My Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Medal Life
In a nutshell
The autobiography of Frank Shorter, Olympic marathon champion in Munich 1972, whose victory helped start the running boom in the USA and elsewhere. Reviewed by Luboš Brabec.
Who it's for: Readers interested in the history of the marathon and the running boom.
Marathoner Frank Shorter didn’t have Steve Prefontaine’s charisma and wasn’t a crowd favourite like Bill Rodgers, but he made his mark on American and world athletics in an undeniable way. And he indirectly influenced the lifestyle of millions of people around the world. Shorter’s Olympic victory in Munich in 1972 helped kick-start the running boom in the USA, whose wave then spilled over to other continents. That and much more is the subject of his autobiography My Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Medal Life.
Reading the book, you realise that Shorter doesn’t wear the title “father of the running boom” with any special pride. If anything, he resists it. But note: by running boom we don’t mean seven-hour marathoners, runners in funny costumes or relay fun runs, but the fact that with his unexpected Olympic triumph he gave his sporty compatriots the courage to take part in road races.
Shorter modestly points out that the wave of running enthusiasm in the 1970s also owed a lot to the books of Bill Bowerman and Kenneth Cooper (he’s the one responsible for the 12-minute run you did at school), the founding of Nike, the personality of Steve Prefontaine and visionary organisers such as New York City Marathon founder Fred Lebow. Even without this sporting and cultural dimension, Shorter’s story would have its charm.
He belonged to a generation for whom the standard athletic path ran: cross-country, track, road. He was excellent at all these distances. “I had no chance of fighting for world medals over 10,000 metres, but none of the marathoners back then could run 27:50 for 10K the way I could,” he points out, reminding us that speed is what turns marathon hopefuls into champions.
True to his track roots, Shorter relied on interval training. His classic marathon-phase week included, among other things, two days of reps and one long run, which never exceeded 32 kilometres. “If I’d done more on Sunday, I couldn’t have pushed myself on the track on Tuesday. I wouldn’t have recovered in time,” he explains.
He adapted the traditional hard/easy formula, alternating hard and easier training days, into very hard and very easy. A really tough session and the next day an easy jog, where even hobby runners could keep up with him. “When you finish your last rep in training, you have to be so tired that if someone put a gun to your head and told you to run one more, you’d answer: Just shoot me,” goes another of the champion’s rules.
The chapters about the Munich Olympics are superbly written too. Not only the race itself, when before the start Shorter worked out exactly where he would make his break (as early as the 15th kilometre) and what pace he would run to the finish to make sure it was enough for first place, but also the days before. Above all the events of 5 September 1972, when a Palestinian terrorist commando burst into the Olympic village and took Israeli athletes hostage, who then died in a shoot-out at the airport. The American team lived a hundred metres away, and Shorter, who was sleeping on a mattress on the balcony, was one of the first to realise something was wrong…
Another tragic theme of the memoir is the death of his friend Steve Prefontaine, four years his junior. Shorter was the last person to talk to him. After a party at Geoff Hollister’s, Prefontaine drove him to the house where he was staying; they sat in the car together for long minutes talking, for example about how to continue the fight with the American federation, whose rigidity kept athletes as pure amateurs living in poverty. Then they said goodbye, Prefontaine started the car, and on the way home he was killed.
“He wasn’t drunk, as people said. If he had been, I would never have got in the car with him,” Shorter writes resolutely. And he adds that for a long time he was tormented by thoughts of what would have happened if someone else had driven him home. Or if they’d said goodbye outside the house a few minutes earlier. Would “Pre” still be alive?
Shorter covers the rest of his career in his memoir only in broad strokes. He devotes more space to his role as the first head of USADA, the US Anti-Doping Agency. He got the job as a trained lawyer and a determined opponent of doping. And also as its “victim”: as it turned out in the 1990s, East German distance runner Waldemar Cierpinski, who took away his hope of a second Olympic gold in Montreal in 1976, was part of the state-organised doping system in the GDR.
American Frank Shorter grabs a drink from a table while running through Munich in the 1972 Olympic marathon, which he won.
Shorter was sure of it from the very first moment. He refused to believe that an average steeplechaser and marathoner whose PB a year before the Olympics was 2:20 would suddenly beat the world’s best and improve Abebe Bikila’s Olympic record by more than two minutes. Years later he got proof directly from Germany. Still, he didn’t try to put pressure on the IOC to revise the results. “After all, I had silver. I felt more sorry for Don Kardong. By rights the bronze medal should be his; as it is, he’s fourth,” writes Shorter.
All this would make My Marathon: Reflections on a Gold Medal Life a standard sports memoir. But Shorter decided to open the darkest chamber of his life. A terrifying nightmare that has accompanied his whole life and, in fact, his sporting career too.
As he admitted five years ago in Runner’s World (more HERE) and as he describes in detail in the book, he grew up in a family where domestic violence was an everyday occurrence. His father, whom he almost always refers to as Dr. Sam, was a respected physician. He helped people, was involved in charity and waived fees for poor patients. There was no more respected citizen in the small town. But at home Dr. Sam turned into a monster who tyrannised the family. He beat his wife and tormented her psychologically, whipped his sons and sexually abused his daughters. For many years, without stopping. As a doctor, he knew how to aim his blows so that nothing showed on the outside. Reporting it to the police was out of the question. Who would believe that the popular doctor was a sociopath? Especially in the 1950s and 60s, when it was considered normal for fathers to keep order at home however they saw fit.
Shorter admits he started running to escape this horror at least for a while. And he adds that it may also be because of his childhood experience that he became an excellent marathoner. Because the pain he had to endure when exhausted in a race was nothing compared to the regular beatings. Long after leaving home he was woken by dreams in which his father climbed the stairs and shouted the name of the child he would take out his rage on that day.
For many years he was also haunted by guilt that he couldn’t protect his mother and younger siblings from the tyrant. The family practically fell apart in the 1970s, and as an adult Shorter saw his siblings only rarely. They couldn’t talk about what had gone on at home for years, and talking about anything else seemed pointless. That’s also why he decided to make his raw confession public five years ago and to describe it in more detail now. It was therapy for him and for his siblings. And he’s also trying to help other victims of domestic violence.
In my eyes, this remarkable book is let down only by an unusual number of factual errors, some of which even an attentive Czech reader will spot. Surprising from a publisher that also puts out Runner’s World and Running Times. A sad reflection on the co-author and editor, who let sentences like this go to print: “Lasse Viren was trying to emulate his compatriot Paavo Nurmi, who won gold medals in the 5 km, 10 km and marathon at the 1948 Olympics.”
But if you can rise above that, read Shorter’s memoir. It’s worth it.
This review was written by Luboš Brabec. Luboš is a Czech sports journalist and also the author of three running books. I consider his first book, Maraton a jiné pošetilosti (The Marathon and Other Follies), one of the best I’ve read about running. These days I’m more motivated by the perspective of an “ageing” runner and his desire to take on one more marathon with dignity. I’m looking for the recipe in his book Ještě jeden maraton (One More Marathon). And if I manage all that, maybe I’ll get to run a race with Daniel Orálek. Thanks to the book Můj dlouhý běh (My Long Run) I know almost everything about him. If that’s not enough and you’re a sports fan, especially of the NHL or the German Bundesliga, follow Luboš on Twitter.
