Mihaly Igloi

(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 February 1998.)

IGLOI’S BOYS. If you think U.S. distance runners lag behind the best in the world now, you should have seen it in the 1950s. Horace Ashenfelter was the golden exception, winning the Melbourne Olympic steeplechase.

Otherwise the Americans ran the long races as expected, which was poorly. None of the 1500 runners reached the final, the highest 5000 or 10,000 finish was 18^th, and no marathoner placed better than 20^th.

In 1956 America’s first sub-four-minute mile was still two years away. U.S. records in the 5K and 10K were minor-league by world standards.

Eastern Europeans – Czechs, Soviets, Hungarians – were the “Africans” of their time. Mihaly Igloi-coached runners in Hungary were setting many of the records.

Igloi, who died recently at age 89, was an unlikely candidate to lead the U.S. out of the distance-running wilderness. He never was completely understood or widely imitated here, so his contribution was never fully appreciated.

He might never have come here if political and military battling hadn’t driven him out of Hungary shortly after the Melbourne Olympics. He came to America looking for personal freedom, not athletic opportunity. There was little of the latter here, where Igloi’s limited English barred him from traditional coaching jobs in high schools and colleges.

The coach first set up training camp in the San Francisco Bay Area, attracting a small band of athletes. They later moved with him to Los Angeles.

Igloi showed how quickly an inspired coach and a few runners can reverse a country’s fortunes. This had happened by the early 1960s.

The Igloi group included Max Truex, Jim Beatty and Bob Schul. Truex, a dropout in the 10,000 in the 1956 Olympics, placed sixth at Rome while hugely improving the American record. In 1962 Beatty ran the world’s first sub-four-minute mile indoors. And of course in 1964 Schul became America’s first – and still only – Olympic 5000 winner.

Igloi used an interval-based training system, in complex mixtures of distances and paces that only he (and perhaps his protégé Laszlo Tabori) understood. Nearly all the training was on the track, with the coach always watching.

This approach obviously worked well for the few runners lucky enough to join him  – and to tolerate the intensity and uncertainty of his program. Igloi’s boys set 49 world records.

But the mysterious method was almost inseparable from the man, who said little about it publicly and wrote even less. He had to be there to make it work, and it didn’t transfer well to other coaches or to athletes training on their own.

Timing also worked against Igloi. His coaching contemporary was Arthur Lydiard, whose runners won twice at the 1960 Olympics and whose ways were the opposite of Igloi’s.

The New Zealander called for lots of running away from the track – and out of the coach’s sight. This system appealed more to runners than camping at the track for hours each day.

Lydiard, who never met a microphone or reporter he didn’t like, had a gift for promotion that Igloi never tried to develop. Lydiard explained himself often and well, and his methods caught on worldwide.

        

Igloi’s didn’t. So he and his system, and his success, are little remembered now –  except by the people who ran for him.

One is Orville Atkins, a marathoner. Orville was an Igloi boy in the mid-1960s, and he later wrote, “Coach Igloi gave me his time and patience only because I asked for it. I respect him and thank him. I was lucky to work and learn under a man who was strong willed, stubborn and a genius to boot.”

UPDATE. Laszlo Tabori, third to break the 4:00 mile barrier, carried on the Igloi legacy by coaching for decades of club and college coaching in California. His best-known runner was Jacqueline Hansen, first woman to break both 2:45 and 2:40 in the marathon. She wrote fondly of her coach in the book A Long Time Coming.

[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.]