By Alexander Wolff

Salazar's three wins in New York included a world best in 1981 (above). Jerry Cooke/SI

After Salazar suffered his heart attack, that woman placed the crucifix by his hospital bed and wrapped the rosary in his hand. They were the first things he saw when he came to. Upon hearing that another woman had survived a heart attack while out running on the day he suffered his, Salazar passed the objects on again. "I gave them to her parents while she was in a coma," he says. She too has recovered.

It's all enough to make one believe in a force greater even than that of the most strong-willed athlete. Which is saying a lot if you consider Salazar that benchmark. As obsessives go, few are more devoted than the anti-Castro Cuban émigré, and Salazar was raised by one. His father, José, had been a schoolmate of Fidel Castro's, serving first in the rebel forces that overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista, then as a civil engineer for the new regime. One day in 1960 Che Guevara ordered José to scrap plans for a chapel in a community-development project, and Castro upheld the decision, declaring that in the new Cuba there would be no place for religion. "That day my father joined the counterrevolution," Alberto says. "The secret police came for him an hour after he left for Miami."

With the family resettled in New England, Alberto soon threw himself into distance running, training and competing as if nothing less than the secret police were at his heels. For a spell he delivered results commensurate with his intensity. One of the leading high school runners in the country, he went on to Oregon, where he won the 1978 NCAA cross-country championship. Two years later, at age 22, he ran his first marathon, in New York City. In the space on the entry blank for predicted time Salazar put down two hours and 10 minutes -- a time faster than Bill Rodgers's course record -- and then went out and won the race, beating Rodgers, in 2:09:41. Back in town a year later he predicted a world record and delivered, Namath-like. In Boston the following spring he beat Dick Beardsley by 10 yards in their epic Duel in the Sun and the following fall won his third straight New York City Marathon. He once described the marathon as a chance to take another runner to "the point where he has to give up," and that's the way he ran -- as if he were engaging others to subdue them, in a kind of foot-to-foot combat. He spoke matter-of-factly about the heat of his Latin temperament and how he could turn it up to his advantage. To fellow marathoner Amby Burfoot, who gently suggested that he might be entering too many races, he snapped, "Well, I've been doing pretty well at all of them, wouldn't you say?" From his Catholic upbringing he seemed to take all the discipline and sacrifice, but none of the humility. "Running became important to me for its own sake," he says now. "I wanted to be the greatest distance runner in the world. I was 23 and a few seconds off the world record in the 5 and 10K and thought I could do it all. Faith definitely became secondary. On Sundays, I was always sure to get my 20 miles in, but I was too tired to go to Mass."

After one too many near-death experiences, his body began to push back. He suffered his first marathon loss in the spring of 1983, finishing fifth in Rotterdam. Three straight times that summer he lost races on his home track in Eugene, Ore., the high seat of American distance running. He came down with bronchitis before the Worlds in Helsinki that August and, entering the 10,000 meters anyway, finished last. The next summer he finished 15th in the marathon at the Los Angeles Olympics. At one point he logged more than 100 miles a week with a stress fracture. Overtraining led to illness and injury and even, he believes, a suppressed endocrine system. He ran long races, but he wasn't running the long race. "I thought I was going to just push through it," he says, "that it was just a little slump."

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