Lindgren helped ‘start a running revolution’

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, September 15, 2005

EVERETT – Four decades ago, Gerry Lindgren became one of the world’s best distance runners largely because he was otherwise an athletic failure.

He tried out for the football team, “but I was such a wimp,” admitted Lindgren, who was excused from the squad midway through his first practice.

Basketball? Not his thing. “I couldn’t dribble the ball,” he recalled. “And I was terribly uncoordinated. I couldn’t even make it down the floor without falling down.”

As for baseball, “unfortunately you have to be able to hit the ball. Again, my coordination just wasn’t there.”

Eventually Lindgren turned to running, where he not only survived, he flourished. With a work ethic that would be remarkable today and was completely unheard of in the early 1960s, Lindgren blossomed into a runner who made the United States Olympic team while still in high school, and went on to become one of the most decorated collegiate runners in NCAA history in his years at Washington State University.

On Thursday night, Lindgren, 59, entertained a few hundred people at Cascade High School in a program organized by Bruins cross country coach Steve Bertrand. The audience included many high school athletes, but there were also coaches and others who remembered Lindgren’s long-ago exploits.

His banner year was probably 1964, when he was not only an Olympian, but also set a world high school record for the 5,000 meters with a time of 13:44.0, a mark that stood until July of last year. Lindgren also ran a 4:01.5 mile which was a world record for a high school athlete until Kansas schoolboy Jim Ryun went under four minutes the next year.

Lindgren went on to win 11 NCAA championships in cross country and track and field, and along the way he helped “start a running revolution” by inspiring the next generation of American distance runners, among them Steve Prefontaine.

Back then, most runners did their training and races on tracks. The idea of running on roads was strange enough that Lindgren was sometimes confronted by dubious police.

“I’ve been arrested 17 times for running,” Lindgren said, drawing laughter from the audience. “Not only in Spokane, but in Pullman, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo. It was hard to be a runner back then because people just did not run on the street in the early 60s. It just wasn’t done.

“In the beginning, there were maybe 10 guys at a road race. Then there was 100. And then there was 1,000. In the course of a few years, it completely bowled me over how many people were out running. And so many of them told me, ‘The reason I started running was because you inspired me.’”

Lindgren, who trained 25-35 miles a day as a high school runner, once ran 50 miles a day for six consecutive weeks just to prove that it could be done.

He lives today in Honolulu, where he has cut back his training to about 50 miles a week. And in occasional competitions, “I even get beat by people in my own age group,” he said with a wry smile.