All My Friends Are Runners: Foreword

Foreword

“The best pace is a suicide pace and today’s a good day to die.”

I once saw a poster that featured this quote by Steve Prefontaine. Everybody who has ever been a runner has a Pre quote hanging somewhere in her room or on a t-shirt or tattooed on his body. It’s just part of the induction process. Pre is really our only claim to fame. Local reporters have no clue who Mo Farah is but somehow Steve Prefontaine managed to get two movies made about him. Riddle me that America.

I’m a Pre fan. I’ve seen the movies, I’ve read the books, I try to know the story. But I don’t like the mainstream perception of Pre’s legacy. Look at that above quote. I mean really look at it. This is the quote that inspires the six-minute guy on your team to run his first lap in seventy seconds and the next three in two minutes. This is the quote that sends a talented sophomore into 120 mile weeks and a stress fracture. I hate to say it, but I think this quote is stupid. And it’s not what I love about Pre.

“Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run. I like to make people stop and say, ‘I’ve never seen anyone run like that before.’ It’s more than just a race, it’s a style. It’s doing something better than anyone else. It’s being creative.”

The sport of distance running is so much more beautiful and tactical than the simplistic notion that everyone just runs as fast as they can and then stops. Try running a 5k all out from the gun and tell me how it works out. To be a successful runner you must understand pacing, training and balance. Most importantly, you must understand yourself. Your strengths, your doubts and your limits.

In Without Limits, the better of the two Prefontaine movies[1], Pre suffers a heartbreaking loss to Lasse Viren and ends up off the medal stand at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Feeling defeated, he ends up taking a job at a bar. Here is where Bill Bowerman finds him and delivers the best line of the movie[2]:

“Know what your problem is Pre? Vanity! … Your belief that you have no talent is the ultimate vanity. If you have no talent then you have no limits, it’s all an act of will. Your heart can probably pump more blood than anyone else’s on earth, and that takes talent. The bones in your feet are so strong, it’d take a sledgehammer to break ‘em. Be thankful for your limits, Pre, they’re about as limitless as they get in this life.”

Despite the fact that you need hard work, determination and heart to be a successful runner, ultimately, talent matters. And Pre was talented. His cardiovascular system tested off the charts. He was a freak of nature.

But what made Pre special was that he used every single ounce of his talent. He was a fierce competitor who was basically unbeatable in front of the Hayward Field crowd. He held every American record from the 2,000 meters to the 10,000 meters at the same time. He won three NCAA Cross Country Championships (the other year he was second) and four NCAA 5,000m/3 mile championships. He was 4^th at the Olympics after his junior year of college. Nobody touches that resume.

If anyone was going to beat him, they were going to have to bleed to do it. He never shied away from competition or adversity. He would go down in distance and race top-level milers or 800m guys. He raced in some horrible and dangerous outdoor conditions to help his hometown and give Oregon fans their money’s worth. Pre understood how to bring out the best in others, and the best in himself. That’s Steve Prefontaine’s real legacy.

In my bedroom at home, I have my own Pre poster with one simple quote on it.

“To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice the gift.”

---

[1] I think Prefontaine is more historically accurate, but Without Limits makes Pre and running look a lot more BA. It’s an easy choice for me.

[2] The best line is probably “Bill has it ever occurred to you that there’s such a thing as overcoaching?”, “Yeah … I’m against it” but that doesn’t gel with my point right now.