WHAT KEEPS US RUNNING…

Peanut Butter and Magic

TRAINING HIS TEAM FOR BOSTON 2014, TUFTS’ MARATHON COACH WON’T CHANGE A THING

The “Don hugs” will return to the boston marathon next year. So will the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, strawberries, chocolate chip cookies, and, especially, the steady encouragement with which Coach Don Megerle fuels his runners’ bodies and souls. In that way, the 2014 marathon will be the same as all the other Hopkinton-to-Boston treks for which the coach (whose name is pronounced Meggerly) has trained and coaxed members of the Tufts Marathon Team since becoming director of the university’s marathon effort in 2004. Though deeply shaken by the blasts of April, Megerle refuses to join in the everything-is-going-to-change chorus that tends to follow acts of terror. The team’s formal training for the next marathon began in mid-June, same as always. It will continue right up to next marathon Monday, as constant as the wardrobe of the coach who, whether it’s June or February, wears shorts that reveal legs in pretty good shape for a guy of sixty-six.

The coach sticks to the promise he made to his first marathon team, a decade ago. “I told the team that every Wednesday at seven a.m., every Sunday at eight a.m., at every interval training session, wind, rain, or snow, I will be there with them,” says Megerle, who began working with runners after thirty-three years of leading the Tufts men’s swim team to success. “Same thing this year. And when I see that first Tufts singlet come into view next year, it will set off sparks inside me like it always does.” More than just a group of runners, the Tufts Marathon Team “is a big family gathering with a lot of interesting, interested, and happy people.”

That family formed in 2003 as the Tufts President’s Marathon Challenge, attracting about three dozen participants. It has grown ever since. Because they raise money for charity, members of the Tufts Marathon Team get bib numbers without having to meet the Boston Marathon’s qualification requirements. Under the team’s contract with its sponsor, John Hancock Financial Services, the number of official Tufts runners is capped at one hundred (that contract expires in 2015, beyond which the team’s fate is uncertain). Even with that limit, Tufts runners and supporters, including the 2013 team, have raised more than $4 million to support nutrition, medical, and fitness programs at Tufts, including research on childhood obesity at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

The team attracts members—students, faculty, staff, and alumni—from across all Tufts campuses. One runner, Alonso Nichols, the university’s assistant director of photography, first experienced the marathon as an observer, seeing it through a lens rather than as a participant. As he photographed the 2012 marathon, someone suggested, half-joking, that he run the following year. “But,” he says, “that wasn’t a challenge I was ready to entertain”—even though he was determined to lose weight and had begun to run on his own.

But by last October, Nichols decided to join the Tufts Marathon Team, soon experiencing first-hand what team members, past and present, call “Megerle magic.” It’s not that the coach has invented some special training breakthrough. His general regimen—short, fast runs to improve technique and longer runs to build endurance, mixed with stretches of indoor and outdoor interval running, where strenuous workouts alternate with rest—is standard for training long-distance runners. What distinguishes Megerle is his “almost Zen approach to running,” Nichols says. “I don’t think Don Megerle ever logged my miles per minute, but that man knew exactly my condition, when I kept a good pace, when I was pushing too hard. You’ll see him with lots of things—like strawberries and bananas to nourish his runners—but not with a stopwatch or a clipboard.”

It’s an approach that has turned this shorter-than-average man into a towering influence for the nearly two thousand Tufts marathoners he has trained. More steady mentor than stat-driven whistle warrior, Megerle finds ways to nudge, prod, hug, and nurture his runners to their goal. “Any marathoner will tell you that successfully running a marathon is ninety percent mental,” says Michael Nash, A73, A11P, who did not take up distance running until he was forty-eight and has since completed twenty-five marathons, seven of them in Boston, including this year’s. “Don de-stresses it for people. He’s just very good at making people feel good about themselves and what they’re doing.” Since 2004, more than ninety-five percent of Megerle’s Tufts marathoners have made it across the Boylston Street finish line.

As far as Megerle is concerned, that includes all of last April’s Tufts runners, even those who were turned away after the bombs went off. Of about 135 official and unofficial Tufts runners, 45 had crossed the finish line before the explosions, and most of the remainder were within a few miles or less. Megerle had already greeted the finishers with hugs and smiles. He was waiting for the rest of the team when smoke and carnage filled the air. He began looking for people he could help when he saw one of his own runners near the Boston Public Library, dazed. Wounded people, some bleeding badly, were being wheeled by on stretchers. “I kept shielding her face,” says Megerle. “I got a medical guy to call her mother and said, ‘You’ve got to get her out of here.’ ”

For the next six hours, until well after dark, Megerle kept walking the finish-line area, looking for his runners, all of whom turned out to be safe. The next day, as it always does, the marathon team gathered for a reception hosted by the Tufts president. President Anthony Monaco—who had sent out reassuring emails after the marathon blasts—broke the event’s somber mood: “My biggest contribution to the day was letting people know that Don was OK,” he remarked. For his part, Megerle knew this was an opportunity to begin the process of getting the team to look ahead, not just back. “I tried to be pretty stoic for the runners, even if I wasn’t really feeling that way,” he says, sitting in an office lined with photos and mementos, including photos of Coach Don at weddings of former swimmers and runners. “I was the guy they could identify with. I wanted them to stay tight, to know it’s going to be fine.”

Talk to any Tufts Marathon Team member and you’ll hear a story of Megerle’s personal touch. Going with them to physical therapy. Remembering their favorite foods. Offering advice on matters that had nothing to do with training. “The runners know that my life will become their life,” he says. “There is nothing I won’t do for these kids.”

Nash, the twenty-five-time marathoner, says now that his running pace has slowed he often looks out for runners who seem to be in trouble. A couple of years ago, he saw a Tufts team member who had fallen far off the pace. She was in tears, convinced no one would be left to greet her at the finish line. “I told her Don would be there,” recalls Nash. “She said, ‘You’re right.’ I knew she took that to heart. And it did help her finish the race.”

Now an executive at Xerox in Palo Alto, Nash graduated more than four decades before Kara Iskenderian, A15, will. But both share the marathon team and Megerle. “I just showed up one day at practice,” says Iskenderian, who ran in high school. “Within five minutes, Don knew everything about my life. He is the kind of person you talk to for five minutes and you just trust him and know that he’ll be there for you.”

Iskenderian, who lost her father in the World Trade Center attack when she was nine, spoke to her Tufts team after the terrorist bombing in Boston. “When 9/11 happened, I wanted someone to just tell me that it would be OK, because I did not think I could possibly be OK again in a year or in ten years,” she says. “I do not like to talk about these things, but as someone who had gone through something similar, I wanted people to know that I’m fine and you will be, too.”

Iskenderian will study in Hong Kong next year. But her fellow Tufts Marathon Team members, and a lot of new ones, will run in the 2014 Boston Marathon. The Don hugs will be waiting at the finish line.

Phil Primack, A70, is a freelance editor and writer in Medford, Massachusetts.