PUBLISHED 05/03/2005
Through the Fire
A tale of two runners, the blazing heat, and the evolution of science.
If you press him to name what put him in that ambulance in the fall of 1978, Randy Brown will pick an afternoon on a dusty Colorado track many years earlier when he was in sixth grade. Although Brown was racing against older kids, he took second, which taught him a lesson. "I wasn't the most talented guy," he recalls. "But I realized if I outworked everyone else, I could beat almost everyone else."
They were poor. He was one of seven kids on a small farm. You worked your way out of things. Brown played football in the fall and ran track in the spring. He kept his times in a small notebook, trained hard, qualified for states every year, and once took third in the half-mile. Brown enrolled at Adams State, in Alamosa, but he never dreamed he could actually compete for the isolated haven for runners 7,800 feet above sea level where coaching legend Joe Vigil was compiling a string of national championships. Yet by the following fall, Brown became the eighth man on a seven-man squad.
The Wichita State Invitational in late September of 1978 was a chance for the guys at the bottom of the Adams State roster to prove themselves. Vigil (pronounced "Vee-hill") was overseeing a clinic and the other runners went to an invitational in Gunnison, so it was just Brown, his buddy John Esquibel, an assistant coach, and three other runners who boarded the bus to Wichita. "The biggest shocker was that I made the traveling team that week," Brown says. An even bigger shocker, however, would be the team's descent into the furnace of late September in south-central Kansas. When they left Alamosa for the eight-hour drive on Thursday, it was 29 degrees. By the 5 p.m. start time the next afternoon, the temperature in Wichita was 106. The assistant coach told the team to be careful and not run their hardest. An ambulance had already carried off a high school runner earlier that day. "But we were still in a competitive race and people were trying to make spots on the team," says Esquibel. "So you ended up going hard."
"It was probably one of the best races in my life, until things went bad," says Brown of his four-mile spiral into heat-induced illness. "I consciously went careful the first lap around. Then I got confident and started passing people. I was the number five runner, but I caught John Esquibel and said, 'Come on, Skibol, let's go!' He gave me this funny look. He thought, Where are you going? Skibol thought he was running about as hard as he should run." The course was a two-lap route with a big hill at the end of each lap. On the first pass at the hill, Brown was flying, but by the second time around things had changed. He thought he was running his hardest, but soon noticed everyone was now passing him. He began hallucinating. "At the top of the hill you could see the finish line," says Brown. "I thought, Why in the world did they make such a crooked line for us to follow?"
Esquibel remembers seeing Brown collapse. "He was falling down and getting up off the ground, staggering, getting up, falling." Brown finally stumbled across the finish and collapsed for good. He woke up in an ambulance to the sound of another runner screaming alongside him. Six runners went to the hospital that day with varying degrees of heat illness. Esquibel would also be hospitalized six days later, after the torturous side aches and blood in his urine began to scare him. Brown's recovery from near renal failure took three months. He ran indoor track months later, but after another illness his running days were essentially over.
Coach Vigil remembers Brown as a good miler. "But sometimes guys get so damn excited they forget to hydrate," he says. That's particularly easy to do when you're running shorter distances. Vigil says he kept abreast of the small body of science that began to evolve during the 1960s and 1970s on the effects of the heat. "I'd get all the literature at the time. But I wasn't coaching many marathoners then," he says. "So we didn't prepare as much for the heat and humidity."
But thanks to a growing understanding of heat science, researchers now know a lot more about how the body responds to oppressive temperatures like those Brown and his teammates faced almost 30 years ago. And what the top scientists have learned over the years applies as much to you when you go out for your daily run as it does to top collegiate athletes--or even Olympians.
After leaving adams State, Vigil went on to work with some of the greatest runners in the sport, including Deena Kastor, whom he has coached for eight years and who had decided in 2003 that her best chance for an Olympic medal was in the marathon. "I knew the Athens course and how hot it got there," says Vigil. "So I continued to learn more about heat acclimatization."
