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UjENA FIT Club Running Interviews and articles with 100 Interesting People

Best Road Races and the UjENA FIT Club is speaking with 100 people who we feel have a lot to say about running, racing and fitness  We will give you background information as will as their insights into the future.  Be sure to post your feedback and comments.

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Billy Mills
Tuesday, June 11th, 2013
Greatest Jayhawk of them all
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by David Prokop (Best Road Races editor)

He became an Olympic hero and an American sports icon for eternity with his dramatic and (to most) totally unexpected victory in the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. He remains the only American in history to ever win the longest track event in the Olympic Games.

On June 30th, his 75th birthday, Billy Mills will be back in Kansas, which served as the launch pad for his run to Olympic glory in Tokyo almost 50 years ago, as a special honored guest at the Overland Park Double.

Although Billy was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, his running career essentially began in Kansas.

After Billy’s father, Sidney, died at age 49 when Billy was only 13, leaving him orphaned (his mother, Grace, had died when Billy was eight), he was sent off to Haskell Indian High School, a boarding facility, in Lawrence, Kan. His older brother, Walter, and his sister, Ramona, had previously attended the school.

At Haskell he started running. He failed to make the cross-country team his freshman year, but he improved so dramatically as a runner he was undefeated in cross-country his last three years at Haskell. He ran 9:28 for two miles in his sophomore year, and by his senior year he had brought that down to 9:08, which got him a scholarship to Kansas University. All this despite the fact he had a medical condition no one knew about (including him) which could wreak havoc on any distance runner’s progress and performance if left unaddressed. 

At Kansas University the running career of the tall (he’s a shade under 6’0”), slender young distance star sputtered. To be sure, he was a fine cross-country runner.  For instance, as a sophomore he was fifth in the NCAA Cross-Country Championships – and the first American! – behind the race winner Al Lawrence of the University of Houston, who had won the bronze medal in the 10,000 meters at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. Indeed, Billy was either first or second American in the NCAA Cross-Country Çhampionships his last three years at Kansas.

“I’m one of the top cross-country runners in the United States,” he recalls his self-assessment back then. “I always considered myself one of the top cross-country runners in the United States, but no one in the country considered me that. My whole perspective was I could do great things.“

However, the reality is that during his frustrating career at the University of Kansas he was erratic in a lot of his races, seemed to lack energy, wasn’t up in contending position a lot of the time when competing, which was interpreted by many, and most importantly his coach at Kansas, the highly respected Bill Easton, as a sign of mental issues, a lack of confidence and fighting spirit, you name it. Billy’s relationship with coach Easton deteriorated so badly towards the end of his career at Kansas, Easton actually kicked him off the team for a time.

No one knew Billy had an undiagnosed medical condition that was at the root of all of this! And, ironically, if people had known of his problem they would have been complimenting him profusely for performing as well as he did under the circumstances, rather than heaping criticism on him.

Billy graduated from Kansas University in 1962, and it wasn’t until 1963, a year before the Tokyo Olympics, when he was attending officers training school in Quantico, Va., after joining the Marine Corps, that his condition was diagnosed.   

At the time he was physically falling apart as a runner, it seemed, so he went to see a  Navy doctor who also treated members of the Marine Corps. What the doctor told him is – “You’re a borderline diabetic and you’re hypoglycemic.” The further implication of this is that Billy had been dealing with this condition his whole track career!

A person who’s hypoglycemic is subject to drastic blood sugar swings if he doesn’t follow a careful diet with a steady glucose intake, thus preventing a serious drop in blood sugar level. If your blood sugar level falls too low, and that can happen very easily if you’re hypoglycemic, your energy level bottoms out. Hardly what a distance runner wants or can afford – and with Billy, this was happening all the time!

This problem didn’t surface as much when Billy was in high school because his coach at Haskell, Tony Coffin (“Who became like a second father to me”) would give him honey before the race – “Not because he knew I was hypoglycemic, but because he thought it would give me more energy.” Whether it gave him more energy or not in and of itself, it certainly prevented his blood sugar level from plummeting.

Comments and Feedback
run I have not seen Billy Mills for over thirty years. It is so exciting that he will be joining us June 30th at the Overland Park Double Road Race. He will also be celebrating his 75th birthday on that day too!
Bob Anderson 6/11/13 3:23 pm
run Dave, great story. I met Billy Mills in 1984 when he came to KC for Hospital Hill Run. Can't wait to see him again.
Bruce Gilbert 6/11/13 8:11 pm
run The First Double Road Race of the Year is coming up quick...June 30th in Overland Park, Kansas (just outside of KC). Billy Mills is our guest of honor...
Bob Anderson 6/23/13 10:03 pm
,,,,,

That all changed when he got to the University of Kansas. He asked Kansas coach Bill Easton if he could have some honey or some other type of glucose just before a race for energy, but the answer he got was strict and unyielding – we have our team meal four hours before the meet and that’s that! In other words, we don’t deviate. Result: Every race Billy Mills ran as a Kansas Jayhawk, he was experiencing low blood sugar levels – and subsequently reaping the flurry of criticisms for his erratic and often subpar performances.

“Where is my energy gone?” Billy now expresses the bewilderment he often felt when he was running at Kansas. “I’d finish the race not tired from running, but just exhausted!”

After his diagnosis at Quantico, Billy went on a high protein diet. “Within six weeks,” he says, “I started performing at a whole new level of energy. I got myself to the point where I could actually kick.” His real capability began to emerge.

Billy also started working on developing a finishing kick, due to some advice he received from an unlikely source.  In July 1963 he competed in the CISM all-military championships in Brussels, Belgium, where he ran the 10,000 meters for only the second time in his career. He took the lead with 500 meters to go, but in the last 200 meters he was passed by one runner, then a second runner, before another runner blew by them all – in much the same fashion Billy would sprint to victory down the homestraight the next year in the Tokyo Olympics. It was none other than Tunisia’s Mohammed Gammoudi, who would play such a significant role in the 10,000 at the Tokyo Olympics.

Later Gammoudi passed some advice on to Billy through an interpreter. Bill recounts that moment: “He said to tell Billy – ‘More speed!’ “ In other words, work on your speed.

Billy continued training, and concentrated on improving his finishing speed. At the end of July 1963 his best time in the 400 was 54.5.  Then he got it down into the 53s, then the 52s, skipped 51 altogether, stayed in the low 50s for a short time before running 49.9, followed by 49.7! It was then he thought, “I’ve got the speed to kick with anybody in the world, and all because Mohammed Gammoudi said, ‘More speed.’ “

In qualifying for the 1964 Olympic 10,000 meters by finishing second to Gerry Lindgren in a tight battle at the U.S. Olympic Trials, Billy gained another important insight from a fellow competitor, namely Lindgren, from a comment Gerry made rather innocently afterwards.

In the race Gerry had put in a lot of surges, which was his normal style of running, but Billy covered them all. Approaching the end of the race, however, with the two of them clear of the field and Billy’s spot on the Olympic team secured, Billy let Gerry go when he surged still again. Gerry, then all of 18, a distance running prodigy and little giant killer if there ever was one, told Billy after the race, “That was the last surge I had. If you had gone with me, I don’t know what would have happened.”

At that moment a truth dawned on Billy. “I was thinking, ‘I should have tried to win this race. I can’t make that same mistake in Tokyo. No matter who puts in a surge or how often, you have to cover it!’ “  

Four days before the 10,000 in Tokyo. Billy says he did something probably nobody else in the race would have even thought of doing – he ran a 200 against a stopwatch out of starting blocks! His time – 23.3! That’s blistering fast for a distance runner.

It was then he knew for a certainty that if he could only stay with the pace in the Olympic 10,000 until the last lap, he could outsprint anybody. And we all know what happened in Tokyo: He streaked by Ron Clarke and Mohammed Gammoudi so fast on the homestraight, it was “like an arrow shot from a bow,” Mohammed Gammoudi would say years later through an interpreter. He also added this assessment: “Too much speed!” Years later Ron Clarke, the race favorite going into the 10,000 in Tokyo, offered this observation: “It doesn’t happen very often, but on occasion someone runs as if they have wings on their feet….” He left unspoken the thought that in Tokyo Billy ran as if he had wings on his feet.

The question that lingers in the air is:  Impressive as his Olympic victory was, how great a runner could Billy Mills have become if he hadn’t been hampered by the hypoglycemia all those years, which affected his training, limited his progress and development, etc. It’s a question that can never be answered, of course.  Maybe it doesn’t need to be answered. Because for that one shining moment, when all the best were there, from around the world, Billy Mills stood on top, the best of the best. There’s not much more a man can prove or would want to; Ron Clarke himself, who set countless world records but never won an Olympic gold medal, said to Billy in 2012, “I’d trade all those world records for one Olympic gold medal.” That is the true measure of what Billy Mills achieved in Tokyo.

In time, Billy and coach Easton reconciled, and coach Easton paid him the ultimate compliment, “You’re the greatest Jayhawk of them all.”

Today Billy and his wife, Pat, who’s an artist, live in Sacramento, Calif. They met as students at the University of Kansas and have now been married 51 years. They have four grown daughters (Christy, Lisa, Billie Jo and Megan), 12 grandchildren and one great granddaughter.

Billy worked in the life insurance business for almost two decades after his running career ended, but he gave that up in 1984 after the autobiographical movie of his life, Running Brave, came out, with Robbie Benson in the starring role. Since then Billy has been an advocate for Native American rights and is the co-founder of Running Strong for American Indian Youth – www.indianyouth.org. Thus far he has helped raise more than $120 million in cash and goods/services for Running Strong. Earlier this year he was awarded the Presidential Citizen’s Medal (the second highest medal the country can bestow on an American citizen) by President Obama for his work with Running Strong.  Billy is also in great demand as an inspirational speaker (although he calls himself an “empowerment speaker,” an important distinction), and he does promotional work all over America and abroad. He’s justifiably proud to say he has friends in more than 165 countries around the world.

Alas, his running days are over, due to knee and hip issues which are the result of skiing accidents. His wife is an accomplished skier. Billy, it seems, was a much better runner than he is a skier. He quips, “All of my injuries came from trying to stay with my wife down the slopes.”

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