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?