Salazar's Marathon Ordeal

By Richard Stengel

Trying times for the world's fastest distance runner

Marathoners are used to racing against time, each other and themselves, but for the past year Alberto Salazar has been running against an opponent he had never encountered before: failure. In 1982 the Cuban-born Salazar stood alone as the world's best distance runner. He held the American record in the 5,000-and 10,000-meter runs, and had the world's fastest time in the marathon, in which he was undefeated. An Olympic gold medal glistered on the horizon. Then last year, Salazar began to run down and out. His inner fire seemed to have become self-destructive.

That fire once drove him exuberantly. As a cocky University of Oregon senior in 1980, Salazar predicted that he would win the New York Marathon, the first he had ever entered. He did. The next year he predicted he would run the fastest marathon ever in New York. Again he kept up with his words. His obsession to win almost killed him: in the summer of 1978 he received last rites from a priest when his body temperature hit 108DEG during the 7.1-mile Falmouth Road Race in Massachusetts; after winning the 1982 Boston Marathon, he required an IV tube as this time his body temperature plummeted to a dangerous 88DEG. He trained relentlessly, never taking a break from season to season.

The first troubling sign appeared just over a year ago. A small groin pull led to a disappointing fourth in the World Cross Country Championships in Great Britain. A month later he finished fifth in the Rotterdam Marathon. His nadir came in August at the World Track and Field Championships in Helsinki. Fighting off bronchitis, he finished last in the 10,000 meters. The gritty and fiercely proud runner could hardly recognize himself. "I know that wasn't me out there," he said. Salazar took two weeks off, the first holiday he had allowed himself since he was 13. Bewildered and troubled, he diagnosed his own problem: "I just tried to train and race at too high a level for too long a time. It finally caught up with me."

To find himself and his old form he tried everything and anything. He trained less. He consulted a psychiatrist. Now a born-again Christian, he sought help in prayer. His wife Molly tried to get him to do "a little mellowing." But nothing seemed to help. Recalls Salazar: "I was just real uptight for a real long time, not just about running, but my daily life."

He tried to put his worries aside and concentrate on a 10,000-meter race in Phoenix on March 3 of this year. Describing the event as a "no-excuses race," he saw it as his personal Rubicon. He could not get across; Salazar trundled over the finish line in eighth place. During a postrace TV interview, he almost broke down. His confidence seemed destroyed. He was having trouble sleeping. "I used to be able to put my head on a pillow and, bam, I'd sleep like a rock for eight hours," he said wanly. "But for the past year and a half, I've had to take a sleeping pill to get some sleep." His agony was palpable. Confessed Salazar: "I don't feel any different physically, but mentally there is something wrong."

A burned-out case, thought many saddened observers. But Dr. Doug Clements, co-director of the University of British Columbia's Sports Medicine Clinic, thought otherwise. He called Salazar's coach, Bill Dellinger: Might Salazar be suffering from a physiological condition Clements termed nonanemic ferritin deficiency? A former college running teammate of Dellinger's, Clements has theorized that ferritin, an iron complex stored mainly in the bone marrow, is used or discharged by endurance runners faster than it is replaced. The consequences, says Clements, are that "a runner would fail to improve with training." Tests on Salazar showed a low level of ferritin.

By now the marathoner was game for anything, and his doctors put him on iron supplements. Although Clements' theory is not endorsed by many s experts, Salazar has embraced it as a panacea. He finds evidence of improvement. Although he finished third in a 10,000-meter race in Eugene, Ore., on April 7, he was encouraged by his time--27:56--and his strength at the finish. Whether a lack of iron is the answer, Salazar wants to believe that the problem lies in his body, not his head. Says he: "I had so many people telling me it was mental, and after a while I started believing it."

Whatever the outcome, Salazar believes he has learned something during his personal hegira. He has found a kind of equanimity. Says he: "I don't feel like I have to prove myself the way I did before.

It was like every time I went out I had to try to set some sort of record." But now the distance runner is beginning to take a long view of things. He once thought an Olympic gold medal would be the ultimate fulfillment. Now he says, "If I go into the Olympics thinking that winning a gold medal is all there is to life, I'm going to be very disappointed." But well before that there is the possible disappointment of failing to qualify at next month's trials in Buffalo. To avoid that, Salazar must first defeat whatever has been defeating him.

A race of a different kind is just beginning for the world's fastest female marathoner. Joan Benoit, 26, the plucky, pint-size distance runner from Freeport, Me., had seemed a good bet to challenge Norway's Grete Waitz in this year's Olympic marathon, the first ever for women, but on March 20 during a 20-mile run near her home, she noticed a peculiar pain in her right knee.

When the pain persisted, Benoit flew to Eugene, Ore., to consult her coach, Bob Sevene. Conventional treatment--rest, anti-inflammatory drugs, cortisone injections--did not help. So last Wednesday, she underwent arthroscopic surgery in Eugene for the removal of an inflamed plica, a soft, penny-size piece of tissue underneath the knee. When damaged by the kind of stress placed on it by distance runners, the plica thickens, interfering with the tendons in the knee and causing considerable pain. Now the question is how soon she will be ready to run again.

"There's no doubt about it. She's lost fitness," notes Sevene. But engineers quickly rigged a special bicycle that she can pedal with her hands even while she is still in bed. The coach hopes that Benoit will begin running this week and get in three 14-mile runs before the women's Olympic trials at the end of next week. Says Sevene: "The doctors say it's going to be tight. But if she can pull it off, it's a hell of a story." --By Richard Stengel. Reported by Steven Holmes/Los Angeles

With reporting by Steven Holmes