Big Week For The Old Runaround

Even as the American public huffed and puffed its way toward fitness in one way or another last week, the country's best cross-country runners, a zealous lot with little regard for snappy uniforms, personal safety or celebrity, took part in four national championships over an eight-day span. During that period members of this emerging nation of athletes raced over golf courses and hay-fields, through creeks, mud, snow and oxygen debt, jostled up and down precipitous hills, and fought the elements, the compass and each other before witnesses that for a change did not consist solely of trees.

Ever since cross-country running was replaced by gunpowder as a means of gathering food, it seems to have been a stepchild amid the welter of autumnal sports. At most schools the cross-country coach's office usually was down near the boiler room and financial support was restricted to supplying runners with laundry detergent for faded sweat suits. Today, with America alive to the merits of the neighborhood jog, cross-country is gaining stature and the coaches are getting calls from alumni asking about the benefits of interval training. But as the sport's finest gathered together—first for the men's and women's collegiate championships in Madison, Wis. and Denver, Colo., respectively, and then for the two AAU meets last Saturday in Seattle and Memphis—there were enough zany occurrences to suggest that the sport is not yet out of the woods.

For instance, in three of the four meets, runners got lost. At Seattle, the two pacesetters made a pact to finish together, only to call it off and sprint to the tape. The race was decided when one of them misjudged the finish line.

The world's best distance runner, Henry Rono, got cold feet at Madison and finished as a straggler. At that same event an elderly guard collapsed. Fans tend to stay away from contests where a ticket also guarantees frostbite, but it could have been worse. At the AAU race, officials threatened to arrest spectators.

Some people claim that such unpredictable events are what make cross-country interesting; that, in addition to raw running talent, the event requires discipline, concentration and the ability to stay upright, to say nothing of a refined sense of direction and the capacity to compete in conditions better suited to hibernation. In Seattle eight inches of snow fell on the weekend before the race and meet director Bill Roe was asked what would happen if the stuff did not melt. Or worse, if it snowed again. "We'll run the race," he said firmly. In Memphis there was no threat of snow but, in order to get women accustomed to international-style racing, they were asked to splash through creeks as well as jump over logs and bales of hay.

Through all of this there emerged a series of heartening personal triumphs. Mary Decker, no longer a teen-ager, at last, continued her comeback by winning the AIAW meet, then headed off to New Zealand to train with her friend and coach, Dick Quax.

Alberto Salazar, a junior at the University of Oregon, came close to becoming the first man ever to win both the NCAA and AAU titles in the same year. He took the NCAA, then came back strong in the AAU only to finish a yard behind Greg Meyer, his teammate at the Greater Boston Track Club.

Kathy Mills, the defending women's collegiate champion, suffered a cruel disappointment when she missed a turn and lost this year's race to Decker. She spent most of the following week with an ailing foot in a bucket of ice, then gamely raced another 5,000 meters in the AAU meet and finished fourth behind winner Julie Brown, thereby earning herself a berth on the American team that will compete in the world cross-country championship in Ireland next March. But cross-country runners are nothing if not hardy. Brown, for instance, once won a race on a broken leg.

For the world's best long-distance runner, however, there was no such glory at the NCAA championship. The body of a distance runner is always crying for mercy. This time Henry Rono listened. Exhausted by a year in which he set four world records at distances from 3,000 to 10,000 meters and discouraged by the arctic conditions in Madison, the Kenyan star was never in the 10,000-meter race after the first mile. He masked his embarrassment by chuckling and mumbling to himself as he fell farther and farther off the pace. Rono finally plodded across the line 237th in the field of 241 finishers, so annoyed that he threw away his finish number and refused to talk to the press.

During the night before Rono would fail in his defense of the individual NCAA title he had won the last two years, an inch of snow fell on the Yahara Hills Golf Course and at race time the temperature was well below freezing, a stiff breeze was blowing and the wind-chill factor was—20°. Some of the runners wriggled into panty hose to keep warm while others donned lightweight tights or, like Salazar and his Oregon teammates, went all out with long underwear. Shortly before the start a student trainer for the University of Texas at El Paso squad, which was one of the favorites for the team title, applied a concoction of "Miner Medicine," a lanolin-based protective glop, to the faces and necks of the school's shivering Kenyans.