SLACKERS: Alberto Salazar and the art of exhaustion. – By Malcolm Gladwell

Found via @farnamstreet.

For the first half of the nineteen-eighties, the greatest distance runner in the world was Alberto Salazar. He grew up in a Boston suburb and ran for the University of Oregon. Distance runners tend to be elfin. Salazar was tall. Great distance runners are graceful: they float, landing lightly on their toes and snapping their calves back so that their heels almost touch the tops of their hamstrings. Salazar shuffled like an old man. His college coach said that he looked as if he were sitting down and running at the same time. His college teammate Rudy Chapa was biomechanically perfect: if you saw the two of them running side by side on the track, you would assume that Chapa was the champion and Salazar the journeyman. But it was Salazar who won the New York City Marathon three consecutive times, and who in 1982 had one of the finest seasons of any distance runner before or since.