It’s a warm spring afternoon in 1979. Well, it’s a warm spring afternoon in Bellingham, Washington, which means it’s mostly sunny and around 62 degrees (F). I’ve just wrapped up my final varsity track season. I was always a middling-average runner, the seventh guy on the cross country team. Being the guy who could only deny other runners from scoring doesn’t make for strong motivation.
My final track season at Western Washington University had been great fun, but since my personal best for 10,000 meters was only 32:15, there would be no trip to nationals for me. There’s only one more postseason meet left, which is a non-scoring, multiple college affair in Bellingham’s Civic Field stadium.
My regular running buddy, Jeff Sherman, had prodded me into running the 1500 at the meet. I never run 1500s, having mostly focused on 5,000 and 10,000 meters. But the season is over, and it seemed like an oddly fitting way to end my varsity long distance running career.
So on this warm spring afternoon, I show up at the track to do speed workouts.
Speed is a relative term here, and I wasn’t feeling all that motivated. After a couple of miles of easy warmup jogging, I decide in a desultory manner to run quarters. I stretch a bit, then proceed to run 8 x 440 at around 71 seconds, with a 220 easy jog between. No one else was on the track at the time, so I was blowing through the workout solo. It didn’t feel all that hard, but it’s always hard to gauge your effort when running by yourself.
As I start jogging an easy cooldown mile, Dick Holloway shows up on the track.
Dick wasn’t a college runner; he was the plant manager at the local Mobil Oil refinery up in Ferndale. At the time, Dick was in his early 30s, and was known as something of a maniac. He was a 2:23 marathoner at the time, and worked harder than any runner I’d ever met. One of my more memorable runs was a trip up to Stanley Park in Vancouver with Dick after I’d been out drinking all night and sleeping about an hour. We ran 15 miles. He loved to run with people, but most of the better runners on the team avoided running with him because his conversational style was often abrasive. But we always got along.
Dick comes up to me, and asks me if I would work out with him. I tell him that I’d just finished, but he keeps badgering me, so I give in, and tell him I’ll run part of way. “And oh, by the way, what are you running?”
“Quarters, with a 110 jog,” he replies.
That’s a fairly intense workout, and I start to regret agreeing to join him, but the die is cast.
We proceed to run the first quarter, hitting it in 68 seconds. After that one, I thought, “That’s it, I’m done.”
By the third quarter, though, we were in a rhythm, hitting each quarter in 67-68 seconds. The 110 recovery between is fairly quick, too, not the typical easy, slow slog. We run twelve quarters in all, the last one in 65. After that, Dick and I run an easy four miles, then he says goodbye, jumps into his car and speeds off.
That weekend, I run 1500 meters in 4:09, which translates to around a 4:27 mile. It’s not that fast in the scheme of things, but certainly a high water mark for me. I don’t really remember much about the race, though.
But I still remember the workout I ran a few days before, where I ran 20 quarters, twelve of them in 68 seconds or less. All the races I ran back then are mostly a blur, but I vividly remember a dozen quarters on a track on a glorious spring afternoon.
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