Racing the Clock by Bernd Heinrich

Author:Bernd Heinrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Informal academic groups centered on specific disciplines would meet in seminar rooms on campus, but an informal group of us runners that prominently included Max had also formed on the UC track. We met at noon or late in the afternoon to run. Mark Gruby, an older gentleman and former sprinter and horse trainer, became our self-appointed mentor and coach. He critiqued our running form: arm swing, leg lift, even the positions of our thumbs were subject to correction under his critical gaze in an effort to perfect the art and science of the race against the most important variable as measured by his ever-present, ever-correct, never-judgmental stopwatch. Speed through smoothness was the goal we all aspired to. Max had both. In body type he tended toward that of Alberto Juantorena (known as “El Caballo,” the horse), the Cuban running phenomenon who had won both the 400 meters and 800 meters in the 1976 Montreal Olympics and who was then as powerful in our imaginations as Usain Bolt would become some three decades later.

I was hoping to catch up with Max and others of our loyal and always enthusiastic running group by doing regular repetitive speed work, late in life for developing peak performance as it was for Max and me. But it went better than expected. In my 1974 running logs I read with joy and satisfaction of our daily ritual of running intervals of 220s (yards), 330s, quarter miles, half miles, each of usually three to five repetitions with quarter-mile to two-mile jogs in between. We challenged and encouraged one another, and we routinely ran our 440s in under a minute. I reduced my former best quarter-mile time at UCLA by three full seconds, to 54.0. Three seconds for that distance is a lot, and that achievement brought up a new thought: Might I be able to run a two-minute half mile? My best time for that distance, three seconds shy, was not even close, and the barrier now loomed as a target. Then, on October 29, 1974, I ran a timed half in 2:00.6, missing the magic mark of the two-minute half mile but coming close enough to taste it, after having run the first quarter in 57 seconds. I could see my mistake; it had been my pacing. My running notes read, “Tied up last 220. Next time do first 440 in 60.0. No faster!”

The guys knew I had been thinking of someday breaking the two-minute barrier in the half mile and decided my dream had a chance. They wanted to give me a little help and arranged to stage a private event where Mark would officiate and Rick Brown, our UC Berkeley star half-miler, would pace me as rabbit. I was more excited about racing the clock than I had been for any race. I remember lining up one Saturday morning when the track was clear, the stadium empty, and Mark releasing us from the starting line. I ran the first quarter following Rick, holding

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