"If you want to win a race you have to go a little berserk."
- Bill Rodgers
The first thing you must realize about Bill Rodgers is how good he was. The second thing you have to realize is how unique was his path to being a great runner.
"Billy Rodgers did not look like a young man with ambition. He did not look like a fierce competitor,. He did not look like an athlete... He looked skinny, loose, and flaky, with a head topped by straw-colored hair--like the scarecrow in the Wizard of OZ... But his head was not stuffed with straw although he often acted as if he had no brain."
Rodgers was born in Hartford, CT, on Dec. 23, 1947. He was a talented runner in high school, winning a Connectucut State cross-country title. At Wesleyan, he was a pretty good collegiate runner, recording his lifetime track bests of 4:16 for the mile and 8:48 for two miles. But by his senior year, he was smoking and drinking and drifting away from running. After graduating from college, he applied for an received conscienious objector status to the war in Vietnam. He bought a motorcyle and spent a lot of time riding around, unemployed and with no definite ambition for anything. When he did finally get a job, it was as an orderly at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. There he wheeled patients around, and when they died, he would wheel their bodies to the morgue.
After seeing a man who had lost his larynx and part of his trachea from smoking, Rodgers decided to quit. After watching the 1971 Boston Marathon and seeing some of his old friends from college, he realized he missed running and started jogging at the YMCA. After his motorcycle was stolen, he started jogging to work.
Fired from his hospital job, Rodgers spent most of 1972 unemployed. But he was running now, and that gave him more time to train. Running 100-mile weeks and training with hid friends on the Greater Boston Track Club gave structure and meaning to his life. He became a good local runner, winning road races and finally attempting the marathon.
His first attempt at Boston in 1973, he didn't finish. The next year he finished 14th in 2:19:34. Very impressive times for a local kid. But what happened in 1975 was truly astonishing. In March, Rodgers competed in the World Cross-Country Chapionships -- arguably the hardest race in the world to win. He finished third, far ahead of Olympic gold and silver medalist Frank Shorter.
It was a shocking result, but no fluke. Rodgers had been averaging almost 130 miles a week for months prior to the cross-country race, training hard under the tutelage of Bill Squiers. Entering the 1975 Boston Marathon, he was in the best shape of his life, although relatively unknown outside the running world.
Running against a world-class field that included Great Britain's Ron Hill and Canada's Jerome Drayton, Rodgers destroyed them. Despite stopping twice to sip water, and once to tie his shoe, Bill Rodgers ran 2:09:55, the fastest time ever by an American and one of the fastest times ever run by anyone. In the next several years, he would win Boston three more times with a best of 2:09:27 in 1979, he would win New York four times, he would be ranked #1 in the world in the marathon by Track and Field News. He would set the world record for 25K on the track at 1:14:12. (Five consecutive 5Ks in 14:50).
Rodgers, along with Shorter, became the emblem of the running boom in the United States. At 60, he is still one of the most beloved figures in distance running in the U.S. And he still runs, setting various records in his 50s before injuries, including a broken leg, curtailed his training.
Happy Birthday, to the scarecrow who, it turned out, had more brains than anyone else.
Wikipedia article on Bill Rodgers
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