When I was a boy, my brothers, who were great athletes in their own right had posters hung up in the cellar (we didn’t call it a basement because it had a dirt floor and coarse stones making up the foundation). It was really just a hole in the ground. In the corner of the ‘furnace room’ (a converted coal furnace, now burning oil) next to the makeshift bench press and scattered dumbbells, taped up to the round stones with electrician’s tape were a series of posters titled ‘Conditioning for a Purpose.”
One of the posters was of Steve Prefontaine, the legendary Oregon runner before his untimely death in 1975. The posters had a series of stretches and weight exercises designed to make you faster or stronger or have more endurance. “Pre” was credited with saying, “Someone may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.” So, when 8 of the areas toughest racers showed up at the Scholars Inn Bakehouse for a pre-winter training ride on a cold November morning, I knew that I was in for a few hours of bloodletting.