The Front Runner

dimethyl sulphoxide, that had been successful in reducing the pain and inflammation of tendinitis, and started dosing him with it.
    Despite all I'd heard of Vince's temper on the track, he was very docile with me. I just told him what I thought he should do, and he did it, and I checked in on him every other day. Like Jacques, he was a good student, and he went right to work. He was also cheerfully promiscuous—while he didn't sleep around much, because he was too busy, he would lay anything that interested him, even girls. Jacques put up with this stoically.
    Vince hadn't been at Prescott a week before he tried to lay me. "How about it, Mr. Brown?"
    Had this been Denny Falks six years ago, I would have jumped right out the window. This time I took it very casually.
    "Listen, you little nymphomaniac," I said, "you're a very attractive kid. But I have a rule about not going to bed with my runners, and I never break it. It's the only way I can keep a job and earn a living. You understand?"
    "Shit," he said, disappointed. "I really wanted to find out what you're like. We heard so many stories."
    "Stories?" I said.
    "John Sive told us you were one of the heaviest studs in New York."
    "Tell the others about my rule too, so they don't get any ideas," I said crisply.
    Billy Sive had three problems. Shortly he had me tearing my hair out.
    His first and biggest problem was that he always overdid. He was the most strongly motivated and hardest-working runner that I had ever known, but he had no common sense at all. It was obvious to me that if I didn't keep a tight rein on him, he would train himself and race himself to death.
    Second, he was a front-runner.
    You have two kinds of runners: kickers and front-runners. Vince and Jacques were both kickers. The kicker likes to dawdle in the rear of the pack, letting
    the others carry the burden of setting the pace. He saves himself for a last-lap sprint to the front. But the front-runner goes out in front right away, and tries to stay there and burn off the rest of the field. If he goes out too slow or makes a tactical mistake, he sets himself up for the kicker's killing rush. Many a front-runner has given a world record to a kicker.
    Later on, the sports magazines were always comparing Billy to the great Australian front-runner, Ron Clarke. As a former trackwriter, I was always irritated by these facile comparisons. If I were to compare Billy to anybody, it would be to Emiel Puttemans.
    Billy and Ron Clarke were different in two ways.
    First, Clarke was a front-runner on principle. He thought it was immoral to noodle along in the rear. Billy was a front-runner because, simply, it panicked him out of his mind to run in the pack. "I choke back there," he told me, "with all those elbows and feet. I have to have open space in front of me. I have to run free." For him, a race usually resolved itself into an animal struggle to keep that freedom. But he still didn't have the strength, or the speed, or the grasp of tactics, or the strong finish, to burn off the biggest kickers. My job would be to give him what he lacked, if I could.
    Second, Clarke was a nervous uncompetitive guy who often psyched himself out before big races. Billy never had this problem. He was at his coolest in a big race, and he was savagely competitive. He would, as I said, kill himself to stay in front. His desperate need to be himself, and to prove that he had some worth as a man and as a human being, showed very movingly on the track.
    Billy's third problem was that he was stubborn. In the first months, I had battle after battle with him. He felt he needed my direction, yet—for reasons that I'll go into shortly—he also felt he had to put me down.
    Our first battle was about mileage. This was ironic: Billy came to me hoping I would tell him what he was doing wrong. When I told him, he refused to listen.
    At Oregon, he had lived in a euphoria of testing himself, and had been stacking up close to 200 miles a week. Lindquist, who is very big on volume training,
    had encouraged this. I wondered if Billy's lack of improvement had been due to simple overload. His history of cramps and stress fractures was a dead giveaway. He was calcium deficient, but magnesium deficiency can also cause cramps—magnesium regulates the motor impulses to the muscles, and high mileage really drains the runner's system of this crucial electrolyte. Beyond that, I think that Billy was simply unable to handle such high mileage, and the