Breakthrough!

The 3200m has always had a very special place in my heart.  It’s the second to last event, and in the bigger varsity meets when I was in high school that usually meant that it was run after dark under the lights as the spring air started to cool.  It can be a really tough race, too, if you run it right.  People talk about how the 800m is the hardest race, but let’s be honest, although the 800 involves a good 40-60 seconds of serious discomfort, that 2-mile will hurt you profoundly for a lot longer than that!  It’s a long enough race that you have to really be an aerobic machine to be successful running it, but it’s also short enough that speed can be a factor the whole way.  It is almost the exact distance that one can run at maximum oxygen capacity, and as anyone can tell you who has run at that speed, it’s rather uncomfortable, especially for, say, 10 minutes.  Two of my most memorable races from my own high school running career were two-miles, and both of them were under the lights at the end of the day.  One was a win in McPherson and the other one was a lifetime personal record in Topeka at our league meet.  I love the two-mile on a cool evening under the lights.  It’s been a long, long time since I’ve personally experienced the love, but Friday evening I remembered again through Wyatt why I love it so much.

The Sunflower League is a group of a dozen of the biggest schools in Kansas.  Each school has somewhere around 1500 students, and as a consequence there are a lot of talented runners when all those schools come together.  The meet was last Friday, May 11, and it was a cool, overcast, mostly still day that was perfect running weather.  The winner of the girls’ 1600 ran a national top-ten time of 4:45, and the boys’ race winner ran a highly impressive 4:18.  Wyatt’s teammate, Ben, ran his personal record and school record 4:23.  In my whole high school career I don’t think I ever personally saw another high school runner break 4:20.  I told Ben after his race that I had never seen anyone that I knew personally run a 4:23.  Those boys’ times may not be in the national class for high schoolers, but they are still darn fast times.  It was a fast night.

And so on that nearly perfect evening Wyatt lined up against a field of about 25 good, strong 3200m runners at 9:27 PM and the gun went off.   He came through the first quarter just under 75 and then through the second quarter just under 75 again.  When he came through the third quarter in 79 on pace to hit is mile PR, I ran across the infield to meet him on the backstretch with an urgent message.  The fact is, he looked strong.  He looked really strong and completely relaxed, not at all like he was struggling with running an opening mile close to his mile PR.  So, on the far side of the track I told him as he went by, “You might come through the mile under 5:10.  That’s OK, don’t worry about it.  You look good.  You look very good.”

Sure enough, he came through the fourth lap with a 5:09 cumulative split, only 5 seconds off his mile PR, and when I saw him on the subsequent backstretch I knew he was thinking about taking off and going for it.   “Relax,” I told him.  “Just relax and wait for 6.”  It seems he heard me and heeded me because he sat in behind his teammate, Mike, and cruised through his slowest quarter, an 83.  On the backstretch of the 6^th lap he and Mike were starting to have to work at it, but they dropped a second off the previous lap, and by the backstretch of 7 I could hardly believe what was shaping up.  I exhorted Wyatt and Mike to chase down two Olathe East runners several meters ahead of them (in the end they caught one and Mike missed getting the other one by a fraction of a second).  With 600 meters to go Wyatt was running great and was far far ahead of his previous personal record of 11:00.

On the final lap, I said this to Wyatt as he went by, “This is a special, special night.  Stay strong through the finish and you are going to crush your PR.”  And so he did, running a final 78 and setting a HUGE personal record in 10:35.  When he heard his time, I think it nearly brought him to tears.  He hugged me, he hugged his coach, Dan, and he hugged his mom.  He raised his tanned arms to heaven and several times said, “Thank you, Lord.”  Several of his teammates came around him and congratulated him on his outstanding race, and although he was completely exhausted he was walking on air.  I certainly was.  He had now, as a freshman, run a faster 2-mile than almost all of my high school races except for just a few of my very best ones.  I was thrilled for him.

Beyond the obvious elation that any runner experiences after a big breakthrough, I think this race had a lot of additional significance for Wyatt.  I suspect he had been having some doubts about his innate abilities as a runner and about his future potential.  He had been stuck for several races right around 11:05 +/- 5 seconds and I think he wondered if that’s where he would always be stuck!  Anyway, at the finish of this beautiful race he said some other things that really came from deep in his heart, but I don’t think I will write those things down here in a blog where anyone in the world might read them.  I think maybe those things are more deeply personal and part of his story that are better left for him to tell someday whenever he thinks it is time to tell them.

Epilogue:

Although there are no flukes in our sport, no lucky three pointers or lucky holes-in-one, it was nice last night (5/18) at the 6A regional meet for Wyatt to get further confirmation of his breakthrough.  On a much more difficult evening (more wind, warmer) Wyatt ran another 10:35, whereas almost all of his teammates’ times fell off from last week.  Certainly he has arrived solidly at a new level.

As for me, I managed to run a 1:24:28 half-marathon in the Kansas City Corporate Challenge this morning.  My knee never hurt.  I ran within myself and competed well for where my fitness level is.  During my race this morning mental images of Wyatt’s toughness in the last 1000m of his race last night inspired me to be strong and keep competing to my best to the very end of the race when I honestly wanted to just give up and cruise in.

City Track Meet -- Boy Number 2

I never would have thought an April could be running paradise without the Boston Marathon, but it was outstanding.  Wyatt managed a couple of 3200s under 11:10, including a wonderful effort at Shawnee Mission West where he ran 11 flat.  He also ran a strong 5:04 at ODAC on the 6th.  I ran a post-microfracture debut 5k in 17:54 on April 21 that was a wonderful surprise since I would not have guessed that I could manage a sub-18 race off only a month of running.  The biggest surprise of all last month, however, was the emergence of boy number 2, Josiah, as a middle distance runner.  He has run the 800 and the 1600 for Frontier Trail Middle School in every meet this spring and, oddly, the 75m hurdles.  This post, however, is not about this past, wonderful month of running, as good as it has been.  This post is about one of the gutsiest, most fearless races I’ve ever seen.  This post is about the Olathe Middle School (7^th Grade) City 800m championship race that happened on May 3

.

Honestly, I’ve never before thought of Josiah as a distance runner.  For one thing, he is my basketball boy, so I think of that as his primary sport.  For another thing, when the kids were littler he was always the first one to wear out.  When we hiked in the mountains, for example, we would barely get 200 yards from the car when he would need to sit down and rest and start asking, “Are we almost done?”  I thought then that he might lack the innate mental toughness needed to be a good distance runner.  Boys change, however, and it turns out I was wrong!

He wasn’t even going to run track this spring, but fortunately his mother had the good idea to conspire with Mr. Blasi, the head track coach.  Josiah wouldn’t listen to her encouragement to run track, but he did listen to Mr. Blasi and decided to go out.  At the start of the season he was the number 2 or 3 distance runner on the FTMS team, but he immediately started improving:  6:08, 6:01, 5:51, 5:45, 5:39 in the mile, and similar improvements in the 800 to get down to 2:34.  Going into the City Meet this week he was well positioned to do okay against the best runners from all 9 schools in Olathe. 

I took the afternoon off Thursday so I could see him run all of his events, including the hurdles.  In the previous meet he finished second in the hurdles and complained that the wet bottoms of his shoes slipped coming out of the blocks and slowed him down, so I took my spikes down from their perch up high in the closet to see if they would fit him.  They did.  And at City, then, he nailed an excellent hurdle run, taking 2^nd place in his best time of the year.

In the mile (1600m) there was stiff, stiff competition in the 7^th grade this year in Olathe.  He ran a very commendable race, making a nice surge in the third lap to move from 8^th to 6^th, burying the two guys he left behind.  He finished in a nice personal record 5:36, ten or more seconds ahead of 7^th place but also ten or so seconds behind 5^th.  The winner ran 5:14, and as good as Josiah got this year and as much as he improved, it definitely would have been expecting way too much to think that he would be competitive against kids going under 5:20.  He will get there against those kids if he wants to – I know he will – just not this year.  But still, he ran a nice 3-second PR against a really tough field.  I was really proud of his mile.  But then came the 800.

Had I just finished a mile in 6^th place 20+ seconds behind the winner there is almost no way I would have run the 800 – against almost all the same runners – the way Josiah ran the 800.  Seeded 7^th in the race, he was apparently completely unimpressed and unintimidated by the competition he just faced 75 minutes earlier.  At the gun he took off like he was shot out of a bow, and in the first 200 opened up at least 10m of lead over the second place runner.  By the time he came through the quarter he was still in the lead with a wicked fast 68.  

Leading at 400

Other runners were starting to close on him between 500 and 600, but I just had a fleeting thought that just maybe he might be able to actually hold it up.  Alas, no.  Mr. Lactic Acid jumped on him hard at 600, as he often does to runners who over-reach in that opening quarter of a half-mile, and Josiah’s opponents started going around him.   Coming through 600 and around the final turn he dropped to 2^nd, then 3^rd, then 4^th, 5^th….. 6^th.  Ahh, he had tried so hard.  He had given it everything he had, I figured.  He had risked it all against some really good competition, and he could hold his head high, even with another 6^th place finish.  But then with 100 meters to go something happened.  That boy of mine – the one who used to frustrate me when he was little because he didn’t seem to have toughness or competitive fire – did something competitive, something tough, something especially fiery.  He decided he was not going to finish 6^th, and he threw down a final, ferocious kick, and clawed his way back to 3^rd.  As he went by those three boys they all tried to respond, they tried to answer, but he continued to answer back, refusing to give up and refusing to be denied his spot on the podium, and he finished the 3^rd best 800m 7^th grader in Olathe in a massive personal record time of 2:26.9. 

Go Jaguars -- Josiah scores well-earned points in the 800

I wonder if someday Josiah and I will look back on this little 7^th grade track season as a watershed.  This year he learned he can run distance events.  He learned that he can be successful and win races (he won several).  I learned that he can be very tough.  I learned that he can be very competitive and absolutely full of fire.  May 3, 2012.  Write it down.