Lindgren ran for pure joy, not for records

On the morning of his induction Friday evening into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, Gerry Lindgren went for a run in downtown Portland.
Of course. What did we expect? A round of golf? Vegging out in front of SportsCenter?
“Out along the river there’s a little parkway,” he said. “I went out with a couple of other guys, down along the river, across the bridge and back up. About six miles.
“But was it ever cold! I just can’t take it.”
Often the metaphors have outweighed the memories in the story of Gerry Lindgren, and now this one – the man who came in from the cold – became fully realized this weekend. The goofy elf from Spokane who confounded not just the running world back in the 1960s, but anyone’s notion of possibility, was welcomed into the sport’s most distinguished company as part of an induction class that also included Jackie Joyner Kersee, Michael Johnson and Joan Benoit Samuelson, as well as fellow old-timers like John Pennel, the first pole vaulter who went more than 17 feet.
He was, predictably, “a little embarrassed by the whole thing.”
It could be suggested that the embarrassment should belong to the track community, for its tardiness.
But track and field is a realm that curiously values the outcome of a meet that’s held only every four years over more big-picture concerns. Olympic gold is the ultimate currency. For evidence, look no further than the fact that Billy Mills – who ran a dead-heat world record with Lindgren in 1965, but couldn’t touch his high school or collegiate resume – beat Lindgren into the hall by 28 years.
Mills was the stunning winner of the 1964 Olympic 10,000 meters, a race as mythic as any in track history. Lindgren, lamed by a badly sprained ankle, was ninth in the same race.
Forty years later, the moment remains vivid to Tracy Walters, Lindgren’s coach at Rogers High School and a witness to that drama in Tokyo.
“In those days, you could walk right into the Olympic village,” Walters recalled, “and after the race, I found Gerry on his cot. I put a hand on his shoulder and said something like, ‘Hey, ninth in the world isn’t too bad for a kid.’ Billy was Gerry’s roommate in the village and Billy was there, still in his uniform, sweating, wearing his medal, and I picked him up and swung him around and told him it was the greatest athletic spectacle I’d ever seen.
“He looked at me and said, ‘I proved one thing – that I’m the second-best runner in the world.’ He had just won the gold medal and broken the Olympic record, but he had enough compassion and awareness to realize Gerry’s pain and mine, and allow us some token of satisfaction.”
For Lindgren, there would never be any real Olympic satisfaction, a circumstance that doesn’t seem to have engendered any lingering regret – no matter how it seems to mitigate the sports fan’s memory.
In truth, Lindgren’s legacy as a runner was validated before he ever got to Tokyo or donned a Washington State University uniform. He was, simply, the greatest high school distance runner ever, no matter what followed, and remains so – no trifling distinction.
The fact that his high school record for 5,000 – 13 minutes, 44 seconds – set in 1964 was broken just this summer by Portland teenager Galen Rupp is almost damning. Not just because the record lasted 40 years, but that when Lindgren set it, it was only six seconds slower than the world record.
“Records are made to be broken,” Lindgren said, “because they’re limits on people and humans don’t stand for that very well. So I was disappointed the record lasted so long. When I ran 13:44, the world record was 13:38. Now the record is, what, 12:38? High school kids should be able to run faster, but we’re not doing what we should do – and in a way, I felt a little responsible for that.
“Maybe it was too hard a jump from there to here.”
And then, of course, there was his impossible 10,000 against the Russians in the 1964 dual meet in the gut of the Cold War. To have an 18-year-old American not just outrun Soviet veterans Leonid Ivanov and Anatoly Dutov, but run them into the ground, was a slice of social symbolism that resonated far beyond a footrace.
But it’s hard to coax Lindgren into verbalizing exactly what his impact was.
“I never really wanted recognition as a runner, and winning races wasn’t what I was about,” he said.
“Once, in the winter time in Spokane, I made it to the top of Beacon Hill without stopping, and in my euphoria I wanted to get everybody to love running the way I did. It’s probably stupid for a kid to think he can change the world, but Coach Walters always told me that winning inspires other people. They weren’t an important thing to me, except in that way.”
Surely he had at least a small stake in the so-called “running boom” of the 1970s, although Frank Shorter’s Olympic marathon victory is always cited as the watershed moment.
But it’s hard to gauge just what his real influence was, at least in the terms of what he wanted it to be.
The journalist who covered his successes in Spokane, former Spokesman-Review writer Bob Payne, offered a remarkable insight when asked about Lindgren’s legacy.
“Gerry was an inspiration to others,” he wrote in an e-mail the other day, “and continues to be for some – but almost in a neutral sense, in terms of races won, a name on a piece of paper, not in terms of barriers to be broken. And the ‘tragedy,’ at least in terms of American distance running, is that virtually nobody except Pre (Steve Prefontaine) came along after him.”
Of course, Lindgren, too, had trouble coming to grips with aspects of his achievements and, later, failures. His well-chronicled family issues and a disappearance that lasted upward of a decade surely clouded his legacy for some, and may have served to postpone the recognition he finally received Friday night.
But he is no longer out in the cold. He said he has just finished a book that he hopes will be available on his Web site in a few weeks. He continues to coach runners – and some plodders – in Honolulu. He’s a property manager for a shopping center, and he runs every day – and struggles to break 19 minutes for a 5K.
“There were times my victories seemed more like defeats,” he said. “I wanted to be a pure runner. I was an idealist. I think I still am.”