WHAT'S UP

I'm John, I'm 16, I'm a junior, and I run. Varsity cross-country in the fall, the 3200 in track in the spring, and the rest of the time I'm either running, eating, or asleep. My mom says those are my three hobbies.

This page is about Steve Prefontaine, who is the greatest American distance runner ever (I will argue about this with anybody), and also about my own season, which is going pretty good so far. I updated it tonight because today was the big Saturday invitational and I ran a PR. Scroll down to my season if you only care about that. If you're my coach, hi Coach.

WHO PRE WAS

Everybody calls him Pre. If you run distance and you don't know who he is, you need to read this whole section. If you don't run, read it anyway, it might make you want to.

WHY HE RAN FROM THE FRONT

OK so in a distance race there are basically two ways to run it. You can sit in the pack, let somebody else do the work into the wind, save everything, and then outkick everybody at the end. That's smart. Lots of races are won that way. Or you can go to the front and push the pace so hard that by the last lap nobody has a kick left, including you, and whoever is toughest wins.

Pre ran the second way. Almost every race. He didn't want to win because he was sneaky or lucky. He wanted every race to be an honest test of who could take the most, and he wanted it to be him.

Munich, 1972. This is the race. The 5,000 final starts slow, and Pre hates slow. With about a mile to go he goes to the front and starts pushing, and he keeps pushing, lap after lap, the hardest pace you can imagine, with the best runners in the world right on him. On the last lap Virén and Mohammed Gammoudi of Tunisia are in front of him, and he can't get back past them. And then right at the end, totally out of gas, Pre gets passed by Ian Stewart of Great Britain and finishes fourth. No medal.

He could have sat back and maybe gotten a bronze. He didn't. He went for the gold, and he lost going for it. At first I thought that was the saddest race ever. Now I think it's the best one, because it's the whole reason anybody still cares about him. A lot of guys have won bronze medals. Not a lot of guys made the whole world watch them try.

THE TWO MOVIES

Yeah, there are two. In two years. I don't get it either, but I'm not complaining. I saw Prefontaine on tape at a team pasta dinner my freshman year, and that's what started this whole thing. Then my dad drove me an hour to see Without Limits last fall, because it was only in like three theaters around here, and we were two of maybe ten people there. Here's how they compare.

Both of them end the way you know they're going to end, and both of them got me. Watch both. Watch Without Limits second.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM HIM

1. Make the race honest. If the pace is slow and you don't like slow, nobody is stopping you from going to the front. It's scary. Do it anyway.
2. Hurting is part of it. The third mile of a 5K is supposed to feel like that. Everybody's hurting. The question is what you do about it.
3. Losing while you go for it is OK. Fourth in Munich is better than a safe third, at least in my opinion. Coach Cota does not totally agree with me on this. (See below.)
4. Do the work. Pre trained harder than anybody. You can't run from the front in October if you skipped your long runs in August.
5. Be yourself, loud. He was confident, and plenty of people called him cocky. He didn't change to make people like him. I'm not cocky, but I'm working on not caring so much what people think.

MY 1999 SEASON SO FAR

Our races are 5K, which is 3.1 miles, on grass and dirt and whatever hill the host school found. Our coach is Coach Cota. He's a good coach and a nice guy and he has never once in his life said the word "easy" and meant it. He has a hill near school that the whole team calls The Hill, and on Mondays we run up it until he gets bored, which takes a long time, because he's very patient. The full day-by-day is on my cross-country log.

Here are my races with my mile splits. My dad stands at the mile marks with a stopwatch and yells them at me, and then I write them down after.

The opener (9/4): I went out in 5:12 because I had just watched Without Limits again the night before. Bad idea. By the second mile I was going backwards and about twenty guys went by me. Coach Cota said, and I'm quoting him exactly, "That was very brave and very dumb." Fair.

9/16: My first time under 17 minutes! I ran even, stayed with the front group, and moved up in the last mile. Coach was happy. I was happier.

TODAY, the Harvest Invitational (9/25): This is the big one. 187 guys in the varsity race. Top 15 get medals. Coach Cota's plan for me was to go out controlled and move up. My plan was a little different.

At the gun I went out with the leaders, and somewhere around the half mile I looked around and realized I was leading. LEADING. A varsity invitational! I went through the mile in 5:09, still in front, and I could hear my dad yelling my split and then yelling something else I couldn't understand, which was probably "slow down." I led until a little after two miles. Then the real front guys came by me, three of them, then a few more, and the last mile hurt worse than anything I've ever done. I didn't let anybody else by me in the last half mile though. I finished 9th, in 16:41, a 13-second PR, and I got a MEDAL.

Coach Cota said it was the best race of my life and that if I ever do that again without telling him first he'll make me run The Hill until Thanksgiving. I think that means he liked it.

Pre would have gone out even harder. But I'm 16. I'm working on it.

Other runners on GeoCities: Dave Okonkwo, a first-time marathoner, is keeping an 18-week training log for the Chicago Marathon on October 24. Mile by mile! That's 26.2 of them. Good luck Dave, you're crazy, in a good way.