If you hang around Dick’s Bar at all, or some of the downtown haunts around it, you almost certainly know Bill Bergthold and his Asian wife Pom — arguable the most engaging, charismatic and powerful personalities you’ll meet, and fastly in love with playing the rock group the Scorpians on the jukebox.
As I’m sure you’d also know, even though Pom looks like a supermodel, they both are outgoing enough to mingle about a bit with their own groups of friends, often singularly, with Bill showing bold knowledge of European bands and other things, and Pom being a bit less pronounced when she greets you with hands folded across her chest in a typical Asian pose. But soon after midnight, they’ll reconvene with each other for a final time and return to their home in Roberts.
What you may not know is that when they get near Hudson while on training runs, they are preparing for grueling and successful distance events.
In my more than two decades as a local sportswriter, I’d always found that if I wanted an interesting take on the latest marathon run with local people involved, all I needed to do was ask Bill.
He in his own right is an accomplished athlete, in both marathoning where he posted an insane time in his first outing, and other endeavors such as the triple jump, in which he’s won a master’s national title. However, Bill’s hobby has been to vigorously keep track of, and research, the exploits of both World Class marathoners and at least one local, Ryan Meissen, whose level of success is only a notch below those of international fame.
After years of occasional conversations, it seems to me that Bill, who now is 50 and recently suffered an injury that ended his own running days, has if anything over time even stepped up his viewing of movies and reading of books on these people — with at least one of whom he’s actually been able to train.
They all share a similar secret to their success — an all-consuming drive to never give up while competing and to push themselves mercilessly — although if you told the usually somewhat brash Bill that you were putting him into that same ultra-competitive league, he’d likely blush for one of the first times in his life.
Bill’s wife, who goes by the name Pom since her given name when born in Thailand is nearly unpronouceable, is almost as old as Bill, but still thin and fit. She also trains hard, and is known for her conversation-starting ability to do deep knee bends — with only one foot on the floor and the other leg extended straight forward.
“She’s really taken off with the training, and has only 8 percent body fat on her 108 pounds. I guess I turned her into a training machine,” Bill said.
But it is the career of marathoner Steve Prefontaine, who had great success at the 1972 Olympics in Muenich and became one of the sport’s first true stars, that really gets his attention.
“He went to college in Oregon, which was a mecca for (marathoning). He showed that he was a force to be reckoned with even in high school,” Bill said, displaying his penchant for research. Prefontaine didn’t have a runner’s body or tons of athleticism. He just had super-human drive.
Bill was too young to ever have met Prefontaine — having attended Mankato (Minn.) State University in the late ’70s and early ’80s — although he would have loved a meet and greet.
“I was living vicariously through him, since as far as athletics I was just doing the triple jump at that point,” Bill said, adding that would not have been a good fit for also doing marathons. “At the time, I thought most distance runners were nut bags.”
Later, a very athletic aquaintance who worked at Northwest Airlines challenged him to a 10K, and some of that competitiveness showed through. “I simply couldn’t let him win.”
So, with just weeks before the showdown, Bill started running late Wednesday afternoons with the track squad leaders from St. Thomas University in the tWin Cities. “That only fueled the fire. They thought they’d leave me in the dust but found it amazing that I came back for a second week,” he said.
The result was that Bill was running 800 meters in less than 2-minutes, 20-seconds, and doing eight of them in a training session. “I beat (my initial challenger) by four minutes in my first 10K. Then I started enjoying it. I loved beating the Tommies and was amazed at what I was capable of.”
That was immediately followed by an appearence at the Rice Street mile in St. Paul by the then 38-year-old. He ran a 4:39 and was 12th overall among 90 contestants.
The focus at this point clearly had shifted away from triple jumping. It was time for a marathon in Chicago, and the Roberts man with only two running events under his belt had just 12 months to train.
The novice soon discovered that he had to select a “pace group” with which to begin the race, and without knowing what he’d gotten himself into, chose the 2-hour, 50-minute group. He would run with the big guns.
Until mile 21, he stuck with the unreasonably fast pace, then started feeling intense pain. It turned out Bill had a rare medical syndrome that made it feel like knitting needles were being stuck into his knee.
He started waving encouragement to women who were easing by him in an attempt to break 2:50, which would get them a berth in the Olympic trials.
The winner of the marathon also passed him at a record rate of speed as Bill was off-pace for the final mile. Still, his 2:52 placed him near the top. “It was a ridiculous goal,” he said.
“I didn’t care about the pain, and just fought threw it. I found out later that it’s not supposed to hurt that much,” he said, adding that he managed to avoid surgery by taking nine months off.
Bill then began logging 84 miles a week, with one “wicked” training session every seven days, although he’s proudest of some performances at shorter distances then marathons.
Some of the training sessions around the byways of western St. Croix County were with Meissen, a Hudson man who for years blew away virtually everyone in the region and was racing at near Olympic caliber. The two runners first talked about the take-no-prisoners mental aspect of racing over a beer at a Hudson bar.
They conversed about Meissen being a favorite at the Rice Street mile, where he’d possessed the record for years. “He said that someone may beat me, but they’ll have to bleed to get by me,” Bill recalls, adding that phrase became burned into his consciousness.
Prefontiane might have said the same thing. At a given moment, a competitor would need to push themselves to the point of a heart attack to pass, Prefontaine was noted for quipping.
“Meissen is a fun guy, but he can be wickedly serious,” Bill understated.
In 2010, it was back to the triple jump, as Bill won the event at the USA track and field master’s in Boston. He did several types of training for 18 months to win at nationals, which included “40-inch box jumps” to get his vertical leap back to 30 inches. At had been at that 40-inch level.
He first thought he was edged out and had only taken second.
“I was sitting in the chair with a medal around my neck, after going upstairs to get the silver. Then I was told I’d gotten first,” Bill said.
He had another injury recently, one which he could not beat. His right Achille’s heal was ruptured, and even afterwards, left a lot of scar tissue. “So my running is dead in the water. It’s killing me. I love to train.”
In retrospect, Bill said he could have iced it more thoroughly, but it’s not like him to baby his body.
These days, wife Pom is leaving him in her wake. “Now my goal is just to walk without a limp,” he said.
Now that he’s no longer racing, one other thing is different. Bill for a change did not actively monitoring the Olympics and its running events — although in a different twist from the events that usually get his attention, he said there’s one U.S. sprinter to watch out for.
