Blanchette: Beardsley knows about beating odds

It is coming up on 27 years now since the best of all Boston Marathons, the extraordinary “Duel in the Sun” in which Alberto Salazar willed himself ahead of Dick Beardsley at the finish line – 26 miles decided by 2 narrow seconds.

Our sprinters weren’t that close to Usain Bolt in the Beijing 100 meters.

Their times – 2 hours, 8 minutes, 52 and 54 seconds – have been bettered by only three other American marathoners since, a fact often used to complete the current disparagement of U.S. road racing that the dominance of African runners hastened. But it’s a rather spurious addendum. Any number of track events still list mid-1980s efforts among their top five performances – or don’t the names Carl Lewis, Edwin Moses and Renaldo Nehemiah ring a bell?

Besides, no one’s scored 100 points in a game since Wilt, either.

The topic comes up because enough meltage has occurred on our sidewalks to see the odd Bloomsday plodder begin his annual training, and because Beardsley hopes to inspire a few more Thursday night.

And he will. Beardsley’s 7 p.m. talk at Lewis and Clark High School will suggest that no flaw has to be fatal and that anything can be accomplished – and possibly that no calamity can be avoided.

“I have had friends of mine tell me that if not for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any at all,” Beardsley said. “I never looked at it that way.”

Not even three months ago, when he was cavorting in the ocean near Palm Beach and got bowled over by a wave, knocking loose bone chips from some of the 10 previous operations on his right knee. Arthroscopic surgery ensued, followed by raging infection, staggering pain, the drainage of buckets of ugly fluid and finally another operation – a total knee replacement.

Beardsley thinks he’ll be running in three weeks. Has any marathoner broken 3 hours on a replacement knee?

He is almost 53 now and yet was sub-2:45 only a few years ago, remarkable not just on the aging continuum but in light of the intense trials, both fate- and self-inflicted, he endured since his last hurrah as an elite marathoner in the 1988 Olympic trials. In the space of just four years, Beardsley escaped death on no fewer than four occasions. Working on his Minnesota farm, he became entangled in an auger, mangled an arm and a leg and broke some ribs before he was able to turn it off just before he lost consciousness. A couple of years later, he was blindsided by another driver and injured his back and neck. Then he was hit by a truck while running, and later rolled his Bronco in a blizzard. Three back operations followed.

And so did an addiction to painkillers – so pronounced that he took as many as 90 pills a day, forging prescriptions to stay supplied. In September 1996 he was approached by a pharmacist he knew at a Wal-Mart in Fargo, N.D., who said, “Dick, everybody knows what’s going on.” He was turned over to federal agents and, eventually, to treatment.

“I honestly thought I was going to die,” he said. “The withdrawals in my arms and legs were so bad that many times I felt that if I’d had a saw in my room, I would have cut them off. The first week, there were mornings I was so sick I had to crawl along the hallway on my hands and knees. I’d black out and wake up in my own vomit. I’d tell God, ‘Either take me or make me better.’ ”

Four years later, he jogged a marathon in just less than 31/2 hours. He just celebrated his 12th year of sobriety.

Lost in Beardsley’s more gruesome and graphic ordeal is his original rise as an elite runner, just as unlikely in a more benign way. He was a latecomer to the sport in high school, when he thought a letterman’s jacket might help him get a date, but never made it to a state meet. He began farming after junior college, so there were no NCAA titles. He ran 2:47 in his first marathon, in 1977, and “swore I’d never run another.” By 1980, he was a still-unknown, high-number, wild-eyed leader in the New York City Marathon when TV commentator Frank Shorter, the Olympic champ pronounced: “I don’t know – he looks like a creampuff to me. He won’t last long.”

Oh, the things you don’t know.

In the famed duel, Salazar drafted Beardsley during the climactic stages, not taking the lead until just a half-mile remained. Despite a charley horse, Beardsley had one last burst but could not catch Salazar.

“I learned so much about myself that day,” he said. “In not giving up, in moving toward that finish line, there’s always that chance no matter how tough the situation is. As difficult as that race was, it certainly helped me through a more difficult time.”