking guy. The runner who finished behind me in the '68 Olympic trials was so skinny the Army wouldn't take him. He flunked his draft physical, then went out and ran 50 miles at about six minutes to the mile. It was a new record for the 50-mile run." (Because he wears long-sleeved clothes and runs at night, Daws is pale. The Night Crawler is the nickname given him by a friend.)

Like most marathon runners, Daws looks about ten years younger than his age. It is only after a race, when dehydration has brought out the cracks and wrinkles in his face, that one would guess him to be older than his mid-20s. (After his fastest race, a camera caught him grinning at the world. His neck was scrawny; his skin, sliced everywhere by wrinkles, looked crusty beneath its layer of sweat and was pulled tight across his skull. His neck had wattles like a turkey's. His teeth stood out like the teeth of a horse. He could have passed for 50.)

Recently, Daws has begun wearing his hair fashionably long and his wife has put him into bell-bottoms. Last spring he even had a mustache--which he shaved off. "It made me feel old, and besides, I couldn't seem to run fast with it on."

Even with the long hair, even with his bell-bottom pants, there is something of the Iowa soybean farmer about him. His previous hair style fit him better; it was a butch cut, long on top, where it shot straight up, almost shaved on the back and sides. With the butch cut, with his preternatural youth, with his air of friendly wholesomeness, he resembled an eagle scout from some 1953 Midwestern troop. (And when he was training for the 1968 Olympics, running for hours every day in the Colorado desert, he spent his spare time building airplane models--huge fragile things of balsa wood and tissue paper, the kind no one builds anymore.)

He is also like an eagle scout--or someone from some fixed moral system, at least--in the certainty of his views: This is good; this is bad; this is right; this is wrong:

I was up in the balcony watching a movie when the projector went off and they passed around the hat for respiratory disease. The cigarette smoke in the balcony was so thick you could hardly see across the aisle. I wouldn't give a cent. They had the answer to respiratory disease light there and they wouldn't do a thing about it. It really got me furious.

I don't like new things. People ask me, "Why don't you buy a new car?" I don't want a new car. I've got a Ford I bought for $60 and I'm going to drive it until it disintegrates.

I can't understand this sports-fan business. Who do those fat crocks think they are, shouting and yelling at the players? Most sports fans can't even climb into the bleachers without gasping.

Baseball, now, there's a lazy man's sport. That must be the most boring game in the world. And the players must be in the worst shape. Make a baseball player run half a mile and he'll whine about breaking his contract.

Daws's usual tone is bantering, goodnatured, with his aggression blended in softly, like an herb. One could know him a long time before feeling the hostility under his surface. Usually he seems mild, even bland, with an eagle scout's energetic blandness. All the runners who congregate at marathon races are like that: benign, energetic, friendly and soft-voiced. But they can also chill suddenly and take on the alienated stoic look of people who make a point of finding obstacles and overcoming them alone. Daws recognizes this: About one of his closest competitors, he says, "I can't figure it out. He seems so genuinely mild and gentle. But that edge must be in there somewhere, or he couldn't drive himself the way he does."

• • •

Distance runners have the qualities Thornton Wilder ascribed to Americans; they are "lonely, insubmissive and polite." But America turns out few great distance runners and ignores the ones it does. Ethiopian Abebe Bikila ran barefoot over the cobblestones of Rome to win the 1960 Olympic marathon, then won it again, in Tokyo, in 1964. For years his life story was the second most popular subject of the tapestry/comic book that is a popular Ethiopian art form. (The most popular subject was a perennial: the story of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.) Emil Zatopek won the marathon, plus the 5000- and 10,000-meter races, in the 1952 Olympics, and rapidly became a Czechoslovakian colonel. But when New Yorker Oscar Moore qualified for the 1964 Olympics in both the 5000- and the 10,000-meter events, his boss, a jewelry manufacturer, fired him rather than give him time off for the trip.

And when Bikila and fellow Ethiopian Mamo Wolde (who won the Olympic marathon in 1968) came to America, a runners' magazine ran an editorial:

They had nothing to do but train and cat, train and rest.... "Why shouldn't he win?" the runners said of Wolde. If Pete McArdle [an American Olympic marathoner] had the same opportunity to train, he'd show the Ethiopians something.... McArdle had worked 12 hours [as a bus mechanic] in New York the day before.... McArdle has no private preserve on which to train as did the Ethiopians.... He trains on city streets, running to and from work, and takes an extra hour at lunch (without pay) so he can do some speed work.

Daws gets some time off (without pay) to go to international meets, but he occasionally becomes alarmed--maybe the next time they won't let him off--and he begins to mutter about seeing the governor, about seeing his Senator, about going to the State Department if he has to.

Although Americans say they respect the driving purity of sport, the only athletes they actually respect are schoolage athletes, foreign athletes and rich athletes. If a 35-year-old Ethiopian chooses to spend half his workday running with huge strides across the veld, then that is noble and pure; it has an ascetic alien beauty; besides, what else is there for an Ethiopian to do? But for a 35-year-old American to run around frozen lakes and down hot alleys when he could be working at job advancement, or even watching television--this is a slash at propriety. It angers people. A young man who once worked with Daws was told about his making the 1968 Olympic team. "Um," said the young man without interest; and then, bursting into feeling, "He must be crazy, just to run and run!" When Daws is running, people in cars give him the sort of smiles adults give cute children and children give dolls. When he is training with his friends, all of them wearing track-suit odds and ends, people begin questions or comments to them with, "Say, boys," or "Hey, kids." After a Boston Marathon, a sportscaster at least six years younger than Daws kept calling him Ronnie during an interview, and afterward said with patronizing enthusiasm, "There's a fine young man." In return, reporters look fat and liverish to the runners, and people in cars look squashy, like Mongoloids on an asylum outing. "I hate fat," says Daws. "I can't stand fat people!" When he saw Alice's Restaurant, he was surprised to find Alice attractive. "That's the first overweight girl who's turned me on."

One of the other Twin Cities Track Club members, a doctor, says, "Someone will yell at me when I'm running, and I'll look up to see some obese crock leaning out his car window, and I'll think, 'You're starting to get old; you're overweight; I'll see you in cardiac emergency before long!' " (He delivers his thought for the scoffing fatties like a curse: May you topple from your car and rot!)

The same doctor declares, "My resting pulse is 44. I can't have a heart attack. It's impossible for me to have a heart attack!" And with a small sharp indirect smile that implies I know I'm making a wild claim and I'll admit it's wild if I have to, but, by God, it happened, he also informs you, "For 15 years, my wife and I tried to have children. Then I began running and we had two."

All the runners talk frequently about health. Says Daws, "The average American cares more about his car than about his body. If his car gets dented, he takes it right to the shop. But when his stomach starts hanging out and his arteries start hardening, he doesn't do a thing." What Daws thinks the average American should do, of course, is run. "I heard a doctor say that running just five miles a day could prevent heart attacks. Can you imagine what that would do for world health, if everyone ran just five miles a day? If my legs hold out, I'll still be running when I'm 100."

Marathon runners are older than most athletes--Mamo Wolde was 37 when he won in the Mexico Olympics-- and it often seems that their main competition is not other runners, not even themselves ("You run because you want to see if you can do it," says Daws; "you want to see if you can make yourself do it"); their main competition seems to be death. There is a challenge-to-the-gods hopefulness about Daws's frequent description of himself as "the world's oldest living teenager"; there is a kind of propitiation in the runners' regular bodily mortification along endless stretches of road.

The organizer of the A. A. U. National Marathon in Iowa, a balding, shyly gracious doctor with the face of a mild and gentle Popeye, explains why he began running:

"Ten years ago, I was pounding life too hard. I developed coronary insufficiency with angina pectoris and had a heck of a time keeping my practice. My buddies--three of them--died in neighboring small towns of heart attacks and I thought I was next. About that time, I studied the autopsy reports of marathon runners and without exception, they had developed extra-large coronary arteries. So I proceeded to marathize my heart, very slowly, and it worked. After six or seven months, I couldn't produce pain in my chest with any emotion or exercise. Now I'm running ten miles every morning at 53 years."

This doctor's particular hero--the hero of all the older runners--is a San Francisco waiter named Larry Lewis. Lewis holds a curious world's record: the 100-yard dash for men over 100. Each day, before he goes to work, the 105-year-old Lewis runs about seven miles through a local park. "I talked with Larry when he was 102," says the Iowa doctor. "He's taking care of his baby sister, who's about 85. 'She's old!' Larry said to me. 'There are bedpans and wheelchairs. Those things are for old people. I don't know anything about old people!' "

As the doctor said this, there was a dreamy, confident expression on his mild face. One of the other runners had refused to comment on what running meant to him. "Talking about it with a nonrunner is like talking about sex with a 12-year-old," he'd snapped. But the doctor tried to explain:

"Running is such an inspiration, particularly after six miles. My ten-mile trek is a jewel to me and each day I polish that jewel anew and it keeps the soul aglow with zest and creative ambition all the day. I don't see why the whole world isn't running."

His enthusiasm is reminiscent of a passage in a particular work of hope, a book celebrating the rejuvenation of the Jehovah's Witnesses after Armageddon: "What if you knew that soon you would feel the wrinkles of age fade from your face and from the faces of your loved ones--as you watched the gray hairs vanish and felt the surge of perfect health invigorating your flesh with supernal youth?" Says Daws, "Other people get older and older, I get younger and younger."

But he knows that he will eventually begin to slow. In a recent race, he won the first-place trophy and the over-30 trophy. "That got me down," he says. In another race, he was almost beaten by a high school boy, and in another he was beaten by an over-40 runner. "Young runners are coming up," he says, "old runners are coming up; everybody's coming up." Two months before his second place in the national championship in Iowa, he finished far back in the 1970 Boston Marathon. "I came apart in the cold," he says. "I've never been so cold in my life. One of the guys passed a half-frozen Jap who was crawling down the road on his hands and knees." The life went out of Daws's workouts until his wife suggested, "Maybe you're over the hill."

"That got me out the door!" He added three miles a day to his regular workout.

Daws has never been very fast. He can't run a mile much faster than he could when he was at the University of Minnesota. But after he graduated and began running on the roads, he found he could run close to his mile pace for up to ten miles. "I decided I'd never race farther than ten miles, because I thought longer races were unhealthy. Then I heard about someone--I forget who it was--who was running fantastic marathons, down around 5:30 to the mile. When I heard that, it was only a question of how soon I'd run a marathon."

Five and a half minutes to the mile is about two hours and 24 minutes for the marathon. Daws's first marathon took him two hours and 40 minutes. After six years and 30,000 miles of training, he brought that down to two hours and 20 minutes. But that was no longer a fantastic time; it was skilled-workman time. (continued on page 174)Long-Distance Runner(continued from page 171) Americans had run 2:14, 2:12, 2:11 marathons; and an Australian named Derek Clayton, a man as big as Daws, had set the new criterion for fantastic time: 26 miles, 385 yards in two hours and eight and a half minutes--an average of 4:54 minutes to the mile.

"I don't have much natural talent," says Daws. "Every time I've done well, it's been a surprise." But, as he sometimes admits, he has not been all that surprised. Runners have sprinted off, beaten him regularly by three, five, six minutes; then the next year or the year after that or the year after that, they have had tendon problems, sciatic-nerve problems; they have taken new jobs and not had time to train; they have begun graduate school, or to enjoy parties, or to play golf, or simply to age. Some still follow him in by 10 or 15 minutes in races every year; others have quit running completely. "I have mixed feelings when a good runner quits training," he says. "It might put me a step ahead, but it's something gone from the game."

To win his trophies and his trips, he has had to beat faster runners while they were still in their prime. One of the men he beat in the Olympic trials would not run with him in practice. "You're too slow," the man said, "you just plod." How Daws has managed to beat him and others even faster might be explained partly by his heat training and partly by this letter written by a three-time Olympian to a runners' journal:

I am a newcomer in U. S. A.... and I cannot understand! Why are you so happy when a marathon course is very hilly and tough? Have you so many Sadists? ... Why do the Japanese, Koreans, New Zealanders, Finns, etc., in Ko?ice, Turku, Tokyo, etc., so often run below 2:20 and so many runners under 2:30 in one race? Because they seek a flat-- nice--course! Every organizer takes trouble that in his race the runners run a very good time! Why not in U. S. A.? ... What you have, when your country sends three men to Tokyo in 1964, are mountain climbers. The course in Tokyo is very flat. These three men have not enough speed for a fast race (for a tempo race). Understanding?

I heard the U. S. marathon Championship could be in Holyoke! Oh wonder! With their big mountain on the last mile--do you want internationalists or several dead men? Maybe they also have very hot weather. Is it not possible? ... Is it not enough to run 26 miles? ... It must also be with mountains.... Bring not the marathon runner earlier in the grave!

• • •

For last summer's Olympic trials in Oregon, there was a "flat nice course." Under a warm evening sun, 100 marathoners circled the stadium while the crowd cheered: Then the bright mass of runners poured through the north gate toward the plum trees and bamboo groves and hot asphalt roads outside Eugene. Behind them, amateur athletes continued a professional show. Black sprinters, hushed and powerful as steam turbines, flashed in packs around the turns; a high jumper's nylon suit swished ferociously as he stretched through his slow-motion warm-up ballet; hammer throwers snapped their horse rumps forward as they bounced out of their releasing whirl and sent missiles arcing two thirds the length of a football field.

On the first mile of the marathon, still in the city near the stadium, Daws heard his time: five minutes, 21 seconds. He had been aiming for 5:20 and was pleased. This pace, which he had maintained for long distances several times in race training, would give a two-hour, 20-minute marathon, which he felt could put him on the Munich team. The pack was thinning. Many faster runners had pulled out of sight and lengthened their lead. But for some--two-milers, 5000- and 10,000-meter men--this was only the second or third marathon of their lives. It was Daws's 20th and he knew that most of the early leaders would fade, drop back, drop out--or push until they were senseless. "You remember that race where that guy began running in circles after nine miles?" Daws had laughed to someone while they were checking in.

"Yeah," said the other runner, "and that race where the guy veered off the course and ran up a railroad embankment?"

With his white painter's cap, with his muscular, choppy stride, Daws ran comfortably through ten miles. Pleased at the way the race was going, even his anger toward A. A. U. officials was fading. "They give themselves fancy trips--big boondoggles on jet planes--then claim they don't have the money to send athletes anywhere."

Daws's trip had been anything but fancy. His $60 car had disintegrated and he had been embarrassed that friends had chipped in for his fare to Oregon. To save a few dollars, he had hitchhiked the 100 miles from Portland to Eugene. Not having the money to stay in the athletes' dorms or to eat the athletes' meals ("Christ! It's four dollars a meal," other competitors told him), he was luckily taken in by a family in a nearby town. And a few minutes before the marathon, an official had tried to keep him out of the stadium. "You've got no athlete's pass," said the official.

"Look," said Daws, "I've got on my track suit, I've got on my number, I don't need my athlete's pass. It's in my bag in my room. I've got to get in there and run!" He considered slugging the official and sprinting for the track, but intense talking and identification by other athletes finally got him through.

While a mild breeze flurried the back-road trees and boys on bikes cut in and out among the runners, Moses Mayfield, the only black in the marathon and the leader at five miles, began to slow; eventually, he would quit. At a point near Eugene, at least ten runners turned off the course and trotted toward town. Others, their exhaustion and gauntness giving them the look of war prisoners, had collapsed in the official jeep. In all, 39 competitors would drop out. Most of the runners still on the course carried a film of sweat so thick it resembled mucus.

At 13 miles, Daws's right foot began to hurt. "I'd shaved some rubber off my soles to save weight, but I shaved off too much. I thought the foot was going to burn up." And he began to get sick--something he'd never done before in a race. (His running friends knew him as the only marathoner in the world who could eat a pizza, then race the next day.) His pace slowed; while some of the leaders dropped behind him, other runners passed him. At about two hours, 15 minutes, when the two leaders were coming into the stadium side by side, headed for Munich, insisting on a tie, each refusing a first or second place, Daws got diarrhea and had to duck behind a tree. "You should have seen them come by--runner after runner after runner." When he got onto the course again, he spotted a friend sitting with a blonde on a grassy hill. "You can't know how I was tempted to just stop and sit there with you," he told the friend later. "I knew the race was over for me, but I had learned from the Japanese--that Japanese who was crawling down the road at Boston--that you never quit."

The third-place man finished at two hours, 20 minutes, the time Daws had been aiming at, the time he calculated might place him on the team. At 2:30, ten minutes later, Daws crossed the line. He looked heavy, awkward and slow. "He did look like a mountain climber," said a spectator who had seen the bring-not-the-marathon-runner-earlier-in-the-grave letter. Daws put on his warmup suit and climbed into the roofless athletes' grandstand (athletes weren't allowed in the reserved-seat section), where he began taking pictures of the 5000-meter race between George Young, who, like Daws, was 35 years old, and a brilliantly fast young runner named Steve Prefontaine. Young pushed Prefontaine to one of the fastest 5000 meters ever run. After the race, Prefontaine stayed on the track, taking a few laps, waving at the crowd, signing autographs, talking with the small boys, the teenaged girls, the track fans who clustered about him. And, as the sun became dim over the wildflower-filled graveyard behind the stadium, Daws, one of the last athletes on the field, moved with the edge of Prefontaine's crowd. He carried his U.S.A. Olympic Team bag and wore a wistful outsider's smile. A fat, 60ish man stopped him. "Do you go to the University of Minnesota?"

"No," snapped Daws. "Twelve years ago, I did."

"Well, I went to Moorhead State College. Can I take your picture?"

"Why take my picture? I'm nobody. Take her picture." Daws pointed to a nearby reporter. Then he relented, without losing more than a trace of his surliness. "Well, I suppose my picture is better than a picture of that black line over there."

"It must have been tough," said the man. Daws glared after him dolefully as he left.

"There'll be other races," said one of Daws's friends, "there'll be other trips."

"I don't know," said Daws, "I don't know if there will."

Toward dawn, Daws was drinking fruit wine, as much wine as he had ever drunk in his life, with friends. All were from Minnesota. One was a young teacher who had finished almost 20 places ahead of Daws and whom Daws had helped train. "Christ," said the teacher, as he soaked his feet in a pan of hot water, "I feel like a bag of smashed assholes!" He turned to Daws. "Ever since I was a kid, it's been Daws! Daws! Daws! When I was a sophomore in high school, I went to an allcomers meet and all of us were saying: 'We've got to beat Ron Daws!' And here you are, still at it. When are you going to quit?"

Daws was not amused.

The next day, in an airport snack shop, Daws talked with a runner. "Why don't you retire, Daws?" he asked. "It'd be a good thing for the rest of us if you did."

"I've heard rumors that Abebe Bikila was actually 41 when he won in the Tokyo Olympics," said Daws, as he finished off his milk shake.

When he got home, he went out for a loosening-up jog. A day or two later, he was running fast miles in a park near his home. "It's a tough park--steep hills, uneven ground, and I was taking more than half a minute off the fastest mile I had ever run there. I'm really feeling good!"

• • •

Sure he will not be brought earlier to the grave, half convinced his training will keep him vigorous at 100 and beyond, Daws is out running tonight. If it is raining, he is running in the rain; if it is snowing, he is running in the snow. He is running toward the next major race to which he can afford a ticket, toward the Anoka Pumpkin Festival six-mile open, toward the Mud Ball four-and-one-half-miler in the flower gardens near his home, toward the 1976 Olympic trials, toward his 100th birthday. Every year he runs half the annual mileage of the average car.

Occasionally he runs up and down a hill a few miles from his house. "There's a family on the hill," he says, "and I've gotten to know everybody in it. I know where they all sit at dinner; I can tell when one of the kids is eating somewhere else; I've seen them arguing; I've seen them laughing. Sometimes it's 20 below when I go by, and I'm slogging through a foot of new snow. I wonder what they'd think if they found out about me. I don't suppose they'd believe it. They'd never believe there was someone out there running on their hill."