Peter, Me, and Track

Distance running was my "thing" in high school.  My son, Peter, who is forty years younger, has from

an early age been obsessed with soccer.  As a sophomore he tried track for a couple of months and did well.  This year he came back and, after some indecision over what event to focus on, ended up in the 300 meter intermediate hurdles.

I had set the school record at Astoria High School for miles trained mid-way through my junior year, but it wasn't until my senior year that I became a good runner, one of the top 100 or so in the state, and my senior year I placed sixth in the two mile at district with a time of 9:53.  A couple of years later I ran a 2:42 marathon and was in shape to run about 2:36 at age 21, training about 100 miles a week, when all the years of pounding caught up with my knees, and that was that.

Years of soccer have always kept Peter in pretty good shape, but he didn't really get fast until a year or so ago--though most everyone seemed to assume that since he was skinny and black, he must be fast.  But there were faster sprinters and middle-distance runners on the team, so Peter was prevailed upon to give the intermediate hurdles a try.

Hurdling, however, requires a lot of technique as well as boldness.  Peter had never done more than a couple of hurdles at a time when he entered his first race, and he was shocked when it actually went pretty well.  His crash course (no pun intended) with Coach Conrad had him shaving about a second off per week, and on Monday he easily qualified for the district final, displacing runners who had been working on their technique for years rather than weeks.  In the final he was in position to get around 40 seconds when just before the finish line, when your lungs are burning and your legs feel like lead, the runner just ahead of him knocked his hurdle into Peter's lane, causing Peter to lose a second or so of time and a place.  As Peter noted, it was a tough way to end his last race.  Even so, he finished fifth and has one of the fifty top times in the state after his month of hurdling.

After ten years of athletics being so important in Peter's life, I wonder, what's next?  I kept running seriously as long as I could, long after it was obvious that I would never be Olympic material, and if I'm honest I'd admit there's still a part of me that misses it, nearly forty years later.  When I started working on my dissertation, eventually published by Harvard University Press, it occasionally crossed my mind that writing a book was a whole lot easier, at least for me, than running a 9:53 two mile in high school or a 2:42 marathon in community college had been.

My running achievements were the result of hours and hours and hours and years and years and years of sustained training, even suffering.  I learned what focus and effort could accomplish.  Getting through graduate school and countless hours of research and writing and rewriting wasn't so different, and it sure hurt a lot less.

Peter's soccer achievements have required more years of dedication and probably more hours of training, all told, than my running career did, as he got started at such a young age.  His brief track career testifies to a different set of virtues: boldness and confidence, a willingness to risk getting hurt or, at the very least, looking less than elegant in an unforgiving event.  I'm excited to see where these qualities take him off the track.  I suspect and hope he'll do much bigger things than write books.