Jennings isn't much older, but he's definitely wiser

	At Stanford, the eccentric Gabe Jennings anchored one of the top U.S. track programs. John Biever/SI

The face was vaguely familiar -- but the name escaped me, dodging around the recesses of my brain, avoiding capture. Plus, it was early.

I had traveled all day from my home on the East Coast to the clear-air, high-altitude paradise of Mammoth Lakes, Calif., to write a distance-running story. Three flights ending in Reno, Nev., and then a three-hour drive through high Sierra, which is probably beautiful in daylight but just bludgeoning in the dark. I had a fitful sleep, wheezing for air at 8,000 feet with sea-level lungs.

Now it is morning. I can't even run out the cobwebs because of a sore, surgically repaired knee that I suspect will eventually turn me into a cyclist. I am standing in the parking lot of a modest motel with Team USA running coach Bob Larsen, shivering against a morning chill that will rapidly turn into a postcard afternoon under cloudless skies.

Soon the runners begin arriving from their homes, their motels, their flophouse condos. There is Meb Keflezighi, U.S. silver medalist in the 2004 Olympic marathon. Here comes Deena Kastor, bronze medalist in Athens and the fastest U.S. female marathoner in history. (Watch her this weekend in Chicago. She recently broke the American record in the half-marathon, and in Mammoth I asked her if she was as fit as that performance would indicate. "Yes, I am,'' she said, her pixie's eyes doing nothing to hide a warrior's readiness. Something special is coming..

There were others milling around: Olympian Jen Rhines and former Stanford distance stars Lauren Fleshman and Ian Dobson.

Among them is a tall man with fine, black growth on his chin and beneath his nose. Hair falls out from beneath his winter hat. I have seen him before. Many times. The name, the name? I asked Larsen. "Him?'' replied Larsen, as if I should know. "That's Gabe Jennings.''

Of course it is. The big, expressive eyes, the wide mouth. That look, part rebel, part Prefontaine, part ... part ... who knows what?

I met Jennings in June 1997, when he was a senior in high school in Madison, Wis. He was a gifted runner, the son of free-spirited hippies Jim and Suzanne Jennings. This was back before Alan Webb, when journalists would revel in deconstructing the mystery of America's inability to produce a high-school miler who could break four minutes. No one had done it since Jim Ryun ran 3:55.3 in 1964. (Webb would shatter that record with a seminal 3:53.43 at the 2001 Prefontaine Classic, but in '97 Webb was an eighth-grader and Ryun was untouchable.)