Bottomless Bruce

Distance running is for ascetics. By tradition, the sport is dominated by men with little natural speed who love to lope and to win. Such men are willing to undertake years of thankless training to whip their bodies into lean and tireless machines. They must discipline their will to the self-torture of laboring lap after lap, mile after mile. Most of the top distance runners are well into their 20s, and often beyond. But this year the perennial stars are being run into the boards by a Canadian high school senior: 17-year-old Bruce Kidd, the neighborhood newsboy back home in Toronto, who can cruise through the three-mile grind as though it were a jaunt to the corner soda shop.

This season Kidd killed off Ireland's 31-year-old Pete McArdle and Britain's 39-year-old Fred Norris to win a two-mile in Boston Garden in 8:49.2--nearly a full minute faster than any other schoolboy had ever before run the distance. In the U.S. championships at Madison Square Garden, Kidd won the three-mile in 13:47 while trouncing Record Holder Al Lawrence, 30. In Chicago, running in the cramped event of the mile that barely let him get warmed up, Kidd not only finished a respectable second to Hungary's lean Istvan Rozsavolgyi, 31, but turned the distance in 4:09.4 to set an indoor mark for schoolboys. "Phenomenal is not the right word for Kidd," says Manhattan College's Coach George Eastment. "He's better than that." Relaxing Flap. Kidd has such natural talent that he can scorn the accepted theories of track. He runs so far forward on his feet that he seems to be tottering along on tiptoe. Instead of pumping his arms gracefully to help his balance and stride, Kidd often lets his hands trail at his sides and awkwardly shakes his fingers as though flicking off water. "I started flapping my hands when I used to feel tight, and the flapping seemed to relax me," says Kidd. "I'm certainly not going to change now. After all, I do my running with my legs." Wiry (5 ft. 8 in., 135 Ibs.) Bruce Kidd thrives on a training regimen that would make most U.S. distance men turn to croquet. Son of the director of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, Kidd runs up to 15 miles a day in training. "My parents are reasonably enthusiastic about what I'm doing," says Kidd.

Explains his coach, an accountant by trade named Fred Foot: "To Bruce, the long-distance runs offer a great challenge.

He is doing what comes naturally." Plumbing the Well. Most U.S. high schools ban the two-mile on the grounds that it is too tough for any teenager, but Kidd looks astonishingly fresh when he finishes. Says he: "There's really no point in collapsing, is there?" When Kidd began winning races this season, U.S. colleges jostled like runners in a mile relay to offer him scholarships.

Wherever he ends up, Kidd's future is bright. "I actually have no idea of Bruce's real potential," says Coach Foot, who guides his protege during a race with hand signals. "He's like a well--he doesn't seem to have any bottom." And if he develops at a reasonable rate as he grows older and stronger, bottomless Bruce Kidd is quite likely to become one of the great distance men in track history.

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