Dormant No More, Duncan Is Erupting

As Duncan Macdonald sits on the rough stone of the seawall beside Honolulu's yacht harbor, he gets more and more uncomfortable. He is trying to do a favor for a friend by describing the day last August in Stockholm when he set the American 5,000-meter record of 13:19.4. Somehow, on this mild December afternoon, with Christmas crowds jamming the shopping center across the street, that race seems distant and vaguely embarrassing. "There was a rabbit for the first two miles," he says, his tone flat, "but he was eight or 10 seconds slower than world-record pace. Then Rod Dixon [of New Zealand, who had been fourth in the Olympic 5,000] led for a kilometer, but he was not very fast either. I think he was saving up for a kick to make sure he won. I didn't let him do it." Macdonald's preventive measure was to set off on a scorching drive over the last three laps, forcing the race back into record country. " Dixon took me right at the bell for the final lap. Down the last backstretch I lengthened my stride, something that usually doesn't happen, and I discovered he wasn't getting away. I didn't feel I was in control, but at least I hadn't given up. Then on the turn I found something. I started to lift, passed him at the head of the stretch and just blew on in. Surprised the hell out of me."

Macdonald is unmoved during this recital, but sitting beside him is his wife of two years, Darby Meyer, who was there that day in Stockholm, and now her eyes are shining. "I was absolutely astonished," she says. "I had never seen Duncan kick before."

No one had. Long a good journeyman miler (he ran a 3:59.6 for Stanford as far back as 1970), Macdonald was known for his ability to set a brisk pace and then succumb to the kicks of others. But his sprint last August capped the most abrupt rise of an American distance runner since Gerry Lindgren came out of high school in 1964 and toppled the Russians in the 10,000. Macdonald had run his first serious 5,000 only two months before his record. Three weeks later he made the Olympic team. In Montreal a tactical error in his 5,000 heat cost him a spot in the final, but 13 days later he was the American record holder, slicing 2.8 seconds from the late Steve Prefontaine's best of 13:22.2.

Now, at 28, with a winter of careful training behind him and a genuine curiosity about how close he might come to Emile Puttemans' world record of 13:13.0, Duncan Macdonald is perhaps the world's most promising runner. How he managed this transition is a tale filled with wonder—a considerable amount of it his own—all the more so because he did it while suffering the vicissitudes of medical school, tendon surgery and a house built largely of window frames.

Macdonald was born on the island of Hawaii, where his father is a vulcanologist. He went to high school in Kailua, on the windward side of Oahu, where he set state records in the mile (4:11.8) and 880 (a still standing 1:52.7), records distinguished by the paucity of training that led up to them. A classmate recently recalled that Duncan was a runner. "But all I remember about him then was that he really liked beer." Macdonald, overhearing the comment, gave his classmate a composed little smile. "Nothing has changed," he said.

In the backwater that was Hawaii high school track, Macdonald's gifts found little test. "After about three meets I had raced everybody in the state," he says. The challenges did not begin until he arrived at Stanford in 1967. "It took me a while to grow into my pond again. There were shocks that might not have been so severe if I'd been from California with its vast pool of competition."

Some of that adjustment entailed the working out of a problem familiar to most intelligent athletes, one which may still touch Macdonald. His roommate, Olympic marathoner Don Kardong, describes running at Stanford: "You never had a sense that your duty was simply four years of competition. Instead, running was just one option among many, and you had to develop your own feelings about what you were going to do with it. It wasn't exactly non-pressure; it was humane. Marshall Clark, who coaches the distance runners, knows there are other things in your life. That was important to Duncan because he was known as the wonder runner in Hawaii, but he felt he was more than that."

Scattering his energies for his first two seasons, Macdonald ran without distinction. Then, in his junior year, having discovered the fascination of biology, a major which would eventually lead him to medicine, he turned to running in earnest. In an early-season meet against Oregon he led most of the mile, then watched helplessly as four Webfoot runners cruised by on the last lap. "He came up in the stands afterward," recalls Clark. "He was beet red, with fury in his eyes, a kind of twisted smirk on his face. I pointed out that the Oregon runners were still jogging, cooling down, and how it might be a good idea to go talk to them and find out what they did differently. 'I will,' he said. That's the last time they do that to me.' And at the Pac-8 meet later that year he went under four minutes, and only one Oregon runner—Roscoe Divine—beat him."

But Macdonald was not a lucky runner. "There were always freaky injuries and illnesses, sprains and poison oak," says Clark. "After his 3:59.6—still the only sub-four-minute mile ever run by a Stanford undergraduate—he developed a strange nerve problem in his leg. He couldn't make the final in the NCAA meet. I remember him standing behind the awards platform while the first six got their medals, and his expression was like that on the day of the Oregon dual meet. He was terribly upset." Clark thinks for a moment. "We never talked about those disappointments, although I could with other runners, but they were there."

These silences were a measure of the potency of his disappointments. They surely fired Macdonald's running during his last year at Stanford. Where twice before he had turned down trips to the NCAA cross-country meet because he felt unqualified for the six-mile distance, he now began setting course records. "His mileage went up. His motivation went up," says Clark.