Friday, June 19, 2015

Post-Defeat, Part II: Why Do I/We Care So Much about Athletics?

Reading what a big scar losing a race in an obscure high school track meet left on my psyche has left me a bit, well, embarrassed.  After a wrenching end to a marriage and other close relationships, being a single foster parent, watching my parents and two close friends my age die from cancer, learning how to be a loving husband, adopting and parenting an amazing son and watching him become a man before my eyes, and so forth and so forth and so forth I have to wonder: Why did I care so much about getting second place in a race?  Why was running at the center of my life for so many years?  And why did I immediately translate the competitive drive behind my running to fields like Evangelical Christianity and academia, prompting me to in a few years burn out from each?  My desire to be the best would plunge me into an activity for hours, weeks, even years, then spit my back up on the beach of life, exhausted and confused well into middle age.

And why do so many men, especially, care so much about how our sports teams do?  Why are we so depressed and angry when people we don't even know playing in games we have absolutely no control over "fail us"?

And why do so many adults who appear otherwise reasonable spend hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars making sure that their children have every imaginable advantage in soccer, basketball, gymnastics, or other sports?  And this even--or especially--when the children themselves don't seem very interested?

The answer: I don't know.

OK, I'm enough of a real man to not be able and willing to stop there.  So here goes:

1) Modern men get so fixated on sports in part because we can.  We have the time and money for hobbies, and sports--especially if it involves ourselves or our children--is a compelling hobby.

2) We are also bored.  Most of us have pretty routine lives, and the opportunity to compete vicariously through out children or even our sports team gives us something to look forward to and to savor.  With children, too, the future seems endless.  They dream of  playing professionally, and we are excited to see how far they can go.

But is all of this really necessary?

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Post-Defeat: Part I

Despite running my hardest and and achieving lowering my time in the mile by about ten seconds, losing to Jeff Edwards left me feeling bitter.  What if you lay it all out, push yourself to your physical limits, and still lose?  What if someone who is two years younger, who has only begun to make the sacrifices necessary to run hard and well, beats you simply because he was born a better run than you were?

Of course I kept running.  It was really the only part of my life that excited me.  I did well the remainder of the season, getting down to 9:53 in the two-mile and finishing sixth in districts (behind both Bob Olsen, who got second, and Jeff Edwards, who got fifth) in a race against runners from twelve teams.  I trained hard over the summer and went off to run cross-country at the University of Idaho for a semester, then for a year and a half of track and cross-country at Blue Mountain Community College.  It was after track season there that I trained a couple of weeks for the marathon, then entered one in Vancouver, British Columbia, hoping I could break three hours and instead ran 2:48 with surprising ease.

I liked training for marathons, which required a high tolerance for discomfort (which I could handle for long periods of time) rather than pain.  I was a mediocre runner in community college.  Pretty much everyone running in college was serious about it and getting good training, so I could no longer count on my dedication to training to set me apart.  So I figured I'd finish up my undistinguished cross-country and track career and then focus on the marathon.  I had no illusions of getting to the Olympics.  I figured if I trained relentlessly for ten years or so I might break 2:20 and get to run in the Olympic Trials, which would be glory enough.   I ran 2:42 after cross country season my sophomore year and my junior year, at the University of Oregon, was training for the marathon for the first time, running about 100 miles a week and in great shape, when I turned my ankle badly three weeks before the marathon I intended to run in 2:36.  Then I came back to soon, messed up my knee to favor my sore ankle, went to a top-notch running doctor who told me that my knees were a mess and I'd never be able to train or run seriously.

To hear that was something of a relief, to tell the truth.  For more than five years, ever sense Coach Dominey had shown me the map of the U.S. and told me that I'd run across it, I had focused my life around running faster.  But the sad truth was that I'd never be an excellent runner, even though the single-minded pursuit of that goal had made me extremely fit (resting pulse of 30 beats per minute) and disciplined.

But what does an athlete do when athletics ends?

Friday, June 5, 2015

What I Learned from Running, Part III

So, all week that spring of 1975 I knew that I'd at last have a good chance to win a race.  I had already run PRs (personal records) in the 2-mile, getting down to around 10:00, so was running much better than I ever had before.  All that stood in the way of my crossing the finish line  first was the cocky sophomore who had spent most of the winter playing basketball while I was out in the wind in the cold putting in my 50 miles of base training a week.

In the days before the race, though, I made what might have been a critical error.  Whereas I was a very methodical runner, Jeff ran more on adrenaline.  He was highly competitive.  So I would have been wise to tell him that I didn't think I had much of a chance against his talent, that he was obviously the superior runner.  But of course I was too proud to do that.  Instead I told him that he'd go out fast, I'd hang with him, then I'd break him on the third lap.  So Jeff was fired up to prove me wrong, not, as I had hoped, intimidated by my superior experience and strategic acumen.

But when the race finally came, it looked like my strategy was working.  Jeff wasn't able to just run away from me.  He took off pretty fast, but I stayed in contact, tucked in behind him for two laps despite the rising pain.  As we crossed the start/finish line for lap three, I shot ahead and pushed the pace as I had told him I would, doing my best to break him as he had tried to break me.  But he stayed right with me, and one lap later, with one lap to go, 440 yards, he shot past me.

So, it was time for Plan B: Hang on his heels and then outkick him.  I was really hurting, but I was a faster sprinter than he was, and I often passed people in the last couple of hundred yards of a race.  So I hung with him and was right on his shoulder with half a lap to go and thought the race was mine.  The prospect of passing him and winning the race started to override the burning sensation in my legs.  So I got right on his shoulder as we went around the curve, then swung out into the second lane as we came onto the final 100 yards and started to sprint.

And Jeff just pulled away from me.  There was nothing I could do about it.  He crossed the finish line with his hands held high, his head thrown back.  I crossed, dejected, a couple of seconds later, with a PR of 10 seconds, having run what my coach would soon describe as the best race of my life, staggered to the grassy infield and started retching, the taste of defeat and vomit bitter in my mouth.