Going for the Gold

"The Main Thing is just to relax," says the world's most relaxed runner as we jog slowly up Chestnut Hill Avenue in Boston. "Just keep the body plumb, head to toe. A lot of beginners make the mistake of leaning too far forward. And of taking too long a stride."

Bill Rodgers, the top-ranked marathon runner in America, has begun his midday ten-mile training run. "Training shouldn't be work, work, work," says Rodgers, bouncing lightly up and down and breathing easily, as we crest the hill and cross Boylston Street. "If your heart's pounding when you finish, that's too much. Just take it easy, run your own pace and enjoy it."

We enter a park containing a city reservoir: Other joggers and even some construction workers do a double take, then wave as they recognize the slim, lithe blond guy with the syrup-smooth running style cruising around the gravel path. In Boston, where they have been running the marathon for 83 years and where an estimated 1,000,000 people watched him win it for the third time on April 16, 1979, Rodgers is a hero. He smiles and waves back.

"We're doing about an eight or an eight-fifteen," says Rodgers, instinctively gauging the pace of a run in terms of one-mile increments. "I usually train at six or six-thirty, but last night I did a hard eight-mile run at about 5:30." That does not mean he ran at 5:30 p.m.; it means he ran a mile in five minutes, 30 seconds, and then another and another, until he had done eight of them in 44 minutes. About twice the speed of your good recreational jogger, the kind crowding our sidewalks in unprecedented numbers these days.

"My best marathon speed is four-fifty-six," says Rodgers. "Last April in Boston, I finally beat my personal record of four-fifty-seven--Boston in '75."

Nineteen seventy-five was the year a schoolteacher named Bill Rodgers emerged from the main pack of obscurity in the running world. Wearing a pair of oversized white-cotton gloves that made him look like a blond Mickey Mouse, he set a Boston Marathon record of 2:09:55, the fastest time ever recorded in any marathon anywhere by an American (and the fifth fastest in the history of marathons). Rodgers had a light wind at his back, but that was offset when he startled everyone by stopping four times during the race--once to tie his shoe and three times to sip water ("I couldn't drink and run at the same time like most runners"). Three years later, he won the Boston race again in a time of 2:10:13. "I think I ran a better race in 1978. In 1975, I had that wind behind me and it surely counted for more than 18 seconds."

All this is amusing and slightly academic. In 1979, in a cold 42-degree rain, with the wind in his face, Rodgers won the Boston Marathon in an astonishing 2:09:27. That means he ran the punishing 26 miles, 385 yards at a stunning average of 4:56 per mile. "I probably did a 5:05 on the hills," he adds, casually referring to a mere nine-second-per-mile slowdown while crossing the three infamous Newton Hills (the last one fondly known as Heartbreak Hill) near the 18-mile mark of the Boston course.

For two days, I have heard other running experts describe Rodgers as "floating like a leaf," "running like honey pouring out of a bottle" and, simply, "beautiful." Now, circling the reservoir, I see what they mean.

At steady speed on a flat surface, Rodgers is a marvel to behold, the human body in perfect mechanical balance with itself. I fall a stride behind to observe his quarter flank: His upper body seems incredibly relaxed--no tension in the neck, shoulders, biceps or forearms--though not at all rag-doll-floppy like some runners. He rather appears to glide along; his feet barely seem to touch the ground. With only 128 pounds (and only five to seven percent body fat) on his 5'8 1/2" frame, Rodgers turns running into ballet. He is a Baryshnikov of the road. He is resisting nothing; no part of his body is working against any other part. (Think about it the next time you run--or walk, for that matter. Notice how your shoulders, arms and hips sometimes seem to be in conflict.)

Rodgers has the perfect runner's physique: a small chest cage and very narrow shoulders; long legs set on high hips, giving him good stride, especially downhill. His standing pulse rate is a near-catatonic 38. Even his deep-set blue eyes are unusually close together, perhaps the better to focus on the tiny, narrow line, thousands of yards long but barely a foot wide, that constitutes the true playing field of his sport. Concentration is also one of Rodgers' acclaimed abilities--"When I pass a guy, he's out of sight and out of mind"--and that focused face would seem to be part of it.

As he runs, Rodgers' upper torso is allowed a great deal of graceful twisting movement, more like a woman's run than a typical man's (it is said that ten-year-old girls are the perfect natural runners). Unlike those of a football player who pumps up and down when he springs, his shoulders simply rotate from side to side--free, easy, comfortable. He looks as if he could do this all day, which he probably could.

•

Rodgers is a natural talent who discovered himself late--twice. He first unearthed his running gift when he was a 15-year-old participant in the summer recreation program in his home town of Newington, near Hartford, Connecticut. (Consider that Jimmy Connors found tennis at three and Chris Evert started at six.) He began training in one- and two-mile runs with the only other competitive boy in his town and finished the program with a 5:20 mile that won the city championship.

He was always the front runner in training sessions of any length with his brother, Charlie, who is 359 days older, and the dozen or so other boys who formed the nucleus of the first cross-country track team at Newington High School.

"When the coach would send us out on the road for a two-mile run," remembers brother Charlie, "three quarters of the team would drop off at my girlfriend's house for a Pepsi. Bill would keep running. We all thought he was a little strange. People would ask why. But Billy was always very in touch with his body. That's why he ran so much."

So much so that by his senior year, Rodgers was occasionally knocking out a seven-mile run for the fun of it and beating everybody on the track team at anything over one mile. "The longest event in those days was the two-mile run," he says. "I went to the New England championships my last two years." Then, near the end of his senior year, he did something that surprised himself as much as everyone else: He saw a road sign that read Berlin--6 Miles, and proceeded to run all the way there and back.

"Twelve miles!" says Charlie with lingering astonishment 15 years later. "That was unheard of. We thought that was really weird."

Bill Rodgers' long-distance career would almost certainly have soon ended but for the fortuity of meeting Ambrose Burfoot the following year at Wesleyan University. Burfoot was the classic Yankee individualist, a lonely high-mileage man who won the 1968 Boston Marathon and became something of a legend in Connecticut. During his senior year, Burfoot took in sophomore Rodgers as his roommate. Rodgers' primary concern in college was to break a nine-minute "deuce" (two-mile run), but Burfoot exposed him to the special joys of distance training in the bucolic splendor of rural New England.

"Amby taught me that training was not all this work, work, work, running around a track," says Rodgers. "He got me out by the lakes and woods, into the primitive setting again. Life isn't supposed to be all cars and concrete. I just fell in behind Amby and followed him as far as I could. We often went 15 miles and one day I stayed with him for 25 miles. But my legs started cramping during the last two."

By the end of their year as roommates, this special chemistry dissolved--when Burfoot graduated and Rodgers achieved his own limited running goal: an 8:58 two-miler. Rodgers was increasingly distracted by the worsening war in Vietnam--it was just months after the 1968 Tet offensive--and decided to join the antiwar movement. He applied for conscientious-objector status. He quit running.

"I was totally preoccupied with Vietnam," he says. "In my last year at Wesleyan, all I could think about was if my C.O. status would come through."

It did (even though Rodgers' high school track coach bullheadedly refused to support his application). To satisfy the requirements of alternative service following graduation, ex-runner and C.O. Rodgers had to take a menial job wheeling dead and dying bodies around the halls of the Peter Bent Brigham (continued on page 114) Going for Gold (continued from page 108) Hospital in Boston for $71 a week. By then, he had gone almost three years without running, smoked nearly a pack of cigarettes a day and spent enough evenings in bars to help his figure balloon up to what for his small-boned frame was a plodding 140 pounds. But in 1972, two important things happened to Rodgers: His Triumph 650 motorcycle was stolen and he was fired from the hospital.

"It was two miles back and forth to work," he recalls, "so after the bike was stolen, I just ran." He also started doing a little evening work--three to five easy miles--just because it felt good. Meanwhile, one night in a jazz bar in Boston, he finally met the secretary he had seen frequently as he passed through the Children's Hospital adjacent to Peter Bent Brigham: Ellen Lalone became his girlfriend and mainstay through some very thin months ahead. The hard times began when Rodgers was fired for trying to unionize the low-skilled hospital workers in October 1972. With only six months left on his alternative-service obligation, no one wanted to hire him--and he was not allowed to work in the open economy, such being the opaque logic of the American Selective Service System at that time. So he ran.

"For almost a year, I didn't have anything to do," says Rodgers. "So I'd just run in the morning and run in the evening. That's when I started packing in the high mileage--five in the morning and ten in the evening."

He eventually drifted into a job teaching emotionally disturbed children, to whom he bequeathed the trophies he later won--as incentives for good behavior. He also joined the Greater Boston Track Club and began doing what people in the higher reaches of his sport call "speed work" every four days at the Boston College track under the tutelage of coach Billy Squires.

By 1974, Rodgers had begun to make good showings in a few small races--14th in the Boston Marathon and fifth in a rather weak field at the then little-known New York City Marathon. His big thrill came in March of die following year, when he was sent to Morocco to compete in the annual International Cross-Country Race, an event almost unknown to American sports fans but a very big deal to Europeans. Rodgers was at the time so unpretentiously impoverished that he was running in cold weather in an old pair of corduroys. The track club hastily scratched up funds for a decent track suit with USA stenciled on it. Good tiling, too: Blazing out of nowhere, Rodgers came in third in Morocco in a strong field of international runners. He still ranks that race as an almost greater athletic feat than what followed only five weeks later--his sensational 2:09:55 win of the Boston Marathon.

Rodgers was as surprised as anyone else in Boston.

"Are you sure?" he asked when told he had set a new American record. "Are you sure of that time?"

"I can remember we were up the night before the race," says Charlie, "hand-lettering 'Greater Boston Track Club' on his old T-shirt. Billy was still running in rags." Today the question of whose name goes on Rodgers' racing shirts--Perrier water, Diet Pepsi, Tiger shoes--is about like deciding which stickers go on the side of Mario Andretti's car.

Rodgers was so unknown that when he won that first marathon, The Boston Globe spelled his name wrong: For weeks, it was Will Rogers, then Bill Rogers and, finally, Bill Rodgers. Today, he is famous in running circles all over the world. He holds the first, second, third and fourth fastest marathon times ever recorded by an American. He is also the American record holder in the 15-and 20-kilometer runs, as well as the arcane hour run (he set all those records in a single, officially timed solo run on the Boston University track). Running against several medium-quality distance men in a specially arranged track event in California last winter, Rodgers set a pending world record of 1:14:11.8 in the 25-kilometer run. It was an accident. He was trying for the 30-kilometer record and when he discovered he had set the 25-kilometer mark, decided to stop running. Finally, urged on by the crowd, he completed the final five kilometers. (He still came within 13 seconds of that record.) In 1977, he won the Kyoto, Amsterdam, New York and Fukuoka marathons. He calls Japan's Fukuoka "the world series of marathons, because the best runners come from all over the world." In Japan, they hold babies up for him to touch. Around Boston, his friends now call him "Will-ha," a bastardization of the honorific way the Japanese address him.

Practically the only trophy Rodgers has not yet won is an Olympic medal. In 1976, with an aching right metatarsus and cramps in both legs, a tensed-up Rodgers finished 40th in the Olympic marathon at Montreal. Now, at 31, he is training for gold in Moscow in 1980. And he is the odds-on favorite to win his fourth New York Marathon this October.

•

Rodgers devotes all his time to running. It is his life, his lifestyle, his profession. Within the severe restrictions enforced by the Amateur Athletic Union (A.A.U.), Rodgers makes a living at running. In the fall of 1977, he and Ellen--now his wife--invested all their savings in a store for running gear called the Bill Rodgers Running Center. Managed by Charlie in a basement location in Boston's Cleveland Circle, the store--despite three burglaries--has been an overnight success and may become a chain. A second and a third store have already opened--in the trendy Quincy Market area and in Worcester, Massachusetts. A line of Bill Rodgers running clothes is already on the racks. Rodgers' notoriety and the respect he commands in Boston bring runners to his store from considerable distances to buy the very same shoes they could get anywhere else. With any luck, they will find Rodgers standing around, sipping apricot nectar, chatting with visitors--often journalists--and taking phone calls from New York, Milan, Stockholm and Johannesburg. The trappings of stardom, but not the money, are fast moving in.

In a nation television-conditioned to having its sports stars come in larger-than-life packages, replete with glamor and gaudiness, Rodgers is a new kind of hero. His fans are, for the most part, like him: health-conscious nonconsumers who cannot resist the impulse to pull on their road shoes and knock out a mile or ten every day just for that giddy feeling of aerobic fitness and, of course, the smug satisfaction of overcoming the sheer sloth of daily life. Rodgers is a smaller-than-life figure: He has simple tastes in food and limited material wants. "I don't want to be a millionaire," he says, "I just want to be able to afford some good acreage in the country, have a nice, small house and an otter pond."

When he travels, Rodgers carries along a running kit--the world's simplest sports uniform--and works in an hour's training whenever and wherever possible. "When I do an hour in some out-of-the-way place or when it's raining real hard, I wonder what Lasse Viren or Jerome Drayton [other world-class runners] are doing right then," he says. "I figure that's when I can get an extra edge." He once found himself with an hour's layover at Kennedy International (continued on page 177) Going for Gold (continued from page 114) Airport, so he simply changed in the nearest men's room and spent the hour running around under the air traffic.

Rodgers' training regimen leads to some unorthodox eating habits. Since he likes to run on an empty stomach at midday, he has only coffee or juice in the morning. He has some kind of lunch alter the first run and some kind of dinner (often just a sandwich) after the second, but his day is usually punctuated with an unplanned rhapsody of junk loading: Diet Pepsi, grape juice, Fritos, Oreo cookies and candy bars. Because he takes fluids all day, he wakes up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, usually about three o'clock. "That's when I have breakfast," he laughs. "A lot of milk and maybe a slice of pizza or some cookies." Although Rodgers insists he gets a balanced diet over the long run, it is safe to say his eating habits are not the secret of his success. His only concession to health food is a trayful of assorted pills that he takes every morning: bee pollen, a magnesium-potassium combination, Body Ammo, protein supplement and a multiple vitamin. Like most serious distance runners, however, Rodgers does practice "carbohydrate loading" before a big race--stuffing himself with pancakes or bread to stoke up on calories for the long run.

When an important race is approaching, he spends every fourth afternoon on the nearby Boston College track doing interval training. He mounts a series of 220-yard, 440-yard, one-mile and two-mile runs at racing pace, with light jogging in between. This "speed work" is what enables a runner to put on a surge in the middle of a race, or a "kick" at the end, to break away from his immediate competition and set up a gap for the duration of the distance. "My best mile is 4:18.8. I could probably do a 4:10 if I concentrated on it, but I'll never break four minutes."

Rodgers' strength is the mid-race surge. "I'm not a strong kicker at the end, so I like to put the pressure on early. I'm always a front runner. I like to find out right away who is going to be in the race," he says, explaining the dynamics of the race within the race--the handful of world-class runners who almost immediately leave behind "the pack" of 3000 to 14,000 other entrants in a marathon. "At Fukuoka in 1977, we had a good field--eight or ten guys who could run. At about five miles, I decided to break it up and put on a surge. Only about four guys came with me. The rest thought they could catch up later or they just said, 'No, I can't go, I can't run that pace. Too risky.' Then at about ten miles, I broke it up again and took the lead. I had a great race. I ran the first half of that marathon at very close to a world-record pace--2:08:40." Without any challengers for the final 16 miles, Rodgers crossed the Fukuoka finish line alone in a very strong 2:10:55.

Rodgers' early-surge tactics almost failed him in the 1978 Boston Marathon. After an enormously competitive race during the middle miles, he finally shook off Frank Shorter, New Zealander Kevin Ryan and, by the time he was striding down Heartbreak Hill, Finn Esa Tikkanen. "The race was going normal, but I was very tired," says Rodgers. "Then with about two miles to go, a policeman told me, 'Somebody's coming up fast.' " The challenger turned out to be a young Texan named Jeff Wells, who discovered at the halfway mark that he wasn't really fatigued. His second-half spurt overtook everyone except Rodgers, who finished as "dead meat" only two seconds ahead of fast-closing Wells. "I've never had a finish like that," says Rodgers.

The 1979 race was a variation on a theme. Near the 18-mile mark, Rodgers passed Garry Bjorklund and finally shook off Toshihiko Seko, winner of the 1978 Fukuoka Marathon, on Heartbreak Hill. "Coming off, I think I had about 40 yards on him. I thought, Maybe I have this today. I tried to keep telling myself that. I noticed that as I got close to the finish, he was falling back, so I relaxed and enjoyed it. I got a chance to savor it this year."

Rodgers has an odd way of savoring victory. Two miles from the finish, he was two seconds off his record 1975 pace, doing what he thought was an acceptable 2:10. He cruised along, waving to the crowd. When he turned the corner at the Prudential Building and saw his actual time on the scaffold over the finish line, he realized he had a chance for a new record and began sprinting. The result: a 9:35 for the last two miles and a record-breaking 2:09:27--the fourth fastest marathon in history.

Although he seems a bit of a dreamer off the road, Rodgers is single-mindedly self-aware when he pulls on his apple-red Bill Rodgers shorts and Tiger shoes. "During a race, I'll be thinking about where the other runners are, whether to push the pace a little, who might be getting tired, when's a good time to put on a surge. Like, I run well into the wind. So if it's an out-and-back course with the wind behind us on the way out, I might try to nail a guy just before the turn, so we'll hit the wind just when I'm pushing the pace. That hammers a lot of them."

"In a race," explains Charlie, an average five-miler who understands the fiercely competitive side of his brother and this noncontact sport, "Billy goes out to nail them physically and psychologically. He's always looking for another runner's weakness. You don't just run past a guy; you've got to defeat him."

At 31, Rodgers seems to be at his peak, with no sign of sliding off. "The past statistics indicate that 30 is when runners start slowing down a little bit," he says, "but they never had statistics from people as fit as Frank Shorter and me and Don Kardong and Garry Bjorklund. We're all around 30 and we're going to change all that."

Rodgers has reached his stride just as the running movement in America has achieved proportions of a growth industry. Or growth religion. George Gallup estimates that 25,000,000 Americans are running today. The II-year-old National Jogging Association, a magnet to serious runners, reports that its membership has jumped from 8500 to 32.000 in the past 24 months. A preliminary demographics study shows that fully 36 percent of them earn over $30,000 per year, 52 percent over $20,000. An estimated 50,000 people competed in an ultimate race--a marathon--somewhere in the United States last year. James F. Fixx's The Complete Book of Running has sold close to three quarters of a million hardcover copies. The fitness fad is here.

Not even the tennis boom took hold like this. Starting from an almost infinitesimal base--"I can remember when there was nobody to run with and people threw beer cans at you because you were out there in your underwear," laughs Rodgers--running has mushroomed in just a few years into the greatest runaway participatory sport since they fed the Christians to the lions. Newly converted runners gladly face their lions, too: biting dogs, speeding cars, snow, ice, residual public ridicule and an exotic variety of lower-body injuries (pulled quads, torn hamstrings, sprained calves, bleeding toenails, Achilles' tendinitis; you name it, they've got it).

"Running is the key to life," preaches Bob Anderson, publisher of Runner's World and several related magazines. '"I think running enriches your life. but I don't want to sound schmucky and evangelize about it," responds Rodgers, who is no born-again zealot touting his sport as the new American religion.

Bill and Ellen Rodgers have not gotten rich from Bill's success. They still live in Melrose, ten miles outside Boston, in a $165-a-month second-floor walk-up apartment with severely out-of-plumb walls and sagging floors and a sofa with stuffing coming out of it. They still drive the 1973 Beetle. Each of them spends all his time in running shorts or jeans (Rodgers wears the large metal belt buckle around his 28-inch waist way off to the side, early Fifties style). Except for the new-found joys of world travel, theirs is a remarkably simple life.

One night, over a Boston dinner of cherry-stone clams and scrod, the outspoken side of the mild-mannered Rodgers came out. "What I'm always ranting and raving about," he ranted, "are the damned amateur rules and the sports priorities in this country. I mean, I'm as good at what I do as Joe Namath ever was, but he was fixed for life as soon as he started pro football. I don't really even consider football a true sport. I mean, they're not true athletes. Except for a few of them, they're not aerobically fit. And yet we hold football up to the kids as the greatest thing. All the money in the schools and colleges goes to football, baseball and basketball, nothing to running, which doesn't cost near as much. I mean, why should ten guys be getting in shape when half the school could be getting in shape? Passing a football straight is nice and dandy, y'know, but I think it's an inferior skill. I'll be running over Joe Namath's grave."

Rodgers is constantly walking the fine edge of deep trouble with his boat-rocking comments about the undeveloped status of road running in the American sporting kaleidoscope. After winning the 1978 Boston Marathon, he remarked: "Financially, it was important for me to win." This is literally true, since he was developing his store and his line of running gear--just as Frank Shorter and English runner Ron Hill had done before him. But the comment outraged faithful running fanatics, who still see theirs as the last pure sport, a bastion of physical perfection unsullied by demon coin. Running is perceived as the one honest pursuit in which a man is entirely dependent on his own inner resources and will. It is also seen as truly egalitarian, where old men with better-developed aerobic capability can outrun younger men; where determined women are beating men by the thousands and rapidly narrowing the speed gap at the top levels; where, in short, anyone can play the game on his own terms, in his own space, and find enormous personal satisfaction. These people become apoplectic when Rodgers talks of money. "Money is neutral," he insists. "It's what you do with it that makes the difference."

The simple fact is that when 25,000,000 Americans are on to something, it becomes by definition a commercial undertaking. Who wouldn't like to own stock in Nike shoes or Adidas warm-up suits right now? Large companies have moved into running in a big way to capitalize on its popularity by becoming race sponsors. You'll see names such as Pepsi, Perrier, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Tiger or just the name of your local newspaper attached to nearly every race every Sunday. At the big races--New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta--that means an enormous amount of low-cost publicity.

"The sponsor gets to throw up his ads around a race very cheaply," points out Rodgers, who is the single biggest drawing card on the road-running circuit today. His name is used in prerace promotions like the ads for a boxing card or a bullfight. "If you can't run with Bill Rodgers, come and watch next Sunday ..." began a newspaper ad for one recent race. "The runners are being exploited," Rodgers continues, "and that's another word for slavery, you know. The sponsors get all the publicity and they want to give nothing to the runners. I tell a lot of other runners we have to fight this or we'll be exploited all our lives. But there's a certain type of personality that likes to be hammered--masochists, I guess."

Later, sitting at his kitchen table munching Oreos, Rodgers speaks of servitude. "Some of these race promoters think I'm their servant--come here, go there, do this, do that. That's slavery. Yassuh, massa, yassuh. Well, they're just going to keep on exploiting us until we--snip, snip--cut their balls off! Them days are gonna end!"

He goes on: "Let's face it. The New York Marathon is already a $200,000 marathon. But the runners don't get the money. It's just like the Olympics. Who gets money out of the Olympics? The architects and the politicians, not the athletes. That's how it has always been and always will be, unless we do something about it."

Rodgers received what he described as "some hate mail" after a small Massachusetts newspaper reported that he had asked for an appearance fee--"expense money," in the jargon of the under-the-table world of amateur racing--to run in a local race. The money issue is boiling just beneath the surface of the burgeoning distance-running circuit and may yet erupt in time to touch off a major pre-Olympic brouhaha in the international amateur sporting world. Everyone knows that competitors from Communist and some socialist countries are virtual professionals recruited at a young age and groomed for years at state expense for their Olympian talents. Everybody knows that Western European athletes are supported by a thinly disguised system of state and corporate financing so that they may train almost constantly at their sport.

But in America, not many people realize that the Olympic sports--as opposed to pro football, basketball, hockey, tennis and so on--are still in the financial Dark Ages, living on the same kind of sub rosa promoter payments that functioned even 50 years ago. Tommy Leonard, the bibulous Irish running freak and chief guru at Boston's Eliot Lounge, where he tends bar claims that a relative of his who ran in the 1928 Olympics was secretly supported by an open charge account at Brooks Brothers--a quiet gift from his well-heeled fans.

"I don't want to be a millionaire," insists Rodgers. "What I want is justice." The great solution, he and everybody else at odds with the A.A.U. seem to agree, "would be an open Olympics--no more amateurism, since it doesn't exist, anyway." The hitch, they say, is that even if you stampeded the crusty denizens of the A.A.U., you would still be up against the hypocrisy of the Communist bloc. It holds sway on the International Amateur Athletic Federation, which could effectively dump a majority of America's serious Olympic hopes for having accepted sponsors' money, thus paving their own way to a lot of Moscow gold.

Rodgers, in the interest of bringing home the marathon gold again, is unwilling to lead the movement for, say, a professional racing circuit in the United States. Instead, he runs more races than he should--over 30 a year--and tries to make do on "expense money" and his store. Yet, by running so much, he risks burning out early.

"If we had an open Olympics, I'd be the first one to wave the flags and celebrate," he says. "And I'd join a money circuit. But I don't believe it's going to happen." It is the widely held belief in the running world that the short-lived pro track circuit died not because of a weak market for the sport but because the stars found they could earn more on the under-the-table circuit.

All this comes as shocking stuff to a lot of people whose previous glimpses of Rodgers have shown the gentle, open-faced devotee of pure fitness who would never ask a dime for his labors. But you do not become a world-beater, much less an Olympic threat who can thrill the collective ego of the nation next summer in Moscow, by being a part-time runner. While Rodgers still held his teaching job, he had to race down into the school's furnace room at lunchtime every day to change for his midday run in order to squeeze in ten miles before the break was over. For him, the jig was up when, after he won his second New York Marathon, school officials called him in and complainingly asked, "Do you really have to run at lunchtime?" A bit like asking Chris Evert why she spent all her afternoons on the tennis court.

"You see what I mean?" implored Rodgers after telling that story. "I may be one of the top American distance runners, and one of the best marathoners in the world from time to time. But it doesn't carry any weight in this country. In terms of the sports media, television, the society as a whole, it doesn't mean dog doo."

"He had gone almost three years without running and smoked nearly a pack of cigarettes a day."

"Rodgers' day is punctuated with a rhapsody of junk food: Fritos, Oreo cookies and candy bars."