The Runner (12 page)

You will find that going alone is a simple way. Right from the start, you don’t have to

depend on anyone for anything. Loners are free men and women. Oneness is a very flexible

state.

It is doubtful that anyone in the Princeton admissions office knew exactly what their prize recruit was talking about. But his outlook on life was certainly unique, and was no doubt

different than that of most applicants for a place in the Class of 1992. “If you want to sleep in the snow or starve for a week, you just do it, and with a clear conscience,” he explained. “I have been able to live in a manner that I wouldn’t dream of imposing on anyone else. And there are times when this helps much.”

The biggest problem with being a loner, Hogue wrote, was feeling lonely. While

loneliness was admittedly difficult to tolerate, it also had its advantages, like making you more sensitive to your surroundings, and engraving experiences more deeply on your memory. But

even the strongest person might wake up one morning and find that he had reached the limits of his endurance.

“If you have been lonely for as long as you can remember, the point of diminishing

returns has probably been reached,” he wrote. “You’ve learned enough about yourself. It was time to learn about other people. It was time to find a friend,” he continued, “which, of course, is the other good thing about being lonely.”

The absence of high school transcripts and the standard letters of recommendation

troubled Princeton enough that a senior admissions officer named Katherine Popenoe wrote him a letter requesting more information in light of his “unusual circumstances.” In lieu of grades and official references, Princeton asked for a list of books that he had read, recommendations from two or three adults who had met Hogue before, and copies of papers or written exercises he had produced over the past two years.

“To the extent that you cannot supply documentation,” Popenoe wrote, “you may be well

advised to enroll in a local college and begin to acquire some formal educational credentials.”

While Princeton’s emphasis on documentation made sense, the university was too eager to land a sub-four-minute miler with the made-for-Hollywood story to stick to its own stated requirements for admission.

“Really, I don’t have any papers to send unless you would like copies of essays that I

wrote for other college applications,” Hogue wrote. By mentioning other colleges, he was also threatening to take his precious life story—and his documented talents on the track—elsewhere.

He sent along only a single recommendation, along with an eclectic reading list containing over a hundred books of the type that might naturally appeal to a child of the sixties and a self-educated ranch hand.

Typed on four single-spaced sheets of paper, the list was thoughtfully divided into

idiosyncratic categories of the kind one might see pasted on the shelves in a rural bookstore. The mix of quality literature was impressive, with just enough howlers thrown in to qualify as the work of a self-educated adolescent. There was “Sociology, Political Science”
(All the President’s
Men
by Woodward and Bernstein;
Rules for Radicals
by Saul Alinsky;
Germinal
by Zola;
Die,
Nigger, Die!
by H. Rap Brown;
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, The Underclass, and
Public Policy
by the sociologist William Julius Wilson); “Women”
(Loose Change
by Sara Davidson,
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin,
The Mayflower Madam
by Sidney Biddle Barrows). There was “History”
(Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
by Dee Brown;
Burr
by Gore Vidal;
The March of Folly
—spelled “Folley”—by Barbara Tuchman). Evidence that Hogue, like other applicants that year, had not read all the books on the list is provided by some notable eccentricities in categorization:
The Day of the Jackal
and
The Milagro Beanjield War
are both listed under “Travel,” for example. In a touch that any survivor of high school English classes could appreciate, John Steinbeck received his own category, entitled “Steinbeck.” The

“Science and Technology” section included books by Richard Feynman, I. Bernard Cohen,

Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould
(Ever Since Darwin, The Flamingo’s Smile, The Mismeasure
of Man),
John Gribbin
(In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat)
and Douglas R. Hofstadter
(Metamagical Themas; Godel
,
Escher, Bach; The Mind’s I)
. A section on “Survival Craft”

(Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Geology of the Great Basin, American Indian Utensils)
underlined Santana’s background as a child of the West, as did his idiosyncratic choices in “Literature and Art” (
Wild Cow Tales
by Ben K. Green,
Cowboy and Western Songs
by Austin and Alta Fife).

The list concluded with a rather cheekily titled list of “Good and Bad Books” that left readers guessing how the self-educated cowboy actually felt about a mixed bag of classics and

contemporary titles including
In Watermelon Sugar
by Richard Brautigan,
Being There
by Jerzy Kosinski,
Red Storm Rising
by Tom Clancy,
The Sunset Bomber
by D. Kincaid, and
Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain, who surely would have enjoyed Hogue’s story.

The single supporting letter that arrived with the packet contained just enough

information to suggest to a willing listener that Alexi Santana was exactly who he claimed to be.

“Alexi worked for me as a livestock tender last summer. He was responsible for finding suitable pasture and water in an extremely sparse and rugged country,” wrote George Cina, proprietor of the Lazy T Ranch at P.O. Box 681038 in Park City, Utah. “I was a little skeptical about hiring Alexi when I first met him because he is a very scrawny kid, even compared to other desert

people. Others who know him assured me that he was harder than steel.”

The letter may not have included any verifiable information or even a phone number at

which George Cina could be reached, and no such information has ever been found by Princeton, me, or anyone else. But it proved to be enough to help seal the deal. “As for whether Alexi is smart enough to attend your school, I can’t say,” the author wrote. Alexi had worked on his ranch for a single summer, which was long enough for the fictional rancher to have formed a high opinion of his young employee’s creativity, calmness, toughness, self-sufficiency, and his ability to withstand bad weather and work hard. “Alexi is a very quiet person and I never could tell if he was book-smart,” he wrote:

To be able to spend weeks alone with a herd takes somebody who is either too stupid to

be bothered or a person who has a head full enough of ideas not to get bored. Usually, the stupid person fails miserably at some point. I have the feeling that Alexi is probably one of those geniuses, at least he is unusual.

It was his aim to help Alexi in any way possible, the author added, “just as if he were one of my own Kids. I recommend him without qualification, because he deserves it.”

Princeton

I. The Locker

On March 30, 1988, a police detective named Matt Jacobson arrived at the Secure

Storage facility in St. George, Utah, with a warrant to search for high-end racing bicycles, tools, and other parts that had been stolen from a man in California several months before. Raising the corrugated steel door of locker No. 100, the detective flicked a switch to illuminate a

sixty-square-foot area with aluminum walls, no windows, and a bare concrete floor. On the floor of the locker he saw the stolen bicycle frames and parts, a Rolex submariner watch, papers, letters, a sleeping bag, and other personal effects. The detective guessed correctly that the thief had been living in the shed, perhaps for months.

Standing next to Jacobson in the locker, the bicycle maker Dave Tesch blew on his hands

and stepped forward to identify the bicycles and tools as his own. The glare of the artificial light bouncing off the aluminum walls lent a claustrophobic intensity to the windowless space. The temperature in the locker was well below freezing, and Tesch had been up all night after driving seven hours from San Marcos, California, up to St. George. As he later explained, “I was pretty darn mad and also somewhat obsessed.”

A stocky, olive-skinned man with a hangdog look, soft brown eyes, and self-inflicted

tattoos covering his forearms, Tesch was a true obsessive who cared about very little else in the world aside from building bicycles. Starting with an initial investment of $15,000, the proceeds from the sale of some Chagall plates he picked up in Florida while serving in the Navy, he had built the Tesch Bicycle Company in San Marcos into one of the elite small manufacturers in the world. The company produced approximately five hundred bicycles per year for the growing

community of cyclists who preferred American-made bikes to the undeniably light, fast, and

beautiful machines made by the famous European racing houses like Bottecchia, Frejus, and

Colnago.

Purists complained that Tesch’s bicycles were too heavy, and that they never quite

achieved the same marriage of function, form, and flat-out speed as the Italians. Yet it is also true that the Tesch Bicycle Company, working out of its tiny, handmade space in the wilds of

Southern California, was one of only a handful of American companies capable of meeting the Europeans on equal ground. While the Europeans built their bikes for varied and rugged courses that meandered over country lanes, up and down mountains, and through cobblestone streets,

Tesch built bikes for the American racing circuit, where the races were shorter and faster and the turns were sharper. Adapting the magic formulas of the European makers for the American

racing market, Tesch took the wheelbase of the Raleigh riders and used a fork (the front part of the frame, which holds the front wheel) with thirty-five millimeters of rake (the distance between the wheel axle and the extension of the steering axis), an adjustment that made the bikes easier to handle, and allowed taller American riders to cut corners just like their shorter European

competitors.

In the 1980s, the small number of American craftsmen capable of making world-class

racing bikes clustered together in one of two places. Some lived in or around Chester,

Connecticut, which was home to Albert Eisentrecht, the European emigre designer who did more than any other man to bring the industrial art of making high-end racing bicycles to America. On the West Coast, the town of San Marcos, California, was home to Tesch, Dave Moulton of Masi, and Moulton’s former co-worker Brian Bayliss. Encouraged by the surprise gold-medal victory of the American cyclist Alexi Grewal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, the Californians

expanded their trade in custom bikes throughout the following decade. A company known as

Merlin made racing bikes with bare titanium frames. In Glendale, California, a company called Santana made tandem bikes, rescuing the bicycle built for two from the archives of American pop culture and winning 80 percent of that specialized market.

Charging $3,000 and up for a custom-designed model, Tesch liked to compare his bikes

to Ferraris; one of his most popular colors was a Ferrari red that he copied directly from a showroom paint sample. While Tesch never got rich from the uncertain business of selling

custom-made bicycles, he thrived on the knowledge that he was working at the top of his

specialized craft. He loved driving up to the Tesch Bicycle Company with his Doberman

pinscher in the back seat of his old Volvo, getting out of the car, hearing the click of the key as it turned in the lock, letting the dog loose, and turning up the radio. He loved going to work every morning believing that he made the best racing bikes in the world.

So when Tesch opened the door of his shop one morning in October 1987 to find that

someone had kicked over a turbine vent, jumped down through a hole in the roof, landed on top of the paint table, and made off with more than $20,000 worth of custom frames, parts, and tools, his anger at the theft was compounded by the knowledge that he could ill afford the loss. A similar break-in had been reported at the custom shop owned by Brian Bayliss a few months

before. Since rumor had it that the break-in was an inside job, Tesch leapt with characteristic but misplaced certainty to the conclusion that Bayliss had burglarized his shop. Tesch’s judgment was less sure than usual. He was suffering the effects of a bad fall on a bike that had sent him into a coma for three days and deprived him of his sense of smell. He was also taking Halcion, a psychoactive drug that has been reported to have bizarre effects on the moods of its users.

In fact, the thief was someone Tesch knew well. For the previous few summers, Tesch

had worked as an instructor at Jim Davis’s Vail Cross Training camp, which offered amateur and professional athletes the chance to enjoy a week in Vail, Colorado, under the tutelage of famous track-and-field stars like Scott “the Terminator” Molina and the pioneering American distance runner Frank Shorter, who won gold at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The instructors also

included James Hogue, a sub-four-minute miler who, according to the camp’s promotional

literature, had earned a PhD in bioengineering from Stanford University, where he worked as a professor during the academic year.

Hogue stood out from his fellow instructors in other ways as well. His body fat

percentage was said to be only 6 percent, a remarkably low number even for a world-class

athlete, and his shy, diffident manner and youthful face made him appear more like a college student than a professor. His youthful appearance was increased by his regular uniform of a windbreaker or a warm-up jacket with a T-shirt or running singlet underneath and a pair of Nike or New Balance running shoes on his feet, as if to suggest that at any moment he might run a ten-or fifteen-mile race. His training methods were often unorthodox. He drank a mixture of mustard and Perrier during races, and he lit up a cigarette after crossing the finish line, as the other runners looked on in horror.