Better Faster Farther by Maggie Mertens

Author:Maggie Mertens [MERTENS, MAGGIE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2024-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN THE PHONE rang for Decker in high school, it was often her friend, Steve Prefontaine, on the other end. Decker and Prefontaine met for the first time in 1973 while the two were competing in Europe during the summer tour season. Over the six-week trip, Decker turned fifteen, and won all but one of her races.

“Pre felt I was very talented, but that because of all the workouts I was doing and all the racing, and the pressure on someone that young, I think he was just very concerned about ‘burnout’—that was the term he used,” Decker told Tom Jordan for his book Pre: The Story of America’s Greatest Running Legend.2 Prefontaine took Mary under his wing then. On those regular phone calls he would ask how much she was running, check on how her training was going. Just before he died, he tried his best to get Decker’s mother to move the family to Eugene so she could train with Bill Bowerman, the legendary coach at the University of Oregon who revolutionized the track program there and was a cofounder of Nike.

Pre, a “brand ambassador” for the fledgling shoe company (in those days, to remain qualified for the Olympics, athletes had to remain “amateurs” so couldn’t be paid directly in sponsorship deals), sent her a whole box of Nike prototypes.

At the time, Oregon was the epicenter of a radical shift in the way runners (at the time, men) were being trained. Bowerman was obsessed with the idea that training wasn’t actually about running as many miles as possible as fast as possible. He recognized that rest was necessary for elite athletes to recover, long before this was borne out by sport science. One of his biggest tasks was to get the runners under his direction to slow down, to not always run at 100 percent, and to take days off. But for many competitive runners, this can be a tall order. 3

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