Authors: David Samuels
exactly where you stand. You know exactly where you placed and how fast you ran. Every race you run is always part success and part failure, whether or not you win the race. You always run faster than your body thinks you can, but you never run as fast as you want to.
The Hogues had irises growing around the house, so Jim and his friends would hide in
those, or play in the tree house. He was friends with Keith Mark, and Connie Campbell and
Judith Rowley His mom made special vegetarian meals at Jim’s request, like brown rice mixed with yogurt and salsa, salads, and broiled tomatoes. She cooked the other kids whatever they asked for, including hamburgers. Jim became a vegetarian when he was eight or nine years old.
He had learned about being a vegetarian from a yoga book he had read in the library. He walked into the house one day and said, “Now I’m a vegetarian,” and Jim’s mom said, “Okay.”
Stealth and deception were as important to becoming a winning runner as they were in
real life, Jim told his friend Keith Mark. “Don’t be a know-it-all,” he used to tell Keith, who hung on his mentor’s every word. “You know, you may be the smartest guy in the world. There may be ten things to know on one particular topic, and you may know nine of them, which
makes you the world-renowned expert. But if you go around and tell everybody all nine things you know then you’re not the only guy who knows those things, and you’re not the smartest guy in the world anymore.” It was important to keep your mouth shut, and to listen to what other people had to say “Even though you know nine things, and no one else knows what you know,”
he instructed, “if the guy you’re talking to only knows one thing, and it’s the one thing you don’t know, then you let him tell you that thing. Then you know ten things.”
Mark appreciated his friend’s advice. Jim was the best runner he had ever seen, and his
powers of concentration were something close to superhuman. Once, Jim pointed out a kid from Leavenworth High School and told Mark to follow that kid until a certain part of the track, where he should start his final kick. It was a cold day, and Keith was jumping up and down to keep limber as he listened to his friend plot out his strategy for the race. “I came down with my long spikes on the back of Jim’s Achilles,” he remembered. His spikes raked down the back of
Hogue’s leg and tore through his shoe. “I’m not talking about a little poke,” Mark remembered.
“It required stitches.” As he watched the blood drip down the back of Hogue’s leg and onto the heel of his sneaker, Mark worried that he had maimed Washington High’s best runner, possibly for life. “Now, I want you to make your kick here,” Hogue continued, without missing a beat.
Then he lined up and ran the race.
Hogue was intent on training Keith Mark to steal glory from their teammate Dan Ford, a
talented runner who did everything by the book. Hogue hated Dan Ford’s guts. If Jim was going to run twelve quarter miles, he’d tell Dan he was going to run two easy miles and call it a day.
He wasn’t interested in making the team better. He was interested in making a few people better, in part as a way of showing up coach Wayne Hobelman, a painfully modest man who had come
to Washington High School to coach football and wound up coaching track. Hogue refused to
share any credit with Hobelman. For his part, Hobelman found it hard to understand what made his star runner tick. Hogue refused to run cross-country for Hobelman his junior year, and only ran his senior year in order to get into college. He insisted on doing his own workouts. Under pressure from the school principal, Hobart Neill, who wanted the team to win the state
championship, Hobelman asked the team to vote on whether Jim could work out on his own and
stay on the team. The team agreed that having Jim run made the team better.
At one point that year, Hobelman called in Jim’s parents to talk about their son. His
mother seemed shy, the old track coach remembered. She was soft-spoken and apologetic, and
said, “I’m sorry for the way Jim acts sometimes.” Gene Hogue took his son’s side. “Here’s a kid that has really worked hard to get where he is. He’s worked much harder than the rest of them,”
he told Hobelman.
Hogue was a discipline problem, but he was also the craftiest runner that Hobelman ever
coached. He became the state champion in the two-mile race in his junior year. When Hobelman tried to enter him in the two-mile again the next year, Hogue refused. “He kind of sneered at me,” Hobelman remembered. “But I stayed with it. That was one battle I won with Jim.”
Twenty years later, Hobelman would still vividly remember the race that Jim ran on a
windy day in Wichita for the state championship. Jim was a skinny kid, and the wind was so bad that it nearly blew him off the track. For five or six laps, he stayed even with his main challenger, a fast kid from Wichita West. With two laps to go, the wind picked up even harder, and Hogue started sprinting with the wind at his back. His coach didn’t understand why. “Jim, what are you doing!” Hobelman yelled. He tried to catch Hogue’s attention, to signal that he still had two laps to go. Hogue ignored him, and began his final kick well before the end of the race. After
sprinting thirty yards ahead of the pack, he settled back into his pace, as the runners rounded the curve into the wind.
“I’ve never seen anybody do that again,” Hobelman remembered, shaking his head at his
memory of the runner who outsmarted everyone on the track, including his coach. “He wasn’t
just out there running. He was thinking, and had a plan.” As Hogue disappeared into the stands, his coach ran after his new state champion. “I wanted to give him a hug. He went to his parents, I think, and was talking to them. I said, ‘Hey, Jim, congratulations.’ He tried to stay away from me.” Hogue didn’t want his coach to get any of the credit. He ran his own race and won.
It was natural that Kansas State, the traditional track powerhouse, recruited Hogue
aggressively, but the school backed off when Hobelman described Hogue as a talented runner
but also a discipline problem. Still, dozens of schools were interested in Hogue, who chose the University of Wyoming, up in the mountains where he and Keith Mark had always dreamed of
living.
In September 1977, James Hogue entered the University of Wyoming, where the
competition was fiercer than it had been in Kansas. Hogue’s passionate sense of determination is evident in nearly every line of the detailed letters of instruction that he mailed back home to Keith Mark:
…the higher up that you start, the safer your position will be. The first impressions you
give the other runners could be very important in whether you make the team or not. Let them know very little about yourself. . . . You should wear either a plain T-shirt or that Wyoming shirt, but remember the less they know about you the better.
Sunday P.M. Go for an enjoyable but difficult run today of about ten miles. You may run
with someone else today. For the last mile of the run, try to be under five minutes. Sprints. Then more sprints. Then 5 more.
From your house: Go to 8th and State then South to Riverview. West on Riverview till it
stops. Go left till Kansas Avenue. West on Kansas till it ends. Turn right and go to Riverview.
West on Riverview to 110th. You may get water at the Baptist Church. There is a faucet on the outside of the building. Go North on 110 to State. Turn right and go home. Lift weights. ... Go to Victory hills and run on the South fairway. You may take your shoes off. Run from the two
corner greens charging up the hill each time.
The solitary intensity of these letters also has something to do with the particular
circumstances in which James Hogue found himself as a freshman at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The coach of the university’s track team, Ron Richardson, was a former assistant at East Tennessee State University who arrived in Laramie in the fall of 1977 with the dream of turning Wyoming into a running powerhouse that would rival the University of Texas at El Paso program run by Ted Banks, and the legendary University of Oregon program run by Bill
Bowerman, which produced the great American Olympic champion Steve Prefontaine. The class
of track-and-field athletes that Richardson had recruited that year was among the strongest in the country. In addition to James Hogue, it included Ron Wartgow, a four-minute miler from
Deerfield, Illinois; Jared Thenley, a six-foot-seven, 260-pound discus thrower from Kansas; and Mike White, a champion high jumper from inner-city Philadelphia.
The members of his team that year remembered Richardson as a cold, distant figure who
lived and breathed the sport of running, and who met with his athletes underneath the bleachers of the university’s indoor track in a small, cramped office decorated with a dog-eared copy of
The Management Techniques of Genghis Khan
. As the skies grew dark and temperatures plunged below freezing, Richardson would push his runners through thirty-two 220-meter sprints,
followed by sixteen quarter miles and eight half-mile runs. Having read that sprinters would retain the muscle memory of running times faster than those of which they were ordinarily
capable, he also evolved a unique training system for his distance runners. Wrapping a
weightlifter’s belt around the runner’s waist, he would attach the belt to a rope approximately eight to ten feet in length. He would then tie the rope around his hand, with a towel underneath to guard against rope burns, and tow the runner up and down the high-altitude mountain trails
around Laramie with his arm hanging out of the driver’s side window of his Volkswagen Bug.
When his runners lost a race at Brigham Young University, he drove them home that night and then picked them up early the next morning, dropped them off seventeen miles from Laramie,
and told them to run home.
The true stars of Richardson’s recruiting class did not arrive on campus until later that
fall. The rules then governing athletic recruitment at American universities did not place limits on the origins or age of athletes, or mandate a capacity to do college-level work. And when Richardson’s high school athletes took the track for their first meet that fall, they were joined by their coach’s secret weapon, a collection of world-class runners from Kenya, including the future Olympians Michael Chrono, Simon Killerly, and Joseph Nzau. The Kenyans were cagey about
their ages. Most were in their mid to late twenties, the age at which runners reach the peak of their mental and physical development Older and stronger, the Kenyans quickly established their dominance over American athletes who were straight out of high school.
More than two decades later, the American runners at the University of Wyoming would
still remember the experience of being thrown into annihilating daily competition with the
world-class runners from Kenya. “People . . . were struggling in their own way with the
acclimation to a college program with a very demanding coach ... in a peer group that was very challenging, even at this level of very high-caliber American athletes,” remembered Mike Penny, then a freshman from Colorado. “All of a sudden, there’s . . . these foreign athletes, who are so far beyond, not even close to where [we] were at that time.” If Richardson’s strategy placed a great psychological burden on the American runners, it did pay off on the track. By the spring of 1977, the University of Wyoming team, led by the Kenyans, was ranked third in the country
behind Oregon and El Paso.
Penny would later become close friends with the Kenyan runner Joseph Nzau. In the fall
and spring of 1977, however, he spent more time with Hogue, who wore a jacket and tie to
classes on a campus where most students favored T-shirts and jeans. His elliptical style of communication appeared to be an attempt to copy the Kenyans, who spoke in metaphors and
avoided answering direct questions, especially about their true ages. “You’d ask them something like, ‘Hey, Joseph, how old are you?’ “ Penny remembered. “And he’d say, ‘Why does it matter how old I am? A tree is old, does it matter how old the tree is?’”
Having been warned by Richardson not to reveal their ages, the Kenyans had reason to be
canny. Hogue was the only one of the American high school runners who refused to concede
superiority to the older, stronger Kenyans. Instead, Hogue pushed himself to the limits of his physical endurance and beyond in order to compete with runners who were more physically
mature and, to Penny’s eye at least, more gifted. Hogue ran with the Kenyans. He ran on his own in the mountains. He copied Joseph Nzau’s training methods, which included running on the
freeways outside Laramie while wearing heavy construction boots in two feet of snow. Soon,
Hogue’s body began to break down under the stress of a training regimen that was far more
demanding than anything he had imposed on Keith Mark. Injured, he ran on the indoor track
whose soft dirt surface was less likely to aggravate pulled muscles and damaged tendons. He ran in the swimming pool. He searched the running literature for new training methods that might help him improve his times.
“The symptoms of the beginning of staleness are the opposite of the symptoms of
successful sharpening; the runner no longer wishes to race,” he wrote to Mark that spring. “His resistance to colds and other infections is lower, and he likely is suffering from tendon and muscle soreness. Finally, there is a pronounced decline in will.”
The impressive if uneven results of this regimen are apparent in a letter Hogue sent to his friend at the end of May:
“I got your letter just before my last test. I’ve studied 37 hours for this one,” Hogue
wrote.
These past two weeks have been really exhausting. . . .
Indoors. Air Force anchor mile relay 51.6 2nd
Colo State 1000 1st 2m relay 1:58.9 2nd
Colorado 300 way back 32.71 mile 2nd 4:16.38 . . .