A Marathon Year for Marathon Man

It was in 490 B.C. that the first marathon was run. It was a one-man race. After the battle of Marathon, in which the Greeks drove the Persian invaders into the sea, an Athenian athlete named Pheidippides was commissioned to run the good news the seven leagues back to Athens.

Pheidippides ran the entire distance in one gulp, bare feet bleeding, lips cracked, throat parched. He arrived in the Acropolis delivered the glad tidings. “Rejoice! We conquer!” And toppled over dead.

The distance he ran that day was about the same as the marathon distance run today--26 miles 385 yards.

I was telling this story to a marathoner friend who had dropped out of a race with a fiery pain in his side one day. He looked up suspiciously. “You mean this guy fell over dead after the 26 miles?” he wanted to know. I nodded. He shook his head. “Why in hell didn’t he fall over after 16 miles?” he growled.

The marathon is a lung-killer, a calf-roper, and, in Pheidippides’ case, a heart-stopper. It’s too long, too hard, too painful, too perilous.

Pheidippides died because he wasn’t ready for it. He had spent no time in a weight room. He hadn’t done any interval running, he hadn’t built up his lung capacity, his oxygen debt, his cardiovascular responses.

He ran only one marathon in his life. But even those to whom marathoning is a way of life don’t run very many of them--two or three a year.

What would you think of a guy who runs 93 a year?

Most marathoners--indeed, most medical men--would say that’s bucking for a heart attack. But Jerry Dunn proposes to run that many this year, precisely to get away from a heart attack.

People run marathons for all sorts of reasons. To get away from the world. To get away from themselves. To get away from a desk and a telephone. To commune with nature. To test themselves, try limits. Some men sky-dive, some scuba-dive, some climb mountains, race cars or swim channels.

Jerry Dunn took up marathoning to sober up. He was trying to get away from a bar, a jukebox, a life that was noisy but fruitless.

A couple of failed marriages, a lot of empty bottles and lost jobs and he found himself, a college graduate, mowing lawns in front of a hotel in Sarasota, Fla.

He decided to hit the open road. It was either that or wade out into the Gulf of Mexico and really drown his sorrows.

The marathon cost Pheidippides his life, but it saved Jerry Dunn’s. His father, overweight and over-smoked, had dropped dead at 47. “I was 18,” Dunn said. “He came home one day, blew his horn, asked me to help him out of his car. His back hurt, he said. Then he keeled over and died of a massive heart attack.”

The memory of that day haunted his son. For one thing, he felt in the back of his mind his own life was going to be short. As if to make sure, he started to drink.

He not only drank drinks, he served them. He was a bartender. He smoked. There were times when it looked as if he wouldn’t even be around as long as his father.

He took his last drink almost the day he ran his first race. “I swapped one addiction for another” is the way he puts it.

He had dabbled in a few routine 5K and 10K races but, when he ran his first marathon, in Philadelphia in 1983, he found an exhilaration he had never known from a shot glass. He went through the famous “wall of pain” 20 miles out without really feeling like Pheidippides. It was uncomfortable, but not unendurable. Jerry liked to run.

He was a little like that battery commercial. He liked to keep going and going and going.

He didn’t run his marathons for speed. He ran to finish, not to win. If you run a marathon in 2 hours 10 minutes, the recovery period can be weeks, months. If you run a 3:33, the recovery can be hours.

He began to run back-to-back marathons, sometimes two same-day marathons, always two marathons in one 24-hour period. Or less. Nobody had ever thought up that refinement before.

Dunn took up stunt-running. He ran across his home state of Indiana. He ran across Colorado. He ran a 100-miler from Leadville, Colo., along the spine of the Rockies at 12,000 feet. He ran across New York state. He ran from New Mexico to Wyoming.

He had the lung capacity of a sperm whale. His pulse is a steady 50 to 52, blood pressure in the low 100s, body fat 6%, cholesterol perfect. He runs more miles than the Pony Express. His secret, he says, is a gangrenous-looking but highly effective solution of green chopped-up barley, which is called Green Magma. It’s the only cocktail Dunn allows himself these days, and he swears by its curative powers. If Pheidippides had it, he would have lived to tell the story. Or run back to the battle and the marathon would be 52 miles, 770 yards today.

Dunn, 47, hit upon the slogan “93 in ‘93” to call attention to his avocation.

He was in town for the Palos Verdes Marathon this weekend, the 47th on his schedule, taking him past the midpoint of his goal.

His trick is to enter and run the regularly scheduled marathon--but the day before he runs a specially monitored twin marathon.

This runs him afoul of the Guinness Book of World Records, whose officials balk at recognizing any but officially sanctioned events, but Dunn insists he runs the accredited marathon course under supervision of whatever race officials he can persuade to accompany him. Since marathon courses are public thoroughfares the day before the event, Dunn frequently finds himself out on the roads at 4 o’clock in the morning. At that hour, his only accompaniment is owls, safecrackers and duck hunters. Plus his own clocker, often following by motorcycle.

He runs 4-hour marathons, hardly gold-medal stuff. But, then, nobody got a clock on Pheidippides, either.

He will run in the New York Marathon, the Seattle, Portland, Washington, Chicago, Milwaukee and Denver marathons and, to show he’s no dummy, will wind up in Honolulu in December.

He’s America’s Marathon Man. And, if you look out some dark 4 a.m. and see this tall skinny guy flapping along in skivvies and a headband, don’t call the cops. It will only be Jerry Dunn warming up for a marathon with a marathon. That’s like getting ready to fight a bear by wrestling a crocodile.