If the doctor's latest prognosis is to be believed, Ray Barrus doesn't have long to live. He'll be lucky to see the new year. So what else is new? For more than eight years death has been running on his shoulder, and he's still here, drawing life from each day, enduring the pain and uncertainty, one step at a time.
Isn't that just like an old distance runner?Every day, through all those years, his body has literally fought for its life, fending off one attack of cancer after another. It began in the stomach, and he beat it. It reappeared in his lungs, and he beat it. Then it turned up in his liver and later in a kidney, and the fight is on again. More chemotherapy, more poison coursing through his veins. More pain. More waiting. In May, his hair fell off in clumps in his hands and washed onto the shower floor. Bald again, the drama beginning anew.
For a while doctors would make no more predictions about his longevity. Barrus was already off the charts. No one can explain his survival, his sheer endurance. He should have been dead years ago. But on he goes, the old runner trying to go the distance. Doctors were more hopeful this time, but after two treatments of chemotherapy last spring, the cancer was still growing. Last week, Barrus pressed his doctor for a prognosis.
Maybe some time before Christmas.
So there it is: 51 years old and living at home with his parents in his childhood home, on Main Street in Grantsville, quietly fighting the fight.
"They keep telling me I'm going to die, but I keep living," he says. "It's in the back of your mind all the time. But after you've gone through it, and you live, you don't have much faith in what they say. I suppose they're right. They're looking at charts and statistics."
But can statistics measure a man's heart and will? Especially that of a man who was once counted among the best distance runners in the world. A man who was able, simultaneously, to weather divorce and cancer and five major surgeries and five rounds of chemotherapy, while alternately teaching high school classes when he could and helping to raise some of his seven children.
"How much does a person have to go through?" wonders BYU distance coach Sherald James, who coached Barrus. "Horrible things happen to tremendous people, and he is tremendous."
Barrus was an All-American distance runner and a team captain at BYU nearly 30 years ago. In 1965, he finished second in the steeplechase at the NCAA championships. A year later, he broke the American record in the open national championships. So did the guy in front of him. Barrus took second place. He went on to compete internationally in Europe for three summers and finished third in the European Championships.
"He was a real hard worker, both in school and on the track," recalls James.
Barrus' hard work might well have cost him a berth in the Olympic Games. After missing a month of training because of an injury, he trained furiously the week before the 1968 Olympic Trials. It was the classic mistake of an eager, young runner. With 11/2 laps remaining in the steeplechase final, Barrus was running with the leaders, well ahead of American record pace, when fatigue - the byproduct of overtraining - overtook him. He finished seventh.
Barrus hoped to continue his running career, but after taking a job as a coach and health teacher at College of Eastern Utah, his career began to wind down. Track races were difficult to find in Utah, especially in Price. The running boom was still a couple of years away, and there were few road races and almost no money to be made in the sport. In 1970, the Deseret News sponsored the Mountain West's first marathon. Although the marathon was too long to suit his tastes or his training, Barrus decided to run it anyway simply because he needed a race.
He was never challenged. He so routed the field that he actually walked part of the way, reasoning that, with a 10-minute lead at 18 miles, there was no point in running all the way. He might have been tempted if he hadn't been so dehydrated (he didn't take a single drink during the race because there were no aid stations in those days). He still reached the finish in a respectable time of 2:49:47.
A month later Barrus entered and won another Utah marathon. It was his last race. At the age of 26, he was done. A couple of years later he trained half-heartedly for another run at the Olympics, but nothing came of it.
"If he had come up during the era of Henry Marsh and those people and had the opportunity and the funding to continue training, he would have been up there with the well-known American distance runners," says James. "I'm not sure he wouldn't have dominated that particular era for quite a number of years. But there was no funding, and he had a family, and he had to support them and never had an opportunity."
Barrus, even with his taste for competition gone, continued to run for the sheer joy of running. He found it therapeutic. During his daily runs, he organized his life and sifted the day's events. As a coach at CEU, he ran once and sometimes twice daily with his runners. Even after he was first told he had cancer, he continued to run regularly for two years.
It was in 1986 that his body began to fail him. He noticed a difficulty in eating and swallowing. The doctor discovered cancer in his stomach, and it was growing rapidly up into the esophagus and down into the bowels. He was 42.
What irony. Barrus was a health teacher and had lived what he taught. He ate fruits and vegetables. He didn't smoke or drink. There were years he wouldn't even allow himself to drink a pop. Cancer? How do you figure? "Maybe it was all the red meat I ate when I was growing up," he says.
Doctors said he had a 5 percent chance of surviving for two years. They removed the cancerous growth, and two years later, to their astonishment, the cancer was gone. They pronounced him cured.
Six months later, in 1989, they told him he had lung cancer, just about the same time his marriage began to unravel. Barrus knew his chances with this particular cancer. As a health teacher, he had read all the cancer literature that had passed across his desk for years. He knew the prognosis even before the doctors told him. He asked anyway.
What are my chances of recovery?
None.
He was given six months to live.
Barrus quit work and waited to die. He kept nothing in the divorce settlement. What did a dead man need? He gave it all away. The chemotherapy began. Incredibly, he felt better the morning after his first injection. After two rounds (each consisting of four injections of chemicals), the X-rays were clean. The doctor wanted to do another round of chemotherapy just to be sure, but Barrus, in a decision he has second-guessed in recent months, refused. He'd had all he could take. That was in 1989, and the cancer seemed to be a thing of the past, but in 1991 cancer was discovered in one kidney.
Doctors removed the kidney, but the cancer had already spread throughout his torso. In April of this year, doctors found cancer in his liver, and after two rounds of chemotherapy Barrus reports, "The treatment's not working. Every day I can tell I'm not as good as the day before."
The treatments stopped a couple of months ago. "There was no reason to continue," he says. But last week he and his doctors decided to try one more round of chemotherapy. "It's one we tried before and it worked pretty well," he says.
A quiet, serene man, Barrus sits on a couch in the home his family has lived in for 30 years, right next door to the home in which they lived the previous 20 years. Just inside the front door there is a trophy case, containing the Deseret News Marathon trophy, an All-American certificate and a picture of young Ray in his BYU warmup suit.
"You just try to go on and do the things you'd normally do," says Barrus. "But it's hard to do. You can't develop any new relationships."
As he says this, he shifts positions on the couch for the umpteenth time, still trying to find a way to sit that will better accommodate the soreness in his ribs. It takes more and more morphine and percocet to dull the pain anymore.
Barrus worked until 1990. After leaving CEU, he worked as a teacher and/or coach at several high schools in the state - Skyline, Cyprus, Tooele and Springville - between cancer treatments. Four years ago he was granted a disability, although he continues to work when he can in a business owned by a cousin. Mostly, he spends his days reading, watching TV, riding his horse and visiting his children. Last winter he even managed to run a few times.
Later this month, he and his family will drive to Salt Lake City to watch the Days of '47 Parade, just as they do every year. Standing alongside Main Street, Barrus has watched a long procession of runners over the years run the last few miles of the Deseret News Marathon. Sometimes he watches the finish in Liberty Park, and runners - mostly old runners - will recognize him. But even during the good years he was never tempted to join them in the race.
This month he finally will return to the marathon in a ceremonial capacity, helping to mark the 25th anniversary of the race.
As for the future, Barrus remains quietly optimistic. "I'm still alive," he says as he sees his guest to the door. "I haven't given up yet."
Isn't that just like an old distance runner?