State Mile – The start

All of my thoughts during a Mile are generally vulgar, profane or scatological in nature. The Mile isn’t a tea party where we say, “Please, after you.” Or “No, I insist, you were here first, after you.” The real truth is I want to rip your head off and blow boogers down your neck cavity. Every profanity I’ve ever heard occurs to me during the violence of a Mile race. That’s not me normally, but that is me during a Mile. Fortunately, every ounce of energy is focused on completing the distance. There is no breath to be wasted on speaking. No one can hear my vulgar thoughts, and that’s a good thing. Mom would be disappointed in her son.

So don’t be surprised at the obscenities that roll through my consciousness during the Mile. What you should be surprised at is how relatively tame my obscenities are. I’ve cleaned them up quite a bit for this blog, but wanted to include a few of them so you have a feel for the event as I experienced it. Simply put, the Mile is a violent act perpetrated by me on myself, but encouraged and abetted by those stupid sonsabitches who have the audacity to run front of me at any moment in time. If they’d just slow down it wouldn’t hurt me so much.


The Start

When I was standing in my lane waiting for the race to start I looked around at the other guys. Only a few of them were wearing decent running gear. Most were dressed like I was. My shorts and my shirt dated back to the 1950’s when my high school was first founded. I’d recognized my running gear in the pictures of the old-timers in the hallway trophy cases.

The running shorts were anything but short. They nearly came down to my knees. The shorts were made of a shiny red material that looked too much like satin. I thought they might be mistaken for women’s underwear or pajamas. My running jersey was heavy and must have been made of wool. It scratched and itched so badly that I only put it on just prior to the race start and removed it immediately thereafter. I felt like Old Stew-Ball, the racehorse, amongst a herd of thoroughbreds.

The underappreciated old racehorse was a self-image I’d fostered over the previous year while running 1500 miles in preparation for this race. Being a little bit angry helped manage the misery of running alone in the extreme weather of summer and winter. Even though I was physically punishing myself during all those miles, I mentally felt like I was punishing or “showing” all those who’d slighted or ignored me over the years.

I was aggravated that the newspaper focused on the “ball” sports and ignored cross country in the fall, and only covered the sprinters during the track season. I was angry that my classmates generally didn’t know I was a distance runner, and those who did had scant appreciation for the level of dedication required. I was hurt that only my family would ever bother to see me race. I was bothered that cheerleaders and the “In Crowd” went to football and basketball games, but never to one of my sports.

While I knew what I had achieved in the advanced classes at school, in the concert choir, in the church youth group, and through running, I felt overlooked and underappreciated. Yeah, I had a chip on my shoulder. And so there was a fair amount of anger and bitterness I’d accumulated over the last three years of running that I was prepared to unleash during this race in a fit of controlled aggression.

So there I was standing in lane 4, wishing I could have gotten to the bathroom one more time, with an extra guy in my lane on my outer shoulder, and the starter yelled, “Take your marks!” We all leaned forward to hold still and the gun went off immediately after he yelled “marks!”, and I thought “Asshole! You didn’t even make the sissies hold still for a lousy microsecond! Sonofabitch!” I was left standing there.

It wasn’t because I was caught napping. It was an unusually fast gun, especially for the Mile, and frankly, I am slow. I was still a skinny scrawny puke back then, not like the impressive hulk/hunk that I am today. (In my dreams) When the gun went off I went out hard because Coach Wilkinson wanted me to keep in contact with the leaders. Regrettably, the genetic cesspool I was born with didn’t include the gift of speed. Even though I’d started extremely fast for me, by the end of the one curve stagger I was in the back of the pack and dangerously close to last place. I might have been last but I didn’t dare look back to find out for sure.

I thought, “Oh crap, oh crap, oh CRAP! Wilkinson is going to kill me!” But there wasn’t anything I could realistically do about it. I was going as fast as I dared without all-out sprinting, and there was way too much distance left before I started that nonsense.

High school kids are generally full of adrenaline during the first lap of the Mile and can be found zigging and zagging through traffic, changing lanes suddenly, wasting energy with sudden movements, and causing all sorts of misfortune. Being next to last wasn’t such a bad place to be as it was safe, but I would never convince Wilkinson of that; not that I had a choice in the matter. Since I was Dead Flipping Last, or close to it, there was no urgency to move from lane four into lane 1. I took the whole backstretch to move over the four lanes. Still running way too fast, and still not catching anyone, I was thinking, “Assholes, what the HELL are you DOING?”

At the end of 220 yards I could see Krantz leading the pack into the beginning of the curve with Dennis close behind. There must have been 13 guys between us. I was easily 20 yards back already. I thought “If these guys can keep up this pace I am doomed. This has got to be 4-minute Mile pace. Am I unprepared? Has everyone else taken their workouts up a quantum leap that I can’t reach without me knowing it?”

I refused to get wrapped up in the adrenaline rush of the first lap. The adrenaline can make you run too fast and put you in oxygen debt. Sometimes the adrenaline can screw you up on the first curve and the back stretch, and then when you get in front of the main straightaway and the bleachers for the first time, everyone yelling for you gives you another jolt of adrenaline and screws you up a second time.

I heard my dad yelling for me as I came down the front stretch toward the start/finish line of the first lap, but I did my best to ignore his encouragement. Well, not exactly true. I welcomed his encouragement and support. Whenever any of my teammates would yell, “Pick it up, Tom”, I refused to take it literally. What they meant was to encourage me. They didn’t mean for me to literally pick it up. I was running the race. I was the horse and jockey. I knew exactly the fitness level of the horse and how he was feeling. That moment was not the time for emotional highs and feverish efforts. There would be an appropriate time for that later. The first lap was the time to run like a seasoned professional, running on logic, not on emotion. Pace was the key. I translated their exhortations into, “Run smart, Tom. Run smart!”

During the Mile I felt there was a right way and a wrong way for everything, and I was extremely particular about the way split times were called. That is just a kind way of saying I was an irritable SOB during the Mile. As I approached the end of the first lap I could NOT hear the official reading split times. “God BLESS the dumbass sonofabitch!” This was the state meet. Can’t they do anything RIGHT?

With the crowd roaring it was already difficult to hear. The official was facing the track and calling out splits every second at a right angle to our approach. As we approached the starting line we couldn’t hear the man. The only person who could hear him was the runner passing by directly in front of him and essentially shouting in the runner’s ear. If you happened to pass by between two seconds, you might miss your split entirely. If the dumb-butt would face down the track and call out splits as the runners approached, we would hear his cadence, would know the splits of the guys in front of us, and would have an excellent approximation of our own split as we crossed the line, even if we didn’t hear the man. It was yet another piece of consternation and anxiety in a day already chock full of them.

I got lucky and heard 62 seconds as I went past the start/finish line. “Geez-SUS, (emphasis on the second syllable) Crap, and many bad words!” I don’t run the first lap of my 880 yard (half-mile) races that fast! A 2:04 is my fastest half-mile time. My legs were already starting to feel stressed and I was breathing hard. “They CAN’T keep this up. I can’t keep this up. I cannot run this pace and finish.” Again I wanted to yell “What the HELL are you Dumb-ASSES doing? You are screwing up a perfectly good Mile race. You are screwing up MY Mile race. Do you realize I’ve spent an entire year preparing for this race and you guys have already SCREWED-UP the PACE?”

The only consolation to my screwing up and running a 62, which was much too fast for ANY of us, was that everyone else had screwed up worse than I had. The only guy who had the brains and balls to run a smart race was the guy behind me, and I wasn’t altogether sure that there WAS anyone behind me. Surely Coach Wilkinson would read his stopwatch and realize that I was running a relatively smart race so far. It was a mighty small consolation.

Seeing what appeared to be the entire pack in front of me generated buckets of anxiety. I’d like to say I was calm and sure of what I was doing, but that would be a monster-sized lie. What if I misheard the split? What if I misjudged my competition? What if I am having a bad day? This is supposed to be my greatest achievement. What if it turns into my greatest debacle? “Oh crap, oh crap, oh CRAP!”