The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine

by Brendan O'Meara

By 1967, Ron Clarke, the great Australian runner and owner of several world records from two miles to 10,000 meters, wrote in The Unforgiving Minute, “Consistent training, not over two or three months, but over two or more years, is the only secret to success.”

Discipline, Steve thought, made the difference between an elite runner and a regular runner.

When the two first ran the 220s under Buford’s guidance, save for the couple in the grandstands, there were no cameras, no crowds. This was Vince Buford and Steve Prefontaine alone on the track, brother to brother. “Just the two of us, man, on the track all by ourselves. Guess who else saw it?” And Buford lowered his voice to a whisper, “Nobody.”

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”

Perhaps greater than Steve’s immense physical gifts was his mental approach.

Where once he ran to excel and belong, his purpose was evolving, with running becoming a gift for others to enjoy, as performative as it was driven by results.

As the saying goes, it was better to whole-ass one thing than half-ass two.

‘No one’s on an island. You have a family, you have coaches, you have teammates, you have competitors. All that together is what makes runners achieve their goals.’

“In every case, I would prefer to undertrain a runner rather than overtrain him.”

He said, “Pre, you see, was troubled by knowing that a mediocre effort could win a race, and a magnificent effort can lose one. Winning a race wouldn’t necessarily demand that he give it everything he had from start to finish. He never ran any other way. I tried to get him to. God knows I tried. But Pre was stubborn. He insisted on holding himself to a higher standard than victory. A race is a work of art. That’s what he said. That’s what he believed. And he was out to make it one every step of the way.”