Herb Lindsay Comes On Strong

Just a few minutes now until race time and Herbert Donald Lindsay is getting ready to blast off. It's something to see: Lindsay practically snaps, crackles and pops with assorted tensions. This is customarily the moment when racers are withdrawn, each self-absorbed and looking inward for strength. At most they'll nod distractedly at one another in fleeting indications of goodwill. Not Lindsay. He's delivering an unspoken message all around; it can be seen in his appraising glances at the others, in his subtle changes of posture, the casual shaking of a thigh muscle or the flexing of a shoulder. This is what Lindsay is telling the other runners:

All right, it's belly-to-the-ground time, gang. You wanted to race; ok-a-a-a-a-y, you're going to race. Make sure that your seat backs and tray tables are in their full upright and locked position, and no further smoking until you're well inside the terminal.

To be fair, it must be noted that not all of this is conscious on Lindsay's part. His appearance puts a lot of the competitive chill in the air. Lindsay has a craggy and chiseled brow; in an overhead sun, his eyes are hidden in darkness. His jawline is unyielding. His body is lean and flat this way, from the side view, but wide this way, from head-on. At 5'9" and 150 pounds, he is Arnold Schwarzenegger with most of the air let out. Or, as Greater Boston Track Club Running Coach Bill Squires says, "The first time I saw Herb in full pursuit, coming over a hill, I thought, 'My God, he looks like a melted halfback.' " With Lindsay, every important bone is overlaid with a sheath of muscle. His thighs are slabbed on the sides.

The popular thinking in this nation is that runners just aren't supposed to look this way. It isn't necessarily the correct thinking, as we shall see later, it's just popular. People tend to identify runners with the wraithlike Bill Rodgers, who looks like Woody Allen at speed, or Frank Shorter, handsome but terribly gaunt. The theory grows that because such men are successful runners, skinny must be good. And then up pops a Lindsay, clean-cut and rippling, giving off fierce messages about "Let's go racing." We see his competition number and the Nike prototype racing shoes—those advance-model Nikes are a dead giveaway—but are we sure this man is a real runner?

This man is, indeed, uh-huh, a runner. As it turns out, Lindsay, who is 25, is one of the very best road racers in the country, and the best at several distances from six to 12 miles. He's the U.S. record holder at 43:50 for 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) and 46:0 for 10 miles. In 1979 he won 16 of the 22 major races he entered—including two billed as national championships—and never finished worse than third. For all of this, Lindsay was named Road Athlete of the Year by Track & Field News. So far in 1980, he has 14 victories in 18 starts.

It is a measure of Lindsay's dedication that one of his four 1980 losses was an absolute what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here disaster: the U.S. Olympic Trials 10,000-meter final in Eugene, Ore. last June. Lindsay wheezed home ninth—his old nemesis, Craig Virgin, won—having had all his doors, windows and fenders blown off. The trouble with that race seemed to be that it was conducted inside a stadium—with no hills and hollows, no curbs, gutters, lunging Airedales or little old ladies spritzing the racers with garden hoses. This was only the second time in his life Lindsay had run a 10,000 on a track. The defeat came on a miserable rainy Tuesday evening. Five days later, on Sunday morning, Lindsay showed up at Portland, Ore. and won the Cascade Run Off, setting his U.S. 15-km. record. And that brings us back to the aforementioned ferocity.

If the other competitors were to look more closely, they'd figure this out. That isn't hostility Lindsay is giving off, it's competitiveness. It must be the body and forehead and jawline; inside, it turns out that Lindsay is really full of a sort of fierce joy. "I suddenly realize that I've given myself gooseflesh," he said before the start of the Cascade Run Off. "Look at this. Look at my arms—goose bumps on a hot day like this."

In action, Lindsay becomes even more revved up and a lot of vivid technicolor stuff plays through his mind—as happened this spring at the 15-km. Midland Run in Far Hills, N.J. Finest road-running field ever assembled, the experts said: Rodgers, Henry Rono, the steeplechase 3,000, 5,000 and 10,000 world-record holder, plus Lasse Viren, gold medalist in both the 5,000 and 10,000 at the 1972 and '76 Olympics, and Dick Quax, a silver medalist at the 1976 Olympics in the 5,000. And suddenly, there was Lindsay, flying along this rolling highway, hipbone to hipbone with Viren. Everybody else was behind them. Lindsay had raced and beaten Viren before, but Lindsay also is an unannounced romantic. He kept stealing little sidelong glances at this celebrity, as one might size up Robert Red-ford at the next table in a restaurant. And then Viren began surging on him; that is, spurting ahead for spells, then slowing to a mere breakneck speed, trying to scrub Lindsay off along the side of the road. But Lindsay, delighting in the occasion, went surging right along.

"And tears came to my eyes," he says. Lindsay is honest about this memory, even though he's aware that there is a lot of Louisa May Alcott in it. "Here I was, side by side with this legendary runner, and, well, I suddenly realized that I was pressing my body to the limit—and my body was responding. And, I swear, a tear actually rolled down my cheek." Not that the sudden flood of emotion clouded his vision; Lindsay may be full of marshmallows, but he ain't dumb. He ultimately surged Viren to pieces and beat the Finn by some 40 meters, winning in 43:54.

This preoccupation with one's body—"I was pressing it to the limit" and all that—is typical of most athletes, of course, but most pronounced among runners, and Lindsay is a great example. Runners regard their bodies in the abstract; in effect, standing off to one side and looking at them critically, or getting out and walking all around them to check on things. There is an intense awareness of every bodily nuance; runners lie awake at night listening to their little digestive gurgles and rumblings as one might listen to the wind in the trees or the house creaking. In an interview before the 10,000 at the Trials, Lindsay earnestly tried to explain that, while being considered one of the favorites in the race was comforting, any number of possible bodily ailments could strike at the last moment. "Say that I develop a tiny gas bubble in a remote little coil in my lower intestine," he told Gary Burns of the Boulder Daily Camera. While the columnist was considering that awful possibility, Lindsay squirmed a bit, indicating that he could pinpoint the precise location of the offending blip. "Why, it could knock me right out of the race."