Two hundred mile beyond McPhee and its Games, the Trans-America had settled back into a daily routine of forty- to fifty-mile stages, usually divided into morning and afternoon sections, as they made their way towards Colorado. Muller and Stock had wiped out the advantage that Doc and his group had established at Las Vegas, and again led the field, if only narrowly. Other runners such as the Williams’ All-Americans’ hope, Capaldi, the Australian, “Digger” Mullins, and the Jap, Son, had begun to feature in the top ten at the end of each stage, and were now in the top twenty on aggregate time.
The McPhee Highland Games provided a welcome respite for journalists hard-pressed for copy, and pushed the Trans-America into the columns of the weeklies for the first time. But the impact of Carl Liebnitz’s article did not hit the Trans-America until two days after its publication, when it came into the hands of Flanagan’s medical director, Maurice Falconer.
By this time, the Trans-America lay just short of the Utah-Colorado border, near Green River, having crossed forty miles of steep mountains by Richfield and Salina. The article read:
“There will be those that will die.” Those were the words of leading physiologist Dr Myron Bernstein, Professor of Physiology at the University of Stanford. Dr Bernstein was commenting on reports of C. C. Flanagan’s Trans-America race, now sweating its way towards the Utah-Colorado border.
Dr Bernstein’s prediction is based on the massive daily calorific requirements of Flanagan’s Bunion Derby runners. The Stanford physiologist estimates that the running itself consumes about 5,000 calories a day, and added to this is another 1,000-2,000 calories a day for normal basic body functions. Professor Bernstein sees no way in which the runners can consume the necessary 6,000-7,000 calories a day to enable them to avoid cannibalizing their own bodies. “These men,” he said, “are literally eating themselves up. First, they will burn up all available body fat, then they will start to consume muscle. Mr Flanagan’s men are heading in only one direction – into hospital.”
I put it to Professor Bernstein that the runners might have enough excess fat and muscle to burn up, but the professor was emphatic. “These men are distance runners. Double their height and you have their weight in pounds. They carry only about 5% fat, in comparison with the normal 20% you and I carry around. And remember that these are hard times and many of them may already be inside the 5%, in which case they are undoubtedly on the brink of disaster.”
When I put this to the race organizer C. C. Flanagan, his response was immediate. “Scientists said the bee couldn’t fly – but it did. They said no man could run a mile in inside 4.10, but it has been done, and mark my words, one day some college boy will put up two fingers to the scientists and run it in four minutes fiat. We’re talking about men, not machines.”
So we have the classic case of the expert versus the dreamers, our dreamers in this case being the thousand-odd men and one woman plodding East across the desert beyond Las Vegas. As Mr Flanagan says, men are not machines, for there is a ghost in these machines that may make all scientific discussion about calorific input and output not worth the paper either the experts or me (for that matter) write upon.
It was Dr Maurice Falconer who spoke first, brandishing Liebnitz’s article as he pushed open the Trans-America caravan door.
“Just what does this mean, Flanagan?” he shouted. “Who the hell runs the medical department here, you or me?”
Flanagan did not respond, but pulled out the cork on a bottle of whiskey with his teeth and poured out a large glass, pushing it along his desk towards Falconer.
“Have a snort, Maurice,” he said, and sank on to his rocking-chair.
Falconer frowned and snatched the glass from the desk and gulped it back. Flanagan poured him another drink, gave himself one, then replaced the cork in the bottle.
“Now, what’s the big problem, Maurice?”
Falconer gulped the first half of the fresh glass and sat back, visibly more controlled.
“You’ve seen this article?” he said, putting it down on the desk on his left.
“Naturally.”
“Then why didn’t you refer Liebnitz to me?” said Falconer.
Flanagan glanced across the caravan at Willard Clay.
“Willard, when did Carl Liebnitz come to me with Bernstein’s statement?”
“First day, at Flanaganville, at the end of the first stage,” replied Willard.
“And where was Dr Falconer at the time?”
“Up to his neck in cripples back in the medical tent.”
“So what was I to do?” said Flanagan, raising his arms.
“There was no way I could interrupt you, was there?”
“No,” admitted Falconer grudgingly.
“More to the point,” said Flanagan. “Is this guy Bernstein right?”
Falconer took another pull at his drink. “In strict theory, yes,” he said. “These runners should be burning up about seven thousand calories a day. So they need that number of calories simply to maintain their body weight.”
“But in practice?” pursued Flanagan.
“In practice, who the hell knows?” growled Falconer, drawing a damp white handkerchief across his brow and pushing back a mane of white hair. “Payson Weston walked across the USA about fifty years ago and he was only a little runt. Okay, so he lost some weight, but it didn’t kill him. He sure didn’t vanish into thin air in the middle of the Rockies.”
“So what’s your opinion of the physical condition of our men?” asked Flanagan.
Falconer shrugged. “About a quarter of them should never have been within a thousand miles of this race,” he replied. “Even at their fittest they could never have made it, and after two years on the breadline . . . well, most of that bunch are out of the race anyway. Another quarter are fit men, not athletes perhaps, and in better times they might have made it, but only a handful should even get as far as Nebraska. The third quarter are low-calibre athletes in the conventional long distances, or men from other sports who have licked themselves in shape especially for the Trans-America. Some of them will make it.”
Falconer closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them. “The final twenty-five per cent, men like Cole and Eskola, are fine long-distance athletes, but even for them the Trans-America is a gamble: no one since Weston has ever covered such distances daily and even then it wasn’t in a race.”
“So how many do you reckon will make it to New York, Maurice?” Flanagan went on.
Dr Falconer wrinkled his nose.
“My guess is between four and five hundred,” he said. “But remember, we’re dealing with human beings, and there’s three hundred and sixty thousand dollars at stake. For many of these men that’s the difference between life and death, so there’s no real way of knowing how many will finish.”
“So, this smart-ass Bernstein is just pissing in the wind?” said Flanagan.
“Perhaps; but we’ve still got to keep up the calories. Myself, I think that milk may be the answer to the problem. It’s virtually a complete food and very high in calories. So we’ll have to get iced milk in daily.”
Flanagan looked at Willard, who nodded.
Falconer loosened his collar and sighed. “Bernstein’s a nutritional specialist and he’s looking in a narrow mirror. The real problems for these men lie in three places. The first is in the ability of their muscles and tendons to take the daily pounding. So the answer to this race may lie in a few millimetres of Achilles tendon rather than in calorific intake.”
The medic picked up his glass. “Got any ice?” he said before continuing. Willard placed two cubes in his glass. “The second is in the various body systems. By this I mean general health, things like stomach aches, throat infections, the normal run-of-the-mill ailments that most men work through every day without giving them much thought.”
Flanagan nodded.
“The problem is that the athlete is a living contradiction, for he’s both tough and delicate. Sure, he can take hours of pain and discomfort that the ordinary man couldn’t handle for five minutes. But the other side of the coin is that trivial complaints that Mr Joe Average would shrug off and ignore are disasters to a highly-tuned athlete. What’s a molehill to the average guy is a mountain to him. So it’s essential that the general health of the runner is good.”
“And the third?” asked Flanagan.
“The third place is in the mind.” Falconer tapped his forehead. “This is where the daily battles will be lost and won. The Chinese have a saying, ‘A tiger’s picture is outside, a man’s picture is inside.’ The Trans-American’s picture is inside, and that’s a picture we haven’t seen completely yet.”
“So what should we do about Bernstein?”
“Nothing,” said Falconer, standing up and placing his empty glass on the table. “Carl Liebnitz has his story and he’ll soon be on to something else for his next piece. Journalists are sprinters, not marathon men. If our friend Bernstein were really interested he’d be down here like a shot with a team of experts – Jesus, this race is a ready-made thesis for a man like him. No, I don’t think we shall hear much more from Professor Bernstein.”
He opened the caravan door and made to leave.
“Sorry I blasted off at you like that,” he said, turning. “It’s been a hard day.”
“Forget it, Maurice,” said Flanagan. “Just get yourself a good night’s sleep.”
Flanagan poured himself out a long drink and then filled Willard’s glass. He shook his head. “How many crates of booze do we get through every week here?” he asked. Willard realized that he did not have to reply. “Wow,” Flanagan went on, “I never saw Maurice riled up like that before.”
“Still, he had a good point,” said Willard, gulping down his drink. “The way Bernstein put it, most of our guys would have vanished down cracks in the road by Cedar City.”
“So we take Maurice’s advice and put in an order for two pints of milk per man per day,” said Flanagan. “They got that many cows in Utah?”
Willard scribbled the details on a pad. “And another thing,” said Flanagan. “Get a crate of booze over to Maurice Falconer’s tent. We’ve got a good man there. So let’s keep him sweet.”
In every race, whatever the distance, there is a moment of truth, when one man imposes his will upon the field and stamps his authority upon it, or when he realizes forces within himself whose existence he has not expected. For Hugh, the final twenty miles towards Grand Junction was that moment. It was a long “moment”, lasting for almost three hours, much of it in the harsh Utah sun, and it was a struggle that had nothing to do with the other competitors, though it had everything to do with the eventual outcome of the Trans-America.
As before, a German had surged into the lead, though this time it was not Muller but his compatriot, the stocky, bronzed Woellke. The initial speed was nothing like Muller’s cracking seven miles an hour of two weeks before, but it was sufficient to leave the field, after just half an hour, stretched for over a mile on the narrow road. He pulled with him a dozen optimists, including the Mojave Indian, Quomawahu.
Hugh wore a soccer shirt and a trimmed sombrero, the latter a purchase from an Indian back in the Mojave. He had sandpapered his feet, cut his toenails and talcumed his armpits and chest, as he had seen Doc do, and round his wrist he now wore a handkerchief as a sweat-band. If only Stevie and the boys back in the Broo Park could see him now!
A light breeze blew little whirls of dust in the road ahead as the runners pierced the central desert. Hugh had always thought of the desert as a dead thing. But this was alive and watching. All around the tall saquaro cacti stood like silent spectators, with hedgehog cacti crouching like dogs at their feet. In the distance he could see the soft chocolate brown of the hills through which they would soon have to pass. Everything was bright, sharp, alive.
Again he was running with Doc, the little man having added sunglasses to his desert equipment. Doc looked at his watch and eased off as the five-mile point was reached. “Forty-five minutes,” he said. “Let’s drink.”
Hugh drank the warm, bitter desert water, then poured a carton over his face and neck.
“Heating up,” said Doc, pointing to the rising sun. It was, and all around the pace continued to slow as the heat made its impact. By the next water-point, at ten miles, they were passing sweat-drenched runners who had dropped to a walk. Behind them, Flanagan’s trucks had already begun to pick up non-finishers.
“I reckon we’re the first people to come here by foot since the eighteen-eighties,” said Doc. “About three thousand came out here from back East with pushcarts – they could move twice as fast as oxen.”
Hugh pulled down his sombrero and drew his kerchief across his brow. He could feel the sweat build up again on his forehead even as he brushed it off. It poured in rivers down his cheeks and neck and soon he could feel it coursing down the valley between his abdominal muscles.
At first the sweat was a relief, acting as it was intended to do, as a means of cooling the skin. Slowly, however, the sweat started to encroach upon him. It tickled his temples, drenched his eyebrows, poured its salty tears into his eyes, making them smart and sting. Then he began to sniff the salt sweat up into his nose, making him cough. His light jersey absorbed all the sweat it could, then stuck to his body like a leech. The sweat ran down the inside of his crotch, down his legs, into his feet.
He looked sideways at Doc. Sweat was running down the channels in the older man’s lined face. Doc shook himself like a dog, spraying out showers.
“Time for more water,” he said, nodding to the attendant at the water-point, who was serving Bouin, Dasriaux and half a dozen others.
Hugh’s thirst had started to rage. He had gulped back two cartons of water when Doc laid a hand on his arm. “Easy,” he said. “Let it go down slow. Let the mouth enjoy it.”
Half past ten, and five miles to go to the end of the first half of the day’s stage. The road shimmered with heat, and Hugh felt as if they were running through a corridor of warm air. He noticed he had stopped sweating. The sun was evaporating his sweat and his skin was hot.
They completed the twenty miles in just under three hours forty minutes, finishing in tenth and eleventh positions. Flanagan had set the mid-point of the stage by a dried-up river bed, where there was plenty of shade under gnarled and twisted Joshua trees, and had set up two great central refreshment tents as places both for food and for respite from the heat.
By midday the sun was so hot that the Trans-Americans were confined to tents and caravans. For the moment the Trans-America lay still and dead, twenty miles out from Grand Junction.
“Can’t figure it,” said Doc, sipping his tenth orange juice in the gloom of the tent. “The way those two Krauts have been burning up the road. Something’s wrong.”
“What can be wrong?” asked Hugh.
“For starters” – Doc put down his drink – “those guys are too young to be running these big distances. Hardly out of their teens. It ain’t natural. They haven’t got the miles under their belts. No. Something’s wrong, though I can’t yet figure it out.”
He turned on to his back and pulled his cap over his eyes.
“By the way,” he said. “You’re doing good out there. Real good.”
The runners lay like dead men, like the debris of some great battle. They lay in rows naked on their backs on their blankets, their hands across their chests, bodies gleaming even in the gloom. Now that they were out of the sun the sweat streamed from each pore; the tent stank of the sweat of forty thousand miles of running.
Outside, the sun hit the tent relentlessly and its surface was impossible to touch. Inside, in the cathedral of the great tent, the Trans-Americans dedicated themselves to the next stage of their race.
For Hugh it had been his first experience of running under hot conditions. His only flicker of fear had been when he had stopped sweating, for this had been a new experience. The feeling of the body burning itself up stride by stride was an uncomfortable one, and one which he would have to face until they had cleared the desert. Since it had not been accompanied by any noticeable muscular fatigue he was content, but he had become increasingly aware of how little he knew about covering such massive distances daily.
In his researches back in Glasgow’s sepulchral Mitchell Library he had devoured every book he could find on distance running. Good God, even marathon runners were not advised to run much more than twenty miles a week in training! And now he was trying to cover twice that distance and more a day, six times a week for three months on end, across some of the toughest country in the world. The settlers had had enough on their hands getting across these dry wastes even without the Indians, he thought.
Barstow, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Boulder – places he had never even heard of, or if at all only in the darkness of the Carlton Cinema, Townhead, Glasgow, fumbling with some unwilling lass in the back row of the stalls. Hugh had no fear of failure, for somehow he sensed that even getting as far as Las Vegas had been a kind of victory, and that every day since then had been a fresh achievement. In each day’s running he had found, and hoped he would continue to find, new depths and qualities in himself, and that was a victory whatever the outcome of the race.
His thoughts strayed to Dixie. He had often dreamed of girls like her, but now that he had met her he had not the first idea of how to approach her. She seemed so controlled, so sure of herself. Even the thought of laying his hand on hers made him shiver, not because he did not want to touch her, but out of fear of rejection. What could they talk about? They had so little in common. He would ask Doc to organize something for one of the rest days, he decided: something that would bring them together and spare him the embarrassment of her saying no . . .
Doc lay back, head cupped in hands, chewing on a straw, and allowed his thoughts to slip back to his first day as a travelling man. He had ranged the Mid-West in summer, the Deep South in fall, for only at harvest time was there money in a farmer’s pockets.
He would set up a platform near the river and at night, as twilight came, set the kerosene torches ablaze. When, drawn by the lights, the banging of drums and the blare of trumpets, a sufficiently large crowd had drawn round, he would put McGinty the comedian on stage.
“Why do old maids go to church on Sunday?” McGinty would ask. “So they can be there when the hymns are given out!” Or, “Why did the chicken cross the road? So he could get to the other seed!”
All good stuff, plundered from Jackson’s On a Slow Train Through Arkansas.
Then to the pie-eating contest.
Pies, liberally coated with molasses, were suspended from a beam and the lads of the town, hands behind their backs, would make idiots of themselves trying to consume them.
Then to the real business of the evening. Doc, in goatee and Prince Albert coat, sporting on his chest a jangle of medals, would stand on stage for some moments, his back to the crowd, silently studying an anatomical chart.
Then he would turn to face his audience.
“In life there are only two certainties, ladies and gentlemen,” he would say, grasping his lapels. “Death and the taxman. I cannot do anything about the Department of Inland Revenue, but, ladies and gentlemen, I can change your life.”
He would then dramatically reveal a bottle of Pinkham’s remedy.
His spiel would last anything between half an hour and an hour, depending on how the mood took him, and would end with a clamour of hands grasping for Mrs Pinkham’s elixir.
Lydia Pinkham. Even twenty years after her death she was still offering advice to women by mail – before the government stepped in and stopped it.
Doc lay cradling his head in his hands. Yes, it had been a great life. But this, the Trans-America, was what he had waited for . . .
Morgan looked around him. They were certainly a strange bunch. Gabby old Doc, who seemed to have lived ten lives, all of them on the run. That dark, hard Scotsman, McPhail – a decent enough guy, but somehow young for his age. Martinez: Martinez was like a child, springing along gaily and happily, but with an immense responsibility, the life of his village, resting on his slim shoulders. Morgan was glad that the little Mexican had won a few bucks on the second stage, back in the Mojave.
And Thurleigh. The Englishman was like something out of a school picture book, delicate and remote. Thurleigh had come from some other world, a world of assumptions which Morgan instinctively disliked. Still, as long as he kept out of his way.
And what of the girl, of Kate? He still had no idea why he had gone out after her. She was as unlike Ruth as it was possible to be. Just the thought of Ruth made him wince. This race was for her, for their child. He had dedicated himself to it completely: no woman must be allowed to divert him.
Juan Martinez lay on the floor in a corner of the tent, rolled up in a tight ball, engulfed in the folds of his blanket. Already he had won more money than he had dreamed possible and had arranged with Flanagan that it should be forwarded to his village through the agency of the Bank of Mexico. Juan Martinez lived from day to day. In any case, for him New York was simply a dream. He could not conceive of it, could no more imagine its crowded streets and its skyscrapers than a deaf man could imagine a Wagner opera. The Trans-America was proving tougher than he had expected, harder even than his daily runs with the Tarahumares had been. But a thousand-odd miles away in his village life was immeasurably harder, and he daily dedicated himself anew to grinding out fifty more miles on the endless dirt roads, the memory of his people firmly in his mind . . .
Only a few feet away from him Peter Thurleigh, his brown feet poking beyond the foot of his blanket, started to snore, realized he was doing so, gulped, and settled back again into silent sleep. Though he had still not discarded his blue-lined Oxford shorts he had adopted more practical long-sleeved clothing for his upper body and was now – his body burnt almost black by the desert sun – indistinguishable from the other Trans-Americans, and was still in the top twenty places on every stage. Though his view of the world was incomparably broader than that of Martinez, like Martinez he had never conceived that the Trans-America would be like this. He had never imagined men who could notch up fifty miles a day, day in, day out, over nightmare deserts and crippling hills, in temperatures that would fry an egg. He lay on his bed, listening to the scuffles and snores of the thousand men around him. His Rolls-Royce had ended up in a ditch back in Barstow and now his chauffeur-butler, Hargreaves, was in Barstow hospital with appendicitis. Thurleigh was on his own, with well over two thousand miles still to go. Peter Thurleigh smiled. The butler and the Rolls had really been rather juvenile; a piece of undergraduate showing-off. Hargreaves, an out-of-work American actor, had never been closer to England than Sunset Boulevard, his only experience as a butler having been in Eric von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives in 1922.
No, thought Peter Thurleigh, a titled parentage counted for little out here. All that mattered was the ability to hold body and mind together for fifty miles a day, six days a week, over country that made even the torrid Paris Olympics cross-country race look like a Sunday-school picnic.
For the dirt-roads of Utah absorbed titles and professions just as they had absorbed settlers half a century before. In any case, even back in England his peerage had counted for little. For his father, Albert Swindells, had made his money in Luton in the 1880s in the hat trade. It had been his financial support for the Liberals in difficult times that had secured Swindells his peerage. But the “man of straw”, as Swindells the milliner had been called, had never secured the hoped-for respect from the class which he so admired. And neither had his son.
Thurleigh imagined he was back in the “dorm” at school. The same groans, the same fetid smells, the same creaks as men turned from side to side, or sought furtive sexual relief. For a moment Peter felt that cold shiver of fear and uncertainty he had known as a twelve-year-old on his first night at Eton.
At school, sport had been the key, for there sport was a religion. Individual sports like track and field athletics or cross-country running could, however, only be tolerated if linked with success in team sports, and his ability on the rugby field provided that essential balance, that team involvement, which made individual prowess in athletics acceptable. It also made almost acceptable the fact that his father, though a peer, was in trade.
At Cambridge he had never felt at ease, and even his title and his affluence did not allow him to relax. Not for him the spinning of idle days at Fenners, of training that consisted merely of a trot and a massage. While others dined on tea and crumpets, watching him through rainy pavilion windows, he plodded dourly round the Fenners track. Long after they had gone at night and long before they had risen in the morning, he ran mile after mile.
But they did not care. Indeed, they despised him for it. It was simply not right to show such seriousness, such commitment, for everything had to be accomplished with ease and grace. He was acting like a tradesman, not a gentleman. No, young Thurleigh simply would not do.
He had tried everything to be accepted. Indeed, he even became an anonymous athletics correspondent to The Times, sometimes commenting at length on his own performances in an attempt to make his fellow undergraduates understand his commitment. But it was no good. Always they, the charmed ones, danced the night with the gossamer girls he so feared while he stood in the shadows, expensively and impeccably dressed, invariably alone.
At both the Paris and Amsterdam Olympics he had met another kind of athlete, the harriers, working-class men steeped in road and cross-country running. But Peter could no more relate to them than he could to his contemporaries at Cambridge. He was stuck in a sort of limbo, aware all the time of a nagging inadequacy which athletic success seemed unable to assuage.
It had never occurred to him to enter the Trans-America until that night at the Reform Club. Some members had been discussing the Trans-America race earlier, but now they had moved on to the subject of the sprinter compared with the distance-runner . . .
“Sprinting,” said Lord Farne loudly. “Nothing to it. Like a bloody greyhound. No guts, no heart.”
Peter Thurleigh had swung round in his chair immediately.
“And how, Farne, would you define a sprint?” he asked.
It was Aubrey Flacke who answered. “How far did you run in Paris at the Olympics?”
“Fifteen hundred metres, just short of a mile,” said Peter. “That was my main race.”
“Then my answer is fifteen hundred metres.” Grinning Farne pulled lightly on a Havana. “Yes, that’s my idea of a sprint – fifteen hundred metres. Happy?”
“So what’s your idea of a real test of an athlete?” said Peter through clenched teeth.
“The long distances,” said Flacke, scenting blood. He picked up a copy of The Times. “Like this damn race in the States.” He put down his drink and rifled through the newspaper until he reached the sports pages.
“Here we are, my lad,” he said. “C. C. Flanagan’s Trans-America next March. Three thousand one hundred and forty-six miles. Take a bloody Irishman to think up a race like that, says I.”
Peter Thurleigh looked at Farne.
“Is that your opinion too?”
“I should say so,” said Farne. “Three thousand miles – that’s my idea of a bit of sport.”
“Does it say how many have entered for the race?” asked Peter.
Flacke sipped his brandy, then returned to The Times.
“At the present date one thousand one hundred and twenty,” he replied.
“And what would you lay against an English runner finishing in the top six?”
Flacke looked across at Farne.
“I would say that depends on which Englishman we’re talking about.”
“Me,” said Peter Thurleigh.
“Ten to one,” said Flacke. Farne nodded.
“Then I lay ten thousand pounds,” said Peter Thurleigh, standing up. “No need to shake hands on it.”
On the other side of the tent Hugh McPhail could not sleep and instead sat writing a letter to his friend Stevie. How could he explain what it was like to be here, somewhere in the middle of a desert north of Las Vegas, to little Stevie, back in a dark Bridgeton slum? How could he explain the endless daily stream of men pouring themselves into the landscape, crawling painfully East, driven on by a crazy Irishman in a cowboy suit? It was like something out of a Hollywood movie; certainly it was the same terrain, and all that it lacked to make it complete was the menace of Indians lurking behind rocks. He put down his pencil, only the first paragraph of his letter complete, and shook his head.
A hundred yards away, in the luxury of Dixie’s caravan, Kate Sheridan slept soundly. Now that Flanagan had ended his “cuts” she was able to run at a pace which allowed her body to adapt daily. Daily, however, she still managed to pass a few more men, moving slowly towards her target of a place in the first two hundred and a prize of ten thousand dollars. The national press was already speaking of her as the first of a new breed: a superwoman capable of taking on men at their own sports. Only she knew how weak, how uncertain she really felt, never sure that her body or will could stand up to the searching daily tests.
But while some newspapers had taken her up as a symbol of the “new woman” of the Thirties, an Isadora Duncan of sport, some had ignored her altogether, while still others had denounced her as a muscular strumpet – although they changed their minds as photographs of a vibrant, attractive woman started to arrive at their offices. The ladies section of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States refused to comment on “Miss Sheridan”, beyond observing that she had undoubtedly lost her amateur status. Kate had retorted by saying that she had lost that years ago; a comment which was not reported in the national press. Meanwhile she was enjoying herself immensely. Her body now stripped of fat, her pulse down to a regular fifty beats a minute, she had never felt more alive. The running, far from taking something from her, made her feel stronger. It would all be perfect if only Morgan would touch her. Every day, after the stage was over, they met with Doc and the others in unspoken but understood union. But unspoken and unacted upon it remained.
Two-thirty. The tent was beginning to stir. Half an hour to the next stage, twenty miles across hot, dry, rising ground.
Doc kneaded olive oil lightly into his calves and thighs. They were climbing up to over five thousand feet in the next twenty miles in unseasonable heat, and he would feel it. They would all feel it, particularly those who had not at least a few hundred miles’ training under their feet.
Mean air. The air thinned at these heights – not to the degree that it would later in the Rockies, but, with the heat, enough to stretch them, even at a modest six miles an hour or inside.
He patted Hugh on the knee.
“Take it easy,” he said. “We’re running to over five thousand feet again. Thin air. Slows you down.”
He looked over at Morgan. “Tell the girl too,” he said. “Tell her to take it slow.”
The gun cracked and one thousand one hundred and twenty runners trundled out on to the soft broken road. The sun had not yet lost its sting and Hugh could feel it on the surface of his soccer shirt.
Although they were now moving into mountain country the road itself did not rise steeply. These were quite unlike the mountains of the Scottish Highlands. These mountains were brown and scabby like slag heaps, nature imitating not art but industry. The sandy-coloured hills were cracked and lined, split by endless sun and occasional flash floods. Farther off, Hugh thought he could see the white of snow, but surely that could not be.
Even on this stage the German Muller took the lead, flowing easily out into the still bright desert. This time no one attempted to keep up with him.
Doc, Martinez, Morgan and McPhail joined the leading group, behind the All-Americans and the German team, forty runners strung out over a hundred yards. Kate settled in at the back of the field, her running stride modified to a low, neat, heel-first action.
This time Hugh did not sweat at all. Rather he felt his body begin to burn early on, and he craved water long before the first refreshment point. He looked to his right at Doc. The older man’s body was like that of an insect. He crawled across the broken road, taking up each rut and ripple easily.
On reaching the first water-point Hugh drank in great gulps, but this time there was no satisfaction, no matter how much he took: his body absorbed the water just as the greedy road was absorbing him.
Five miles on, at the next water-point, the heat had not diminished.
The leading group had telescoped to a huddle of men running at a steady nine and a half minutes per mile, with Muller and Stock over half a mile ahead. Hugh could not stop drinking, and even when he splashed cooling water on his face and body it dried immediately. There seemed not enough water on earth to satisfy him.
Between ten to fifteen miles it happened. The field split. Hugh could feel himself become detached, gradually dropped by the leading group, and there was nothing he could do. Doc, Martinez, Thurleigh and Morgan and half a dozen others slowly eased away from him, and Hugh found himself with the Indian, Quomawahu, and a dozen others, struggling, his breathing becoming increasingly laboured.
They were still climbing and the thin air was beginning to take its toll. It was like running in an airless furnace. Soon Hugh was no longer racing; he was simply surviving, moving from one stride to the next.
The telegraph posts. They looked more like crucifixes strung across the brown plain. Hugh thought only from one crucifix to the next. By these painful steps he made his way to the final water-point, five miles from the finish. He drank until his throat ached. Five miles to go. He poured some water on the front of his thighs and gulped down the remainder. He was on his own now, no Doc to pull him through. His legs were heavy, and even after several minutes at the water-point his breathing had not fully recovered.
He had been in this situation before, back in the sour mosses of the Highlands with Duckworth, but never at altitude and never in such heat. Every message from his body told him to stop. After all, it was all pointless. There was always the next stage, and over two thousand miles to go. What did it matter that he stopped and walked for a few miles? But it mattered to him. Back in Scotland he had made a vow that he would never walk. He would run across the United States of America.
Pole to pole, crucifix to crucifix, endlessly spanning the plain. About him lay the crumbling hills over which shadows now slid like sleek cats, but Hugh no longer knew nor cared. His mouth had completely dried out and hard white foam began to form on the outer edges of his lips. Somehow he was still aware of his hands moving in front of him, his toes below him just passing within vision. Somehow his mind was still working, fighting its own battle, as if there were two selves in senseless debate.
He was dying, for there were miles to go, weren’t there? Miles which his legs could not possibly penetrate. He was alive, for he was moving. He was dead, for the air itself seemed to be poison, destroying his throat and lungs. He was alive, for the blood still pulsed through him, serving his onward legs. He was alive. He was dead. Alive, dead, alive, dead, alive, dead . . .
Hugh fell forward into a dark pit, spent, arms out to his sides, helpless.
“Fifty-fifth,” shouted Willard Clay. “McPhail, Great Britain.”
When Hugh recovered consciousness he was in the hospital tent with Doc Cole and Dr Falconer standing over him. Falconer flicked his thermometer and put it back in his pocket. “A hundred and four point five degrees,” he said. “His blood’s been on the boil.”
Doc looked anxiously at Falconer. “He going to be all right?”
“A week ago I would have said no,” said Falconer. “Doc, do you realize McPhail’s pulse was 205 beats a minute when we brought him in? He must have run the last five miles with a pulse close to 200 and a temperature of over one hundred and five degrees. Crazy!”
He took his stethoscope from his ears to let it rest on his shoulders and pulled his fingers back through his yellow-white hair.
“Have you any idea what you men are?” he said. He did not wait for an answer. “Living laboratories. In these three thousand miles you could provide enough information about the human body to keep physiologists in work for a hundred years. But no, they’ll be sitting back in their labs in their clean white coats, dissecting frogs and rats, when the real stuff is out on the road here. Hell, they could find out more about heat tolerance here than they’ll discover in a million years back in their universities.
“A week or so from now, in the Rockies, they’ll find out more about the heart, local muscular endurance, and the way the body responds to altitude than they’ll get in a mountain of books. Jesus, each runner’s heart will beat fifty-four thousand times a day, every single day of this race! Our scientists have got over a thousand living experiments out there, and none of them gives a damn!”
He looked down at Hugh.
“All of this doesn’t help you much, son. Sure, you’ll be all right. Anyhow, the forecast for tomorrow is cool, perhaps even a touch of rain.”
Doc pulled Hugh to his feet, and, after thanking Falconer, the two men walked out of the tent into the gathering gloom.
“You sure had us worried out there,” said Doc. “Muller blew up, but still made first, Stock just behind, myself fourth. What you didn’t know back there is that the guys in front of you were running even worse than you, so you didn’t lose much time. As things stand, just over an hour covers the first twenty men so far. It’s a real tight race.”
Hugh shook his head. “I can’t face heat like that every day, Doc. It’s not possible.”
“You won’t have to,” said Doc. “The forecast is cool for the next few days. Today’s heat was way out of line for the time of the year. Anyhow, give me your shirt.”
Bewildered, Hugh did as he was told. Doc opened the bag he was carrying and withdrew a thin knife.
“You know all your body needed today?” he said, stabbing the knife through Hugh’s jersey. “Air.” He stabbed Hugh’s shirt again. “Your body couldn’t get rid of its heat. No wonder you couldn’t run.”
He sat down on a rock and continued to pierce Hugh’s shirt with his knife.
“This lets the air get to you and cool the skin. Then you can stay cool.” Doc handed him back his punctured shirt. “Heat,” he said. “It near finished the whole field at the St Louis Olympics back in I904. The only thing that kept Hicks, the guy who won it, on his feet was the slugs of strychnine his manager kept fixing him.
“Then, in 1908, in London in the Dorando race, it was just the same. The sun hit us like a stone and guys were reeling about like drunken sailors. Johnny Hayes, one of our boys, won that one. Funny thing, no one remembers Johnny, ’cept his mother. No, next day the papers were all full of Dorando, Dorando Pietri. They said his heart had moved two inches. Anyhow, Princess Alexandra gives him a cup for bravery a few days later and off we all went on the great professional marathon roundabout. We ran everywhere – the Nile, Berlin, Edinburgh; we even ran indoors at Madison Square Garden.”
“Indoors?”
“Anywhere, just so long as it was twenty-six miles three hundred and eighty-five yards. I ran in some good ones too. The best was the last, a two hour-twenty-nine minute run by the Finn, Kohlemainen, in 1912. I ran two thirty-four, the fastest I ever did. Then a few years later it was all over: the marathon bubble was bust. All of us, Dorando, Hayes, Shrubb, were pros – no way back to the Olympics. Still, we had a few laughs and made a few bucks.”
“Why did you keep running?”
“Just couldn’t stop. Funny thing – when I got drafted in 1917 the army wouldn’t take me – flat feet!”
Doc saw that Hugh had not yet taken his point.
“Hell,” he said. “I know running isn’t a team sport. The biggest load of crap I ever heard was at the 1908 Olympics. We were on the boat to London, first day out. The team manager, an East coast Irishman, name of Gustavus P. Quinn, gets us all together in the ship’s lounge. There we are, big Irish shot-putters like whales, bean-pole high jumpers, quarter milers, just a pair of legs with head on top, and marathon-runners like skeletons on diets. ‘First thing I want you men to realize,’ said Quinn, standing to his full five foot four, ‘is that you are a team, the United States team. Therefore, gentlemen, you must help each other. So I want to see the shot-putters out there putting up the bar for the high jumpers. Middle-distance boys, get yourselves out there and run beside the walkers. All the time, remember, men, you are a team.’ All the fat-arsed noodles around him nodded and filed off into the bar.”
“And what happened?” asked Hugh.
“Nothing much,” said Doc. “The putters threw, ate and drank. The runners ran round and round the boat, the jumpers jumped, and the walkers heeled and toed it round the ship. In track and field you are alone, ’cause this is sure as hell no team sport. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I’m not happy when I see the Stars and Stripes go up there on the masthead. Just that it’s only by running for yourself that you can do the best for your country. Hell, what’s a country anyhow? Just a collection of people who live in the same place, most of whom don’t care a dime whether you’re on your way to the Olympics or the moon. But this, the Trans-America, it’s different.”
“How?”
“First, because there’s money at stake, enough money to split with a partner if you win one of the big prizes. Second, because here men can team up and help each other through bad patches all the way to New York. It’s already happening, every day. You see what I’m getting at? How we could work together?”
“But what chance do we have against teams like the Germans and the All-Americans?” asked Hugh.
“The way those Germans are going, not much,” said Doc. “They’ve got a manager, doctor, masseurs. But that’s my point. We’ve got to form teams. That means groups of guys who will split whatever prize money comes their way, guys who trust and respect each other and who’ll back each other up over the next two and a half thousand miles. That’s the only hope for people like us.”
Hugh nodded. “It’s happened already. I’ve heard that Bouin and Eskola have teamed up, and so have Quomawahu and Son.”
“Jesus,” said Doc. “A Frenchman tied up with a Finn, an Indian with a Jap. We’re doing better here than the League of Nations.”
“It makes sense though,” said Hugh, opening the flap of their tent and holding it for Doc to enter.
They sat down on their blankets, facing each other.
“So here’s my offer,” said Doc, drawing a circle on the dirt floor with his index finger. He cut the circle in half.
“A fifty-fifty split all the way, no matter what. Say, for argument’s sake, one of us gets hurt, and the other takes the race, it’s still a fifty-fifty split.”
Hugh nodded. “What if anyone else wants to join the team?” he asked.
“Then we both have to agree to their joining. No point in teaming up with someone one of us doesn’t like. Hell, it’s a big enough pot, and I’m sure we can both think of guys we’d like to team up with. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. What do you say? Partners?”
Hugh pulled his punctured shirt over his head and tugged it down over his waist. He stuck out his hand.
“Partners,” he said. “Though God knows why you chose me.”