When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.

My introduction to dissociation had been at Kenneth Cooper's clinic in January of 1975. Cooper had assembled a gaggle of top American distance runners and a half dozen top researchers, the intent being to figure out what the difference was - physiologically, biomechanically, psychologically - between elite and subelite runners.

Prior to the 1976 Olympics, I was a 5,000m runner.

Don Kardong Quotes