Distant Heroes
An Athlete's Search for a Graceful Exit.
By Joan Nesbit
As featured in the Web Only issue of Running Times Magazine
And so it begins. How does one exit the athletic stage gracefully? I went to Indianapolis, Indiana to search for clues in the USA Track & Field archives at Butler University. I am researching and interviewing suspects and survivors. But what is the crime? It’s definitely a crime of passion; a crime of those who, like Shakespeare’s Othello, "love not wisely but too well." If you love track & field with your whole soul, how do you say good-bye? How do you quit? How do you move on after that last race?Jack Bacheler
Jack Bacheler is my first interview. Known in running circles for helping to start the world-famous Florida Track Club (which may have spawned the distance running boom in America), his stats include a 9th place finish in the 1972 Olympic Games marathon, a 5000m finalist in the 1968 Olympics, and a National Champion in the 10,000m. His most famous friend and teammate is Frank Shorter. The two of them, so the story goes, once tried to out-mileage each other by sneaking out for a 3rd work-out in 24 hours; they caught each other running at midnight! Shorter later said of his decision to move to Florida to train with Bacheler, "It became a matter of singular concentration, discipline, monomania. I had to zero in on one thing; I had to make it so nothing else mattered. I just made up my mind to work and see how good I could be. I didn’t want to quit and say for the rest of my life, `Well, maybe I could have been.’" (Sports Illustrated interview, July 5, 1976).
I had heard of Bacheler’s work ethic. Athletes that he coached annihilated their opponents through sheer toughness. I wanted to ask this former monomaniac how he came to terms with being just another runner after having been one of the best in the world. So, I asked him to lunch.
We made an unlikely pair, as Bacheler, a gangly 6’6" near-giant of a man (yet quiet and unassuming) and shrimpy me, 5’ 1," loquacious and high-strung, sat down over Greek salads and iced tea at NC State’s local pizza joint. I started too soon—too abruptly—firing questions between stabs of my fork: "When did you realize you had talent? Why did you choose Florida, of all places, to run post-collegiately? What was it like coaching yourself? Did you coach Frank Shorter? Etc." He answered patiently, dutifully, then waited for me to slow down, catch my breath, and look him in the eye. This was a story to be taken in lingering sips, like a good Merlot, not downed in a few over-eager gulps.
Was it sadness I saw when I looked up? Heartbreak? Grief, even? Surely not, after all these years. "So tell me," I blurted, untrained in any methods of subtlety, "How do you move on in life after being a great athlete?"
"You don’t."
Now, finally, I was silent. You don’t. No more banana peppers to crunch, no more unpitted olives to gnaw on. I picked up a package of Saltines and stared down hard at my plastic task of unwrapping.
"But I thought you were going to teach me how to transition to the next phase of my life," I begged.
"I never did," Jack answered. "It’s as if someone accidentally died and I never got the chance to say what I wanted to say . . . to say good-bye."
"What happened?" I was ready to listen.
"Well, in 1968 I made the Olympic team in the 5k and I went on to make the finals in the games, feeling quite easy in the qualifying rounds. Then, the next day I got gastro-enteritis and was VERY sick and couldn’t run the final."
I thought of an article I’d read about the ‘68 games: "The trouble with Mexico City, of course, is that it does not just sock it to you in the lungs, it goes for the stomach too. The incidence of infection among visitors is so great that ‘You got it yet?’ is a more common greeting than, ‘How you doing?’" (S.I.; Oct 28, 1968).
"Well, what happened in 1972?" I asked, hopeful for a much-deserved happy ending to this story.
"I ran the marathon and my feet swelled up but my shoes didn’t. I lost all my toenails but one. I finished 9th with four people passing me in the last part of the race."
That was the marathon where the USA went 1, 4, 9. I wondered, was Bacheler haunted by Shorter’s gold medal? He didn’t strike me as a jealous man. In fact, he and Shorter had intentionally TIED in races in the past.
Said Shorter, "Maybe part of our tying is sort of an attempt to thumb our noses a bit at the attitude that the whole basic idea is to trample everyone underfoot, to put on your spikes and run them over, literally." (Runner’s World, 1972). So, it wasn’t jealousy. What then?
Thirty years, a marriage, two kids, a fine career as a professor of entomology, the coach of several national class athletes had all passed, yet Bacheler says of his running, "It still hurts."
Ouch. I found myself wanting to offer Jack some sort of ritual or burial to finally grieve the perceived loss in his life, like the Lakota who cut their hair after a loved-one dies or like my friend who burned all his bedroom furniture after divorcing.
At the end of the interview, Jack lent me a most prized possession: his runner’s log. I felt it’s weight, both physically and symbolically, and asked, "Are you sure you want to part with this?" In it contained ten years worth of work-outs, races, secrets, and memories.
"I trust you," he said.