Devil at My Heels - Louis Zamperini [12]
“You’ve got to develop self-discipline, Toots,” he would say. “I can’t always be around. You need to take care of yourself on weekends.”
I’d rather have had an ice cream sundae, but I did what he told me. I didn’t want to let Pete down. I also knew, however much I struggled against it, that running was the right course to follow.
To stay on the straight and narrow I made a secret pact with myself to train every day for a year, no matter what the weather. If I missed working out at school, or the track was muddy, I’d put on my running shoes at night and trot around my block five or six times, about a mile and a half. That winter we had two sandstorms and I had to tie a wet handkerchief across my face and mouth just to go out. I also kept boxing, to develop my chest muscles. In the end I was probably even more disciplined than Pete wanted me to be.
By February 1933, I was ready. The Torrance High track uniforms were wool, weighed too much, and itched terribly. I told my mother I wanted to run as if I had no clothes on. She bought me a silk shirt and made my shorts from an old pleated black satin dress. Inside, she sewed what she claimed was a teeny piece of felt from the cloth of the cloak of Saint Teresa. They probably made millions of those, but I didn’t object. I wore leather shoes by Riddell. They had a steel plate inside, for screwing in cleats, and each was as heavy as three of today’s running shoes.
As a sophomore, I entered the class B 1,320-yard competition, three quarters of a mile. My spindly legs still embarrassed me, so I warmed up behind the bleachers where the crowd couldn’t spot me. But once the race started, I forgot my worries and ran as hard as I could. I kept winning.
I really wanted to run the mile and set my sights on the class A race. I won in 4:58, breaking the school record held by my brother. He was probably more excited about my win than I was. Later that spring, at my first race in the Los Angeles Coliseum, I broke the state record for the class B 1,320, with a time of 3:17. It was an easy race; I wasn’t pushed. Afterward the Torrance paper boasted about me, and it felt very different from my other exploits that, although anonymous, had once made the local headlines.
Pete continued to coach me and even got permission to run alongside me in races when no competition existed, forcing me to extend myself. He was wise. When I complained about the pain and exhaustion of the final lap in a mile race—which took about a minute—Pete gave me some advice that’s stuck with me to this day: “Isn’t one minute of pain worth a lifetime of glory?”
Pete knew. He was the seventh-best college miler in the country and could have done even better. There is no doubt his dedication to me cost him personally. I knew that with Pete’s help I had a good chance to become a world-class athlete.
I researched how other runners trained, and I doubled their efforts. When I started to beat them, I knew the simple secret: hard work.
I had only one problem. I didn’t want anyone in my family to watch me run except Pete. That may seem strange, I know, but I was still making the transition from juvenile delinquency to decent behavior. I wanted to wait until I had my foot firmly in the door before I let my parents, their hearts already all aglow, come to the meets. I was embarrassed by what I’d put them through and if there was even the slightest chance of failure, I didn’t want to have it happen right before their eyes. At the mere suggestion that my parents might come to a meet, I’d freeze and warn them to stay away. One afternoon, my mother came anyway. I didn’t notice until I’d already run two laps. I stopped dead in my tracks, trotted to the fence, and told her to leave.
“Hurry,” she said. “They’ll catch up.”
I wouldn’t budge until she relented. Then I won the race.
The more I ran, the better I got. I entered half-miles, 1,320s, and miles. My name began to crop up in local sportswriters’ columns. They called me “Leather Lung” and “Iron Man.” I relished the attention and my first encounters