Chapter 6: PRs Were Bigger in My
Day
I feel
that most runners tend to be converts to the sport. Most kids don’t grow up
watching track on TV or wearing OTC jerseys. They don’t call up their friends
and go for a run. They do normal things like shoot around a basketball or have
a catch. Maybe throw on a Peyton Manning jersey. I’m one of the biggest track
fans you will ever meet and I still would rather see Steph Curry play
basketball against Kevin Durant[1] on TV then watch the first
two minutes and the last two minutes of a 5k[2].
But
eventually, a true runner will find the imperfections in his or her sport and
will embrace Track and Cross Country. The most popular story is the soccer
player who is stuck sitting on the bench and wants to be in the action. They
try out track, fall in love with the sport, the competitiveness and the
brotherhood and boom: you’re converted[3]. Welcome to the family.
My
first love was basketball and it’s still my favorite sport[4]. I played intermural
basketball for Upper Dublin Township for most of my childhood, including my
first year of high school. I also tried out for the high school’s freshmen
team. After the first round of try-outs, I was cut. The only redeeming part of
my try-out was that I was at the front of the pack for every suicide drill.
Probably a sign right there that I belonged at track practice instead.
When I
first joined the indoor track team, I was about a month behind everyone else,
including my friends from Cross Country and my best friend Todd Warszawski, who
played soccer in the fall but had run track with me in middle school. We ran
long distance together as 7th graders and he handed off to me on the
4x100 relay as 8th graders[5].
My
return was a mixture of painful workouts and absurd PR (i.e. “Personal Record”)
stories. During my extremely brief basketball sabbatical, Todd told me about
how he had recently PRed for the 800 meters in practice four times in a row
during a repeats workout. So that was intimidating. Compounding things, in my
first workout over winter break, I got demolished by everybody on the team and had a painful, lonely cool down, out of
sight from the rest of the pack. It was one thing to get smoked every day in
practice by the older guys; they had been kicking my butt all fall. But it was
another entirely to get dropped by a group of other freshman that I had never
before lost to in a race.
I
considered it especially embarrassing because I was trying to impress my new
coach, Richard Ames. At Upper Dublin, we had a different coach for track and
cross country: Paul Vandegrift coached our XC squad and Richard Ames coached
the distance guys during track[6]. Looking back with the
knowledge I have now, varying coaches by season seems like an absurd concept,
but at the time, I didn’t give it a second thought. It took me a few years to
realize that we were the odd ones, not everyone else.
However,
the system worked beautifully for us and our team had a lot of success. This
was due, at least in part, to the fact that the two coaches communicated
effectively and had similar ideologies. The other part was simply that they
were each fantastic coaches who knew how to get people fast.
I
trained hard, despite my early deficiencies in stamina and Mr. Ames[7] saw fit to reward me by
entering me into my first ever indoor meet, running the open 800 meters at
Haverford College. Or at least I’m pretty sure he was trying to reward me. At
the time, I couldn’t help but feel like it was a punishment.
When I
first started indoor track, I dreaded the meets. I would give up my entire
Saturday, usually missing my intermural basketball game, to wake up at the
crack of dawn and go race at a stuffy indoor facility where I couldn’t breathe.
My fellow freshman and I were also stuck wearing gym uniforms instead of
singlets that season because we didn’t have enough of the latter for everyone[8]. Looking back now, those
things seem silly in comparison to the big picture. It’s a shame I didn’t
realize how spoiled I was to have a coach who would fight to get a couple 68
second 400m guys into a meet.
That
first race, I stumbled into the Haverford field house with a bunch of pajama
wearing teammates. Most brought pillows to the meet and would just pass out for
half the day before preparing to run. My friends were off warming up for the
freshman/sophomore DMR (the Distance Medley Relay) so I got dragged into the
team picture: the only person wearing the Upper Dublin red gym uniform rather
than the white racing singlet[9]. When the time came, I ran
in a pair of training shoes and weaved my way to a 2:33. That was a PR by about
22 seconds. A 22 second PR! In the 800! Gosh, those were the days …
[1] Clearly, I wrote this a couple
months too early
[2] Seriously, if our sport is going to
get even remotely popular, we need to improve TV coverage. Get some interesting
announcing and show the actual races! I prefer the British coverage of the
World Championships to the USA’s even if it means I have to watch Mo Farah
drink tea with one of the hosts. At least they know their stuff and make me
feel invested. I’d honestly rather watch American Ninja Warrior than some of
the track meets I’ve seen “broadcast” on TV.
[3] North Penn pulled two of the best
runners in the state from the soccer team in Brad Miles and Sam Bernitt, each
in successive years. Those two years they won back to back state championships.
Most of the best track athletes probably haven’t been discovered because they
are enjoying playing a game rather than suffering on the course. And if I had
the option, I’m sure I’d make the same choice. But I suck at most ball sports.
[4] I like the way they dribble up and
down the court. Also, my favorite play is the alley-oop
[5] Odd event transition right? Well
that’s what happens when you have weight classes in sprint events
[6] In later years, when Mr. Giamarco
came along, I actually had three different coaches, one for XC, one for
indoors, one for outdoors. That year we were 5th at states in XC,
won indoor states in the DMR and won Penn Relays. Consistency is overrated?
[7] For some reason nobody said Coach
Ames, he was just “Mr. Ames” or “Ames”. We also never said Coach Vandegrfit, he
was just Grift, or Coach Dinkins (“Dink”) or Coach Giamarco (“G”). I guess it
wasn’t until college that I started calling people Coach.
[8] That was the worst part about the
whole thing. They were heavy and the shorts were long. It was worth probably
about 3-4 seconds by itself. And that’s not over exaggeration. My PR that
season came when a couple older guys got stuck running with me and Todd on a
4x8 and we had to borrow a couple huge football players’ legit track uniforms
so we wouldn’t be disqualified for not matching. Even though we were swimming
in the things, I broke 2:30 for the first time and ran a pretty nice PR for
myself. I don’t think it was a coincidence. Stealing your team’s uniforms is
not a victimless crime …
[9] It’s a fantastic
yearbook picture. I stick out like a sore thumb in the bottom right corner,
trying to look tough among the older kids. And half our squad might actually be
asleep. It’s the last time they took a team picture at an actual indoor track
meet.
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