The Perfect Mile. Neal Bascomb

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СКАЧАТЬ what these young men, hounded by a shirtless older man, were doing. Running for exercise was odd in and of itself, but a group doing so through the botanical gardens carrying bamboo poles in each arm and shrieking like banshees as Cerutty called to them to run like ‘primitive man’ was pure scandal.

      What Cerutty had in mind for the ten-day training camp in Portsea would definitely have been beyond the observers’ comprehension. Landy was sceptical as well, yet there he was. By following Cerutty’s gruelling regimen, Landy hoped to win a spot on the Olympic team.

      Before breakfast the men ran the Hall Circuit, a course that threaded through tea trees, up hills, down steep slopes, and across sand dunes for one mile and 283 yards; the runners were timed and pitted against one another with handicaps and a three-pence bet apiece. The winner won the pot, and Cerutty didn’t hesitate to direct runners around the wrong bend so that he could claim the prize himself. Sometimes he clocked their runs and badgered them to go faster, questioning their manhood or dedication, often both. He ridiculed and taunted them mercilessly, particularly Landy, whom he thought needed toughening up. ‘Move your bloody arms!’ he would shout. ‘Too slow! Too slow! … Come on, you lazy bastards! You’re hopeless bloody dogs! Children could run faster than that!’

      Other training sessions were held on nearby golf courses, where Cerutty had his charges accelerate up hills to achieve the kind of energy explosion they needed in a race. They ran up sand dunes for the same effect, an exercise Landy particularly disliked. He preferred the rhythmic flow of running on flat ground. For resistance training they sprinted along the beach in knee-deep surf. When not running, they swam, surfed or hiked along the coast. They were always in a state of movement until Cerutty stopped to give a lecture on the grass beside the 300-metre Portsea Oval. There he taught his Stotan – part Stoic, part Spartan – philosophy. Cerutty had coined the term and its requirements:

      1 Realization that, as Wordsworth the poet says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ which denotes there is no time for wasteful ideas and pursuits.

      2 In place of wasteful hobbies there commences a period of supervised and systematic physical training, together with instruction in the art of living fully. This replaces previously undirected life.

      3 Swimming will be done all the year round … This especially strengthens the will and builds resistance to quitting the task ahead.

      4 The cessation of late hours. Amusements both social and entertaining should be reduced to a minimum, and then only in the nature of relaxation from strenuous work.

      Cerutty delivered this philosophy along with quotes from Plato, Buddha, Jesus, Freud, Einstein, and St Francis of Assisi, among others. He stressed the importance of yoga, non-conformity, a diet of oats, the study of nature and animals, and running barefoot to connect with the Earth. There were also the impromptu lessons after meals, like the time when Cerutty lectured them on warming up. A cat was sitting on a ledge outside one of the huts when their coach snuck over and emptied a bucket of water over it. The cat leapt away and disappeared in a flash. Cerutty then expounded, ‘There. Did the cat do stretches? Did the cat jog around? Did the cat do knee bends? Did the cat have a tracksuit on before racing? No, the cat just got up and went. No more warming up. Forget it.’

      For Landy, the son of an accountant and the product of private schools, this was wild stuff. He laughed off most of it, but there was wisdom in what Cerutty said about training hard. The body had amazing limits that most people never tested; Cerutty drove Landy to try. He had helped bring out a discipline and focus the young runner never suspected he had. This ability had been dormant, but now it revealed itself. The other athletes at Portsea were impressed by Landy’s discipline. During hard runs that seemed to last for ever, they also began to realise they could never match it.

      There was no sense of jealousy, however. In fact Landy took away from this time with Cerutty more than important lessons. He had won a tightly knit group of friends at Portsea, among them Perry and Macmillan as well as three-milers Geoff Warren and Trevor Robbins. The hard training and rustic setting combined to create a sort of boot camp, one that drew the athletes together. Landy, Robbins, Warren and two others bunked in the ‘ski hut’, which was a modified wooden container originally used to import Volkswagen cars. The first night Landy stayed there he had a bad dream about trying to get out of a hole. The nightmare was so vivid that he literally clawed his way out of his top bunk and crashed to the floor. The next night he agreed to be roped into his bed. Meanwhile, Perry and Macmillan, the two more established Stotans, were staying with Cerutty in an old cabin nicknamed after the luxury hotel, ‘Menzies’, because of its superior accommodation. One morning after a particularly cold night, Landy approached Macmillan and explained, ‘It’s pretty tough out here. Nobody will get up and get the breakfast. If you do and get everything out and ready, the second you turn your back, suddenly all these vultures’ – and Landy then jokingly mimicked a vulture poised to strike with its claws – ‘and little monkeys come down and eat it all up and go back up to their bunks, and yours is gone.’ By the end of the story, he had Macmillan in hysterics. With each such episode at Portsea, the others liked Landy more and more.

      By the tenth day of camp, the gang of runners had bonded. They were both exhausted and inspired. Cerutty came away with a better understanding of what made his runners tick. Of Landy he wrote, ‘He undervalues himself, his achievements, and his possibilities, merely because he measures himself not against mediocrity but against the highest levels … Courage and desire to excel without undue display of effort, much less suffering, causes him to run well within himself … What his highest potential level is I can only guess at.’ Though Cerutty thought it unlikely that Landy would ever become a true Stotan, they both knew who had set him on the path to athletic greatness.

      On 12 January 1952, in Melbourne, Landy set out to break 4:10 in the mile, the time established by the Australian Olympic organisers to qualify for Helsinki. Without ‘Big Mac’ Macmillan to push him, Landy led from the start, pushing harder than ever before, but he crossed the finish line a second short. ‘It is bad luck,’ he said after the race. ‘I don’t suppose there will be enough finance to send us both [Macmillan and Landy] to the Olympics.’ He swallowed his disappointment, and only a few hours later ran a 3,000m race in 8:53, breaking the Australian open record. The training at Portsea had increased his endurance, but not his speed over shorter distances. Two weeks later in Sydney he beat Macmillan by inches, but again the time was too slow to qualify.

      By the cut-off date for selection, Macmillan and Landy had both run the qualifying time in the 1,500m, but only Macmillan had run the requisite speed for the mile. When the list of sponsored Olympic team members was published in March, Landy’s name was missing. There was a loophole, however. If Landy and a few others could come up with $A750 each, they could join the team. It was a lot of money, a year’s wages for some, and the Geelong Guild Athletic Club rallied to raise it for Landy. They held Saturday night dances and ‘chook’ raffles, which awarded the winner a dressed hen. With a lot of work and good intentions, the club members raised most of the money, but they were still $A250 short. Landy’s father made up the difference. His son was going to the Olympics. John heard the news while driving a tractor on his family farm on the South Gippsland coast, 130 miles south-east of Melbourne. He had only eight weeks to train.

      Before Landy left for Europe, Joseph Galli published an article in a magazine by the name of Sports Novels whose title mirrored what many were thinking: ‘Victorian John Landy May Soon Become Our Greatest Middle-Distance Runner’. It was the reason so much effort had been made to send him. Landy was quoted thanking Cerutty for his guidance, and then the miler made a prediction, not of future success but rather of his untapped potential: ‘I don’t know just what my body can stand up to,’ he said – not yet.

      At Kapyla Village in Helsinki, Cerutty finally quieted down. Landy lay in bed, uncertain as to how he would stack up against the world’s best. He had made great strides in his development and had run well in England, but still he was СКАЧАТЬ