Billy Mills

(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 September 1990.)

EYES ON THE PRIZE. For a glimpse of what it means to win an Olympic gold medal and what that prize means to its winner, dial a certain number in the Sacramento area code. Someone there will answer, “10K Gold.”

That’s the office of Billy Mills, the only American gold medalist at 10,000 meters. His business career now focuses as sharply on that one accomplishment as his running career did on accomplishing it.

“Focus” was and is a big word to Mills. He used it often in our recent phone conversation about his 1964 race.

Mills said he had no more talent than anyone else in the field. He hadn’t won any of his four previous 10,000s.

He hadn’t trained harder than anyone else in the field. Injuries had wiped out “40 percent of my workouts” in the Olympic year.

Mills’s strength was his ability to focus on a single goal. He never let distractions and disappointments blur his vision.

“Even though I was hardly running with the Games two years away,” said Mills, “I was formulating a plan. I wrote in my workout book in 1962, ‘Gold Medal, 10,000-meter run.’ I began training in January 1963 with that goal in mind.”

He told himself, “I truly am a great distance runner. God has given me the ability. The rest is up to me. Believe, believe, believe!”

His belief was tested often in 1964. During an indoor three-mile race that January, Mills was ordered to drop out after the leader lapped him. When Billy refused, an official shouted, “You’re an embarrassment.”

Next problem: “I wanted to average 100-mile weeks. This was hard to do with shin splints interfering, so I extended my ‘weeks’ to 10 days. I added up the best seven days from those 10. This way I could keep my mileage up and stay on track mentally while still getting the recovery days I needed.”

Mills placed second to Gerry Lindgren in the Trials 10,000. Billy ran 29:10 and thought he could have gone at more than a second faster for each lap. He wrote then in his logbook, “Gold medal, 10,000-meter run. Time, 28:25.”

Ron Clarke of Australia held the world 10,000 record at the time, which made him the Olympic favorite. Every day in training, Mills visualized outkicking Clarke on the last lap at the Games.

“Then I realized that Clarke might not be the only man there with a lap to go. So I added a mystery man to my mental scenario, and worked on kicking past him, whoever he might be.”

Mills wrote before the race, “My speed is there. Just stay with the leaders for 5½ miles, and then the race begins. Believe, believe, believe!”

During the race Mills almost dropped off the pace a couple of times. “But I hung in there. The reason I didn’t quit was that long-term focus on this day, this hour, these minutes and seconds.”

The last lap went almost exactly as he had rehearsed it. “I caught Clarke and the ‘mystery man,’ Mohamed Gammoudi, just as I’d practiced doing it.”

Mills had focused on winning in 28:25. He won in 28:24.4.

“From this race,” he said later, “I learned about the height of competition. It wasn’t to beat Clarke or Gammoudi, but to reach within the depths of my capabilities and compete against myself to the greatest extent possible.

“That was where my real focus lay. I focused first on Billy Mills and maximizing Billy’s own capabilities.”

UPDATE. Long after Billy Mills’s race of a lifetime, I shared a stage with him. He said then, “I have fulfilled my last track goal. I was in Tokyo, and our guide asked me if there was anywhere I wanted to visit. Naturally the first place that came to mind was National Stadium [scene of the 1964 Olympics].

“My one regret was that I never got to take a victory lap at the Games. We’d lapped some runners twice, and by the time they finished I had been hustled away for interviews.”

He finally ran that bonus lap, alone and ever so slowly, to savor these long-delayed moments. Only his wife Pat was watching, from the same seat she had occupied before.

“As I ran,” Billy recalled, “I could hear 75,000 people cheering. I saw the spot where Ron Clarke accidentally bumped me into the third lane… where I made my move… where I thought, ‘I can win!’… where I realized, ‘I won!’

“Then I finished and heard just one person clapping. It was Pat. I burst into tears and walked away so she wouldn’t see me.” She surely shared his tears, as she had shared his triumph and where it had taken them ever since.

[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.]