After reading “Born to Run” there is one story in the book that I find truly amazing and that summarizes what it’s all about. Its the story of Emil Zatopek and the importance of enjoying what you are doing.
“There are two goddesses in your heart. The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get the wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you. Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.” – Coach Vigil
The perfect prototype for this theory was a Czech soldier, a gawky dweeb who ran with such horrendous form that he looked “as if he’d just been stabbed through the heart,” as one sportswriter put it. But Emil Zatopek loved running so much that even when he was still in grunt in army boot camp, he used to grab a flashlight and go off on twenty-mile runs through the woods at night.
In his combat boots.
In winter.
After a full day of infantry drills.
When the snow was too deep, Zatopek would jog in the tub on top of his dirty laundry, getting resistance workout along with clean tight whities. As soon as it thawed enough for him to get outside, he’d go nuts; he’d run four hundred meters as fast as he could, over and over, for ninety repetitions, resting in between by jogging two hundred meters. By the time he was finished, he’d done more than thirty-three miles of speedwork. Ask him his pace, and he’d shrug; he never timed himself. To build explosiveness, he and his wife, Dana used to play catch with a javelin, hurling it back and forth to each other across a soccer field like a long, lethal Frisbee. One of Zatopek’s favorite workouts combined all his loves at once; he’d jog through the woods in his army boots with his ever-loving wife riding on his back.
It was all a waste of time, of course. The Czechs were like the Zimbabwean bobsled team; they had no tradition, no coaching, no native talent, no chance of winning. But being counted out was liberating; having nothing to lose left Zatopek free to try any way to win. Take his first marathon: everyone knows the best way to build up to 26.2 miles is by running long, slow distances. Everyone, that is, except Emil Zatopek; he did hundred-yard dashes instead. “I already know how to go slow,” he reasoned. “I thought the point was to go fast” His atrocious, death-spasming style was punchline heaven for track scribes (“The most frightful horror spectacle since Frankenstein” …”He runs as if his next step would be his last” … “He looks like a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyor belt”), but Zatopek just laughed along. “I’m not talented enough to run and smile at the same time,” he’d say. “Good thing it’s not figure skating. You only get points for speed, not style.”
And dear God, was he a Chatty Cathy! Zatopek treated competition like it was speed dating. Even in the middle of a race, he liked to natter with other runners and try out his smattering of French and English and German, causing one grouchy Brit to complain about Zatopek’s “incessant talking.” At away meets, he’d sometimes have to many new friends in his hotel room that he’d have to give up his own bed and sleep outside under a tree. Once, right before and international race, he became pals with Australian runner who was hoping to break the Australian 5,000-meter record. Zatopek was only entered in the 10,000-meter race, but he came up with a plan; he told the Aussie to drop out of his race and line up next to Zatopek instead. Zatopek spend the first half of the 10,000-meter race pacing his new buddy to the record, then sped off to attend his own business and win.
That was pure Zatopek, though; races for him were like a pub crawl. He loved competing so much that instead of tapering and peaking, he jumped into as many meets as he could find. During a manic stretch in the late ’40s, Zatopek raced nearly every other week for three years and never lost, going 69-0. Even on a schedule like that, he still averaged up to 165 miles a week in training.
Zatopek was a bald, self-coached thirty-year-old apartment-dweller from a decrepit Eastern European backwater when he arrived for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Since the Czech team was so thin, Zatopek had his choice of distance events, so he chose them all. He lined up for the 5,000-meters, and won with a new Olympic record. He then lined up for the 10,000 meters, and won his second gold with another record. He’d never run a marathon before, but what the hell; with two golds already around his neck, he had nothing to lose, so why not finish the job and give it a bash?
Zatopek’s inexperience quickly became obvious. It was a hot day, so England’s Jim Peters, then the world-record holder, decided to use the heat to make Zatopek suffer. By the ten-mile mark, Peters was already ten minutes under his own world-record pace and pulling away from the field. Zatopek wasn’t sure if anyone could really sustain such a blistering pace. “Excuse me,” he said, pulling alongside Peters. “This is my first marathon. Are we going to fast?”
“No,” Peters replied. “To slow.” If Zatopek was dumb enough to ask, he was dumb enough to deserve any answer he got.
Zatopek was surprised. “You say to slow,” he asked again. “Are you sure this is too slow?”
“Yes,” Peters said. Then he got a surprise of his own.
“Okay. Thanks.” Zatopek took Peters at his word, and took off.
When he burst out of the tunnel and into the stadium, he was met with a roar: not only from the fans, but from athletes of every nation who thronged the track to cheer him in. Zatopek snapped the tape with his third Olympic record, but when his teammates charged over to congratulate him, they were to late: the Jamaican sprinters had already hoisted him on their shoulders and were parading him around the infield.
“Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry,” Mark Twain used to say.
Zatopek found a way to run so that when he won, even other teams were delighted.
You can’t pay someone to run with such infectious joy.
By the end of 1953 he held eight world running records—the only man in history to hold so many records at the same time. He was the first man to run 20 km in less than an hour. In total he set 18 world records.
