by Kenny Moore
Bill began by having Mundle, then a junior, ease off the “hard day every day” schedule he had been following. “Slacking off” was what Pete called it and, contrary to Bill’s expectations, he did not run well that season. In his senior year he trained the way he’d heard Paavo Nurmi did—and set the Oregon two-mile record at 9:32.4.
Bowerman pounced on this. For the track and field class he taught, he asked Mundle to write a term paper on the Finnish training techniques. Mundle found that the Finns did a lot of intervals—repeated short runs on the track—with controlled recoveries. His research also turned up the information that Mihaly Igloi of Hungary, who coached record-breakers Sandor Iharos and Lazlo Tabori, had his runners do intervals not once, but twice a day.
Czechoslovakia’s Emil Zátopek, who had won the 1948 Olympic 10,000 meters in London, was already demonstrating the power of this kind of training. Zátopek was renowned for doing as many as forty hard 400-meter laps every day, with 200-meter recovery jogs. In the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, he would become the only man ever to win the 5000 and 10,000 meters and the marathon in a single Games, all in record times.
Repetition work was revolutionizing running, at least in Eastern Europe. The science of it was first explored in the 1930s in meticulous research by Germany’s Woldemar Gerschler. Working with physiologist Hans Reindell, Gerschler showed that dozens of repeated 200s increased the pumping power of the heart better than any other exercise. Gerschler called his method “interval” training because, he said, the cardiovascular improvement occurred in the rest interval between the hard sprints. He and Reindell would not allow a runner to begin the next repeat until his pulse had returned to 120 beats per minute. If this didn’t happen within ninety seconds of the end of the prior repeat, the workout was deemed too difficult and would be adjusted. In late 1938, Gerschler began coaching Rudolph Harbig, who would run 800 meters the following July in a world record 1:46.6, a record that would stand for sixteen years.
So, yes, intervals worked. But there was a catch. Runners often improved their times dramatically for a few weeks or months, but then tore Achilles tendons, or one weird day woke up with bones that seemed to have aged forty years in the night and devastated by the conviction that running was infantile and meaningless. Such runners had gone (and the word is too feeble) stale.
Runners who overdose on intervals can often need months before their systems are once more able to handle the lactic acid stress of repeatedly going in and out of oxygen debt. Then, six weeks later, they can be devastated all over again. Bowerman likened the pure interval syndrome to climbing a peak. The higher one went, the faster one raced—until one pitched over a cliff into black, sour uselessness.
Bowerman wondered how to responsibly administer intervals to college milers. Mundle’s findings contained a clue. The Hungarian coach, Igloi, who would emigrate to the United States after the 1956 Hungarian revolution, put his men through twice-daily sets of intervals, sometimes two and three hours’ worth, but he would not let them run a serious step except in front of his deeply judgmental eye. If he saw a hint of stiffness, for example, he would reduce the work until the runner was ready again. In the United States Igloi would train Jim Beatty to the first indoor sub-4:00.
Bowerman was so impressed by Mundle’s research and racing that he would use the term paper as the basis for all his work with endurance men. Although he would tailor workouts to the specific creatures in front of him and would experiment until he died, from 1950 to 1952 he puzzled out most of his solution to the great problem of how to train for the middle distances.
There are only two training questions, both simple and haunting. What should I do and how much should I do it? Because a miler needs both the speed to race and the stamina to cover the distance, that miler’s coach must choose from a vast continuum of possible work—from long, slow runs to all-out sprints, from rigidly timed repetitions on the track to go-as-you-feel romps on a beach or forest trail (often called fartlek, Swedish for “speed-play”), from one workout a day to three, from twenty miles a week to 200. In other words, choose from zero to infinity, from indolence to madness.
It was good that Bowerman wasn’t a miler himself. He could approach the problem not with the wishful thinking of ambition but the objectivity of a physical scientist. He sensed that the answer had to include not only the right type and amount of work but also the right type and amount of rest to keep a runner from illness or injury. If he erred, he wanted to err on the safe side of that cliff, so he decided to train and race his men to seasonal peaks but back off before they crashed. Moreover, he aimed to train them for their training—by having them do slower, strengthening, “base” work in the off-seasons. Thus began his dismissive view of indoor track, which throws all-out racing into the middle of winter. Such races interrupt a sensible sequence of fall cross-country, winter stamina work, and spring intervals and races, intensifying toward the pinnacle, the outdoor national championships and international meets in June and July.
Intervals, therefore, would be central to Bowerman’s program, but his runners would do them only two or three times a week. Penciled in on the rest of the days would be a steady Sunday run of ten to fifteen miles or an hour of fartlek on a hilly golf course. These rigors were separated by easier days: three- to six-mile jogs with stretching, form drills, some light weight lifting, pull-ups, maybe a swim, to allow the system to recover and keep athletes benefiting from their hard work. All this would add up, on average, to sixty miles per week.
Bowerman began exhorting Oregon runners to finish their workouts “exhilarated, not exhausted.” As he timed them on interval days, he would scrutinize their form, grabbing a runner’s throat and taking his pulse. He’d check the glint in their eye, sending the tight and dull to the showers, and especially those whose pulses weren’t quick to return to 120 beats per minute. His credo was that it was better to underdo than overdo. He was adamant that he trained individuals, not teams, and he came to believe that group workouts could even be counterproductive. “The best man loafs, the worst tears himself down,” he would say. “Maybe only one guy in the middle gets the optimum work.”
All this was the genesis of his annual welcoming line to freshmen. “Stress, recover, improve, that’s all training is,” he’d say. “You’d think any damn fool could do it.” In fact, interval training takes such care that to this day few coaches can consistently produce milers.
When Bowerman first articulated the hard-easy method, he was widely despised for it. The anthem of most coaches then was, “the more you put in, the more you get out.” When Bowerman chided them—“Come on, the greatest improvement is made by the man who works most intelligently”—they were morally affronted. His easy days were derided. The intentional tailoring of stress to the individual was called coddling. Many coaches had their own personal “systems,” to which the runners were expected to adjust. Bowerman had it all backward. (Indeed, his common-sense approach is still resisted by a minority, and probably always will be.)
This, of course, was not a matter of intellect, but of trying to monitor driving hunger, a hunger not confined to coaches. Driven runners really think 200 miles per week is doing them good. But if a coach wishes to rise above damn foolishness, he must celebrate optimum rather than maximum. And Bowerman did. He distanced himself from his runners’ crazed yearning to do more. He saw when they needed to be snapped out of it and took royal pleasure in the snapping. Hammered by Hedrick to channel, Bowerman would hammer the demented to channel less. And if a runner couldn’t forsake work for its own sake, that runner would be off his team. As for all the doubting coaches, there was only one way to reach them: Crush their runners with his.
Bowerman’s first real talent came from Canada. Jack Hutchins from Vancouver would be a Canadian Olympian at 800 and 1500 meters and the progenitor of a tactic that Oregon runners would copy for thirty years. On his first jog around Hayward Field, Hutchins noticed that the track ran behind football stands on the south end zone, blocking the crowd’s
view of what went on back there for as much as eighty yards. Hutchins invented the great drama of disappearing behind the grandstand in fifth place and coming out in first while the crowd went wild. “I don’t know if Bill taught that or not,” Barbara Bowerman would say, “but you always looked for it afterward, the gap that grew and grew after the Oregon leader came out—the roar growing with it—until the chasers flailed into view.”
Bill not only taught it, he exploited it. He shaped his runners to do it because an athlete had to sprint a minimum of 360 yards to pull it off. “Woe to anyone,” Bowerman would say, “who sickens me with the sight of showing off so much for the backstretch goons that you tie up and get run down at the finish.” He gave us a nine-tenths-effort 330 at the end of some workouts, and ordered pull-ups to make our arms and lats strong enough to keep our legs driving that far. We tested ourselves in time trials and discovered what a powerful thing it is to know from how far out we could kick. To have it grooved in muscle memory that the top of the backstretch is a thrilling place to sprint would win many races for Duck runners, at home and away.
As well as originating that long kick, Hutchins was a bridge to more Canadians like him. He brought 440/880-man Doug Clement from Vancouver. Later there would be shot-putter Dave Steen, miler Vic Reeve, half-miler Sig Ohlemann, and sprinter Harry Jerome. Bill loved the Canadians for their manners, Barbara would say: “They had that respectfulness that seemed built-in to British Empire people, except the Australians. Bill used them as examples.” He also used the Canadians, along with the rest of the track team over the years, to help him build his house.
In 1949, the Bowerman family scouted the rivers of Eugene in their aluminum canoe, looking for a place to call home. They responded to the McKenzie as strongly as Bill Hayward had, although more for its restoring beauty than its trout. The river coiled tightly against the Coburg Hills, only twenty minutes north of the Oregon campus. The forested slopes, though logged in places, were virtually undeveloped. Farms covered the loamy flats. One day they stopped the canoe to picnic on a point below a big hill of oaks. Eleven-year-old Jon looked up from his peanut butter sandwich and said, “What’s that? Something white.”
It was a picket fence, even though there weren’t supposed to be houses up there. The whole family hiked up the hill and found that the fence ran around an old cemetery. Down an overgrown lane and through a hundred yards of woods, they emerged onto a little bench of sod and fern, framed by oaks. Below, the audible river marched right at them, as if to push into the mountainside, then swept past, taking the eye across the valley to the pastures and town beyond. “We’re home,” said Barbara. Bill grinned and silently nodded. He and his sons began pacing off where their house would go.
The owner, an orchardist named Pieterman, sold them sixty acres for $4,000—a sum covered by the first payment from the sale of their Medford house at the same time. The lot was remote and had no water or electricity at first. But a veterans’ home loan gave them money to build a house. Professor Al Miller of the architecture school, after hiking the steep driveway that was the site’s only access, designed the house to be constructable by a few men using two-by-fours instead of harder-to-wrestle solid beams. Bill’s helpers were professors Bob Lacy, law, and Kenneth Ghent, math, and University High principal Ray Hendrickson. Both Lacy and Bowerman had flunked manual arts in high school, so the building rose on clouds of pride and amazement. The house was placed back from the cliff edge, leaving a small lawn that was soon replaced by a cement deck, and angled toward the southwest, putting the river straight ahead and sunset in summer off to the right. On the day in 1950 that the family moved out of the prefab in Eugene, one of their new neighbors, an old Norwegian master carpenter, hung the doors on their new home.
The track team pitched in on building the house, too, but for them this was only the beginning. Bowerman would always have some unfinished garden or pond or fence or shed or shop or tiny sawmill. Soon a runner’s goal-setting session meant being handed a shovel, shown a pile of sand, and made to move it nearer a cement mixer before being rewarded with Barbara’s lemonade and oatmeal cookies. These job assignments—whether at the house or around the track—were tests of moral fiber. Bowerman seldom said so, but failure to do a job and do it right was a mark on the wrong side of the ledger.
The greater reward, of course, were the notes on Bill’s legal pad that sketched out the coming six months, concluding with the athlete’s big race and the seconds per lap he’d have to run to have a prayer. In Bowerman’s mind, a runner was always at some point in an annual unfolding. He was training, for example, at 4:12 pace in March in order to run at 4:00 pace in June. “The only way to get to point B is to start at point A,” Bowerman would say, and he felt it so strongly that he gave names to those points. The speed a runner could hold right now was his date pace. The speed he hoped to sustain in the NCAA mile or 5000 meters was his goal pace. Interval days would contain some of each, blending the currently attainable with a taste of what was to come. If a workout was three sets of intervals, the runner might do one set at 60-second pace, the other two at 64.
One of the first freshmen to get the full—if still evolving—Bowerman treatment was Bill Dellinger, who was born in Grants Pass. Dellinger’s running ability was discovered in a ninth-grade PE mile where, Dellinger would recall, the track and football coach yelled, “Holy smokes, kid, come here! I want you out for our track team!” Dellinger obeyed and was changed. “I’d been hanging out in bars with older guys and smoking cigarettes and chasing girls and trapping muskrats,” he once said. “I found a different direction on that track team.”
The Dellinger family moved to Springfield for his high school years and Dellinger kept running. Oregon wrestler and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey, a year younger than Dellinger, would recall watching him from the window of the school bus as it pulled away: “Running to school instead of riding, rain or shine, the very sort of nut you’d expect to win the state cross-country title.”
“Hey,” Dellinger would say. “If Kesey called you a nut, you were free to be pretty weird.”
Not that Dellinger gave much outward sign of nuttiness. At five foot nine, with a deep chest and strong, hip-twisting, head-rolling gait, he arrived at Oregon in the fall of 1952, attracted by Pete Mundle’s progress and Bowerman’s scary joviality. A prankster himself, Dellinger recognized a master. Mundle had returned to Eugene to work on a graduate degree in math, so he was around to help break in young Dellinger. Over the next two decades he would visit Eugene often and run with Bowerman’s current crop.
Dellinger had never trained consistently in high school. He ran track in spring and cross-country in fall, but played other games in between. Not averse to the occasional beer, he sometimes had to lose a few pounds in the early weeks of training. But Dellinger was tough; he didn’t need many easy days to come back from hard ones. And he was smart, quickly grasping the virtue of running even pace the way Mundle did. After two years under Bowerman, he found himself contemplating doing something he’d once thought impossible: run a swift mile.
The lure of the mile never fades, but in the early 1950s it was irresistible. A small handful of runners on three continents—Australia’s John Landy, Wes Santee of the United States, and Britain’s Roger Bannister—were coming ever closer to the record of 4:01.4 set by Sweden’s Gunder Hägg in 1945 and to breaking the four-minute barrier itself. Dellinger, duly inflamed, set his heart on running the mile and nothing but the mile.
Bowerman and Mundle, seeing how fast he recovered from workouts, thought he should go farther. “Run a mile and a quarter with Pete, see how it is,” Bill would say. Then the next week, “See if Pete will take you a mile and a half.” In that fashion they got him up to racing two miles. In hindsight, Dellinger would come to see Bowerman’s strategy as “a big part of my callousing process,” a term he would use when he became a coach himself to describe the effect of toughening both mind and body.
Dellinger would ev
entually break world and American records for two and three miles, indoors and out. But it was in the mile that he struck the first championship blow for Bowerman’s methods. Three weeks after Bannister’s historic 3:59.4 at Oxford’s Iffley Road track, Dellinger, a sophomore, stepped to the line for the 1954 NCAA mile in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Obeying Bowerman’s edict that “You don’t win a mile by winning the first quarter,” Dellinger began at a 63-second pace while the leaders flew away at 60. After one lap, he was last. He cruised past a few stragglers in the next half-mile, but was still ninth with a lap to go. Then Bowerman had the pleasure of seeing the calm, hard-muscled runner, his lemon shorts and green singlet easy to follow, moving through the field, gaining sureness with each man he passed.
Dellinger reached second place off the last turn. His reward for having husbanded his energy was being able to lift into a full sprint. Thirty yards from the tape, he shot past the stiffening, astounded Louis Olive of the US Military Academy and won going away in 4:13.8.
Years later, knowing what it would lead to, Bowerman would term Dellinger’s mile triumph “my greatest and most satisfying experience.” He may have felt Dellinger’s victory was as much harbinger as vindication, but opposing coaches were far from threatened by one lucky win.
In the months following Dellinger’s victory, Bill wasted no time in alerting talented milers to the University of Oregon. That August, he drove north to Vancouver and the British Empire Games to see the “Miracle Mile,” the first head-to-head battle between the first two men under 4:00. Australia’s Landy, the world record holder by then with 3:58.0, knew his best chance to win lay in upsetting Bannister’s wait-and-kick strategy by sitting back himself, but he tore ahead at the gun nevertheless. The race had drawn such attention that Landy felt obliged to ensure a fast race. “Otherwise,” he would say, “the sport might have suffered.” The price of his nobility: Bannister outkicked him 3:58.8 to 3:59.6.
