Ghosts

In soft regions are born soft men.

-Herodotus

Stephen ran a workout on Goshen’s track today. It’s 47 degrees, spitting drizzle and with a 20 mph headwind that follows you around the track, like running through 8 inches of water. It’s a feeling I know well.

In NY in the spring, if the wind isn’t in your face, it’s not because there’s no wind. Just turn left, and it’ll slap you, affronting any forward motion, insulted by your efforts to oppose it. I was jogging around in lane 4, hobbled by 25,000 miles worth of tendon degradation. It was many years ago now, 19 perhaps, when I first started running track workouts on Goshen’s track. 4×800. 5×800. 2:47. 2:44. 2:41. It was 7th grade and I was running 800 meter repeats on muggy spring evenings, the sun setting, twilight closing in, but my running life just then dawning. I’ve always loved track workouts. I can attack anything 3 minutes at a time.

Stephen’s workout today was fairly easy – nothing I couldn’t have done in my sophomore through senior years in college, even with the headwind. 5×400 in 65 with a minute and a half recovery. A split 1000 – 500, 300, 200 with 60 seconds rest between. He handled it gracefully and on perfect pace. It was a tune up, but Goshen’s track never lets you off the hook. The wind is somehow captured by the trees and hills, as it swirls in your face on the homestretch and both curves, then dies when it’s at your back.

In 8th grade, it was the 800 meter record I was after – owned by Brett Walker, 2:13. I came up a half a second short, blaming the smoke in my eyes from the starter’s pistol. In 9th grade, an epic dual with Manuel Thomas from Washingtonville. 4:39 was it? I was hobbled then by a hamstring problem – the beginning of 9 months worth of hamstring problems that left me waking in cold sweats as a dreamed of clawing my way around the track, digging my hands into the rubber trying to gallop, dragging my leg behind. Never fast enough, never fast enough, never fast enough. I still have the dream at least once a year, clawing, clawing, losing, failing.

Today I jogged in lane 4, with the clouds swirling, the leaves flailing, confused by the 47 degree highs during late May. But New York is not a place where you take your nice days for granted. The leaves said to themselves, “next Tuesday then, spring comes next Tuesday, for good this time”, only to see temperatures dip back into the 40s again – “fine, surely by mid-June, surely.”

In 10th grade, in the middle of track season, a warm day in late April, Coach Conklin tells us we’re doing 200s, at race pace. A reasonable idea. “Which race?” we ask – because this is an important piece of information. “The 200, of course!” he answers to our amusement. That’s not really how it’s supposed to work. But Brett Walker and I were very competitive, and you could never count out JB in a speed workout, and the St’s weren’t about to be exposed as slow distance runners. I remember Jeff Smith bringing it that day too. We hammered the first two in 25point. Walker, always one to fling his feet at your shins with his back-kick, clipped my hand with his foot on the second one, nearly falling. He was out of whack for two weeks. We slogged through the last 3 200s, out legs burning. 26, 27, 27 – in tatters. We can barely do the warm down and the whole team is in the tank for a week. This is why you don’t run 200s at 200 race pace.

Steve rams a 500 in 71 down the wind’s throat, coming through the 400 in a perfectly smooth 57. I pick up the pace in lane 4, giving him something to run at, in theory, but in practice just annoying him and fulfilling a never-dying urge to run fast despite screaming tendons.

In 11th grade, Cornwall comes for a dual meet in April. Kory Klowe and I lock horns in an 800 – I eek past for the win in 1:58.2, my fastest time of the season. I beat everyone that first time, but Klowe later gets into my head and takes the state meet spot come June. My house floods. I sit on the tires at the elementary school in the pouring rain and weep having lost my chance my house no place to hide from my failure. But after the 800 on that day with Cornwall, there was a 4×400. I was the anchor. I am one of the only people who negative splits 400s. I always approached it the same; I learned from my father in 7th grade. 100 as fast as you can. Ease into a fast rhythm for the next 100-150. Then pour everything you have into the finish. It’s Klowe again on the anchor. Arthur Ahr, a long-time Goshen track supporter who is thrilled to see a competitive team, is standing with 190 to go. No one else is there. I’m right on Klowe’s shoulder. “BLOW HIS DOORS OFF” he bellows. My pleasure, I think, as he fades, flushed off the back. I should have never given him my spot in that state meet.

I pick up the pace today as Steve his about to start his final 200. I’m still in lane 4, but I have a 25 meter headstart. Slowly at first, then faster, I’m on my toes, in a dead sprint as Steve marches me down on my inside. The curve ends and I hold him even for about 70 yards, my left achilles treatening to sever and my lungs tasting the iron of my own blood. “I looked up at the finish and said, ‘oh no, he’s struggling,'” says my Dad concerned about Steve’s workout, “but then I realized it was you.”

Coach Graham pulled Mike St and I aside before a Burke dual meet, of all things, in 12th grade. “I want someone to show some balls out there,” he barked. A football coach, he loved me despite the fact that I was a distance runner. I was a distance runner who always worked harder than everyone else. Who (almost) always won. Who (almost) always could be counted on. You wanted to make Coach Graham proud of you – distance runners always want football coaches to recognize that they’re as tough as their players from the fall. And he knew it. Burke had a guy that could run 4:55. Mike and I could have played with him for a few laps, dropped a 30 second 200, then jogged in with trainers if we wanted – we did such things in these sorts of dual meets. But I took it out in 63, to Graham’s delight. “BALLS” he shouted after the gun. We both run 4:22, the fastest times thus far in the state that early in April. Our fastest for the year also.

I cut the corner after my first fast 200 in several years. The sky is a little grayer, the rain a little harder, the wind a little more fierce, my achilles screaming accusations of abuse. I’m grinning from ear to ear. I just got to open my stride and run. In 12th grade, I did 12×200 in 27.5 with 90 seconds rest on that track. Always find the straight that has the wind, run into that straight. Champions never run with the wind at their back. Always into the wind. Never the easy way. That track won’t let you. The ghosts aren’t holding your legs and punching your face to make you fail; the ghosts are there to make you stronger.

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