Honolulu. December 2014.
Gerry Lindgren met us for lunch down by the zoo. Before I could decide against a third beer, Gerry excused himself. He was barely out of hearing, when my wife – who had never heard of the man before – says, “That is one strange dude.”
Perhaps. And so much more.
Excerpt from When Running Was Young and So Were We. – JDW
Conversation with Gerry Lindgren (December 1997)
I remember a scrawny high school kid from Spokane battle alone against a team of grizzled muscular Commie soldiers, tens of thousands of spectators, like a youth tossed to the lions. In the L.A. Coliseum no less. The tale of David and Goliath ever comes to mind.
He was never an easy man to catch up with.
A couple nights before the Honolulu Marathon, at a banquet held annually at the Oahu Country Club, a beautiful woman walks up to the table and asks me for my autograph. The room is full of famous people and I figure there must be a big mistake. Then I realize the woman is looking past me into a dark corner. Partially obscured by a large tropical plant is a little man, so quiet I hadn’t noticed him sitting there. I look at the nametag on his scrawny chest: Jerry Lyndgrin, it says.
Gerry Lindgren! Some men are famous, others are legendary. Before Bob Kennedy, before Alberto, before Kardong and Boston Billy, before Frank. Before little Mary Decker. Pre-Pre even, there was Gerry.
A couple bright eyes beam out from the shadow of the potted palm. A napkin gets signed and the woman leaves.
“I have been looking for you for 25 years,” I tell him.
“And now you’ve found me.”
Lindgren lives.
He is so wimpy.
“When I was a kid, the things I hated most were my squeaky voice and my wimpy body,” says Lindgren. “I mean, I hated myself. And the two things that allowed me to have an influence on running and get other people to run were my wimpy body and my squeaky voice. They’d see my wimpy body on the track and say, ‘If Gerry can do it, then I can do it, too.’ Later, I’d get on the P.A. system, or they’d hear me talk, and they’d say, ‘Oh, he’s just a wimp.’
“Pre, Steve Prefontaine, used to tell me this all the time. When he heard me talk, that’s what got him started running… he knew he could run, too. Even though he couldn’t make it in baseball or football, which is what you did if you were in Coos Bay. He knew he could be a good runner, because of me running that way with a high squeaky voice and a wimpy body.
“I knew somebody who knew him well. And one year, when Pre didn’t make the baseball team his friends were on, he was so disappointed. I was visiting our mutual friend up the coast in Reedsport, about 15 miles away. ‘Why don’t you run down and say “hi” to this kid?’ I didn’t know who Pre was but apparently he had heard of me.
“So, I ran down and knocked on his door. He answered and said, ‘Hey, you’re Gerry Lindgren.’ I said, ‘Hi, you’re Steve Prefontaine.’ He says, ‘I’m going to beat you. I’m going to beat you someday.’” Lindgren laughs at this memory. “He says, ‘You’re wimpier than I am.’”
The 52-year-old Lindgren, a breach baby, had to have his arm twisted to enter this world. His shy arm broken.
“My father was 6’7”, 285 pounds.” Lindgren remembers, “and the problem was he was an alcoholic. Like a little Vietnam War in my house. Three children in the family and all of us had our growth stunted. It was so bad. When all the other boys in my junior high school, voices breaking, getting deeper, mine refused to break and never did. After I shed my Dad, my sophomore year, I grew four inches, up to 5 foot 6. That’s as far as I went.”
At 126, he is six pounds heavier than in his high school days. Stop and think about it now, that’s the perfect size for a distance runner.
Squeaky wimp.
But not a wuss.
“You can never judge courage,” Lindgren offered. “I taught Pre you have to be aggressive from the beginning of the race. And your aggression doesn’t come in the race, it comes in training. You can prepare for an opponent’s tactic, but not the aggression he brings to that tactic. I could break everybody but Pre. Awesome his aggression. I used to get butterflies when I first ran against Pre. I used to hate his courage. I’d love it but I’d hate it.”
Remember something Oregon coach Bill Dellinger once said, off the top of his head, he thought Pre was afraid of losing. Asked Gerry if he had been afraid.
“If anything, I was afraid of winning,” he replied. “My original goal was just to make the cross-country team. The coach, Tracy Walters, told me I could help make the team better. How? By getting out in front and making them chase me. I was such a wimp, the other kids didn’t want me ahead of them. I was never trying to win a race. I was always trying to make the other guys work hard.”
No surprise, Lindgren is a good, maybe great, hot weather runner.
“I have always loved bad conditions. When you get into bad conditions, everybody feels it. But you can use the conditions to your advantage. I remember, against the Russians, it was 105 degrees down on the track. While we were warming up, every time they’d look at me, I’d wipe my brow, and act like I was burning up. They knew I was too young, but they were fascinated by me because I was such an unusual thing. And every time they looked at me, I wiped the sweat off my face.”
Sometimes he wore his wimpiness like a weapon, a sharp blade.
“When we lined up to come down the steps for the big, grand entry, I looked over at them and said, ‘Hot.’ And they said, ‘Yes, hot. Hot.’ Which planted one thing in their minds. Hot. Hot. Hot. They are not thinking I am hot, too. So, when it comes time for me to take off and sprint, they have to decide, do we cover his move or do we quit? Because they thought it was so hot, they hesitated. They made a mistake. That momentary judgment, it was the wrong one. They forgot I was hot, too.
“In every race, there’s a critical time where you have to make a decision: can I do it, can I not do it? I was always trying to find a way to get the other guy to decide he couldn’t do it.”
How do you help people improve by breaking away like that?
He shrugs his narrow shoulders. “After the race, they kick themselves. They say, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ The next race they are going to have a strategy. They are going to go with the guy who makes the break. They will train harder, they’ll learn to compete better. When I beat the Russians, you can’t imagine the guilt I felt.”
Hard even now to believe the kid won.
Lindgren was a competitor.
“One of my best-ever races, probably my favorite race, was against Jurgen May, the Track & Field News Athlete of The Year. He was an East German who jumped the Berlin Wall. A 1500 meter runner, he was very fast. Switched to the 5000 meters and he was undefeated the whole year. Awesome kick like I have never seen before. He could run the last 400 meters in 50 seconds, 49 seconds. Nobody could stay with him.
“And I had him right on my back with two laps to go. What could I do? With 500 meters left, I grunted, dropped my arms, and sprinted as hard as I could go.
“Well, he was coiling and tightening, tightening, tightening, getting ready to launch this 400 meter kick, which was so devastatingly awesome.
“When I moved… boom! He hit, like triggering a spring and he was moving like you wouldn’t believe. I tried as hard as I could to stay with him and I was about 25 meters behind when he reached the final curve. All of a sudden, he fell apart. Because 500 meters was way too soon to launch such a sprint.
“I made him make the wrong decision. Even though it was a positive, aggressive move for him. If he had waited, he’d have killed me.”
Sometimes you can be positive, aggressive and wrong.
Pre was in that race. “Before the race, I told Pre what I was going to do, except for the last sprint, which I didn’t know myself until I was in the race. I told Pre I planned to go out in the fastest first mile he had ever run, under 4:10, which wasn’t done back then. Pre was behind me at the mile. When they gave us the time in German, he hollered, ‘Too fast, too fast.’ Which made me feel good because I knew then I had him on the ropes.
“But I slowed down too much the second half of the race.”
At least he tried. At least he did that. He also won, clocking 13:38.4 to May’s 13:40.8 and Pre’s 13:52.8.
Lindgren tried to make a difference.
“You have to have the guts to run your race,” he says. “You have to have confidence in your training. When it gets to the point in the race where you have to sprint, even as fast as the other guy, you are going to have to plan. Every step of the way, you have a plan. You are going to do something. Seems to me many runners today have no plan. So, when something happens, they have to react, instead of causing the action. You have to make it happen.”
Don’t wait for it to happen.
“I used to talk to Pre before the races and I’d say, ‘Here’s what I am going to do. First, I am going to take off as hard as I can go.’ I’d say, ‘don’t worry about it, because I’ll die after the first mile.’ But I have to let them know I am in control. Then we’ll see what happens. The second mile, I’d try to hold the pace. By the third mile, I’ll probably be having some trouble. I’ll try to come up with something at the end.”
That’s a plan? ‘I’ll try to come up with something.’
“Sure,” Lindgren professes. “Okay, maybe I don’t know what I can do against this particular competitor. Many times your plan doesn’t work. You do have to improvise.
“But when you are running a race, every step of the way, you have to be thinking, what can I do to ensure whoever wins has run his butt off. Instead of sitting there and waiting and waiting and waiting,” Gerry says. “You have to be the one who makes things happen.”
You have to train that way.
“When I was training,” he continues, “I always took Ron Clarke along on my back. He was right there and I would try to break him. You have to go out and do yourself in.
“I don’t believe in ability. We all have the same ability. Attitude is everything. You have to believe you can make a difference.”
That takes a plan.
Lindgren’s secret was no secret – hard work. Hard work is a gun.
“My big forte as a high school boy was the great mileage and that’s what allowed me to run with the more mature internationals. I ran so many more miles that I could go longer and harder than most runners,” Lindgren begins to sound a little like a track club bumper sticker. “They weren’t putting in enough miles to get into really great shape.”
The wimp could go longer and harder than all but a few.
“Tell you the truth, I feel better today than I did in the beginning. I don’t know why, but running is more fun. Maybe it’s my diet.”
Lindgren is a vegan; he eats no animal products. That means, as I understand it, no barbeque ribs.
“As I grew older,” Gerry admits, “I was getting cowardly because I didn’t have the energy. Therefore, I didn’t have the courage to do what I had to do.” He quit meat.
And he’s still running. “I have been running for so many years and I still love it like I did the first day. Just love to run. Love to compete, love to try.”
He even loves the injuries.
“One of the best things that can happen to you as a runner is an injury. It’s actually a blessing, not a tragedy. Because when you have a goal and you are running and getting closer and closer to your goal and suddenly you have to pull back because of an injury, something you wanted was taken away from you. And you want it back. Once you have had a chance to rest your body and recuperate, because every day you break it down, break it down, break it down. Your body needs to rest, that’s why you have the injury.
“You have to attack the injury, do everything you can to get over that injury… ice, elevation, homeopathic, everything you know to get over it. Then you are physically fighting the injury while being forced to rest and wanting very badly to get out there and run.
“When you come back, you are a dynamo. You are rested, your attitude is right, you have much more going for you than the guy who was never injured and continued to run. Every time a guy gets injured, within two weeks of coming back, they are right up there with the guy who didn’t get injured. It’s a blessing.
“One of the reasons I was able to run so well was I was one of the most injured guys you ever did see. When I was competing, I was injured as much as I wasn’t injured.
“I over-trained,” he concedes, apparently no worse for wear. “I really did.”
Wimp.
Lindgren outlasted men he wasn’t supposed to outlast. He outran faster men. He must have been doing something right.
“There is no right way to train,” he notes. “But a race should be easier than your training runs. If you want to race at a 62-second pace, you have to train at a 60-second pace.
“It all depends on what you are going for. Ron Clarke was a good tempo runner. He could hit a good tempo, he could hit a great tempo. But if you could stay with his tempo, you could beat him, because he was tempo all the way. So, he lost a lot of races. But he also won a lot of races and set an awful lot of world records.”
Clarke said, if an athlete missed a day’s training, it put him a month behind.
“The last couple of weeks I’ve come up with very sore legs,” Gerry says, “but they are feeling better now because I took the week off. So, I worry. But I think that’s the best way to go into a marathon, a little worried. Keeps you from going out too fast, you don’t mess around for the first ten miles.”
Training 90 miles a week, Lindgren is a coach now. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
“I had a group of 17 runners, 15 had never run a marathon before. The two who had, hadn’t run better than 5:40. I got everybody in under 4 hours. They just loved it. But I trained them hard. They trained at 8-minute pace on the track.
“I do weird things. I put bells on their shoes. When you run a marathon, it’s not a race you run with your body. You have to relax and you run through your feet. It’s tempo, tempo, tempo.
“Never let your body do the work. You’ll use too much energy. In your feet, you have 114 tendons and tendons that work like springs or a rubber band. They press, contract, and push you off. If you run through your feet, you’re springing, bouncing off, springing, bouncing off. And you are using muscle energy to do it.
“It’s really a cheap form of energy and in a marathon you can go far that way. If you are pushing with your body, sooner or later, the muscles will run out of energy and you’re going to fall apart. I teach my athletes to run with the bells. Listen to the jingle, keep up with the rhythm. Tempo, tempo, tempo.”
Lindgren’s long run these days is 30 miles. “Another thing I do for the marathon is put my runners – from the very beginning – through a series of 30-mile runs. Depletion runs, where we run for five hours. We deplete the glycogen so you feel like you are just hanging on your bones. I believe your body responds by building better glycogen stores, so you have more energy. As we do this, down and up more, down and up more, you enhance your body’s ability to conserve glycogen.
“I think it will work. I won’t know until after the race.”
Couple days later, Lindgren is the last finisher to complete the Honolulu Marathon within three hours.
A full half hour slower than his goal.
Gerry Lindgren, a name hard to spell correctly, may be legendary, but he is hardly famous. Never seemed to get much publicity.
“When I started out, I had no ego. I am not a self-promoter,” Lindgren concedes. “Just don’t have it in me. I am not in the limelight, never have been, and it’s hurt me.” He says exactly what’s on his mind. “I’d like to have a sponsor, so I could run full-time and attack the age-group records.”
Records mean a great deal to Gerry. Perhaps that is why he fought for so many. “It is in approaching goals you find happiness in whatever you do,” he says. “I had 37 races in a row where I was under world-record pace through the first half. Of those, I set one record and barely missed another. The record I did get was just because the week before, I was injured. I was too stupid to know I needed the rest, because we just didn’t analyze back then.
“Last week I wouldn’t let any of my runners train. They had to take a full week off two weeks before the marathon. When you do all that hard marathon training, you wear yourself down and you have to build yourself back up again. This week my runners have been looking better than they had before the rest.”
Lindgren is feeling better. He practices that which he preaches. The biggest difference today than when Lindgren was competing internationally are the goals. The goals are different. Every generation has that problem.
“When I was running,” Gerry offers, “the goal was 65-second quarters for 5000 meters. Now it’s 60 per quarter. And back in those days, the best I could think of was maybe 62.5. Maybe I could do that if I had a good day and I had a lot of great training. Before we die, they are going to be looking at 55 seconds. Because they will need to.”
Most American runners are still looking at 65 seconds per quarter.
“You have to look at the 60. Not only that, you have to believe, not that you can win a race, but you can make a difference. So that whoever wins the race, you have to ensure that guy has to show heart in order to cross the line first.”
The Kenyans do that so well. “It’s fun to watch them run,” Lindgren brightens. “They have so much guts. In Barcelona, there was this Kenyan guy in the 5000. After the second lap, he took off and got a great big lead on everybody. And, oh, how much guts that must have taken!
“I was crying as I watched this. Because that’s the kind of runner I think an athlete should be. And, as he got closer to the finish line, they were catching up and catching up. At the end, three people passed him and he ended up 4th place. Didn’t even get a medal. But the courage that guy had. The guts and the courage and the stamina. He just gave his heart. That was the highlight of the Games. “Everybody is so interested in the gold medal. But to me, that man was the real winner.
“I never thought I was the best runner. I just thought I could bring out the best in other people.”
There is something wrong with running in the USA today.
“The purpose to running has been skewed wrong,” believes Lindgren. “We put too much emphasis on winning, on a gold medal. Too little emphasis on what running can mean. Runners change the world. They dictate how all people in the world are going to act.
“When I started running… I got arrested 17 different times for running, because it was something you just didn’t do. Now, nobody even cares if you are running, because it’s so common. They bike, they swim, they do so many things they never ever did back then.
“First there was the running revolution, then everything else followed. The runners started it all. Runners are the heart of our species. Running is so visible, and your courage has to come out so obviously.
“All of us learn from each other how to be human,” Gerry Lindgren will say. “Runners set the standards.”
He made a difference. Took giant steps. And left big shoes to fill. We owe the little wimp our gratitude.
The runt.
