I don’t want to win unless I know I’ve done my best, and the only way I know to do that is to run out front, flat out, until I have nothing left. Winning any other way is chicken shit. – Steve Prefontaine
Waited until the Olympic Trials concluded before telling you about Brad Fawley’s exceptional new novel The Frontrunner. Not to be confused with Patricia Nell Warren’s 1974 classic The Front Runner. Telling you straight, don’t confuse them.
The Frontrunner has already been compared to running literature’s iconic Once A Runner. While Fawley was a small college All-American, John Parker was a three-time SEC mile champion. Just sayin.’ Parker, no doubt, was NOT a front runner, more the sit-and-kick type of athlete. Both understand “The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.”
Recently got a note – ‘sometimes I get lost in your writing.’
Wrote back – ‘gonna take that as a compliment.’ I was assured, indeed, it was a compliment.
First got lost in The Frontrunner when the kid is called to the high school athletic director’s office. Plaque on the door reads: Ron Delaney. And I was lost in Gaelic greatness and Villanova and the Penn Relays….
Fawley will mess with you like that. He plants these nuggets for the cognoscenti to chortle internally. Buck Flanagan as Oregon Duck coach. Ha.
Lost all my notes, so I asked for a couple of excerpts. Give me some philosophy and give me some action, I pleaded. He has a lot to choose from, as the book is full of fun, wise and exciting words, 399 pages worth.
A story of possibilities and heartbreak and redemption. And when it was over, I wished the book was longer. What happens next? Please tell me there’s a sequel. Already written, Brad assures me.
You see, there really is The Way. And Brad Fawley is a generous man who does the work. Out in front.
Good book.
Five Fine Fragments From The Frontrunner by Brad Fawley
“Two kinds of racers. Frontrunners and the rest. Frontrunners are a rare breed. They go out fast and run from the front. They run for time and figure if they go fast enough for long enough the rest will suffer so badly they will just give the fuck up.”
“The rest?”
“The rest? Those that made the promise and are really racing, not just going through the motions? They hang and kick. They hope to stick with the Frontrunner, not break that invisible thread that connects them to the leader. Ahead of them is the Frontrunner, tortured by not knowing where anyone else is and self-doubt.
“Think of it. No one has ever been where he is in that moment, there in the front of this race, on this day with nothing ahead but an ocean of pain and the empty track. A man running without limits.
“While all the rest? They only need to stay with the Frontrunner until the very last seconds when they will try to pass him and kick it to the tape. The hangers have it easy. They already know that someone has run faster than them. There he is, leading. So they know it is possible. They’re not plowing new ground or breaking any barriers. There the guy is, right in front of them. So, the only test they face is sticking with the leader and then outkicking him.”
Russ asks, “Why would anyone want to be a Frontrunner?”
“It’s not something you decide. You are born to it or, you’re not.”
As he watches his boy run down the road and head for home, Chuck remembers sending him off to school the first time. He must have been about five. After he found his seat on the bus, Russ had turned to look out of the window and Chuck could see the boy’s eyes following him, wide open, not worried, but wondering.
Then, the bus disappeared down the road and Chuck went back into the trailer and sat there in the kitchen watching the coffee in his cup grow cold and listening to the faucet drip. As he thought about it, it seemed to Chuck that he was destined to be alone in the world. Caroline left him, his parents now dead, the other women and Tiffany gone. Now Russ. It got easier as the years passed or, at least, he had gotten used to the going away.
But, he knows that this time will not be like the times Russ got on the school bus. There will be no coming home at the end of the day with art projects clutched in his hand and a mostly empty lunch box. He knows he can never run the odometer back and try again. You get one shot and one shot only. It makes him shake his head to wonder at the fact that here he is doing his damn best on this empty country road to help his son get away.
My damn best. That’s something I can hold onto.
Eventually, as is inevitable, the day ends and dusk falls. Sunburned and encrusted with a film of salt and again feeling dizzy, he approaches the outskirts of another small village whose place is marked on the horizon by a concrete grain elevator. He climbs a rolling rise a few miles from the town and, at the crest, sees below him, sitting on the edge of a cornfield with the end of day light flashing off its aluminum sides, a diner and the yellow light that spills from its windows.
Dot’s Diner.
It’s time. Russ knows that the road for him ends here today. He is empty. Both mind and body fragile vessels cracked wide open and drained. A pile of shards waiting to be fitted back together in a new form and filled to the brim with a clear lake of shimmering hope. A bowl held by his own two loving hands. And, inside, peering back and reflected on the surface, a visage of himself he struggles to recognize.
The sun sets and the night drops a dark blanket over the land. The stars appear. Russ runs. Around midnight, the moon peaks out from over the mountains and throws Russ’s shadow on the track. It follows him, stretching and contracting, ahead and then to the side and then behind, lap after lap flashing past the kerosene lamps glowing yellow in the night. A silent ghost floating across the land.
Russ remembers his watery image caught in the plate glass window of the hardware store. He thinks of Doug bending over him at the Compton race, showing him the stopwatch. He thinks of his father, standing on the pedals to keep pace, ringing the bell, loving him. He remembers Mollie letting him sit in her bay window and talking with him. And Stewie and Jimmy laying on the grassy infield. And sitting with Lauren on the hill and watching the lights blink on in Eugene below, tickling her and laughing.
After mile 19, Russ asks, “What was my time?”
“Does it matter?”
After the first lap of mile 20, as Russ passes Brad in the lawn chair, Brad shouts out into the darkness, “Where are you?”
Russ does not answer. But he knows. I’m right here, right now.
Russ turns off the engine and it ticks, spilling heat into the cool morning air. He looks up at the crystalline blue sky domed above and thinks of his long journey to this place. In the rearview, his father’s eyes look back, set deep on each side of his mother’s nose.
Russ smiles remembering what his father told him about the promise he made to himself in the trailer some twenty years ago, looking down into his son’s tiny face. A resolution made by an underdog. A promise that no one would have bet he would make, much less be able or equipped to keep. The odds stacked against him.
Dad had the meeting. Just him facing him. He came to the line clear eyed. Certain he could not fail if he took the lead, ran from the front and never looked back. The proof sitting right here in an old pickup truck.
Russ Clayton is a young man who keeps losing the important people in his life. Each time someone disappears, he finds himself adrift. The Universe stacked against him. He only finds peace running alone on the roads of his small town in Kansas. Russ finally believes that everyone in his life is gone. Feeling abandoned, he gives himself up wholly to the running by setting an impossible goal. But, he needs help.
Long ago, Brad Coy was the fastest marathoner on the planet, but a man who also lost everything he valued to a cheating Russian runner named Yuri Grimlov. Finding a kinship, Coy and Russ team up, retreat to the desert, on a quest to shatter the brain’s protective hold on the body that prevents us from reaching our physical limits of speed and endurance. Meanwhile, Grimlov has been charged with restoring Russia’s tarnished reputation for doping its distance runners. He takes two twin boys from their family and subjects them to his special mixture of psychological manipulation, doping, and scientific training.
Inevitably, Coy and Grimlov face off again. Russ discovers whether he really ever was alone in the world and the Twins confront the limits of their love for each other.
Bookshop.org
The Frontrunner
"Think of it. No one has ever been where (s)he is in that moment, there in the front of this race, on this day with nothing ahead but an ocean of pain and the empty track. A (wo)man running without limits."
Prefontaine photo by Jeff Johnson. Ditto, Lindgren, courtesy of the photographer. And Walt Chadwick.