On June 13 Chicagoan Ed Slowikowski stepped to the starting line at the Metro West Twilight track meet, on the outskirts of Boston, with one chance left to qualify for the 1992 Olympic Trials. For ten weeks he had been trying to shave a tenth of a second off his best time in the 1,500-meter run. This was the last day to do it.
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After a winter of intermittent indoor racing, Slowikowski’s season began in earnest in late April, when his corporate sponsor and part-time employer, the Reebok company, flew him out to the Mount SACC Relays in California. He ran a respectable race at 3:46, but four seconds is a long way in the digitally timed and ultracompetitive world of world-class running. “I was having a lot of emotional problems at the time and really wasn’t ready to race,” Slowikowski recalled later.
So it was back to the drawing board with his longtime Loyola coach, Gordon Thompson. After two weeks of hard interval training combined with long-distance work, Slowikowski shaved his time to 3:44.1 at the National Invitational Championships in Indianapolis. “I kicked well in the last 100 but the overall race didn’t go as planned,” he said in his typically confident but self-critical manner. For his next attempt, on May 23, he again traveled west, this time to Santa Monica, where he almost struck pay dirt with a lifetime best of 3:41.9, just one-tenth of a second from qualifying. “That race went out real fast,” he said. “It should have been easy to qualify there but I wasn’t strong enough and died like a dog.”
As the 14 contestants bolted from the starting line Slowikowski’s left leg was cut open by another runner’s spikes. But it was just a flesh wound and he didn’t miss a stride. From the start of the race a “rabbit” (someone who agrees to sacrifice himself to set a fast pace early on) took out the lap in a blistering 57 seconds, easily fast enough to break the four-minute mark if this had been a mile-long race. The runners spread out single-file and Slowikowski settled comfortably in seventh place “feeling smooth and controlled.” At the half-mile point the lead group came through in the 1:57-1:58 range.
He also studied the competition’s current times in Track & Field News (the self-proclaimed “bible of the sport”) and their performance in the 1988 trials, so he’d have an idea of what to expect–who’s likely to start fast and fade, who has a good final-lap “kick.”
