In The Long Run, It's Grete

Summer woods, dripping and fragrant. Trails of sand and sawdust, smooth from the rain, lead through blueberries and fern, rising over smooth humps of granite. The ridges, carved by glaciers, run north and south, with lakes between, their waters dark with conifers' shadow, evoking Norse legend. In the mind's eye the remains of Grendel lie wedged beneath sunken logs and stones.

The trail goes for miles, its severity of rock and evergreen drawing the runner on, farther and farther from Oslo. So long as the day is cool and wet, few people are to be seen, but with the midmorning sun appear elderly couples in walking shorts and tea dresses, backpackers with dogs on leads. The slanting shafts of light sometimes fall upon bare girls, glowing brown behind veils of fireweed. Graying, wiry runners trot slowly but with radiant purpose, as if they don't mean to stop until they reach Trondheim or Stavanger.

With such terrain and a tradition of rigorous sport, it seems a wonder that Norway has not produced more fine runners than it has, but, of course, for five months of the year this land lies beneath snow. Then the trails are used for cross-country skiing. Runners, if they don't simply quit and ski through the winter, must go to the hard and treacherous road.

Grete Waitz does. Those are the days when she rises at 5, hours before the northern dawn, and pushes out into the cold and wind. "Don't run with her in the morning," says Arne Kvalheim, a former Olympic 1,500-meter runner and now an Oslo city councilman. "She runs too fast. A 5:45 mile pace right out the front door." Then during the day Waitz teaches physical education, Norwegian and English to secondary students at Bj�lsen School in one of Oslo's tougher neighborhoods. The light has again failed by the time she joins her husband Jack, an accountant, for her evening training, which may be an hour of repeated charges up a snow-swept hill, weighted by two or three sweat suits, seeing no more than a stride or two ahead, her breath snapping in the 10-below-zero air.

"There is no sense of sacrifice," she says, "except sometimes in the summer. When it is warm and sunny, it's hard for me to run. I'd rather go on a holiday instead. But in the winter, I go early to bed, I get up and run. I like it, the way I live, but I find I can't explain the satisfaction to people who do not run."

Perhaps the way to start is to mention the achievements founded upon all that cold, dark work. Waitz has won the world cross-country championship the last two years, by 30 seconds each time. In July of this year she ran 3,000 meters in 8:31.8, a time second only to the 8:27.1 world record of the U.S.S.R.'s Lyudmila Bragina, and she won the 1977 World Cup at 3,000 meters, the longest regularly contested track race for women. On the road, Waitz has covered the popular 10-kilometer distance in a world-best 31:15.4, again half a minute better than any other woman. In her only marathon, the New York race of a year ago, Waitz broke the world record by more than two minutes with her 2:32:30, a time that seems but a hint of her true potential.

Knut Kvalheim, Arne's brother and the Norwegian men's 10,000-meter record holder, is the man who got Waitz interested in her first marathon, and he believes that if conditions are right this Sunday in New York when she returns to try her second, she will run in the vicinity of 2:25. Statistics support him. A ratio of other good marathoners' times for the 10,000 meter shows that they all slow down by a factor of 8% to 10% in the longer race. Granting Waitz the liberal rate of a 10% slower pace than she maintains over 10,000 meters, she still figures to complete the full 26-mile 385-yard marathon distance in 2:25:07.

The element that has allowed Waitz to so embarrass prior long-distance records is her speed, not necessarily raw sprinter's power—that she doesn't have—but an ability to sustain a high percentage of her maximum pace over all kinds of distances. This she developed in a 10-year career as a middle-distance runner, and she has taken her records by such margins in part because she is the first international-class woman miler and 3,000-meter runner to attempt the 10,000 and marathon seriously.

Waitz was born Grete Andersen in Oslo 26 years ago. Her father was a manufacturing pharmacist, and her mother worked in a grocery shop. "I always liked sport," she says; she had gone from handball to gymnastics to track before she was 12. She ran the sprints at first, rising to "the longer distances" of 400 and 800 meters when she was 15. Her chief inspiration was a neighbor, Terje Pedersen, who in 1964 was the first man ever to throw the javelin more than 300 feet. "He was my hero," says Waitz now, smiling at the memory. "I joined the same club, I wanted to please him so much.

"As a child I understood I was better in the 800 than the 400. As I trained I got no faster, only stronger. By 1972 I was running the 800 and 1,500, and I saw I was better in the 1,500, so I trained more and more but still got no faster, just stronger."