The Perfect Mile

Landy enjoyed a comfortable childhood. His family lived in a gracious, five-bedroom house in East Malvern, an upmarket suburb a few miles south-east of Melbourne, a city of one and a half million born during the Gold Rush. The Landy family dated back to the mid-nineteenth-century influx of immigrants from England and Ireland. Along with his two brothers and two sisters, John was loved and supported by his parents, who were neither too strict nor too lenient. His father, a disciplined man, well respected in the community, was a successful accountant and served on the Melbourne Cricket Club board. His mother had a great interest in history and literature. The children attended private schools and were urged to pursue their own interests. They holidayed in Dromana, a seaside town outside Melbourne. If one asked about the Landy family, the response was that they were ‘good people’.

The young John Landy was more interested in butterfly collecting than in running. When he was 10 years old, he met a local beetle specialist who introduced him to entomology. With three other local kids, Landy often rode his bike twenty miles into the bush to chase after butterflies with a net and a pair of fast legs. At home he would carefully secure his latest find on a mounting board and add the creature’s taxonomic classification for identification.

Only when Landy was 14 and entered Geelong Grammar, an elite boarding school outside the city where the ‘prefects whack[ed] the boys’, that he began to distinguish himself in sport. It was the height of the war in the Pacific, and his father was away from Melbourne handling logistics for the air force. John was part of a group called the Philistines, boys who, as he described it, weren’t regarded as ‘intellectual powerhouses’ but who knew their way around the playing fields. Like the others, Landy preferred Australian Rules football, and he excelled by being quick on his feet and a fierce competitor. In the off-season Landy proved pretty good at athletics events, too. In his final year at Geelong he won the school cross-country, 440-yard, 880-yard, and one-mile track titles – a clean sweep. He then claimed the All Public Schools mile championship in a time of 4:43.8. That was impressive, but two years earlier at the same championship Don Macmillan had posted a time better by seventeen seconds, so not much attention was paid to Landy’s future as a miler outside the small circle of devoted Australian running fans. Still, a handful of people were watching Landy’s efforts on the track.

When he enrolled at Melbourne University to take his degree in agricultural science, Landy continued to dabble in running, but he considered his prospects limited. He had a good head for numbers, was aware of the times of Australian and international stars, and given his progress to date he thought his best time in the mile would be 4:20. In whatever sport he pursued, he wanted to be the best, and running laps around the track didn’t appear to repay the effort involved, particularly as he began to lose more races than he won. During his second year in college, one spent 120 miles north-east of the city to learn the more practical side of agricultural science (mending fences, driving tractors, tending to sheep and cattle), Landy won the Hanlon ‘best and fairest’ footballer trophy, a distinguished prize. While there, he didn’t win any foot races. More than ever, playing half centre halfback looked to be the right choice for his undergraduate sporting activities. He liked being part of a team as well. Like many Australian athletes before him who had great potential, he was losing interest in running as a result of a lack of encouragement and insightful training.

But in late 1950, everything changed. Like many Geelong students, Landy had joined the school’s athletic club after graduation in order to participate in meets. The club captain, marathoner Gordon Hall, had advised him to alternate days of cross-country and sprint running. He took that advice. After a race at Olympic Park, however, Hall approached him and said, ‘You’re not fit.’ He suggested Landy speak to his own coach, Percy Cerutty, who was a fixture at Olympic Park; to find him, all one had to do was listen for his piercing voice. The two went to see Cerutty, and Hall introduced Landy, who, though not exceptionally tall, towered over the bantamweight 116lb coach.

Cerutty stroked his chin and finally said, ‘Never heard of you.’

The coach liked to press an athlete’s buttons in order to gauge his reaction and strength of will. Usually he invaded a young man’s space in the process, setting him further on edge. Landy fell for the bait, commenting that he was truly a footballer and only played at running. That attitude was anathema to Cerutty, who demanded 100 per cent commitment from his athletes. Before the conversation had barely begun, Cerutty was walking away. Nonetheless, he told Landy that if he was interested in learning how to run, seriously interested, then he should come by the house in South Yarra for another talk. They didn’t set a date.

Cerutty knew what he was doing; an athlete needed to choose to be taught. Only when Landy went to him could Cerutty show him what he would gain by listening to him. He had already recruited two of Australia’s brightest young stars and helped them to achieve astounding results.

The first was Les Perry, the ‘Mighty Atom’, as some called him, because of his short stature and indefatigable energy. Perry had first caught the Cerutty show at an annual professional foot race known as the Stawell Gift. On the infield, Cerutty was waving his arms about while explaining to a crowd how he had just run seventeen miles to the nearest mountain range and back. ‘Endurance? You’ve only got to get out there and do it. Face up to it: man was meant to run.’ A year later, upset at his progress in running, Perry answered an advertisement Cerutty had posted in the local Melbourne paper. He went to the house in South Yarra, and over the course of the afternoon Cerutty lifted weights and ran around the house ranting about prehistoric man and the survival of the fittest. But his ideas on fitness made sense. Perry enlisted his help, then urged his friend Don Macmillan to see him as well.

When Macmillan, one of the most naturally gifted milers to appear on the Australian scene for years, showed up at Cerutty’s door on a Sunday morning, he was in a terrible state. He was failing his exams, having trouble finding time to train, and worried about his direction in life. Cerutty sat him down to talk about books, to discuss the Bible, and to argue philosophy. Then he gave Macmillan an ultimatum: ‘If you want to come work with me, be part of my gang, I’ll tell you straight out, I’m not interested in failures. You have to pass all your exams. That bit’s up to you, but if you want, I’ll tell you how to do it.’ He gave Macmillan an hour-by-hour schedule, directing him when to get up, drink his tea, run, study, take a shower, eat, run again, read the paper, and go to bed. Within a few months, Macmillan had passed his exams and won the Australian mile title in record time. At that same championship Les Perry came in first in the three-mile race.

When John Landy decided to make his way to South Yarra, Cerutty’s reputation was well established. As he led Landy up the stairs to his study overlooking Melbourne’s botanical gardens, the coach paused and, with a befuddled look, asked, ‘What did you say your name was? Landy? Gordon Hall told me you won the Combined Public Schools mile last year, and I always study the results … What was the time you ran?’

‘About 4:44 …’

‘I have never heard the name,’ Cerutty said, looking him straight in the eye. He sensed that Landy would resist taking direction. ‘It seems to me, young man, it is time you put the name of Landy on the world map.’

In a study measuring seven feet by seven feet and crowded with books, cherry red velvet couches, dumbbells, a decanter of port, a typewriter, and a hodgepodge of papers and magazines, Landy sat in silence as Cerutty dispelled the notion that Landy would burn out or, worse, harm himself if he trained too much. The ‘human organism’ was built to handle stress, he said; the body actually welcomed it. Through continuous effort, superior fitness was guaranteed. Look at the rigorous training of Emil Zatopek or the Finnish runners Arne Andersson and Gundar Haegg, he told Landy. Look at Percy Cerutty.

Landy was fired by his ideas. Nobody had ever spoken to him in this way. He told Cerutty that he would train with him. When Landy left, Cerutty simply noted on a card the young man’s date of birth and the mile time of 4:43.8 he had run in the 1948 Victorian Public Schools Championship. He filed it away in his athletics card catalogue, unaware that it was John Landy who would launch him into the international arena as a coach.

It took three weeks of hard training and a few lessons on running style for Landy to realise results. On 20 January 1951, he dropped his mile time by six seconds. Cerutty then gave Landy a training outline and sent him out on his own, never enquiring as to whether or not the young runner was following his guidance. And Landy did not feel the need to offer the information himself. The proof was in his performances. Two months later, after upper body strengthening with dumbbells and hundreds of miles of conditioning work, his time was down another ten seconds. On 22 May he ran a 4:16 mile, an extraordinary improvement. It was the first time Landy thought he might have a shot at the Olympics, though the qualifying time was 4:10. This ‘Conditioner of Men’, as the brass plate outside Cerutty’s house read, had discovered his greatest athlete yet. Landy had natural coordination, very strong leg muscles, and most importantly, he could sustain punishing levels of training. In this last respect, coach and athlete were much alike.

Almost from the day he was born in 1895, Percy Cerutty was a sickly child. His father was an alcoholic and his mother barely kept her son from malnourishment. Cerutty was plagued by pneumonia; his lungs barely functioned. Much of his youth was spent reading. He was continually nursed to health by his mother and sisters. At 15, when he took a job as a telegraph messenger boy, he had to ride his bicycle many miles into the suburbs, and he found that he enjoyed this. At 18 he won his first foot race. By the age of 21 he was experiencing brutal headaches that blurred his vision and made him vomit, yet he still raced, posting his best mile time of 4:34, just behind the fastest middle-distance runner in Australia at that time.

After he married and took up a career as a telephone technician, however, he hung up his racing shoes for the serious business of adult life. But soon the dreariness of that life began to sap his strength; he took to smoking and inactivity. The migraines worsened, his health deteriorated, and depression overpowered him. One day, at the age of 39, he stumbled into an empty church with tears pouring from his eyes. He had reached rock bottom. He was thin and weak with no hope but an early death.

His doctor recommended a six-month leave from the telephone company and gave Cerutty one prescription: ‘I can’t heal you with medicines, Percy … You have to save yourself. If you want to do anything about yourself, you’ll get off that bed under your own will and spirit.’ Cerutty took that advice seriously. He restricted his diet to raw foods and quit smoking. Perhaps most importantly, he started reading. He devoured everything from poetry to religious texts, weightlifting advice, Eastern philosophy, scientific treatises, and long-distance training guides. He developed a new approach to life, one unencumbered by fear and defined by exerting himself fully – physically, intellectually, and spiritually.

Mostly, though, he exercised. He lifted weights. He joined a walking club and began to take longer and longer hikes through the bush. Within a year he had completed a seventy-mile hike, to his wife’s shock. The outdoors exhilarated him. It was not long until he started to run again, and he ran constantly. Soon his body was transformed into that of a much younger man. In 1942, at 47, he showed up at the Malvern Harriers locker room and announced, ‘I’ve come down to have a run with you. I used to be a member here.’ Gone were the migraines, rheumatism, and spells of depression. The road hadn’t been easy though. When Cerutty had first begun exercising, he would return home on the brink of total collapse, his heart racing. He could hardly push open the front door. He would lie down on the floor, eyes glued to the ceiling as his breathing and heart rate gradually returned to normal. But he learned to appreciate the torture his body endured because he always recovered and returned stronger the next day. ‘Thrust against pain. Pain is the purifier,’ he said.

Within a year of joining the Harriers, he was regularly clocking mid-four-minute miles. Then came the marathons, 100-mile races in twenty-four hours, 200 miles in forty-eight hours. Such feats by a man of his age brought attention, and Cerutty adored it. He also welcomed the chance to expound his theories. As he codified his philosophy of training and life in the late 1940s, athletes were beginning to pay heed. In 1946 Cerutty purchased three acres in Portsea, a town south of Melbourne on the easternmost point of Port Philip Bay. There he began to build a ten-by-fourteen-foot hut and a larger shack out of lumber dismantled from shipping boxes. He would be a teacher.

By Christmas 1951, when John Landy walked up to the gate for his first and only visit to the Portsea property, Cerutty’s buildings and philosophy were complete. He didn’t train athletes; he guided ‘Stotans’.

The gate to the property was shut. Unlike the rest of the athletes at the camp, Landy had come down to Portsea on his own for the ten-day training session. His parents were circumspect about Cerutty, particularly because of his outlandish antics, but their son’s improvement as an athlete was undeniable, so they didn’t object to the trip. Seeing no lights on, Landy realised it was too late to catch anybody awake. He had brought a sleeping bag and, not wanting to disturb anyone, he found a hollow to sleep in. Because of the chill in the air, he donned every item of spare clothing he had brought, including his football socks, before slipping into his bag. He was all right until rain began to pelt his bag. Then it turned into a downpour. Shaking, wet to the bone, he stuck it out. By first light the hollow had turned into a streambed, and Landy stumbled into the camp, half in shock from the cold. The Portsea training had begun.

In the year since Landy had first called on Cerutty, he had paid close attention to the coach’s direction. He had paid ten shillings for lessons on how to move his arms and how to run like a rooster, clawing at the air. He had strengthened his upper body by lifting dumbbells. He had participated in running sessions on a two-and-a-half-mile horse path named the Tan (after the four-inch layer of tree bark discarded from tanneries, which cushioned the dirt), and bounded up and down Anderson Street Hill with the others under Cerutty’s watchful eye. Their runs provoked gasps from the Melbourne residents nearby. They couldn’t understand what these young men, hounded by a shirtless older man, were doing. Running for exercise was odd in and of itself, but a group doing so through the botanical gardens carrying bamboo poles in each arm and shrieking like banshees as Cerutty called to them to run like ‘primitive man’ was pure scandal.

What Cerutty had in mind for the ten-day training camp in Portsea would definitely have been beyond the observers’ comprehension. Landy was sceptical as well, yet there he was. By following Cerutty’s gruelling regimen, Landy hoped to win a spot on the Olympic team.

Before breakfast the men ran the Hall Circuit, a course that threaded through tea trees, up hills, down steep slopes, and across sand dunes for one mile and 283 yards; the runners were timed and pitted against one another with handicaps and a three-pence bet apiece. The winner won the pot, and Cerutty didn’t hesitate to direct runners around the wrong bend so that he could claim the prize himself. Sometimes he clocked their runs and badgered them to go faster, questioning their manhood or dedication, often both. He ridiculed and taunted them mercilessly, particularly Landy, whom he thought needed toughening up. ‘Move your bloody arms!’ he would shout. ‘Too slow! Too slow! … Come on, you lazy bastards! You’re hopeless bloody dogs! Children could run faster than that!’

Other training sessions were held on nearby golf courses, where Cerutty had his charges accelerate up hills to achieve the kind of energy explosion they needed in a race. They ran up sand dunes for the same effect, an exercise Landy particularly disliked. He preferred the rhythmic flow of running on flat ground. For resistance training they sprinted along the beach in knee-deep surf. When not running, they swam, surfed or hiked along the coast. They were always in a state of movement until Cerutty stopped to give a lecture on the grass beside the 300-metre Portsea Oval. There he taught his Stotan – part Stoic, part Spartan – philosophy. Cerutty had coined the term and its requirements:

1 Realization that, as Wordsworth the poet says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ which denotes there is no time for wasteful ideas and pursuits.

2 In place of wasteful hobbies there commences a period of supervised and systematic physical training, together with instruction in the art of living fully. This replaces previously undirected life.

3 Swimming will be done all the year round … This especially strengthens the will and builds resistance to quitting the task ahead.

4 The cessation of late hours. Amusements both social and entertaining should be reduced to a minimum, and then only in the nature of relaxation from strenuous work.

Cerutty delivered this philosophy along with quotes from Plato, Buddha, Jesus, Freud, Einstein, and St Francis of Assisi, among others. He stressed the importance of yoga, non-conformity, a diet of oats, the study of nature and animals, and running barefoot to connect with the Earth. There were also the impromptu lessons after meals, like the time when Cerutty lectured them on warming up. A cat was sitting on a ledge outside one of the huts when their coach snuck over and emptied a bucket of water over it. The cat leapt away and disappeared in a flash. Cerutty then expounded, ‘There. Did the cat do stretches? Did the cat jog around? Did the cat do knee bends? Did the cat have a tracksuit on before racing? No, the cat just got up and went. No more warming up. Forget it.’

For Landy, the son of an accountant and the product of private schools, this was wild stuff. He laughed off most of it, but there was wisdom in what Cerutty said about training hard. The body had amazing limits that most people never tested; Cerutty drove Landy to try. He had helped bring out a discipline and focus the young runner never suspected he had. This ability had been dormant, but now it revealed itself. The other athletes at Portsea were impressed by Landy’s discipline. During hard runs that seemed to last for ever, they also began to realise they could never match it.

There was no sense of jealousy, however. In fact Landy took away from this time with Cerutty more than important lessons. He had won a tightly knit group of friends at Portsea, among them Perry and Macmillan as well as three-milers Geoff Warren and Trevor Robbins. The hard training and rustic setting combined to create a sort of boot camp, one that drew the athletes together. Landy, Robbins, Warren and two others bunked in the ‘ski hut’, which was a modified wooden container originally used to import Volkswagen cars. The first night Landy stayed there he had a bad dream about trying to get out of a hole. The nightmare was so vivid that he literally clawed his way out of his top bunk and crashed to the floor. The next night he agreed to be roped into his bed. Meanwhile, Perry and Macmillan, the two more established Stotans, were staying with Cerutty in an old cabin nicknamed after the luxury hotel, ‘Menzies’, because of its superior accommodation. One morning after a particularly cold night, Landy approached Macmillan and explained, ‘It’s pretty tough out here. Nobody will get up and get the breakfast. If you do and get everything out and ready, the second you turn your back, suddenly all these vultures’ – and Landy then jokingly mimicked a vulture poised to strike with its claws – ‘and little monkeys come down and eat it all up and go back up to their bunks, and yours is gone.’ By the end of the story, he had Macmillan in hysterics. With each such episode at Portsea, the others liked Landy more and more.

By the tenth day of camp, the gang of runners had bonded. They were both exhausted and inspired. Cerutty came away with a better understanding of what made his runners tick. Of Landy he wrote, ‘He undervalues himself, his achievements, and his possibilities, merely because he measures himself not against mediocrity but against the highest levels … Courage and desire to excel without undue display of effort, much less suffering, causes him to run well within himself … What his highest potential level is I can only guess at.’ Though Cerutty thought it unlikely that Landy would ever become a true Stotan, they both knew who had set him on the path to athletic greatness.

On 12 January 1952, in Melbourne, Landy set out to break 4:10 in the mile, the time established by the Australian Olympic organisers to qualify for Helsinki. Without ‘Big Mac’ Macmillan to push him, Landy led from the start, pushing harder than ever before, but he crossed the finish line a second short. ‘It is bad luck,’ he said after the race. ‘I don’t suppose there will be enough finance to send us both [Macmillan and Landy] to the Olympics.’ He swallowed his disappointment, and only a few hours later ran a 3,000m race in 8:53, breaking the Australian open record. The training at Portsea had increased his endurance, but not his speed over shorter distances. Two weeks later in Sydney he beat Macmillan by inches, but again the time was too slow to qualify.

By the cut-off date for selection, Macmillan and Landy had both run the qualifying time in the 1,500m, but only Macmillan had run the requisite speed for the mile. When the list of sponsored Olympic team members was published in March, Landy’s name was missing. There was a loophole, however. If Landy and a few others could come up with $A750 each, they could join the team. It was a lot of money, a year’s wages for some, and the Geelong Guild Athletic Club rallied to raise it for Landy. They held Saturday night dances and ‘chook’ raffles, which awarded the winner a dressed hen. With a lot of work and good intentions, the club members raised most of the money, but they were still $A250 short. Landy’s father made up the difference. His son was going to the Olympics. John heard the news while driving a tractor on his family farm on the South Gippsland coast, 130 miles south-east of Melbourne. He had only eight weeks to train.

Before Landy left for Europe, Joseph Galli published an article in a magazine by the name of Sports Novels whose title mirrored what many were thinking: ‘Victorian John Landy May Soon Become Our Greatest Middle-Distance Runner’. It was the reason so much effort had been made to send him. Landy was quoted thanking Cerutty for his guidance, and then the miler made a prediction, not of future success but rather of his untapped potential: ‘I don’t know just what my body can stand up to,’ he said – not yet.

At Kapyla Village in Helsinki, Cerutty finally quieted down. Landy lay in bed, uncertain as to how he would stack up against the world’s best. He had made great strides in his development and had run well in England, but still he was unsure. And he was very sensitive to the fact that he owed his Olympic ticket to the generosity of family and friends. He felt pressure to live up to the efforts they had made to get him there in the first place. Yet each day he spent on the track, observing the speed and fluid style of other athletes, his confidence in his ability to compete against them weakened. His coach might have believed he had the greatest insight into running and training, but Landy knew these Europeans and Americans had pretty good ideas of their own about what it took to be world class. He knew he would soon find out how good.

4 (#ulink_08cf8002-19c7-59b2-a557-ffcc182c9373)

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same …

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

Rudyard Kipling, ‘If …’

The rain during the opening ceremony left the red brick-dust track a soupy mess. During the night, Finnish groundskeepers spread petrol over it and lit hundreds of small fires to burn off the water. Smoke billowed into the sky over the stadium and its acrid scent permeated the surrounding streets. By dawn on Sunday, 20 July, the track had dried, and it was levelled and smoothed out by concrete rollers before the first athletes arrived.

Wes Santee woke up in his room unsure of what to do. Throughout the morning, tens of thousands of people descended on the stadium. Scores of athletes, many of whom represented countries that had been at war a few years earlier, milled about the Olympic Village, passing the time between training sessions, meals, and their competitions. Santee dared not step outside Kapyla, certain he would get lost or run into trouble. He was one of the youngest members of the USA track and field team. It was his first Olympics, and for the life of him he could not find out what he needed to know. When was he competing? Against whom? And when could he train? Remarkably, this fundamental information proved elusive. Everyone had their own races to worry about, and for an Olympics that was being built up as a contest for national pride, particularly between the Americans and the Soviets, Santee was beginning to realise that this did not necessarily mean team leadership and cooperation were priorities.

He was left to fend for himself, a situation that was utterly foreign to him. At the University of Kansas, he was used to being surrounded by team-mates who looked after one another. He was also used to having his coach tell him when to arrive for practice, who he was competing against the next weekend, how to run the race, what to eat beforehand, when to arrive at the stadium, and where he was allowed to warm up. This management of the details allowed him to concentrate on the one thing he had supreme confidence in: his running. As a member of the United States Olympic team, however, directions to the dining hall and bedroom were about the most useful bits of information he had been given. He felt alone and, as the Games commenced, increasingly panicked. The pit in his stomach came less from thoughts of his upcoming race than from how he was going to find out when it was scheduled to take place.