So said George Young just after the 1972 Olympic Trials. Never mind that two weeks before his 35th birthday, he had just made his fourth Olympic team in his third event, or that he had just broken the American record for 5,000m. What irked Young was that Steve Prefontaine had dusted him over the last two laps.

Today, we're supposed to believe that Pre was invincible, especially when running at the University of Oregon, site of the '72 Trials. But Young saw things differently. Sure, Prefontaine, as the American record holder in Young's new event, was to be respected, even feared. And the two had never raced each other, so Young hadn't had a chance to take the measure of the man. But Young had a few credits in his column: When Pre graduated from high school, Young had already won the bronze medal in the steeplechase at the 1968 Olympics. He had set indoor world records at 2 and 3 miles the following year. He had his U.S. uniforms from the 1960 and '64 Olympics, back when Pre was prepubescent. Hell, he had won the 1968 Olympic Trials Marathon in his first attempt at the distance. After 12 years of running 8 miles in the Arizona desert at 6 a.m. every day, of annually upping the intensity of the near-daily afternoon track sessions, of taking on the best in the world week after week because, well, damnit, that's the point of the whole thing, Young wasn't about to concede a race just because someone was a hometown hero.

But Young hadn't raced for weeks before the Trials, and when Pre ran 2:00 for the final 800 meters to win in 13:22, Young was left 7 seconds back. To Young, training to be a world-class distance runner wasn't easy, but it was simple—whoever worked the hardest won. Hence his post-race resolution.

That evening, Pre suggested that Young stay in town so that the two could train together before Munich. In the same way that Pre is now seen as the prototypical professional track athlete, he looked at Young as a model in an age when runners' careers seldom spanned Olympiads. (Pre's coach at Oregon, Bill Dellinger, had been Young's Olympic teammate in '64, but had long since retired.) But a living as an American runner was yet to be had; Young had to decline Pre's offer and return to his family and job in Arizona. Still, he had made his impression on the runners who would become the leaders of the running boom. As then-wide-eyed-trackie Don Kardong, still four years away from taking fourth at the '76 Olympic Marathon, puts it, "In those days, no one except Hal Higdon kept competing more than a year or two after graduation. I was perplexed with admiration for a guy who was doing what Young was doing. This incredibly old guy—early 30s!—was still running, and still kicking our asses."

The George Young who Steve Prefontaine wanted as a training partner wasn't the George Young who graduated from the University of Arizona in 1959. Young the younger was a so-so runner with a lackadaisical work habit. He didn't break 10:00 for 2 miles until near the end of his freshman year. By graduation, his PRs were a still-modest 4:13 for the mile, 9:12 for 2 miles. Young had run that fast only because that's what was necessary to remain undefeated his senior year. To reward Young's unbeaten record, his coach arranged for him to run the national championships, albeit in the steeplechase, which Young had never seen, much less run.

To the great good of U.S. distance running history, nationals that year were held at Boulder, CO. Young had grown up in the similar altitude of Roswell, NM. "I thought about DNFing," he recalls now with a laugh, "but with the altitude, I was able to hang in there. We started lapping people. I was still ready to step off the track," and thus would have ended his running career.

But in the last few laps, Max Truex, who Young knew as a top college runner from Southern Cal and who would set an American record at 10,000m, began yelling at him. "I didn't know where I was in the field," Young says. "Max told me I was third man, and that if I passed one more, I would make the team for the U.S.-Russia meet. I was just excited that he knew who I was." Young passed a gasping Phil Coleman to finish second in his first steeple in 9:37.

The happenstances continued. "I got soundly thrashed at the U.S.-Russia meet," Young says, but he had a taste of high-level competition and wanted more. He took fifth at the Pan-Am Games, and although his steeple PR of 9:07 was still 13 seconds off the Olympic standard, he was getting within spitting distance. "The head of Army Special Services found out I was going into the Army," Young says, "and he asked if I would like to train for the Olympic team. This seemed way above what I could do, but it was better than going to Korea." With a cadre of running military men, Young learned that he could train much harder than he had while in college. At the 1960 Olympic Trials, although picked to finish 11th out of 12, Young won in 8:50, a Trials record.

Still, this hardly seemed the inevitable start of a barrier-breaking career. "Back then, you ran the Olympics and got on with your life," Young says. "I already was married and had a young son to take care of. But I didn't make the finals at the '60 Olympics. I figured that as long as someone paid for it, I might as well keep doing it, and give it a go for another four years. And as long as I was going to do it, I might as well work hard at it." Through increasing immersion in the international track scene, Young, who had been a 5-time-a-week trainer, learned about two-a-days, high mileage, gut-wrenching intervals and other hallmarks of successful running. By the time they were roommates at the '68 Olympics, Young had become such a ferocious trainer that Marty Liquori called him the best conditioned runner he had ever met.

"Training is very simple," Young says with the self-assurance of one who has the truth. "It's like lifting weights or studying. The harder you work, the better you get. I ran a race faster every year I raced. If someone beat me, it was because they were training harder than me. I looked at what others were doing, saw what I could use and did a little more. I enjoyed going out on the track and putting in a workout that I hadn't done before, or that I thought no one else in the world was doing. The races took care of themselves—I got to where I looked forward to them because the pain didn't last as long."

After the Army, Young became a teacher, athletic director and coach at Central Arizona College, in Casa Grande. There, he had the chance to apply his brutally basic approach to others, and with success. "Over 25 years," he says, "we were usually in the top 5 at junior college nationals. When I coached a small high school, we won states."

Suffice it to say that there would be easier programs to be part of. "A lot of them thought I was crazy," Young says with relish. "A lot didn't come back because they didn't want to work that hard. That's good, because I don't know any other way to do it. I ask the kids I coach, 'If I told you that if you get up in the morning and dig a hole in the ground for an hour, that at the end of that hour you'd find gold, you'd do it, wouldn't you?' Of course they say, 'Yes.' But when I tell them that if they get up every morning and do that with their running, they'll eventually hit gold, most of 'em don't believe me. Why is it so hard to believe that if you get out there every day and work as hard as you can, you'll run well, or get a degree, or get a good job?"

Young is characteristically brusque when he hears today's training buzzwords. "'Peak' is not a word I allow my runners to use," he says. "There are no peaks. If you keep working harder, you'll keep getting better and stronger. But everyone talks about staleness, how you have to avoid staleness. The only staleness is mental staleness. The only physical staleness is death.

"I trained with speed year round," he continues. Indeed, much of his 5,000 miles a year was metered out in lung-searing 330- and 440-yard repeats. "Now, I hear about needing a break after the Olympics, then building a base," he harumphs. "That's three or four months out of the year when your training isn't what it should be. You can put in your six weeks of base, then start speedwork and get sore and stiff, or you can get out on the track the first day and get sore and stiff and get it over with.

"When I got home from the '68 Olympics, it was late September, early October," he recalls. "I had won the bronze. I was in tremendous shape. That day, I started preparing for the indoor season. I knew I was ready to break world records. Once you get ready, it's not too hard to keep that fitness. Workouts that used to make me puke were now easy. But if you want to take your month or two after the Olympics, go take your time off."

The day after losing to Prefontaine at the '72 Trials, Young ran 6 miles. The next day, he ran 8 miles in the morning, and 16 quarters in :62 in the evening.  

Young lived in a zero-sum world, in which he woke every morning in Arizona and cursed that the spinning of the globe meant that his Russian rivals had already been training for hours. If ever there was an aerobic Cold Warrior, it was Young. Even his appearance attested to that: a wholesome, handsome face; regulation-length cropped hair; a squat, sturdy muscularity befitting a drill sergeant.

Unapologetically a product of his time, Young drew almost as motivation from the annual U.S.-U.S.S.R meets of the early 60s as he did from the Olympics. Both were a chance to represent his country; the dual meets, with their two-per-county format, allowed Young to go mano-a-mano with the communists. "I was raised during an era where I was just naturally very competitive when it came to the Russians," Young told biographer Frank Dolson. "Whether it was right or wrong, that was the way I was raised and schooled and taught. So one thing was in the back of my mind more than anything else. I wanted to win the Russian-American dual meet." When Young finally did, in 1964, his wife, Shirley, was so excited that as she ran to the track to greet him, she was oblivious to the fact that her blouse had come undone.

But just as Young adjusted his training throughout his unprecedented career, so too did he alter his outlook. The Russian head coach became a good friend and a source of training information (although perhaps a la the old Jesuit trick of studying your enemies to overcome them). By the end of the decade, when bleeding ulcers had convinced him to let go of some of the mental intensity, Young was charting new ground. He didn't run for money—that would come later—but he was as much of a professional as was possible for an American distance runner in the 60s. He had become an expert at working the shamateur indoor system, arriving hours before a meet, yet collecting the promised several days' per diem. And when a bidding war broke out between Puma and Young's preferred shoe, adidas, at the '68 Olympics, he was happy to collect $4,000 for continuing to wear his brand of choice. But it was the unflinching work ethic that was the true mark of Young's professionalism, a professionalism of attitude that served as an example to Prefontaine and others who followed.

Young dallied with outright professionalism, joining the ill-fated International Track Association in 1973. He got $4,000 for signing, plus a promise of another $4,000. Victories were worth $500, second place was $250. Not a very lucrative arrangement, nor a satisfying one. Young retired in 1974 at the age of 36, saying before his last race, "The main reason I'm quitting is that I'm running for money, and it doesn't motivate me that much." Today, he says, "Pro track? There was no money there. You win $500, so 10 cents to a dollar per mile for the week. That's not much of a payday. The sheer enjoyment of it was lacking; it was just time to let it go. Physically, I felt great. I thought about hanging around long enough to break 4:00 for the mile as a master. It would have been easy to do. There just wasn't the financial incentive."

Two decades later, it's possible to make a decent living as an American distance runner, and to do so away from the nostalgic world of mediocre competition of the ITA. Yet Young doesn't think that's the way to go.

"Today," he says, "they all say, 'I need someone to support me so that I can run.' But you can't train all day. What are you going all day? Having a job and family combined with my running made me a better person. When I was on the track, I was focused on my workouts. When I was done with the workouts, I dropped all that. Maybe all this talk of staleness is because they're doing nothing but thinking about their running all day. Get a job, so you have something to go to mentally."

It's no surprise, then, that Young scoffs at the usual proposals for solving America's running woes. "It's the same as in education," he says. "We think that if we throw more money at it, it will get better. Look, there's not a lot of money to throw, and what little there is goes to taking care of Carl Lewis. You have to build from the ground up. Get kids, work 'em hard, and they'll get some local press. Then the 7th and 8th graders will want to be like the high schoolers. People like winners, whether it's running, or school, or business. If you're successful, people will get excited about your program.

"But we're not getting coaches with expertise at that level," he continues. "You get a lot of people who run their 10K road races who don't know what they're doing. Road races are great for the general public, for health and all that, but they're a detriment to racers. If you showed these coaches the workouts I did, it would blow their minds. You want to run what Ryun, what Liquori ran in high school? Well, then you have to work as hard as they did. But do that, and a lot of these parents will think you're masochistic." Using another education analogy, Young says, "Everyone worries how kids can't read and write, right? Well, we don't teach phonics anymore. We had a system that worked; why don't we go back to it? In track, we had a system that worked. Why don't we go back to it?"

But Young is just lamenting out loud. He knows that it's not as easy as merely recreating the structure of his time. "Nowadays, everyone is always trying to find an easier way, whether it's running or reading or what have you," he says. "Everyone always asks me, 'What did you eat?' I didn't know anything about nutrition; if there was a hot dog on my plate, I ate it. None of those little things make a bit of difference if you're not doing the real work. But they don't want to hear that."

More broadly, Young says, "If kids today don't want to do something, they don't have to. If we got out of line in school, we'd get hit. Now, you can hardly kick 'em out for using drugs. They just have no experience of finishing what they start."

Warming to his theme, Young continues, "I grew up in World War II. When they played the national anthem on the radio, you stood at attention with your hand over your heart. If you started something, you finished it—in World War II, we were gonna hang in there until we won. Then in Korea, we said, 'OK, we'll tie at the 38th Parallel.' Tying was good enough. Vietnam, we didn't even think about winning, and we pulled out losers. The whole society becomes that way."

Such statements might explain why Young, the first American runner to make four Olympic teams, isn't a fixture on the megarace circuit. "I went to some 10Ks for people who wanted me to give a talk," he says. "They didn't like what I had to say. Those invitations stopped. That's fine, because I've stopped arguing with all that take-it-easy crap. I just say, 'All I have are results to show you from my method. You have results to show me from yours. Mine are better.'" 

Today, at age 60, Young is increasingly removed from his former world. He's recently retired from Central Arizona, and says that he helps out with the school's distance runners only if they want his input. About the sport's higher levels, he says, "I don't take Track and Field News; I don't really follow race results much. The only thing like that I read is Running Research News. I read in there about how the Kenyans train, and I think, 'Yeah, that's a tough workout. You do that, and you're going to be good.' Pretty much the only other thing I read about is when foreigners break world records, and I don't see any American names in there."

In Young's mind, his still is. "Even today," he says, "once a week I have dreams about running in the Olympics, and at my current age. I just never thought about slowing because of age. I guess I have these dreams because I programmed my mind that way for so many years." In waking hours, Young still runs out in the desert, but usually not with visions of Russians sprinting through his mind. "I run 4, 5 miles every morning," he says, with an almost ashamed laugh, "for all the vain reasons that everyone else does—weight, to look good. I don't go very fast. I hate to admit it, but I walk one day a week."

He quickly edits himself, adding, "But I walk fast!"

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