Gerry Lindgren

(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 January 1999.)

FAME RECLAIMED. Gerry Lindgren was a hero of my youth. I was young then, and he was even younger.

At 18 he wasn’t just the best ever for his age. This kid from Spokane with pixyish size and a squeaky voice looked and sounded like a high school freshman. Yet he was one of the world’s best distance runners, period.

Americans liked his prospects of winning a 10,000 medal, maybe even gold, at the 1964 Olympics. And why not? Gerry had beaten the mighty Soviet adult runners that summer, and he’d won the U.S. Trials.

He didn’t win at Tokyo, didn’t come close on Billy Mills’s golden day. We’ll never know how Gerry might have done if not racing on a sprained ankle.

We do know that he tied Mills for the world six-mile record the next year, at age 19. At Washington State, Gerry set an NCAA record for titles won.

Injuries began catching up with him in his early 20s, and he never made another Olympic team. Then adult life caught up with him.

Details are vague, and rumors are best left buried. It’s enough to say that he disappeared from home, family and business in the 1980s.

When spotted running in Honolulu, he denied being – or knowing – this person called Lindgren. He now lived by the name Young.

Supported by new friends in Hawaiian running, he eventually reclaimed his own name, and along with it some of the fame that is rightfully his. He again runs races as Gerry Lindgren and now works as a free-lance coach in the Islands.

Much as I’d admired him early, then rooted for his comeback later, I had never met Gerry. I’d seen him run only twice.

Now I was in Honolulu for a talk at NikeTown. Keala Peters of Nike arranged a dinner the night before.

“This started as an intimate gathering, but it keeps growing,” she said. “We now have 15 coming.”

She ran through the guest list. I knew about half of these people, and most of the others by name. They were a mix of top runners, coaches, writers and officials.

One name in particular grabbed my interest: Gerry Lindgren. It happened that I sat next to him at dinner.

In his 50s he retains some of the look that he had at 18. The years in hiding didn’t speed up his aging. His hair is its original color, and his lines are few. His voice is still boyish, and his sense of humor impish.

This is the guy who once told writer Mike Tymn (who sat on my other side) that he still had “a four-minute-mile mind, but nine-minute legs.” Well, not quite. He’d run his latest 10K in 36 minutes.

Gerry ordered a vegetarian meal. When the log-sized burrito arrived, he asked the waiter, “Did someone put a live chicken in here?”

As he worked through the burrito, I asked how he thought he might have done in the long-ago Olympics if not for the ankle sprain. “Some people built me up as a possible medalist. But I was just a kid who didn’t really know what he was doing.”

The years since then have taught him a lot.

UPDATE. Forty years after his Olympic season, Gerry Lindgren is finally a USATF Hall of Famer. His induction came in Portland, where he also watched the Nike Team Nationals cross-country races for high schoolers. No one that age has topped the running he did in 1964.

Later he wrote Gerry Lindgren’s Book of Running. It’s quirky, like the author who in his late 60s still lives/runs/coaches in Hawaii.

[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.]