by Kenny Moore
Lydiard’s famous dictum was “Train, don’t strain,” and he enforced it with the talk test. If you couldn’t carry on a conversation, you were going too fast. “It followed,” Bill said later, “that the best way to keep people active was to give them someone to talk to. So Lydiard combined conditioning with companionship by telling people to run in slow, steady groups, or ‘jogging’ clubs. Hell, whole communities, from toddlers to grandmas, jogged on weekends and holidays.” It was a slightly fitter Bowerman who greeted his milers when they arrived at the end of the week.
Travel, as it does, opened eyes. And ears. At the formal welcoming banquet, the host dignitaries gave speeches of welcome. Oregon’s team leader, Leo Harris, delivered something stuffy in return. Then his wife, Zoë, was pressed for remarks. She, an impulsive woman who hadn’t traveled widely, stepped to the mike and yelled, “We’re so happy to be here! I won’t bore you with a speech! I’m saving all my energy so I can root for the team! Root for the team! Root for the team!”
Instant, hysterical bedlam. The Oregon runners learned why and joined in the whooping laughter. Rooting, wherever Britannia has ruled, means exactly what one imagines. Bowerman shook and wiped away tears. Zoë sat down, happy to see that people appreciated brevity in this country. Somehow, she would pass the ensuing weeks feigning not to hear Keith Forman or Archie San Romani always saying, “we gotta look for the root cause” or “root that out before it gets too rooting big.”
Despite wet weather, the first race, a four-mile relay at Auckland’s Western Springs Stadium, was sold out. Judged on best mile times, the teams were even. But Bowerman knew the Kiwis were racing sharp, having just come from the British Empire Games in Perth, Australia. Besides, Peter Snell had earlier that year taken the world record to 3:54.4.
Knowing Snell would surely run last, the task for Oregon was to give its own anchor a big enough lead to hold him off. Bill had an idea. He’d conclude with Keith Forman. “Bill thought I would need twenty yards to beat Snell,” Forman recalled. “That was three seconds.” By anchoring with Forman, Bowerman was free to put his champion, Burleson, on the third leg against someone who had to be far weaker than Snell, someone Burley could run away from by those priceless twenty yards. Lydiard saw through this plot and chose young John Davies—second to Snell in the Perth mile—to foil it.
Bowerman had hopes for a new record, but on race day an inch of rain fell three hours before the start, turning the track into a sticky, slick gumbo. The race was run at night and the stadium was poorly lit, a murky setting that did not bode well for Oregon’s leadoff man, tall, bespectacled Vic Reeve. “It was slop, puddles up to your ankles on the inside lane,” Reeve would remember. He was matched against the shorter, stockier Bill Baillie, who would win Kiwi titles at every distance from the 880 to six miles.
Reeve set the pace, the better to make out the two-inch pegs that marked the curb. “I was just trying to hold it together and not slip.” They passed three-quarters in 3:12.
“The first leg between Bill and Vic had all the tension of the duel that had been anticipated,” Snell would write a few years later in his book No Bugles, No Drums. “The crowd kept up a continual roar which swirled to fever pitch on the last curve as Bill overtook Vic. Swinging round into the home straight, they were neck and neck.”
Swinging was the word. Baillie swerved left and slammed into Reeve. “He just decided to cut in on me,” Reeve would remember some forty years later. “He hit me with his arm in midstride and threw me off balance. My shoe slipped in the mud, caught on one of those pegs and down I went. All I could do was pick up the baton and sprint after him. He’d gained forty yards, six seconds. After that, it was catch-up.” Snell remembered the crowd being shocked into silence. “The race in a split second was ruined,” he wrote. “Vic got up and ran on, but with a big gap between the teams, it became a dreary procession on the wet track with no chance left of a decent time.”
Snell made that a little too foregone for accuracy. “Archie lost ten yards to Murray Halberg,” Bowerman wrote in his account to the Oregon Journal. “But then Burley made up twenty-five on John Davies and Keith Forman’s race was tremendous. He closed from twenty-five yards to six on Peter Snell to make it close at the finish.”
Bowerman tried to put the best face on the Baillie-Reeve collision for the readers at home. “Vic was not fouled but he was ‘squeezed,’” Bill wrote, adding that “a good New Zealand medic joined me in cleaning up Reeve’s many lacerations—shoulder, knee, back, and elbow. He was stiff but OK.” Bill also managed to perceive a silver lining. “It rains alike on the just and the unjust,” he wrote. If the weather had been fine and the track as fast as it had been on the preceding Sunday, he observed, “our record might be gone.”
The Oregon team was slated to compete as individuals in several meets around the country before concluding with a second, grudge-match four-mile relay in Nelson, on the South Island. The next races were in geothermally blessed Rotorua, south of Auckland.
Bowerman told Vic Reeve to go find their hotel’s ballyhooed thermal spring and soak his sore knee in it. Arriving quietly, pushing aside giant ferns, Reeve surprised the stark naked Zoë and Leo Harris. “Give us a goddamn minute!” explained Leo. Reeve did. Then, decorously swimsuited, they all soaked together. Reeve concentrated on the pain in his knee to keep from exploding. “I kept wanting to say ‘un-rooting-believable,’ but I couldn’t get it out.”
The Rotorua meet was on December 26, which, across the Commonwealth, is the holiday known as Boxing Day. Snell awoke feeling unsteady from one too many Christmas toasts the night before. He was to race Burleson that night over a mile. Here was Burley’s chance. Conditions for the race were frigid: thirty-five degrees with a raw wind. Reeve led and the wind took it out of him. When Davies jumped him at three-quarters, Forman went with him and Snell was third. In Snell’s written account of the race, “Burleson was still pinning all his faith on his finish and tagged along behind me. I sprinted to win, Burleson was second, and John third.” Given the cold and the wind, Snell’s time was a remarkable 4:05.
The third meet was on the South Island, on New Year’s Eve, in the little township of Waimate, which had a fine grass track. The weather had finally broken and a crowd several times the town’s population turned out. Snell faced Burleson in an 880. Bowerman clocked Snell in 53 for the first quarter and observed that he slowed on the turn, where San Romani jumped him. “A figure came hurtling past,” Snell would write. “This shook me back to awareness. I struggled to close the few yards that Archie had opened up, and at the top of the straight, he, Burleson and I were all together.” San Romani faded slightly. Burleson did not. Bowerman judged that Burley had closed “to chest-width at the finish.”
“He was apparently so frustrated in his desperation to beat me,” Snell wrote, “that as we crossed the line he grabbed at my right elbow with his left hand.”
“Both of them were diving at the tape,” Vic Reeve would recall, “and I remember Burley physically pulling himself ahead of Snell.” But that wasn’t until after they had crossed the line. Snell had won again, in 1:48.0. Bowerman would characterize the race as “a diller.”
Bill pondered all this as he reviewed the Oregon strategy for the last race, the score-settling four-mile relay in Nelson, a pretty town set among apple orchards. The grass track was smooth enough for lawn bowling and the weather dry, but windy. Keith Forman was running strongly, “really coming into his own, tougher every race,” so Bowerman kept him at anchor and told Burleson that if he could give Forman twenty yards they’d win.
“This race,” wrote Snell, “was to decide what the Auckland fiasco had not, which of us was the better team. But we New Zealanders didn’t want to run the risk of another flop and would hustle the pace along. This attitude seemed to be shared by the Americans, with the exception of Burleson.”
Bill Baillie led off again for the Kiwis. But this time, as if to atone, he led all the way, sheltering Vic Reeve, who got close off
the last turn but couldn’t quite get by. Baillie (4:07.5) passed the baton to Murray Halberg four yards before Reeve (4:08.2) reached San Romani. “In the wind,” wrote Snell, “Bill’s time was a little slow and it was obvious that this race could again turn into a tactical battle with victory as the only consideration.”
San Romani was a true miler with a wonderful kick. Halberg, the Olympic 5000-meter champion, knew that and set out to destroy it. “Archie had a tough assignment,” Bill would write in his Journal account. “After one lap, Halberg tried to get away but Archie hung on. On the backstretch of the fourth lap, Archie glided up and shot by. He was too far out for a full sprint and Halberg closed to his shoulder. Archie glided away again and handed off to Burleson five yards ahead.” San Romani had run 4:04.0 to Halberg’s 4:05.0.
As soon as the batons changed hands, a shocking thing happened. Snell would call it “an incredible display of negative running.” As Snell would tell it, “Burleson, with a best time of 3:56.8 to his credit, actually slowed down to a near-walk to force John, who had yet to break four minutes, into the role of pacemaker. We all knew how Burleson liked running from behind, but in our eyes this deliberate go-slow was a ridiculous waste of the lead his teammate had struggled to give him. It was impossible to see just what Burleson’s thinking was. Did he believe he could open up a race-winning lead on John in the last lap or was his interest only in preserving his own prestige?”
Well, both. Burleson was gambling that if he hid behind and cut loose around an exhausted Davies in the last lap he’d get the requisite three seconds for Forman. But Davies had no intention of cooperating in his execution. He calmly began running gentle 66s.
Bowerman, who wanted Burleson to pass Davies hard and run his guts out the rest of the way, was exasperated. “They loafed through three and a half laps,” he wrote.
Davies ran through the three-quarters in 3:17 and led into the back straightaway before Burley attacked. Davies had not only been coasting, he’d been psyching himself up to react the instant Burley came into view on his right. When he did, Davies rocketed with him. “They put on a 220-yard dash, which Burley won by four yards,” Bowerman wrote irritably. “So he left Keith Forman the task of beating the world record holder with a four-yard lead.”
Snell recalled it being only two, and he was probably more accurate than Bowerman. Burleson’s split time was 4:11.2 to Davies’s 4:11.0—meaning that Burley’s tactics had actually cost the Oregon team a couple of yards. But there was no gamer runner than Forman. “Keith took up the challenge that Burleson had dropped,” continued Snell, “by running the first lap in 58.7, but the wind took its toll and he reached the bell in 3:04.7.”
Forman would not crack. “He ran a terrific race,” Bowerman wrote for the Journal. “He gave Peter Snell all he wanted and almost burned that great sprint out of him. Snell tired on the backstretch but just edged past in the last 25 yards.” Snell won by two yards in 16:25.5. His mile had been 4:02.0 to Forman’s 4:02.4. Both teams were fifteen seconds slower than Oregon’s record.
“A thriller for the 12,000 here in Nelson,” Bill wrote with remarkable restraint, “but had we had our yardage—oh well.” The race had been so close, even with Burleson’s antics, that Snell concluded, “New Zealand still wasn’t sure which was the best team.”
Sure or not, it was about time to go home. After six weeks of daily jogging, Bowerman had lost ten pounds and three inches from his waistline. Before they left the South Island, Lydiard coaxed him into running to an abandoned ghost town. He wasn’t quite candid about the distance. “He told me this run was five miles each way,” Bill would recall, “but a sign said twelve. But we went at my pace—a slow, comfortable jog—crossed a creek a few times, running up this canyon, and sooner than I thought, without any of the distress I thought I’d have, we were there. Then we went back the same way.” Bill had managed over twenty miles in four hours.
“It was a mark of his determination and of the value of a sensible approach that he went from no miles to twenty in four weeks,” Lydiard would recollect years later. “We sent him home a jogger.”
When Bill came down the ramp in Eugene, Barbara shrieked that he looked ten years younger. The next morning Eugene Register-Guard sportswriter Jerry Uhrhammer, who had been following the tour, phoned to ask Bowerman to sum up his experience. Bill told him that the competition was great, but the biggest thing that had happened was his realizing that his idea of exercise was “way, way, way low.” In New Zealand, thousands of people jog, Bill said. “Their women jog, their kids jog, everybody jogs.” Uhrhammer asked, “Do you think we could do that here?” And Bowerman said, “Why don’t we find out?”
So Uhrhammer’s article contained Bill’s invitation to anyone of any age to come to the Hayward Field practice track that Sunday and hear more about it. On February 3, 1963, two dozen citizens showed up. Bill spoke about good shoes and loose clothing, and everyone did a mile of trotting the straightaways and walking the turns. The next week, the total grew to fifty. Bill explained how the talk test keeps exercise fun. He was surprised to see about a quarter of the folks were female. The third week, two hundred loosely bundled souls appeared and did a mile or two. Uhrhammer wrote a follow-up piece, mentioning that Life magazine planned to send a photographer to document this bizarre activity.
The following Sunday, Vic Reeve would remember, “Bill timed us in an interval workout, and as we were warming down, he said, ‘Hang around, you might see something unusual.’ We started to notice people showing up. A lot were in street clothes, housewives, professors, some kids, some quite elderly. They kept coming and coming, going around the track. In half an hour they completely covered it, jogging and walking. And they kept coming.” Even in New Zealand, Reeve and the others had never seen such a mass of runners. “That was the start of the American jogging movement,” Reeve would say, “right there, that morning.”
The crowd peaked at somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 human beings that day. The mass scared Bowerman silly: “I knew someone was going to die right there.” He urged everyone to go home and jog with friends in their own neighborhoods “until we get a better handle on this thing.” He went to his office and called Dr. Ralph Christensen, who put him in touch with Eugene cardiologist Waldo Harris. “We can’t take all these old guys out there,” Bowerman told Harris. “We’ll kill them.”
Harris and Bowerman quickly taught each other their specialties. Bowerman laid out the theory and practice of preparing four-minute milers. Harris explained how much stress untrained cardiovascular systems might be able to handle at different ages and weights. Finally they wrote a training program based on running at a speed of 45 seconds for 110 yards, which is twelve-minute-mile pace—slightly faster than a brisk walk. Harris and Bowerman did a little pilot study, giving physical exams to four hefty Oregon faculty members and monitoring them through three months of gradually increasing mileage. All four completed the study safely.
Bowerman’s dean in the PE department, Charles Esslinger, approved a larger study. Bowerman and Harris recruited 100 middle-aged subjects, almost all male, through the Central Lane YMCA. These they split into ten groups of ten that jogged three times a week. Each group was assigned an Oregon varsity runner, each of whom made ten bucks a week jogging with his group, explaining workouts, advising on form, and panicking when someone fat turned purple. Everyone survived, but a few subjects did turn out to have heart conditions. Harris sent those to a walking study group.
Just as he experimented upon incoming freshmen, Bowerman assigned different kinds and dosages of trotting to the test subjects. He found that, like his college runners, some responded better to interrupted work, some to steady running. Bowerman and Harris found dramatic weight loss among the overweight and a general feeling of well-being among the joggers. “Almost without exception,” Bowerman would say, “they began to feel more tigerish.” The likes of fifty-five-year-old Texaco gas station manager Gordon Sherbeck and seventy-year-old radiologist Dr. Larry Hilt
underwent remarkable transformations. Having been sedentary all their lives, they went from five miles per week to twenty after the three months of the study and ultimately became marathoners.
The varsity athletes who headed the jogging groups found this transformation more amazing than their own racing success. Obviously, even athletes were gripped by the conventional wisdom of the time, namely that physical decline was inevitable as soon as one reached middle age, if not sooner, and that such decline was useless to resist beyond middle age.
Originally a nation of pioneers accustomed to hard physical labor, America in the mid-twentieth-century had become a society that actively condemned adult fitness. It may be hard for anyone born after 1960 to believe, but runners in those days were regarded as eccentric at best, subversive and dangerous at worst. During the day, cars would routinely swerve to try to drive a runner off the road. And running at night was deemed suspicious enough to warrant being stopped by a police cruiser and held until phone calls ascertained there had been no burglaries in the area.
It was against this background that Bowerman’s converts began to appear on tracks and in parks. The second study showed nothing but benefits for its 100 subjects and confirmed the effectiveness of the distances and speeds they’d run. Bill was deluged with letters from people and groups who had heard of the jogging phenomenon and wanted information. “Our country is not nearly so vigorous as it was twenty-five years ago,” Bill wrote to his old Auckland jogging mate, Andrew Steedman, with whom he’d struck up a lively correspondence. “We have much to learn from you people and I am going to do my best to get the word around.” He began to organize his thoughts. In reply to another correspondent in January 1964, Bill declared that fifteen or twenty minutes a day of jogging is an ideal way to provide “needed exercise for the average middle-aged American,” adding, “To procrastinators who complain that they cannot afford the fifteen or twenty minutes a day, I echo the words of Arthur Lydiard: ‘You cannot afford not to take the time.’”
