ONE Bobcat Central Minnesota, 1951 Bob Larsen can''t remember a time when he didn''t run. During the first dozen years of his life, a life on the farm in the lake country of Minnesota, he runs because he has to. Here, much of Bob''s life involves figuring out the fastest way to get from point A--­his home in the woods--­to point B. More often than not, he arrives at the same answer--­running. He runs to school. He runs to his friends'' houses. He runs because his family''s log cabin and farm are a two-­mile trek on a narrow lane to the closest road. That road is a dirt road.

So is the 15-­mile route to Detroit Lakes, the closest town. Down that road is the rest of the world--­school, and friends, the closest stores, none of which are very close at all. The nearest friends are three miles away. His one-­room school, with one teacher for all eight grades, heated with a wood stove, is two and a half miles from the cabin. A general store is even farther. When Bob is nine, his mother teaches school a few miles into the hinterlands. She brings Bob and his sister, LaDonna, with her in the family coupe. On the way, they pick up a few Native American kids from the White Earth Reservation who only rarely attended school in the past.

They are older and bigger than Bob and LaDonna but in the same grade. Everyone wedges into the coupe and bounces along the dirt road to the schoolhouse. At recess, the children run through the woods playing cowboys and Indians, climbing trees and hiding in the branches, covering long distances by moving as quickly as they can, then trekking back when the school bell rings. Bob almost always chooses to be an Indian. The Native American kids usually play the cowboys. They chase each other all around the land near the school. No one can catch Bob. The next year Bob and LaDonna return to their regular school.

In the afternoons, they often hustle home on a shortcut through the woods along the shores of the lake and streams on the edge of the neighboring game refuge. There are deer and foxes and turtles. If they get hungry they stop to pick wild berries and chokecherries. Their farm is roughly 600 acres, with decent farming conditions, though not as good as the pricier land farther to the south. The soil is rich, and there are wide, level expanses. Half the land remains wooded, but there is still plenty of space to grow alfalfa, corn, and wheat every summer, and occasionally potatoes and other crops. Bob''s mother has a large vegetable garden. In the fall, she cans the vegetables so her family can eat them through the long winter.

They raise cattle--­milk cows and calves, bulls and steers. They also have pigs, sheep, chickens, and a few turkeys kicking around. One gets slaughtered for Thanksgiving, another a few weeks later for Christmas. They have horses to ride and horses to plow. Bob owns a horse. He pays $90 of his own money for it, money he earned selling baby pigs at the county fair. With the exception of the milk cows, the number of animals they raise depends on the expected price of the meat at the market in Detroit Lakes, where they rent space in a freezer, store some of their meat for sale and some for personal use. On the farm all they have is an icebox.

They cut the ice for the icebox out of the lake using hand saws during the winter. The plow horses pull the ice cakes onto the shore and up to the barn. They cover the ice with sawdust, which keeps it for the summer. When Bob was young he helped milk the cows by hand twice a day. Eventually, his family gets a milking machine. They drink this milk, raw. It is rich and thick. So is the butter they churn from it, and the ice cream his grandfather makes with the hand crank during the summer.

Their cabin sits about thirty meters from Buffalo Lake, which is almost entirely surrounded by woods, creating an intense sense of a family alone in the wilderness. There is also a pond in the middle of the property. Run to the other side of the farm and the shoreline of another lake appears. Minnesota. Bob runs to get from the cabin to the barn, to round up the cows for milking twice a day. He runs to get to the fields, and sometimes to go into the woods to explore and to find wild berries. Every day he shovels manure, and during the winter, snow. Muscles take root in his upper back.

When he was eight years old, he learned to drive the team of horses pulling a wagon or a sled. None of this is easy, but it is the only life he knows--­all farm kids do this sort of physical work daily, the kind that pushes them to the edge of exhaustion. And there is a payoff. They get strong from it. The strength makes them confident, and when they are challenged they believe they will have an advantage over kids who don''t grow up on farms. For Bob Larsen, this sense of physical superiority drawn from hard work will never go away. He will learn how to use it for himself and to pass it down to runners he turns into champions. He will feel it when he runs with the bulls in Pamplona.

He understands bulls, he understands work, he understands self-­reliance, and he understands how to move quickly using only the power of his legs. He doesn''t yet know how important these ideas will be to a truth that he will spend a lifetime searching for, or that he will come as close as anyone to finding it. He doesn''t know that he will understand the secrets to the East African domination of long distance running before even the Kenyans and Ethiopians do. He doesn''t know that he will write the blueprints of training for an activity that will become a worldwide movement, and he will impart this knowledge to two generations of star long distance runners, that they will include collegiate and national champions and Olympic medalists, that one of them will pull off perhaps the most inspirational triumph in distance running history, and that he will do all this in relative obscurity during the next half century. For now, Bob Larsen is still on a remote farm in the middle of Minnesota, happy as can be, until suddenly it all ends. Life on the farm comes to an abrupt completion on a spring afternoon in 1951 with a freak accident. Bob''s father falls out of the haymow on the second floor of the barn. It''s one of those hazards that make farm life among the most dangerous existences on the planet.

His father''s injuries aren''t fatal, but his back is wrecked, not catastrophically, but the farming days are over. There is simply no way to haul bales of hay or milk cows or drive the plow horses or drag the slop out to the pigs. In the summer Bob''s parents will head south and west. They will need money for the journey. Bob will collect the few hundred dollars he has earned through the sale of nine pigs birthed by the sow his father had given to him. He will give it to his parents. They promise to pay him back. Then they leave.

Bob and his sister stay behind in Minnesota with their grandmother until his parents figure out where they are going to end up. They pause in Las Vegas to consider making a life in the desert. It is 104 degrees in the shade. They push on to San Diego, where a new life, warmer than Minnesota, cooler than Las Vegas, begins. San Diego, Fall 1954 There are moments when the boy from northern Minnesota does not like high school, when he misses the family farm and the one-­room schoolhouse, the simplicity of life far, far away from the big city. He misses the horses and the cows, even the smelly chickens and all the work the farm required. There are times when he feels alone. These people out here on the coast of southern California he has gotten to know the past few years are a little different, which could make any teenager slightly uncomfortable.

Then there is gym class. Gym class has always been the time when he runs. In junior high school, these were dashes, 50 yards, 100, maybe 300 at most. The teacher lined the boys up in the schoolyard. A track was chalked off on the concrete. Bob Larsen took his spot at the front and felt no discomfort at all. He knew the boys around him would give him a chase, maybe finish within a few yards or even closer some days when he wasn''t feeling his best, but almost always he would hit the finish line first. He likes to hit the finish line first.

When he runs he is at home, even through middle school, when no one ever feels at home. Now he is in tenth-­grade gym class, his first at this dizzyingly large institution with 3,000 students called Hoover High School. A teacher named Raleigh Holt, is lining the boys up for another one of these runs. He tells the boys that since they are in high school, they must run longer than they did before. This test, and it is a test, because Raleigh Holt needs it to be for reasons that will soon become clear to Bob, stretches 660 yards. They will need to be fast, but this 660-­yard run is also about being strong, Mr. Holt says. Larsen stands at the front, as usual.

His strawberry blond hair is cut in a 1950s buzz. His eyes are bright and wide, focused, like they always are when he is about to run. The expression on his face is blank. Inside, where no one can see, he can feel the grin begin to emerge, because he knows what is going to happen next. When he first arrived in San Diego, Bob joined a fitness program at the local YMCA. It was not far from his house, northeast of downtown in a neighborhood called North Park. After the farm, nothing felt far away. They did sprints and shuttle runs up and down and across the gym floor, the rubber on the bottom of their shoes squeaking with every twist and turn.

They did sit-­ups and push-­ups and pull-­ups and chin-­ups. It was tiring for some, but Bob didn''t really get tired. He does not tire.