Alberto Salazar

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

SALAZAR’S SECOND LIFE. He stood behind me in the checkout line, waiting to pay for lawn-care tools. I now see Alberto Salazar more often in local stores than at races, and I like him more now than when he was the hottest runner around.

I didn’t dislike him before, just never knew him in his first life. Impressive as his running was, I found his tough-guy exterior intimidating and never tried to pierce it.

Age, marriage, fatherhood and misfortune have matured Alberto. The past four years of troubled running have also softened him in ways that now make checkout line small-talk pleasant.

I asked about his yard work. “What else do I have to do but sit around and worry about my health?” he said.

He didn’t answer bitterly but with a laugh, which is a good sign. Salazar hasn’t long been able to joke about his medical woes, which have been unending since 1983 (bronchitis, thyroid deficiency, hamstring surgery, foot injury, bad back).

Soon after we talked, he bought half-interest in a Eugene restaurant. He hasn’t decided to quit running but has started to prepare for life after racing, whenever that might start.

Salazar has put a time limit on himself: one more year of trying to beat these chronic injuries and illnesses. If he can’t do it by then, he’ll aim his legendary drive in other directions.

“I want to resolve it, one way or another,” he tells Ron Bellamy of the Eugene Register-Guard. “Psychologically the injuries are a lot of stress, and I’m not fun to live with at those times. It’s not fair to my wife and kids to put them through that. I don’t want to be like a punch-drunk old fighter who doesn’t know when to quit.”

Salazar could quit on top right now. Forget what he hasn’t done since 1983 (won a marathon, or even run one in more than three years). He’s still the American record-holder, the only U.S runner to break 2:09 twice and the last one to go under 2:10.

Alberto isn’t yet looking for a stopping place. The trait that made him great, his ability to push through the tough races, hasn’t left him. He still wants very much to see his career through to a more satisfying end than this.

If he needs a role model in this final push, he can look back at Ron Clarke. The Australian was the “Salazar” of the 1960s – a man who didn’t simply race to win on a given day but tried to run faster than anyone, anywhere ever had.

In his autobiography, The Unforgiving Minute, Clarke called success and failure “the twin impostors.” Too much success, he wrote, is not as good as it might seem because it makes a runner reluctant to change the habits that made him successful. Failure is not as bad as it may first appear if it drives the runner to correct his mistakes.

Clarke succeeded early, then failed badly and retired young. Later, after examining the reasons for his failure, he took a new course on which he became the most prolific record-setter of the past 25 years.

Alberto Salazar’s early success in the marathon was something of an impostor, as was his series of failures over the past few years. Nothing that happened to him was as good or as bad as it seemed at first.

Salazar has said that youth made him susceptible to the pressures of being the world’s top marathoner at 23. “I was never ready for it all. I had too much success, too soon. I didn’t know how to react to it all. I was just a kid.”

He has done considerable growing up in the meantime. He has learned to deal with the sometimes competing demands of running, business, media and family.

Age is still his ally. If he can recover and stay healthy, his talents have more years to ripen into even better results than he has produced so far. He’s still only 29, and distance runners often improve well into their 30s.

Carlos Lopes gives Salazar hope, for reasons beyond Lopes’s age as Olympic Marathon winner (37) and world record-breaker (38). Lopes also had two careers.

In the first he won the World Cross-Country title and an Olympic 10,000 medal in 1976. He then struggled through his own years of injuries, only to come back better than ever.

Salazar hopes he still stands between two careers. “I know I’ve had my misfortunes,” he says, “but they’ve made me better. I’ve learned from my mistakes.”

Most of all he has gained a new sense of perspective: “Running has been frustrating. But I always temper that by saying everything else is great. I always say, ‘Thank you, God, if this is the worst testing I ever go through.’ ”

UPDATE. Alberto Salazar’s PRs were permanent by the time this piece appeared. He never made another Olympic team after 1984. The U.S. marathon best, which he’d held for a dozen years, finally fell in 1994 (to Bob Kempainen).

Alberto’s final victory came that same year in most surprising fashion. He won the world’s leading ultramarathon, the 90-kilometer Comrades race in South Africa.

By then he had moved his family to Portland and left the restaurant business to work for Nike. This led eventually to coaching the Nike Oregon Project.

For all Alberto did as an athlete, he has achieved much more as a coach. The high point (so far, anyway) came when his runners Mo Farah and Galen Rupp placed 1-2 in the London Olympic 10,000.

[Hundreds of previous articles, dating back to 1998, can be found at joehenderson.com/archive/. 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 Journal, 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.]