“Let me tell you something about winners and losers and quitters and other mythical fauna in these parts,” Denton said. “That quarter-mile oval may be one of the few places in the world where the bastards can’t screw you over, Quenton. That’s because there’s no place to hide out there. No way to fake it or charm your way through, no deals to be made. You know all about that stuff. You’ve talked about it. It’s why you became a miler. The question now is whether you are prepared to live by it or whether it was just a bunch of words.”

Over the course of several years at Southeastern, as Denton’s reputation grew, a number of undergraduate runners decided they would train with him, thinking to pick up on the Secret. A new man would show up the first day expecting all manner of horrific exertion, and would be stunned and giddy to find he could so easily make it through one of Denton’s calendar days. Showing up the second morning at 6:30 he would be of good cheer, perhaps trying to imagine how he would handle the pressure of his inevitable fame. That day would also go well enough, but he would begin to notice something peculiar. There was no letup. The tempo was always moderate but steady. If a new guy decided to pick up the pace, that’s where it stayed, whether he finished with the group or not. You showed off at your peril.


On the third day (assuming the new man made it that far) his outlook would begin to darken. For one thing, he was getting very, very tired. No particular day wore him out, but the accumulation of steady mileage began to take its toll. He never quite recovered fully between workouts and soon found himself walking around in a more or less constant state of fatigue-depression, a phase Denton called “breaking down.” The new runner would find it more tedious than he could bear. The awful truth would begin to dawn on him: there was no Secret! His days would have to be spent in exactly this manner, give or take a mile or two, for longer than he cared to think about, if he really wanted to see the olive wreath up close. It would simply be the most difficult, heartrending process he would endure in the course of his life.


At that point most of them would drift away. They would search within themselves somewhere along a dusty ten-mile tra or during the bad part of a really gut-churning 440 on the track and find some key element missing. Sheepishly they would begin to miss workouts, then stop showing up altogether. They would convince themselves: there must be another way, there has to be. The attrition rate was nearly a hundred percent.


Only Cassidy and Mizner made it through the process and finally accepted the Trial of Miles.