A Runner’s Story

Out of habit, I awaken every day with my running clothes laid out at the foot of my bed. I pull them on first thing before I’m fully awake. My eyes are still crusted with gunk while my body lunges through the dark, stumbling down three flights of stairs, the handrail my savior as I lurch from side to side. On the final stair I sit to pull on each shoe.

The big gray door has one slender window through which I peer as I double-knot the shoelaces.  And stretch against the stair railing. S-t-r-e-t-c-h. For two months of the year, the windows shows daylight, but the rest of the year it shows darkness when I go out. Snow, sleet, rain, heat, I go out there. I ignore the likelihood of slipping because, let’s be honest, nothing will stop me from stepping outside. The very thought of not running—not stretching my muscles—not gulping great lungfuls of air—brings me to a dark place.

Run! And in the same instant, I shake my hands so hard the fingertips tingle. Run run run. It was always enough. Why did I ever try to grab the brass ring? Why did I let the mirage of winning warp my dreams?

*       *       *

Let me tell you about Coach.

There was nothing we wouldn’t do for Coach. “We” being the misshapen, lazy-limbed boys and girls of the composite school who sucked at all the other sports—who couldn’t wield a stick, couldn’t return a volley, couldn’t throw a ball worth spit—who ended up on the trash-heap of Phys Ed rejects.

Coach was the humble, self-effacing type, who’d learned early as a refugee how to melt into the background. “And if that didn’t work,” he jested, “I learned how to run. You can, too.”

He tried to make something of us. Coach got us all running. Got us all wanting to run, needing to run.

He had a mental divining rod that could suss out a runner’s one tiny advantage—maybe a stride a half-inch longer than normal, maybe a foot whose phalanges could always land solid when all other runners’ toes slanted on the turn. And then he’d help the runner work on it, magnify it, and build it into a superpower.

Word of his coaching expertise spread through the public school system as our running team started to move up in the standings. He was pursued by the better public schools; he was also wooed by the private schools, but Coach chose to stay in the inner-city, close to his extended family. “Besides, where else can I get a decent haircut?” he joshed.

Coach could sense trouble before a runner realized what was happening; he could figure out how to compensate for the shaky way a heel landed or correct the slight wiggle of a hip—repetitive damages that, over time, would incapacitate a runner going the distance. His track team had the lowest rate of injuries-to-average points.

He was courted by every college in the state, but Coach stayed at the composite school, even as the first, second, third crop of students he raised up to race graduated from high school and went their separate ways.

Then his world collapsed for the second time. His wife Lucia, mother of their two babies, developed cancer. Stage 3 esophageal, as if she’d been cheering too loud and long for Coach’s teams over the years. She started preliminary treatment. Rumor had it she could get full benefits and receive special state-of-the-art gene-therapy treatment if he would sign for a position in Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic. So he caved. He accepted the offer, and switched to coaching campus track and field. His team climbed the rankings month after month—and Coach watched as her health improved, too.

Unexpectedly, Lucia developed septicemia and died. Coach was blindsided. The runners on his college team were determined to distract him with wins, one right after the other. “For Lucia,” the winner of each event crowed as they held their gold medallions high under the spotlight. “For Lucia, long may her memory reign!”

*       *       *

By the time I switched to Coach’s new college and joined the varsity team, he was three years into his legendary career. I benefited from his experience—and served as a guinea pig for a couple of newer approaches he wanted to pioneer.

At first, I had to conquer starting-block problems. I couldn’t start immediately. “Explode from the block, Vince,” he kept telling me. There was always that hesitation—my brain waited to hear the firing pistol ring out before allowing my toe to push away from the block.

Coach convinced me to start without hesitation. “Yeah, sure, it’ll increase your false starts—but you know what? False starts don’t count against you.”

It shaved time off my run, and that’s what counted.

The second big thing he hammered on was my ever-so-slight tendency to slow down as I approached the finish line. He cajoled me: “You do not want to damage that ‘pretty ribbon’ stretched across, is that right?”

He knew “pretty” and “ribbon” were trigger words for me, and he enunciated them in a posh British accent that made me gag. “No ‘pretty’! No ‘ribbon’!” I howled.

I wanted to slap that grin off his face.

“Imagine this finish line,” he said, “is the door you must crash through at maximum speed to rescue Buster.” He knew my fondness for a certain four-legged creature, my Polish lowland sheepdog, a shaggy-coated canine known for thriving on exercise and hard work.

Every night I visualized what Coach described. Beginning—explode, take the lead. Never mind looking silly with false starts. Ending—breaking down the door to rescue Buster.

“Now that we’ve got your beginning and end cleaned up,” Coach predicted, “you can bring home the gold.”

I trained every day, attended every team practice, did explode-and-rescue at every meet—yet still, I fell short.

You know the saying, “three times a bridesmaid, never a bride”? Well, this was thirty times a bridesmaid. Race after race, I fell short.

What was wrong with me?

I would run all out, give it my utmost and collapse after the finish. Minutes later they’d announce our rankings. I was always posting “good” speeds but never “the top speed.” I would groan and moan, pull out my hair. And at home, with my arms wrapped around Buster, I’d privately cry my eyes out.

It was a hidden grief, not one I could share with friends because they’d always say, “But look, you’re a winner—you’re on the podium!”

Forget it.

Silver and bronze just don’t cut it.

The also-ran runner, if he’s got any ambition, is gnashing his teeth. Not congratulating himself. “Why couldn’t I have run a better race?” is the question that tortures his dreams. The also-ran should not be taking a bubble-bath in soapy self-congratulation. The also-ran should be dissolving in the acid of self-loathing.

Coach respected my anger. He didn’t try to extinguish it. Coach let that anger smolder, hoping it would ignite a new strategy to catapult me into the winning place. But I always fell short: disappointingly, tragically short.

*       *       *

“Now is the time,” I told myself. The winning that existed in my brain took many forms. The cartoon carrot dangling at the end of a fishing rod. The shiny trophy displayed on the topmost shelf of my mother’s mantelpiece. The pregnant line in the “About Me” bio on my future entrepreneurial website: “Champion runner” and “World-class athlete.” But I had to earn those kudos. I had to win the World Athletics Awards before moving on to the Olympics.

During the lead-up to each championship round, I fell asleep every night obsessing over elusive glory. The anguish I felt on losing: I interpreted it to mean another win was lurking inside me.

The pressure built and built until one day I pulled out all the stops.

I ran so hard I felt pain in my chest, a searing pain like a glowing prod touching my breastbone.

Danger or not? Danger or not? That was the rhythm as I barrelled down the track.

Then whoosh, I wiped out on gravel some idiot had dropped on the track surface. My knee imploded.

So damn close. I could not walk for the rest of the season.

I went to a very dark place.

*       *       *

Coach, too, was in a dark place. Life without Lucia, with two high-needs toddlers, in a high-profile job, was taking its toll.

We did not console each other—we had fallen down our separate wells of grief—but we co-existed, each dimly aware of the other.

*       *       *

 It was tough, starting over, once the doctors declared my knee was “healed.” In the new season, I experienced nausea. I was sickened by all the training I had missed. My awareness of how far behind I was lodged in my stomach like a poisonous jellyfish. I had lost muscle, and worse, I had lost “muscle memory,” too.

I ran that first lap, lungs bursting, untrained muscles clenching and unclenching, like an aged prizefighter watching reruns of his championship bout. I welcomed the honest muscle ache of lactic acid buildup—to be expected. Bring it on! But the sickness of knowing all the practices I’d missed—and the fear I’d be cut from the team—that was the jellyfish that swelled to enormous size.

After the first heats, Coach dropped by the stands to see me. I waited, chewing Dramamine tablets. His eyes were darker and more hollowed. He had lost weight. But otherwise, he wore the same aspect as in composite school. A sheen of sweat covered his forehead, as if he exerted as much effort watching his team as they spent trying to meet his expectations.

“Hey.” I brushed the tears from my cheek with the back of my hand, praying he hadn’t seen them.

“You’re back.” His eyes flickered to my cheek.

“Splashed by a water bottle,” I lied.

“Aha, I thought so. Bertie baptized you, did he?”

I choked back a sob. Bertie had run beside me, shaming me with the burst of energy he could pull out of nowhere in the last stretch. I theatrically held my arms wide like a parched tree holding its branches out for rain. “Yeah, baptized,” I said.

*       *       *

When I threw my team jersey in the laundry bag that very last time, I didn’t tell Coach it was goodbye. I couldn’t. The words stuck in my throat. I think he got the picture after I didn’t call him back the next eleven times he left a message, one for each year I had been training.

I gave it my everything—and in the end, my everything was not enough.

I failed my semester; I botched my internship interviews; and Buster ran away and was impounded by a “kill” shelter that had my wrong address.

That is my story. Not one of triumph, with ascending chords played fortissimo in the final credits. Only the minor key of perpetual defeat.

The universe, and circumstances, and pride, bring us together to compete… and tear us apart in our despair and shame at losing, like the ebb and flow of the tide, like the hundreds of parallel lives I could have lived, if only I could have donned the mantle of “champion,” and kindled warmth in the rest of my life with the glow of winning—if only I had taken gold once.

Just once.

The End