Gerry Lindgren's Mileage.....(Crazy....or Crazy like a fox)

the fool abandoned his wife and children you coward

I wish there could be a second attempt at a book about Gerry Lindgren.

The last one was just not that great. Maybe a co-writer is available.. Marc Bloom, Garth Gilmour, that kind of help.

It may be too late now for a good writer to find witnesses and his coach recently died.

I would like to see a well researched, peer reviewed book written about who I consider one of top pioneers of our sport.

As to his personal indiscretions, I enjoyed the way that was approached in Steve Scott’s book and besides people are selective about these subjects. The silence when men were beating up women in a boxing ring was deafening and never mind voters ( a minority I hope) that are prepared to seriously consider a guy running for second in command who got married on the 5th anniversary of the Tienneman Square Massacre .

A lot of those guys in the 60s and 70s got very experimental.

They might've heard about Lydiard and Igloi's training, but very few had access to any specifics.

For the most part, their training was about trial and error. If running more brings improvements, at what point do you stop making gains? Those guys tried to figure that out.

I remember hearing a podcast with Dave Bedford, who talked about running 5 times a day at one point. He quickly realised that it was too much, as he wasn't getting enough sleep because of it.

I beg to differ. Gerry looked very much like an elite runner.

Even better = San Diego 1965.

Any link to the podcast with Bedford? I'd love to hear it! I think one thing that I find so interesting about guys of that era is that trial and error aspect. Also the extremes of training you could see, with guys like Lindgren doing insane mileage (though we can debate how much he actually did) while a look at Jim Ryun's training shows a huge amount of intervals (not light on volume either). No conventional, modern training plan would ever recommend that but it's cool that they tried it out and found that it was sustainable for them. There's Jack Daniels coaching talk where he pokes fun at both of their training to illustrate that you shouldn't just copy what the best guys are doing for training but I do think the idea of being open to some out there training methods is something we've kind of lost.

can you elaborate on this race?

It's definitely too late to get Garth Gilmour to do it. He's been dead for a while and I haven't seen anything from Marc Bloom in a long time. I'm pretty sure he's not dead but maybe retired? I've written several magazine profiles about good runners from the past, never a book. I think Gerry would be difficult to write about. He often gives joke answers to questions I've seen put to him. I'm not sure how seriously he would take the process and it seems as if there might be parts of his life he wants to keep private. If I were to consider doing a bio I think I'd need to lean heavily on people who knew him well for information and I'm not sure there are a lot of those folks around. Tracy Walters would probably have been the best source and Kenny Moore could have been as well. But like Garth Gilmour, they're no longer accessible.

Marriages break up. Families splinter. Most of us kids of divorce do just fine. Not sure why you feel the need to dwell on it for 50 years.

Is it on Strava? Yeah, didn't think so.

Agree 100%… like sharks sensing blood in the water, it’s Gerry Lindgren and it triggers a response.

There are inner city hospitals in Baltimore where the out of wedlock birthrate is close to 100%. 100% family abandonment ….Crickets.

Yet in this bespectacled, flawed, meteor for our sport it is a virtue signal

We've only ever heard his ex's version of the story. From experience I know that when you get the other side of marital trouble stories you normally get a very different picture. Gerry's never gone public with the story at all. I suspect people here who automatically bring this up whenever his name is mentioned just don't like him for whatever reason and see the marital split as a useful way to trash him.

Very, very true. I’m sure there is more to the story and we don’t know anything about the custodial issues. On the other hand, you stay and you fight to have a relationship with your kids. Did he do that and his ex wife and courts just kept him frustrated and hindered?

As for the 200+ mile, 3x per day weeks, I have no doubt he did them, but I also doubt they were a regular occurrence. Maybe he did them day in and day out for a year like the Dave Bedfords, but who really knows? Maybe he just did it for a couple weeks at peak.

There’s really no telling whether he would’ve run faster or slower on different training and later in his career. Many of these guys (Ryun) seemed to get the most out of themselves in high school and college, never really to be heard from again. They merely peaked early. I mean, Ryun still ran 3:33/3:51 in a bygone era on inferior tracks with inferior equipment relative to today. Would he have been faster ultimately? I’d say he was pretty damn close to his potential.

Lindgren’s 8:40 two mile in high school on an 11-lap, indoor track? That’s still a thing of beauty…

most of you have never done super high mileage and therefore really don't understand:

1) how to do it

2) how it benefits you

I have. I will tell you that Gerry did not run high mileage to run high mileage - he was just running. In fact, he did not keep track of it. It wasn't until someone (I believe Ron Clarke) asked that he tallied it up. It is 100% accurate - of course not. Why not? because he was just running not even caring to measure, count or log it.

What does super high mileage do for you?

Once you build up to a super high level it is easy to maintain - look at Bill Rodgers training where he routinely ran 130-160 miles a week. These are made up of a lot easy doubles. Gerry simply ran more by doing his in the form of triple and quads.

When you first start building you feel tired. But as your body adapts the tiredness is replaced with strength. There is no strength like the feeling of being able to run endlessly without tiring. My biggest day was 16 mile run in the am followed by 24 in the afternoon for a 40 mile day. I would have run 10 more in the evening had it not gotten dark so soon. Because I did not do this double long run routinely, this was very tiring - and I think I took the next day off or only ran a short 8 mile run.

Once you start doing workouts with this kind of base there are several things you notice. The biggest is how quickly you can recover between intervals. The second is how much volume you can do. It is as if you don't get tired.

final note: if Gerry Lindgren's times were not certified no one would believe them either. So just because there is no way to verify what he did in practice does not mean they did not happen. With 100% accuracy? - maybe not...but likely something fairly close. Again, ask yourself if he had been running his races in practice back in those days and told people he just ran 8:40 for 2 miles in HS - would you believe it? Of course not. Yet we know he did it because it was at a certified race. Because he did run super high mileage, I do not find what he says he did to be unbelievable and would challenge anyone who does - try running super high mileage for a while and I bet you change you turn.

According to Kenny Moore's Sports Illustrated story Gerry owned a running shop in California, Oxnard maybe, called Gerry Lindgren's Stinky Foot. Supposedly the shop was doing well. But there was some sort of possible legal difficulty and one day he left his wife a note telling her to sell the shop. That was, at the time of the article, the last she or the kids saw or heard of him.

It seems no one else did either. He just vanished. Years later, I don't know how many but it was a few, runners in Honolulu began bumping into a guy who bore a lot of physical resemblance to Lindgren who called himself Gale Young, I believe that's the name in Kenny's article. Some of these runners struck up conversations with him and Young would have stories of having run really good races against some one time big names. I probably should go to the SI Vault and dig this story out but don't have a lot of time now. For a time he clung to being Gale Young and denied knowing anything about "that Lindgren guy" but eventually he acknowledged who he was to someone, I think Moore, they knew each other well from their best years. I'm a little vague here.

This not a normal sort of marital split story. Do you stay and fight for your kids if you've got some sort of legal problem breathing down your neck? Do you do it if you think you're a really bad parent and husband and the rest of the family would be better off without you? I know of a situation where that was the case. The obvious response here is "learn to be a better parent and stay involved" but not everyone can do that or believes he can.

So you're right. There more to the story than gets mentioned here when Lindgren is a thread topic here. As far as I know Gerry has never discussed this situation and it seems unlilely he ever will and maybe for that reason he's responsible for the criticism he gets here.

To the 200 mile weeks, I'd guess they weren't precisely measured but would be in that range, maybe more. People did that sort of thing then. One of Lydiard's good but lesser known runners was a guy called Jeff Julian. He was actually one of the pre race favorites for the '64 Olympic Marathon but did not do well. When it was base time for Arthur's guys and they were getting in about 1,000 miles in ten weeks Jeff was doing 2,000. He worked as a banker and would run a full marathon before work and another 10 miles afterward. This was not a one week thing. It's what he did for that entire ten weeks.

Lou Scott ran the 5,000 for the US in the '68 Olympics. He says he ran 50 miles a day in two sessions to do that, 35 -45 in the morning and 10-20 in the afternoon. That would work out to the 350 mile week we see attributed to Lindgren. Take all this for what you want.

I had heard about Gerry ending up in Honolulu (and had even heard he coached at U of Hawaii for a time) but didn't know the full story. Always appreciate your posts, both bringing up the late, great Kenny Moore's excellent SI articles from back in the day and your wealth of personal experience with legends from that era. I seriously owe you a beer or something because, as someone who delves old message board threads for nuggets about old school runners during slow days at the office, your posts are as good as gold!

A thought (I admittedly have no idea if this is so): Maybe he abandoned everything because someone who was bad news wanted him dead, and he fled and started over elsewhere to escape. Back then it was a lot easier to do this undetected than it is now (obviously). For whatever reason he didn't feel his wife and kids were in danger so he just left all of them behind.

P.S. I'm not in any way looking to justify what he did. I'm thinking of a possible reason he would have made a point to do this.

Thank you. One of the great things about sticking around this sport all my life has been getting to know others who have done the same and maybe have a beer or four. I went looking for the Sports Illustrated Vault to find Kenny's article but couldn't find a link to it. Nor could I find a search bar but did manage to find it:

https://vault.si.com/vault/1987/05/18/a-life-on-the-run-once-upon-a-time-gerry-lindgren-was-the-uss-best-distance-runner-then-he-disappeared-swapping-the-responsibilities-of-marriage-and-fatherhood-for-a-new-identity-and-a-succession-of-odd-jobs-the-author-an-old-

And here is the story of Lou Scott and his fifty mile days:

clickondetroit.com

‘I gave it everything I had’: Detroit Olympian looks back on running in the 1968 games

Karen Drew, Kayla Clarke

Louis Scott was born and raised in Detroit and when he was a child he discovered his love of running.

Open link

https://vault.si.com/vault/1987/05/18/a-life-on-the-run-once-upon-a-time-gerry-lindgren-was-the-uss-best-distance-runner-then-he-disappeared-swapping-the-responsibilities-of-marriage-and-fatherhood-for-a-new-identity-and-a-succession-of-odd-jobs-the-author-an-old-

here you go ...