Thursday, January 14, 2016

Buddy Edelen

(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 January 1992.)

BUDDY’S RECORD. Leonard “Buddy” Edelen is a figure from history. But few of us who run now were running when he ran his best, and little was known about him even then.

Now we can read his full story. Lawyer-writer Frank Murphy has published Edelen’s biography titled A Cold Clear Day.

Edelen didn’t have a chance to claim fame and wealth on the American roads. Little was happening there in the early 1960s.

After failing badly in the 1960 Olympic Trials 10,000, Edelen fled to Europe. He took a low-paying job teaching school and never earned more than $500 for a race. Coach Fred Wilt sent him training advice from Indiana.

Buddy became a marathoner in 1962. He went the distance four times in the last half of that year and in the final race set an American record of 2:18:57.

No one in the world had yet broken 2:15, and Edelen didn’t look like he would be the first when he lined up for England’s Polytechnic Marathon on June 15th, 1963. He’d won his big race of the spring, breaking Abebe Bikila’s course record at Athens four weeks earlier.

“Buddy had no particular plan for this marathon,” writes Frank Murphy of the British race. “He had trained well, and that gave reason for hope, even surprise. If it came, that would be good. But if it did not, it would be no worry.”

The mix was perfect: a well-trained, relaxed runner in a great field on a fast course. The “Poly” was then one of the world’s top four marathons (along with Boston; Fukuoka, Japan, and Kosice, Czechoslovakia). The 1963 field included future sub-2:10 man Ron Hill.

Today the English course would as debatable as New York’s was when Salazar ran an uncredited “record” there in 1981. Murphy describes the point-to-point route from Windsor Castle to Chiswick as “flat to gently downhill, with no significant [up]hills to worry a runner.”

In 1963 a tailwind gave some help at the Poly. But temperatures in the 70s cancelled much of that benefit.

Edelen ran the fastest time in history, 2:14:28. Then he had to weather months of rumors that the course was short. A remeasurement finally put the shortage at 32 yards, but he’d added nearly twice that amount by taking a wrong turn.

He rolled on toward the Olympics with a 2:15:10 at Kosice that fall and a 20-minute victory at the scorchingly hot 1964 U.S. Trials. He then resumed hard work within after week of the Trials.

In that first workout Edelen felt, in Murphy’s words, “the first sign of the injury every athlete fears. It was the injury from which he would not recover.”

Sciatica hobbled him at the Tokyo Olympics, where he placed sixth. His greatest marathon may have been his last, when in 1965 he came within six seconds of his best time despite complaining to his diary that “the sciatica was sheer hell the last six miles.”

Buddy Edelen went on to teach at Adams State College and then to live in Tulsa. At 54 he won’t trust his legs to race, but they still let him run.

UPDATE. Edelen died in 1997 of cancer at age 59. He had been the first American-born man in 38 years to run world’s fastest marathon, and none has done it since. (Alberto Salazar and Khalid Khannouchi were both naturalized citizens.)

A golden age for U.S. marathon men dawned with Edelen and lasted another two decades. In 1968 Amby Burfoot became the first American in 11 years to win at Boston. In 1972 Frank Shorter won this country’s first Olympic gold medal in 64 years – and last to date.

Salazar and Bill Rodgers combined for 12 Boston and New York City victories between 1976 and 1982. The last time an American male had won either race since Greg Meyer’s Boston until Meb Keflezighi broke the 31-year drought there in 2014.


[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 Miles to Go. 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.]

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