State!

Before too much more time gets away I definitely need to create a written record about this past Saturday, even if it is a very brief one.

Leaving Josiah with Lulit at the little clump of trees just north of the finish line at Rim Rock Farm I set out some forty-five minutes or so before the gun for the 6A Boys’ State Cross Country Championship in search of my firstborn son.  Finding his teammates proved to be no problem.  They came jogging up and Nate asked me, “Where is your son?”  I said I didn’t know and that I thought they would know.  They were looking for him because they all wanted to start their warmup.  They decided that they would make a quick pass by through the general vicinity to look for him and then go on if they didn’t find him.  Some 15 minutes later I found the girls’ team near the team tent and asked them if they had seen Wyatt.  Yes!  They had!  But to my dismay they had not found him warming up with his teammates, but they had seen him a while before in the porta-potty line.  They reported that he was about to bail out on the porta-potty line so he could go run a warmup.  By himself.  

Race time was rapidly approaching when the boy’s mother showed up after a long drive up from Wichita that morning.  I relayed to her that no, in fact, I had not seen Wyatt, and that while the boys’ team did not know where Wyatt was, the girls’ team had at least reported a sighting!  We were both concerned about the potential state of his bowels, although I think he made the right decision to warm up, and I hoped if it was just a matter of #1 that he had the good sense to find some trees on the back side of the course during his warm up.  Not everything goes according to plan on race day, of course, but it was the State meet.  I was sure hoping he would be able to get past the logistical difficulties and focus on his race.  I told Kay not to worry.  In 2007 I had run the entire Marine Corps Marathon with a serious urge to go pee.  Sometimes we just have to rise to the occasion in spite of the difficulties.

The first time I finally spotted Wyatt that morning he was at the starting line with his teammates.  Well, that was a relief, I can tell you!

The race itself was a thing of beauty, and I have perhaps never more enjoyed watching a race unfold.  Wyatt and his teammates looked good out of the gate, after which I positioned myself near the mile mark. 

I find the State meet to be the coolest thing ever.  On this day the boys (and girls) get to run against the best teams from all over, many of whom they have never seen before, and it’s just inspirational to see these kids who live 300 miles apart competing against each other for place and pride at the most important meet of the year.  Wyatt came through the mile in about 5:17 sandwiched between a couple of Dodge City kids, and he was looking good.  Oh yes, I thought, this is going to be okay. 

At the two-mile point he was still looking good.  I think he came through there in about 10:42, and he looked fine.  He seemed to be holding his own in there, and it also started occurring to me then, where is Olathe East?  They had nudged us out of winning the Regional Championship.  Man, I wasn’t exactly sure how the scores would stack up at the two-mile point, but I was pretty sure we were having our way with East.

After our runners came through the 2-mile I ran hard up the hill to my new favorite third viewing spot at Rimrock positioned about 500 or 600 meters from the finish line (as measured along the course).  Fortunately the course makes a big sweeping curve there, so it’s only maybe a couple hundred meters for me to get from there then to the finish line.  At this point Wyatt and Nate crested the hill right next to each other, and Emmet, our usual #5 guy was not very far behind them (and coming on strong).  I looked at my watch.  I yelled at the boys that I thought they were going to run good times today!

Having a huge breakthrough race with a strong finishing kick, on the absolute best possible day, Emmet surged past Nate and Wyatt in the last 100 or so, and Wyatt beat Nate, although just barely, for the first time all season.  Really the finishing order on the team didn’t matter much.  Those three guys came in 17:03, 17:05, 17:07, and just like that Olathe North had all their scorers across the line.  Of our top 5, Easton, Wyatt and Emmet all ran personal records, and Alex and Nate ran very well.  I think Nate was a bit disappointed for not matching his sub-17 time from the previous week, and maybe for just getting edged by Wyatt and Emmet, but he still ran a great race.  He always leaves it all out there on the course.  As usual Alex paced the whole team, running a nice 16:20, only 3 seconds off his PR.  Carlos ran 6^th for us and had an 18-second PR for his part, and poor Zan, our only freshman varsity runner just had one of those terrible days that I think he will like to forget.  Hey, every runner has bad days, and Wyatt knows from personal experience that freshmen especially can be susceptible to falling apart on a big race day.

When the final scores were tallied, our Olathe North boys placed 5^th in the State, a huge accomplishment for them.  I doubt at the beginning of the season if anyone would have picked them to do so well.  I’ve never been so pleased and so proud.  Of course, I am proud of Wyatt.  I’m proud of him going out and really competing hard two weekends in a row to get to State and then to place well there.  The fact that he got his PR at State is sweet.  It sure helps pass the winter when you can look back on that last CC race with fondness.  I am also proud of the whole team.  They worked hard and they came and competed when it counted.  

Four or five weeks ago my younger two sons ran in a middle-school cross country meet at Olathe East High School.  My wife told me that when they were kicking off the event the public address announcer had stated something like, “Welcome to Olathe East, home of Olathe’s cross country team.”   That statement, if she heard it correctly, rather annoyed me.  So for this reason, and others, I took no small measure of satisfaction from the overall team standings at State.  Olathe North, it turns out, was “Olathe’s cross country team” on this cold, cloudy day, October 27, 2012, a few miles north of Lawrence.

6A Regional Cross Country Runners Up

No matter how much I enjoy my own running, and I enjoy it a lot, it can't touch the joy I feel in my heart when my kids enjoy it and have their own success.  Yesterday was what the kids these days call, "best day ever."  Every single boy on the team, Alex, Easton, Nate, Wyatt, Emmett, Zan, and Carlos, ran a personal record on the second most critical day of the season to take second in their regional meet and advance to State.  They rocked.

For his part, Wyatt finally shook off the curse that has seemed to plague him on the Lone Elm course and crushed his PR by 19 seconds.  About the race he told me a couple of critical nuggets.  For one thing, when he was going by me right before and right after the 2-mile mark I had told him that he looked good, that it was his day.  And I meant it!  I wasn't trying to fake him out or psych him up.  He did look good to me -- he looked smooth, relaxed, and most importantly fast.  "Dad, what you said was just what I needed at that point.  I thought I was doing OK, but it really helped me to hear that from you."  I think it reassured him that he was O.K!

Another thing he said was that he had passed quite a few people in the second mile, and he said he just decided that he wasn't going to give back those places.  He determined to race well.  In particular he said he was dueling against 2 or 3 East guys in his general place in the race, and although he lost a couple of spots in the final kick (not his strong suit), he pressed hard that third mile and held on to most of the spots he gained, including at least one of the rival East runners.  He was justifiably proud that he had raced well and not just "run as fast as he could."  He was proud of his teammates, too.  He felt like all of them came to compete, and they did just that.

Interestingly, although they all ran hard and raced well, none of them had any idea of the times they had run.  There was no finish clock.  I came up to Wyatt after he came out of the chute and showed him my watch.  17:16.  His jaw dropped.  Then his teammates started getting excited because, with Wyatt's time as a reference point, it started dawning on all of them that it was a very special day.  Not only had they raced hard and competed well, but they had run good times, something that every runner cares about.  Nate broke 17 for the first time. So did Easton -- by a lot!  Alex went deep into the 16s.  Our six and seven guys, Zan and Carlos, broke 19 minutes big time, and Emmett knocked a dozen or so seconds off his PR.

In the end it was not quite enough to win a Regional championship.  Olathe East also had a banner day, it seems, and beat us by a meager margin of 3 points.  It's okay, though.  I don't think it tarnished the accomplishment for any of the boys and it certainly didn't tarnish it for me.  They were all smiles, as they should have been.  Besides, we ain't done yet....  Although perhaps OE might have had an off day out at Rim Rock on Monday, we smoked them good on that day.  This Saturday we'll be back out there at Rim Rock again, for State.  We'll get 'em.  Maybe we'll surprise a few other teams around Kansas as well.

GO EAGLES!

Racing the past

I get asked from time to time if or where I was a collegiate runner. I guess my running credentials have come far enough in the last handful of years that people suspect that I might have been a good runner, you know, “back then.” Then I have to tell them, no, I was an okay runner in high school, and I did not run in college. As if to say, I coulda, woulda, shoulda, I sometimes tell people that it is one of the greatest regrets of my life, although my beautiful bride somewhat justifiably finds this hurtful. Had I been a college runner, indeed the odds would have been greatly diminished that we would have met and shared the life together that we have, and I certainly wouldn’t change the primary course of my life. The Lord has blessed me by truly bringing all my dreams to reality, bit still I have this nagging sense of what could have been. How good could I have been?

In the summer of 1984 another former runner from my high school arranged for me an entrée to the University of Kansas cross country team as a walk-on runner, and I was quite excited about it. I went down to Lawrence a few days before the dormitories opened and stayed with him so I could start running with the team. Over the summer I had run a little bit on my own, but not very consistently, not terribly far, and not very hard at all. Looking back I realize that in high school I probably got by in competition a lot better than I deserved with a reasonable talent level, coasting through off seasons with sporadic running and responding quickly and fairly well to the training stimuli when the seasons started. Running with the KU guys, however, was a bit of an eye opener to say the least.

The first handful of runs at KU I don’t remember as being terribly long or terribly fast, and although I struggled a little bit because of my lack of sufficient summer preparation, I was okay. But along there somewhere toward the end of the first week a coach took us out in the country 12 or 14 miles and dropped us off with instructions to run back home. The guys all took off. I stayed with them as long as I could, but it wasn’t long before I was dropped and really struggling. I don’t think it was until years later, running my first marathon completely unprepared, that I ever had another experience like that. I probably used up everything I had in the first 6 or 7 miles and then it turned into a death march. And then it dawned on me that this was not going to be at all like high school. No, indeed, this was going to be work, and probably a lot of it. Certainly coasting through the off seasons was not going to be an option, and I doubted myself, whether or not I could handle running at the college level and also being an engineering student and, quite honestly, whether or not I could do both of those things and still have any fun. I was also intimidated by the other runners on the cross country team.  These guys were good.  They were far better than I was and had much better high school running records.  So, just like I walked on, I walked off. 

As pathetic as that was, quitting without giving it anything like an honest shot, I was nevertheless given a second chance!  It is seared into my memory the day I was walking along campus after just up and quitting.when Bob Timmons, the legendary KU coach, spotted me, drove up next to me and called me to his car. He asked me why I quit. I gave him my lame excuses. I remember these words exactly, “Joe, I don’t want you to quit.” Here was this man who had trained Jim Ryun to run a sub-4:00 mile in high school talking to this kid who was literally a nobody also-ran from the middle of Kansas, encouraging him to stick with it and not quit. I am still disgusted with myself when I look back on that day and consider the choice I made.  Lame, lame, lame.  Fear.  Fear of hard work.  Fear of failure.

Now 28 years later I can never know what would have been.  C.S. Lewis argued that none of us ever gets to know that.  I also don’t know what Timmons saw in that scrawny 18-year-old kid, but now I should at least like to have some idea. For this reason as much as any other I’ve set for myself some really ambitious goals for the next few months. It’s always dangerous to make goals very public, even if only to the reader of my blog (hi, mom), because there is of course a real risk of failure. There is also a real risk that I won’t even be granted the attempt. That dumb knee of mine…. I think, though, that the Lord is giving me at least a season, perhaps a brief one, to take a shot at settling some old questions in my soul. It’s pretty hard to compare race performances between 46- and 17-year-old boys, but nevertheless I’d like to at least beat my old high school self at his best, and also I would like to run a marathon time that proves, at least in my mind, that I am a “real runner” and that maybe, possibly, had I the work ethic and mental toughness then that I have now, I could have run with those guys at KU and succeeded. Maybe I can’t go back and do it over, but I sure can press forward from here and see where some of the limits are.

So, concretely this means really 3 things to me. First up, the marathon. I know there are a lot of college runners who have run under 2:40, but although that’s not a particularly spectacular time among “real runners”, I am content that achieving this would put me in pretty good company across runners of all ages, and certainly it would put me among some very very good masters runners.  It also means that I would have qualified for the Boston Marathon under any standard of qualification at any point in time.  I remember that a couple of my high school teammates ran sub-2:40 marathons during their college days.  It would be nice to be in their company.

Second, I would like to run a 5k under 16 minutes.  This also is definitely not a special time for collegiate runners.  Heck, one of my co-workers, a former collegiate runner, was somewhere down in the 14's back in his prime.  I suspect that 14:59 is probably out of reach for the remainder of this lifetime of mine, but 15:59 sounds nice.  When I was in high school we didn't run 5k for cross country (as they do these days), so I don't really have on old PR to compare, but sub-16 around these parts is almost a guaranteed state qualifier for a high school runner.  With my placements in high school I never would have made the state meet as an individual; I was just fortunate enough to be part of a team that was good enough to go.  So, 15-something seems like a pretty good place to set the bar, and it has that nice round feel to it that we runners love.  I am fairly certain this time represents a bettering of my best high school self.

Finally, there is a race where I have a good solid time to beat, my 3200-meter time of 10:01.  Yeah, although I am still proud to this day of how gutsy I ran that race, I sure would like to have shaved off a couple more seconds.  At our league track meet in Topeka I decided at the start that I was not going to run where I was "supposed to."  I was going to run with the leaders (one of whom went on to win State) and take my chances.  My chances were OK through a mile or maybe even 2000 meters, but then I really started to hurt.  I labored hard through the 6th and 7th laps, and by the 8th lap the guys in 4th, 5th and 6th place were coming up hard behind me.  I don't know if I have ever dug more deeply than I did in the final 200 meters of that race, but I held those guys off and earned myself a nice bronze medal and a personal record.  I'll never forget that my coach was ecstatic because apparently by holding off a couple of those guys from Manhattan I had managed to push their whole team down a spot in the team placings.  On a fresh day I feel pretty confident that I could go out and run under 10:20 right now.  But I sure would like to run a 2-mile, or even the 19-meters-short-of-2-miles 3200 meter, in 9:59 or faster.  I think almost all the college guys I have known at least broke 10:00 in high school.  I'd like to do it, too.

Do I have a chip on my shoulder?  Something to prove?  Yep, you bet.  I sure like running fast.  I enjoy it thoroughly, and as I have written before I think running is a part of who I am as God designed me to be.  So, while I'm on this chase to find out where my limits are as a 40-something dude, I'd also like to beat some young guys along the way, including me.  

Day 1

Today sort of kicks off for me the first day of serious training for my big hairy audacious marathon goal.  I took some fun money I had squirreled away and some of my winnings from the Sioux Falls Marathon and hired a coach.  Now just for a few weeks of hard running.  Log book.