The tough get going. This is what my high school track and XC coach used to say to us every day. These words have been chiseled into my brain. I can’t remember who I met yesterday, but I’ll never forget my high school coach.
My teammates and I spent more time with him than with our own parents. As highly impressionable 16-year-olds, he had an enormous effect on all of us, which, 54 years later, I’m still unpacking. Of the approximately 500 kids he coached, there is no doubt that every one of them remembers his name, voice and face to this day.
His name was Elf Pedlar. After being around Elf for two years, my teammate and best friend Zolt and I suddenly wondered, “That can’t really be his name.” So, we looked it up in the phonebook and there it was: “Elf Pedlar.” We drove by the listed address to make sure it wasn’t a sugar plum fairy castle. It wasn’t. Instead, it turned out he and his wife had raised 14 foster children in their very modest, single-story post-WWII house. Score one for Elf.
Michigan winters are dark and cold, so we would train on the indoor track. This track was old-school (literally and figuratively). It was suspended from the rafters above the gym floor, a full loop was only 110 yards with the corners so steeply banked one could barely stand up on them. Such a dizzying number of laps were required to complete a mile that someone dubbed the track, “The Record Player.” These were the legendary “boards”—1 x 6 boards nailed onto wooden joists with a strip of dark green linoleum tacked on top. With 15 high school boys blazing around the Record Player, it produced a thunderous roar. The heat up high in the gym was intense, and the smell of analgesic and sweat from the wrestlers practicing below was memorable. To run in this fishbowl, one had to establish an early position; passing could only be done with a committed burst and there would be no complaining about the occasional elbow.
Of the approximately 500 kids he coached, there is no doubt that every one of them remembers his name, voice and face to this day.
While I’ve enjoyed participating in ultrarunning for decades, the sport is hard for me to watch. It’s like spectating a person walking in the woods. Maybe because after racing on the boards, everything else was boring.
One day we were dogging the workout—maybe the heat and odor were wearing us out. Someone piped up, “Coach, why don’t you run with us?” We all fell silent, taken aback by the brash suggestion and having no idea what might come next. Elf pulled off the stopwatch from around his neck, hung the strap on a rail and still wearing slacks and regular street clothes, turned to us and said, “Ready?”
We weren’t ready; he blew our socks off. It was insane. He was so fast. He delivered a lesson to me and my 16-year-old male teammates that remains with me to this day: keep your mouth shut and let your feet do the talking. Score another for Elf.
Who was this guy? We delved deeper. Elf Pedlar went to the local university on a track and field scholarship. He would run hot water into his dorm room sink, put in a can of pork and beans to warm it up and that was dinner. He couldn’t continue to run, let alone sustain a running “career” after college because he needed to make money to support his family. When I hear of people today who drop out of college to “pursue an ultrarunning career,” my respect is muted.
Cross-country used to be where the kids who couldn’t do anything else ended up, but by the time we were seniors, our core team had been running together for three years. We had mojo and the new classes also wanted to run. After the district meet, where we put all five of our scoring runners in the top 10, we walked into the football stadium at halftime and the announcer on the PA told the crowd we were the 6A League Champions. High school social status had long been dominated by the jocks and the greasers, but there we were, wearing corduroys, flannel shirts and running shoes. It was 1969, Frank Shorter wouldn’t ignite the running boom by winning the Olympic Marathon gold in Munich for another three years, but all of a sudden, we were the cool kids. Tom Boekhout, our XC captain, was elected homecoming king.
I grew up in this sport. And the sport of running grew up with me.
The outdoor track season arrived that spring. As usual, we were training on a borrowed college cinder track because our high school didn’t have one. Zolt and I were goofing off one day, standard practice for 17-year-old males. We cut across the turn on the far end of the track, laughing about shortening the lap length of an interval, and Coach Pedlar was furious, which we had never seen before. He smacked us both in the head with his clipboard, yelling that we were a couple of old goats and that he wasn’t going to waste his time with us if we didn’t take things seriously. Ever since then and to this day, Zolt and I always hold up our end and get the job done, whatever it is, on time and as promised. Letting down someone you love is the worst, and we learned it’s easier to step it up and get it done than to feel the shame of letting someone down. Score another for Elf.
All our workouts were running intervals on a track. We simply did what we were told, and it seemed fine. I later realized running hard intervals every single day was not something even Olympic athletes would attempt.
The Wednesday before the district track meet on Saturday, we ran 30 quarter mile repeats on the cinder track. That’s thirty (30). The big meet arrived, I could hardly walk let alone run, and had a terrible race. I was discouraged, stopped training, but showed up at the next race and set a PR. So, with renewed commitment, I was back at the next workout which was 110 repeated wind sprints in the fourth-floor hallway of our high school. I’m not making this up. We did this three days before the regional meet, which, surprise surprise, was another disaster. Looking back, the reason for these wild swings in my racing performance is painfully obvious, but it wasn’t at the time.
I now realize Elf Pedlar didn’t know who he was dealing with. The standard, “Go! Go!” coaching style was not right for me, because, at his urging, I would go. I would do anything. I ran 6 miles in the dark before school, went home after school and ran 3 miles to the track workout, and then the 3 miles back home after that. We took the time to figure out who he was, but he never learned who we were.
When we saw him in the hallways, Coach would always come up to us and enthusiastically say, “Hi champ!” while shaking our hand with one hand and gripping the funny bone in our elbow with his other, which was both irritating, stupid and endearing. Nearing the end of our high school days, it dawned on both me and Zolt that he had been greeting us with “Hi champ!” for 3 years because he didn’t remember our names.
In the fall as school was starting up, he would populate the hallways with cross-country team recruiting posters that proclaimed, “Boy + Cross-Country = Man.” With cunning teenage cleverness or an emerging skepticism of the assumptions of adult life to come, I modified those posters to say, “Boy + Cross-Country = Tired Boy.”
As one may surmise, I have not used a coach since. Being absolutely clear about who you are and your capabilities holds immeasurable value, as it remains a constant companion, often forged through the fires of experience.
The outcome is that every workout since high school, 54 years ago, has felt easy. So, when the going gets tough… not a big deal. It’s just like the good old days.
Author’s note: I sent a draft of this column to three friends from high school. As I surmised, they remembered 1967-69 like it happened yesterday. Here are their recollections of “when the going gets tough…”
“What he instilled (or tried to instill) into us was a gift. Which some of us may have taken longer to learn than others, if we learned it at all: Life is sometimes hard. Face up to it and give it your best effort. Elf was the 11th child in his family, hence the name — German for eleven. He and his wife were extraordinarily generous to so many foster children.”
“Great memories for me as well. A coach that allowed me to train with the boys! (This teammate is female.) He surprised me with a gift of a pair of gold Adidas Mexicanas. I think the boys got blue, but I treasured mine—real leather!”
“The incident on the track when we cut the corner of an interval lap and he got mad at us, and how it shaped how we have always approached things going forward from that time, brought tears to my eyes. You’re completely right about how it made us consider—perhaps for the first time in our young lives—that what we do and how we behave has an effect on others. That was really one of the seminal learning moments in my life, and I am touched that it proved to be the same for you.”