A Long Time Coming: Chapter Four, “Coach Laszlo”

“Discipline is liberation.” (Martha Graham)

My chance meeting with Laszlo Tabori began a period of my life when I learned discipline, dedication, and commitment to a degree I never knew before. Laszlo’s background was intense, and his coaching style was intense. He was what you could describe as a disciplinarian-style coach.

I shall never forget my first workout with him. We ran five big laps around practice fields, about 2½ miles, followed by 15 times 100-yard “shake-ups” (translated as wind-sprints) between the goalposts on a football field inside the track. This was pretty much as far as I’d ever run at one time in any workout.

The team headed for their track bags, and I thought we must be done. But no, my Valley State teammate Jon Sutherland informed me, we were changing into our racing flats in order to start the hard workout next!

If you ever met Laszlo, you would understand why I was too intimidated to leave at that point. I was also too intimidated to stay away the next time and returned for more of the same the following night. Laszlo had a commanding presence, to say the least.

Reflecting back,  I am very fortunate to have received the training I did – and in a strange way fortunate to have progressed in distance running the way it was imposed.  Being limited to quarter-mile races, then half-mile and finally the mile,  my progression was not unlike the English system of developing middle-distance runners as they mature from youth to young adults.

It would seem that I was developed in a pre-planned system of training, what track coaches call “periodization” – except that in my case it was quite unintentional.  Perhaps  I should call myself an accidental middle-distance runner who became a long-distance runner? It must be unusual to have a collection of medals from the 50-yard dash to the 50-mile run. Honestly!

The fortunate opportunity to train with a man like Laszlo is astonishing when I think of our chance meeting. Naturally, he trained us as middle-distance runners because of who he was and how he was coached. When I met him, he had been in the U.S. for more than a decade. Now retired from running, he coached the L.A. Valley College cross-country team.

Laszlo’s story is historical. He was a protégé of the famous Hungarian coach, Mihaly Igloi, a man some call the  “father  of  interval  training.”    His runners broke world records from 1000 to 10,000 meters. In 1955 alone, the Hungarian runners broke nine world records and included three of the fastest 1500-meter men in history. Laszlo was the third man in the world to break four minutes in the mile,  after  Roger Bannister and John Landy.

The Hungarian team had broken a total of 23 world records prior to the 1956  Olympic Games in Melbourne, Australia. However, all hopes of prevailing at those Games were disrupted by the Hungarian revolution and Soviet invasion. Of all his teammates, Laszlo survived the Games the best with a fourth-place finish in the 1500 and sixth in the 5000.

Along with Coach Igloi, Laszlo and some of his Hungarian Olympic teammates defected to the United States directly from  Melbourne.  He resumed a successful running career for a number of years in the U.S. but was a man without a country in 1960, and he never competed in the Olympics again.

I knew little of the time between Laszlo’s departure from running and how he came to coach at Valley College. But I did know that Mihaly Igloi coached at the University of Southern California campus and that the team competed under the name Los Angeles Track Club. The newly formed club at the time included Jim Beatty, Max Truex, Jim Grelle, Ron Larrieu, Joe Douglas, Bob Seaman and, for a brief time, Bob Schul. At one point there were five sub-four-minute milers on the team at once.

Upon Igloi’s departure from the U.S., Joe Douglas took the reins as the coach. The team name changed when it moved to Santa Monica, where Joe continues to coach the Santa Monica Track Club. My late husband Tom Sturak ran under Joe for years, many of which paralleled my running time under Laszlo in the San Fernando Valley. Joe and Laszlo had both run for Igloi and coached similarly in a parallel existence.

When I first joined Judy Graham and Laszlo, we were members of a different Los Angeles Track Club. This was now an all-women and all-events club with distinguished coaches for the variety of specialties. Our star was the great Chi Cheng from Taiwan. At one of my first LATC meetings, we viewed a movie of her recent European tour where she garnered many titles, records, and glamorous awards. I was enthralled. A few years later the LATC disbanded. Laszlo and his ever-expanding group of followers eventually formed our own club: the San Fernando Valley Track Club.

Laszlo, SFVTC (l-r): Miki Gorman, Heather Tolford, Leal-Ann Reinhart, Jacqueline

While competing for the LATC, I ran my first track and field national championships in July 1971, competing in the 880. I had qualified by winning my division in a regional meet, but losing the race to Becky Dennis. I had no idea what “AAU” was when told that I qualified for Amateur Athletic Union national championships. Laszlo said, “Of course you’ll go.”

Judy and I drove to Bakersfield for the meet, but my old VW bug couldn’t make a tough climb over the mountains called the Grapevine. We were stranded until picked up by none other than the coach from another local women’s club, Roy Swett, whose top runner was Debbie Heald. She was one of the best milers in our region, and in the nation. She later became a teammate of ours, but this was our first meeting.

In November that year, I competed in my first cross- country national championships with the LATC. Running in the snow in Cleveland, Ohio, I fell and broke my wrist, but I finished the race and was cast upon returning home.

Even at 2.5 miles, this was close to the longest distance I had ever raced. And then I would be introduced to an event 10 times longer.

(continued in chapter 5, Marathon Start)

Jacqueline Hansen