Mary Decker Slaney

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 1987.)

SLANEY’S SPLASH. Alberto Salazar and Mary Decker Slaney could co-captain the All-Injured Team. Like Salazar, Slaney is as fragile as she is fast. Unlike Alberto, whose problems seem unending, Mary repeatedly overcomes hers.

Both of them live in Eugene. But while I see Salazar often, I seldom bump into Slaney.

My rare meetings with her are cordial. We once chatted through a cross-country flight, and her exaggerated prima-donna image was nowhere to be seen.

I’ve glimpsed that side of her only once, while she was injured and doing water training. I’d come to the pool to visit her coach, Dick Brown, not Mary. But she apparently saw me as a spying reporter, flashed a why-are-you-here scowl and said not so much as “hi.”

This was her private training place, and I had invaded it. I learned, while working this past year on a book with Brown, just how valuable a second home this has been for Slaney.

Dick hasn’t officially coached her since 1985. But he still oversees her frequent rehabilitations in his water-therapy tank at a Eugene medical center or at a local indoor pool.

Slaney trained that way almost daily this winter while recovering from achilles-tendon surgery. She is now “quite fit,” says Brown, and will start racing again in January.

Her history predicts another quick and complete comeback. Brown has seen this happen before. He begins this history lesson five years ago:

“Mary and I had made a deal before the 1983 indoor track season. At the first sign of any injury trouble she would end her season. She pulled out in January because of a problem in an ankle.”

Eric Bass, inventor of a training tank, read the news. He called Brown and offered to send out from Philadelphia a prototype of the Aqua Ark that Bass now markets.

“Mary didn’t need it by the time it arrived,” says Brown. “Her injury had healed, and that year she won the 1500- and 3000-meter titles at the World Championships. The tank sat unused in my shed until the next summer.

“Then at the 1984 Olympic Trials, Mary hurt an achilles tendon. She had warmed up for the 1500 semifinals, then was held with other runners in a pen for 45 minutes. Her achilles tightened up.”

Slaney qualified for the Games but hurt too much to run after the Trials. A doctor injected the tendon with saline to break the adhesions, but that procedure only increased the pain.

Brown recalls that “she was walking around like Chester in ‘Gunsmoke.’ So I pulled the tank out of the shed and put Mary in it.

“She spent the next three weeks in the water, with no land workouts at all. However, she ‘ran’ the exact workouts in the tank that we had planned for her on land – same length [in time], same effort, same periods of work and recovery for her intervals.”

One week before the Olympics were to open in Los Angeles, three days after resuming land training, Slaney set a world 2000-meter record.

“She was more fit then than I had ever seen her,” says Brown. “More fit than at the World Championships.”

Two days before her Olympic 3000, Mary finished a fast 400-meter training run and asked her coach, “What was that, about 59 seconds?” It was a 54.

“Unfortunately, she fell,” Brown starts to say how, then stops because too much has already been said about The Great Fall.

Remember, Mary Slaney did get back on her feet after that to run better than ever. Count on her coming out of the water to do it again.

UPDATE. Mary Slaney made two more Olympic teams and continued competing into her late 30s – while compiling a lifetime count of about two dozen surgeries. At this writing, she still held the American record for 3000 meters (set in 1985), and her 1500 mark had just fallen (after 32 years). She still lives in Eugene while keeping the lowest of profiles here.

Dick Brown invented the AquaJogger, a flotation belt for runners training in water. He and I teamed up on two editions of the book Fitness Running.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]