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

But switching from fifteen hundred to five thousand meters is a big step, and you have only twelve days to condition yourself to that distance.”
    To build up my strength and endurance, I ran five miles a day and had a fresh miler pace me for each mile. I pushed so hard that I wore out the tip of my toe and blood saturated my socks and shoes. Then I tapered down to shorter distances and finally speed work.
    I had no idea what I could do against Bright. Pete had already watched him at a meet in San Diego and realized he ran to conserve energy, saving his strength for a final kick. Pete said he’d let me know when the last lap came so I could move out the entire quarter and, he hoped, take the sprint out of Bright.
    During the race Pete miscounted and signaled me with two laps to go. I sped up, as did Bright. We passed each other five or six times in the stretches, and I found it hard to believe I could keep up. Eventually Bright lost his steam and I pulled away for the final two hundred yards. I could see him over my shoulder. The crowd was going crazy.
    Then the officials made a big mistake. Instead of telling a runner we’d lapped to get off the track to the left (the inside), they motioned him to the right as I tried to pass him on the right. Maybe I should have cut to the left, but my momentum was already established and I wasforced out to the eighth lane, where we collided by the grandstand. I hitch-stepped, went down with one hand on the ground. By then Bright was well ahead of me. I recovered and ran at an angle for the inside lane. The officials got so excited that they goofed again, dropping the tape, then picked it up quickly as I caught Bright at the finish line. It looked like a dead heat, but he won by an inch or two.
    I had lost my first race in three and a half years.
    When I was a winner my friends would slap my back, my girlfriend would hug me, my parents would cheer, I’d be on the radio. Then I’d look at the other guys, friends and family patting them on the back in a different way. That always made me feel bad, especially because I knew someday it would be me. I promised myself to be upbeat when the time came, and now it had. Would I gripe? Be ashamed? Be resentful? No. I put my arm around Bright and congratulated him honestly. “That was a brilliant race, and you deserved to win,” I said, smiling. When I walked away I had more self-esteem than I’d gotten from all my winning. I knew I could always handle defeat gracefully.
     
    ON THE STRENGTH of my performance I got invited to the Olympic tryouts at Randalls Island, New York. Torrance raised some spending money for me and the city merchants gave me a suitcase with TORRANCE TORNADO stenciled on the side. (I covered it with masking tape because I didn’t want the other athletes to give me a hard time.) They also contributed shaving gear, clothing. Since my dad worked for the railway, I got a year’s pass good for one round trip anywhere in America on the Southern Pacific.
    Still, the thought of going to New York worried me. I kept saying, “Pete, it’s not fair that you can’t go with me. I might get lost.”
    “It’s time you went out on your own anyway,” he said.
    We left after dark. At dinner I sat in the dining car, eating off of fine china on a white tablecloth, and I remembered myself a few years earlier in the San Francisco train yard, freezing cold and miserable, looking through the windows of a departing train at the happy people, dreaming it was me.
    Now my dream had come true.
     
    I ARRIVED IN New York during the city’s hottest week in many years. We stayed in Manhattan, in prerented rooms. The whole adventure excited me, except for the reaction of the local papers. I’d grown used to seeing my name in print back home, and I was annoyed that the East Coast press had never heard of me. I wrote a letter to Pete that read: “In the papers here they’ve have picked the place winners for Sunday’s 5000 meter. (1) Lash, (2)