A bit more context before getting to My Big Race with Jeff Edwards in the Spring of 1975.
The summer of 1972, the three months after Carl Dominey told me that I would run 3,000 miles in training before graduating from Astoria High School, was a sort of a solitary boot camp. My training for ninth grade track had consisted of days that alternated between jogging a couple of miles out to Miles Crossing and back or doing "intervals." The distance runners would run an untimed lap, some of us trying to go fast, then collapse in the grass for a ten or fifteen minutes or half an hour until the coach noticed us, then told us to run another lap. We usually did about four in an hour and a half, I think.
Mr. Dominey was much more demanding. He laid out a schedule of runs ranging from four to ten miles almost every day and of varied intensity for me over the summer. I vaguely remember how difficult and painful it was, being three miles from home after already having run five miles or seven, just to keep running. But I kept at it, and pretty soon it wasn't so hard. I remember playing football near the end of the summer over at the Seppas, and wondering why everyone wanted to take a break after an hour. By repeatedly subjecting my body to stress, I had crossed some sort of barrier that most people never cross. And ever since, running eight miles hasn't seemed like a big deal.
But, like I said, I wasn't a very good runner my sophomore or junior seasons. Part of the problem was lack of talent. But I was soon over training. I would read about how some high school runner somewhere was running 120 miles a week, so I'd try to do the same. That led to injuries or just getting run down physically and mentally. Or I'd be in great shape at the start of the season and peak before we even had a race. And in races I wasn't very tough. Running hard requires a willingness to subject yourself to a lot of physical pain. It feels like you are suffocating; and all you need to get relief is to slow down. So I tended to go out slow and then finish fast, taking it easy and then letting the adrenaline override the pain. I remember an 880 my junior year when I ran about 72 seconds the first lap and 62 the second, something ridiculously inefficient like that.
At the end of that year, after two years and some 4,000 miles of training, three things were obvious: 1) I needed to train sensibly and consistently; 2) I needed to go out harder in races, putting myself in position where, by running a steady pace, I could start picking runners off one by one after the mid-point of a race, using the challenge of catching a flagging runner as a carrot to override the pain; 3) We had at least five runners with more talent than I had. It looked like at the start of cross-country I would probably be our sixth runner. So I accepted that this might be the case, resolved to be the best sixth runner in the state if that's what it came down to. Six became my special number.
By training consistently over the summer and then keeping contact with the runners I wanted to beat during the first half of a race, then pulling past them in the second half, it turned out that I was actually our fifth-best runner, and we ended up in a tie for sixth place in the state meet, even with our top runner hurt. And I was just five or ten seconds out of third for our team. I was running much faster than I ever had before and consistently beating runners on other teams that had consistently beaten me.
So that's why when I faced off against Jeff Edwards, that cocky sophomore, some four months later, I figured I was entitled to beat him. Plus, I had a plan.
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