( PRE continued)

This is Ray Prefontaine, father of Steve Prefontaine, whose life and death inspired this event. This is the 11th edition of the Prefontaine Memorial Run, an event named after the man many would consider the greatest American distance runner of all time. This could be any road race, but it isn't. It's Pre's run, and it's held every September in his home town of Coos Bay, Oregon. I'm here on a pilgrimage of sorts.

Touring the course yesterday, I was stunned to see signs lined up in classic Burma-shave style, teasing the following:

"Who was Pre?" "Come and See." "September 15."

Who was Pre? Who, I wonder, could wonder?

Good statistics. But there have been other great American distance runners in the past few decades: Jim Ryun, Gerry Lindgren, Billy Mills, Craig Virgin, Alberto Salazar, and more. Still, Prefontaine rests in a special place in the minds, the hearts and, most importantly, the guts of those who witnessed his exploits.

Ask the question, "Who was Pre?" and someone will tell you a story of a race, or several races. The 1970 NCAA 3-mile in Des Moines, Iowa, when Pre, his right foot laced with stitches from an accident the day before, ran a 2-minute final half to hold off Garry Bjorklund and Dick Buerkle. Or the 1972 Olympic Trials, when Pre led most of the race, shadowed by older, wiser veterans who finally faded in the wake of the 21-year-old's punishing kick. Or the 1973 NCAA Cross-Country Championships in Spokane, Washington, when Nick Rose pushed to a 50 meter lead at halfway, and observers began to sense that this time, the Pre magic was smoke. Pre proved otherwise. The crowd gasped aloud as he summoned his strength, reeled the Brit back in and captured a third NCAA title.

Ask the question, too, and you may hear of a workout. A time he gobbled quarters, halves and 1320s like mixed nuts. A 10-mile run when the pace spiraled out of control like an argument. A track session during which a training partner seemed to challenge Pre's dominance, and the carefully planned splits suddenly became as irrelevant as last week's weather, with a furious Pre redefining the concept of speedwork.

Ask the question, and more than anything you'll hear about an attitude, an alloyed personality forged of guts, pride, determination, cockiness and a few other basic elements that were hard to identify. Inevitably, those who ran against Prefontaine were struck by his attitude, by a style unusually blunt for a distance runner, and by tactics that smelled of challenge.

"Pre was the first person I met," noted longtime rival Garry Bjorklund, "where there was so much to bite off, you couldn't chew."

Steve Prefontaine was a constant source of irritation, confrontation and inspiration to those who knew him. He had a certain look, a way of glancing back as he rounded the turn in the lead, that seemed to say, "I've got this thing in hand now, and I'm only mildly interested in seeing where the rest of you are." And then he would surge.

Like so many other runners in the early 1970s, I never beat Pre, in spite of repeated attempts. In the 1970 NCAA Cross-Country Championships, I caught him at 4 miles. He glanced back, and that was it. In the PAC-8 3-mile the next spring, I challenged him twice for the lead. He hung on both times and finally blasted past for the win. The photo in the next day's paper showed Prefontaine grimacing at the finish, painfully wasted.

"I was hurting," he told me after the race. "If you'd gone hard for a couple of laps, you would have had me."

It was the ultimate compliment, to have made Pre hurt. But it was also a sign of my inadequacy. Why hadn't I gone harder, longer? Why couldn't I be more like him?

"His talent was his control of his fatigue and his pain," said Walt McClure, his high school coach. "His threshhold was different than most of us, whether it was inborn or he developed it himself."

On this September morning before the Memorial Run, I see something in his father's eyes that reminds me of all this. And as we begin the road race journey, the suddenness and finality of Pre's death 15 years ago, the tragedy that snuffed a special spirit, and the sadness of passing things, are inescapable.

Coos Bay, Oregon. Home of Steve Prefontaine and a whole lot of people in the logging industry. Much of the Oregon Coast seems designed for city people escaping from accounting, law and business for a weekend of sand between the toes. Coos Bay, though, has an edge of sweaty legitimacy, born of cutting and hauling large trees to market. In the Coos Bay of the 1990s, downtown is spruced up to lure the tourist dollar, but the railroad runs right down the waterfront, mountains of wood chips are piled up for export, and the work ethic hangs in the air like drizzle. Signs in the back of pickups announce: "This Family Supported by Timber."

Steve Prefontaine seemed a perfect reflection of Coos Bay, tough and independent. He liked to describe his teenage years as, more or less, a decision between running the hills and flashing a switchblade. Athletics won out, but one always felt he might revert at any time and join the darker elements of Coos Bay.

Those who knew Steve Prefontaine well insisted his hard shell covered a warm interior. There were times one got glimpses of a different Pre -- friendly, community-minded, struggling with self-doubt. Mostly, though, he just seemed tough, irascible and terribly anxious to get on with whatever life had in store.

The Prefontaine Memorial Run follows one of his favorite training runs, and as I head up the first hill on this course, I recognize it as vintage Pre. A straight shot from the town to the hills, a gnarly test of fortitude. Ray Prefontaine remembers his son running repeats here. Others in town recall seeing their native son run up a lot of hills. But, selective memory being what it is, never down.

Pre was said to react with disdain when he first noticed cross-country runners in Coos Bay, but once he tried the sport, he found himself in a fast-flowing stream. At age 16, he told his mother he would go to the Olympics one day. Senior year, he broke the U.S. high school record for 2 miles by nearly 7 seconds, running 8:41.5.

Pre's following four years at the University of Oregon established a legacy. The already powerful track program prospered, with Steve Prefontaine its most famous member. He trained hard, raced savagely, continued to break new ground. And when he stepped in front of the Eugene crowd, his people…magic.

Sport is entertainment. These days, that means color-coordination and the prancing of prima donnas who carefully orchestrate their competitive spats. With Pre, the entertainment was pure, knife-edged, transcendent. "Here I am," he announced without words, warming up on the track. "Wait'll you see what I do this time." Chills ran down the backs of his fans, and "Go Pre!" exploded from within.

He never let them down, taking on any rival in any circumstance, sometimes seeming to be on the brink of disaster and then, just when you thought it was over, dredging and grasping a final something from a place deeper than the pain, deeper than the self-doubt, deeper than despair. He would rally, and he would win.

Steve Prefontaine was so at home on the track, so cosmically centered there, that the Prefontaine Memorial Run is something of an anomaly. Pre never competed in a road race, never realized his sport would become the passion of the masses, never heard the term "Running Boom." He did, though, train on the course over which I am now struggling, one of the hillier, testier routes in the asphalt pantheon.

As I round the final turn and pass the house where Pre grew up and where his parents still live, I see Marshfield High School, perched on the hillside like a Tibetan monastery. A minute later I'm on the school's track, finishing 10 kilometers in 34:15, well behind winner Don Clary.

It's a pleasant place, this track, on a pleasant morning. The sun has broken through, a gentle breeze whiffles through the trees, and the finishers of the 11th Prefontaine Memorial Run are enjoying it all in the aftermath. Looking around, I can imagine the young Prefontaine training here, alone, on one of those bone-numbing Oregon winter afternoons, with dark clouds crashing across the sky, rain pelting the face, and the runner holding onto his dreams. Five more quarters to go.

In the Art Museum in Coos Bay, a room is dedicated to Steve Prefontaine, and I visit it later. Ray Prefontaine is there, watching the film of his son in the 1972 Olympic 5000, when the 21-year-old went for broke, challenging older, stronger runners. But he stumbled a few meters from the finish and was nipped for third, losing the bronze medal to Ian Stewart of Great Britain. It was a hard Olympic experience for Pre, first the murder of Israeli athletes, then doubts about the meaning of the Games and the attempt to hold onto a dream that turned Kafka-esque. It left him disappointed, disillusioned and emotionally spent.

When he recovered, Pre came back strong, attacking the track with renewed vigor. In the next two seasons he set and reset American records at 2 miles, 3 miles, 6 miles, 2000 meters, 5000 meters and the 10,000. Occasionally he lost a race, but even beaten he never seemed vanquished. Oddly, he sometimes described himself at the time as just "going through the motions." Some motions. For all of us competing at the time, Pre was still the standard.

In the wake of the Munich Olympics, too, Pre seemed more accessible, more at ease, more at peace with life. His ferocity on the track seemed undiminished, but his relationships with other runners seemed to grow.

It was during this time, in June of 1974, that I chased him for eight laps of a 3-mile race in front of his Eugene crowd, before he and Frank Shorter surged away in the final mile. A picture of this race hangs in the museum in Coos Bay, a black-and-white photo with a much younger me tagging along in the background. That was another epic battle for Pre, a race where the challenger, Shorter, took the lead with 200 meters to go, and that look came over Steve Prefontaine, determination overcoming inertia, pride conquering apathy, anger overpowering pain. On the homestretch, he muscled and squeezed his way ahead of Shorter by six-tenths of a second and set a new American record of 12:51.4. The crowd, his people, stomped the wooden stands and screamed so loudly I felt disoriented and almost stopped before the finish.

I could not beat this guy, but I had slipstreamed in his emotional wake to a personal record of 12:57.6, probably the best performance of my life. It gave me confidence and opened doors. The following spring, largely as a result of this race, I was invited on a 2-week trip to the Peoples' Republic of China as part of a U.S. Track and Field Team. When I returned, still flush from the adventure of my life, Dick Buerkle, one of the few Americans who ever beat Pre, approached me in the airport.

"Did you hear the news?" he asked, ashen-faced. "Prefontaine died. In a car crash."

The day after the Prefontaine Memorial Run, I am back in Eugene, taking a run for old time's sake. I jog along the trail dedicated to Steve Prefontaine, "Pre's Trail" and trot along streets filled with memories. I stop at Stevenson Track at Hayward Field, site of so many of his spectacular races.

This is the track where Pre raced his last race, on the evening of his death. It was a 5000 in which he beat Frank Shorter in 13:23.8 -- not Pre's best effort, but he had a lot on his mind. He had been fighting the AAU over whether he and other runners would be allowed to race when and where they wanted. And he was frustrated by the general lack of support for American track athletes.

"I'm just like any other American," he told a reporter from the Oregon Journal. "If I don't pay my electric bill, they turn off my lights. After college, our athletes are turned out to pasture. We have no Olympic program in this country. It's as simple as that. No sportsmedicine, no camps, no nothing. I'm not talking about subsidizing us. I'm just talking about a national plan. I want to see some interest from somebody. In the past, we've sat back and let our natural talent do it. Well, the rest of the world has caught up."

So Pre was feeling a bit frustrated and scattered at the time of his final race, not quite at the top of his form. Still, he finished just 1.9 seconds off his American record. It was his 25th straight win in Eugene in distances over a mile.

It was on this same track that friends and fans held a memorial service for Pre a few days after his death. The speeches ended early so thousands of fans could sit in silent appreciation while a clock ticked off the seconds of an imaginary race. And as the clock wound down to what would have been his last lap, they couldn't contain themselves.

"Go Pre!" they shouted, and cheered, and cried.

As I leave Hayward Field and jog up into the hills where Pre spent the last minutes of his life, I can't help but reflect on his impact on lives like my own. His was an attitude that was tough to duplicate, and it affected us all.

"The characteristic that separated Pre from the rest of the world was his pride," said Coach McClure. "To be the best was his only goal. Man imposes his own limitations. Limitation was not in Steve's frame of reference."

I'm feeling my own limitations at the moment, race-weary legs that don't recover as well as they used to. They struggle against gravity to carry me up into the hills above Hayward field, then down a narrow roadway overarched with trees, like a cool, moist cathedral. This was a road Pre also ran many times, but which turned on him just after midnight on the evening after his last race.

The circumstances of his death remain unclear. He had been drinking at a party that evening, but that never seemed an adequate explanation for why, at 39 minutes past midnight, his MG convertible suddenly veered off course on a road he knew so well. The car flipped over, crushing him to death.

We'll never know exactly what caused the accident, but we do know this: Steve Prefontaine lived 24 years, during which time he became one of the most remarkable and memorable distance runners the human race has ever known. And when he ran in front of his people….

I stop running, walk to the side of the road, and find the cold dark granite that marks the spot. After 15 years, I still feel melancholic reading the simple inscription in 2-inch, hand-painted white letters:

"Pre 5/30/75 RIP"

-Don

This is one of the stories in Don Kardong's book "Hills, Hawgs and Ho Chi Minh." For information, click here