The Front Runner

of little European cars. We were so bathed in fumes that I wondered what was happening to my runners' lungs. In Europe in summer, everybody is migrating somewhere else. The Germans go to Spain, and the Spanish go to Germany. The Swedes go to France, and the French go to Sweden. The main roads are lined with litter, and the smell of shit hangs over the roadside grass and bushes, in the hot air. We learned fast, and kept mostly to the byroads. There it was cleaner, the countryside less spoiled, the towns less crowded. With Jacques' French and Vince's limping Italian, we had few language problems.
    The three of them taught me the sensuous joys of traveling. I had been on European tours with athletes before, but always as the ill-at-ease Yankee yearning for apple pie. They taught me how to fall in with people, how to react viscerally to every sight and sound. We picked up hitch-hikers, often other athletes going to meets.
    We got drunk on the air and silence of the northern forests. We sniffed the flowers in the flower market of Brussels, though we were too broke to buy any. We ran very early in the morning in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, and saw the whores going home to call it a night. In Paris the three of them marched me into a tattoo parlor and made me get a lion put on my right shoulder. "You have to join the club," they said. In the Rhine valley, we filched ripening grapes from the roadside vineyards.
    I have one haunting memory of stopping somewhere on the plains of northern France, at Billy's request. We parked on the side of the road in the silence, while he went along a wheatfield picking a fistful of the little red poppies that grow wild in Europe.
    When he put them in my hand, they were already wilting. "The Leo flower," he said.
    "I hope I stay up better than that," I said. But we put them in a paper cup of water, and propped them between two suitcases, where they flopped and shortly died
    At night we settled in some cheap hotel in a small
    town. Hotels were one small luxury I insisted on—the boys had to get proper rest to do international-class running. No flopping somewhere on the ground in sleeping bags, or sleeping in the car. A runner can go short of sleep one night, but not two nights, or his performance suffers.
    We ate dinner in small restaurants or cafes, and other meals out of grocery stores. That was another area where I didn't skimp—they had to eat right. Luckily one can eat very well in places like that in Europe (though sometimes I had to holler if grease was put in the food—neither Vince nor Billy could tolerate grease in their systems).
    Sometimes we ate, talked, laughed with other athletes if we had them along. But usually we ate alone. By ten we were usually in bed. Billy and I could sometimes hear the mattress squeaking next door as Vince and Jacques made love, and no doubt they could hear our mattress.
    A couple of times on the road, we had to share one large room with two beds. Those were nights that we did without. Vince and I were shameless enough for it, but neither Billy nor Jacques would have tolerated it.
    But, relaxed as we were, we didn't forget for a moment why we were over there.
    The boys were scrupulous about training, working out wherever they could scrounge a track or a city park. I can still see Billy pacing off a quarter-mile along a lonely country road in Belgium, so that he could do his ten quarters for the day. We made sure we showed up for meets in plenty of time to settle in, case the scene. In between, we talked tirelessly, analyzing their performances and their European opponents, some of whom they might be meeting in Montreal. I could see them picking up the rough European track tactics, and knew the trip would not be wasted.
    We were careful about the water, sticking to bottled stuff, but we all got tourist diarrhea anyway Billy got it so bad in Oslo that, after the 10,000 meter, he ran straight off the track to the bathroom.
    We showed up at the meets travel-stained, but rested and ready to kill. The officials looked at me and the
    expressions in their eyes said: This is the coach? A couple of times I was taken for an uninvited runner. While I wasn't dressed exactly like a hippie, I did wear faded stevepipe jeans, hiking boots and a lumberjack shirt, and had let my hair grow a shade—it was now maybe two inches long. But when they saw my kids run, they stopped smiling. They knew I was dangerous.
    After the meet, there was the pleasant socializing. The