Free Devil at My Heels: The Story of Louis Zamperini by Louis Zamperini

In fact, every runner gets chased by dogs when he trains. If you want the dog to leave you alone, you extend your back leg six inches and nick his snout.
    This felt different.
    “Hey, what are you doing?” I yelled. “Cut that out!”
    He did it again. My socks began to fill with blood.
    I had to get out of the box. I pulled my elbows close to my body, in good racing form, and tried to slide between two runners. But they set their elbows at a ninety-degree angle and caught me in the ribs—a favorite trick of predominantly indoor runners. I later discovered a hairline fracture, but at the time it just knocked the wind out of me.
    The race seemed to drag by slowly, and I fought frustration for three laps. Then the leader made his move. The other runners, thinking he’d win easily, relaxed and the box opened a bit and I squeezed through. Apparently they’d forgotten my finishing sprint. I caught the leader and passed him easily. Safely out in front, I glided a bit for last ten yards because I was so mad that they’d run such a slow race.
    When it was all over, Coach Cromwell asked how fast I thought I ran. Famous for being able to time my laps within a second, I said, “I’m lucky if I broke four-twenty.”
    “Then you’re lucky,” he said, “You ran 4:08.3 and broke the National Collegiate record. What’s more, you’re not even breathing hard. You could have run anything. Even four flat.”
    A four-minute mile? The impossible dream? But suddenly it didn’t feel so impossible.
    If I have any regrets about that race it’s that had I been able to follow through on my plan to really open up the last half mile, I might have broken four flat that day . I’d felt that good.
    When the doctor patched me up I had three gashes on my shins, a spike hole through my foot, and both my socks had turned red. The newsreels show me afterward, wrapped in big bandages. People wrote letters, asking, “We don’t understand it—why were your legs taped?” Even my future wife, who was probably twelve at the time, told me years later that she and her mother had gone to a theater to see Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood and had also watched me in a newsreel with both legs bandaged.
    In the end I was just glad to win. I got the record back for Glenn Cunningham and me.
     
    THAT NIGHT I should have rested for next race and let my legs heal, but a big local politician lent seven of us his Cadillac, and his son as driver. We bought the kid a movie ticket and took off on our own with the car. We picked up three girls at our hotel, had a few beers, and didn’t get to bed until 3 A.M . A week later in the Big Ten meet at Evanston, I lost to Fenske by five yards.
    After that, although I won some races and lost others—and defended my NCAA mile title in 1939 with an easy victory in 4:13.6—my attitude was never the same.
     
    AFTER YEARS OF strict training, I just wanted to relax and play a bit. I spent a lot of time with Harry Read, a college friend and fraternity brother. An unexcitable fellow who had no particular objectives, Harry impressed me because he was always so calm and even-keeled. He had all the money he wanted, as well as a new car and a twenty-four-foot yawl named Romancia . Harry could trace his American ancestry back several generations, which just stoked my deeply rooted sense of inferiority and insecurity. But Harry never pressed his advantage.
    Harry considered track a waste of time. In turn, I couldn’t understand his addiction to sailing. He did get me down to the marina one day, and after drinking beer, scraping, and sandpapering, he took me out on the bay. The trip was pleasant enough but no big deal.
    We did have one big interest in common: neither of us was a scholar, and we agreed that our immediate mission in life was to do whatever promised to be adventurous and fun. On a Christmas vacation trip east with Harry I bought a new tan Plymouth convertible in Detroit. At home, we’d tool around the state,