Mind is everything. Muscle, pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind. – Paavo Nurmi
Chapter Eighteen
TRAINING DAY
Sarah Herrington flew around the Nurmi Loop at the Arboretum, tearing small holes in the woodchip trail. By training mid-morning, she had the course to herself. The birdwatchers were gone and the lunch-time walkers were trapped at their desks, tapping keyboards and wishing time would fly.
Sarah loved running this two-mile route. She vividly recalled the first time Bill showed it to her, shortly after she had moved to St. Louis. They jogged along Busch Boulevard, breathing exhaust fumes from a thousand speeding cars and she doubted herself for leaving the Twin Cities.
“I’m hating this run, Bill. How long we gonna be on concrete?”
“Just another block, Sarah. Trust me, you’re going to like this place.”
Suddenly, Bill veered left, up a short driveway toward a brick building surrounded by trees. NATURE CENTER, said the letters bolted to the building’s front. He turned sharp left again onto a narrow dirt path. Tall weeds and tree branches brushed them as they ran single file for about fifty yards. Abruptly, the deciduous jungle opened onto a wide meadow, nearly the size of a soccer pitch.
“Here’s a great place for stride-outs,” he said. Bill stopped, stretched for a minute, then started prancing like a Tennessee Walker. Sarah liked how he left her alone, without making suggestions.
“I’m going to run four loops, Sarah. The first one I’ll jog to show you the course. Then I’ll accelerate through the rest of the workout – my fourth lap will be hard. Stick with me this first lap, OK?”
He trotted along the meadow’s edge and ducked beneath an arch of raspberry vines. In a second, they emerged into the shade of a dense forest. Woodchips were piled six inches deep, held in place by board railings. The air was damp and summer’s heat and the sounds of the city were gone. Sarah peeled back her sunglasses and jogged about ten feet behind Bill.
“This is the Nurmi Loop,” he said. “I’ve named every course I run after someone or something. You know Paavo Nurmi, don’t you?”
“Not personally,” she replied, trying not to sound like a wiseacre. “Sure, Nurmi, the Flying Finn. Nine gold medals in the Olympics. Ran the mile in 4:10.”
“Here’s the first hill,” he said, accelerating a bit as he drove his arms. “It’s about seventy-five yards to the top.”
The path snaked up a ridge where they could see the entire arboretum. The city, an ocean of concrete and brick, surrounded their green island.
“You’re not serious about this being a two-mile course, are you?” she asked, puzzled.
“You’ll see,” he smiled and resumed running. “It’s a non-repeating two-mile loop, guaranteed.”
Bill Szymczak stretched out down the hill and accelerated around a sharp right-hand turn at the bottom. He strode over the first wooden bridge. “This is about a half-mile,” he said over his shoulder.
Sarah was starting to enjoy herself. The chips underfoot made a whumping noise. They absorbed shock but they were springy – unlike sand or dirt – they gave something back. She felt like a deer, coursing through the woods. The trail weaved past tall pines, old maples, and older oaks. It rose and fell, sometimes sharply, down gullies and up steep hills. A creek gurgled, mostly unseen, zig-zagging beneath the trail. Purple and yellow wildflowers grew along the course – she would have to learn their names.
“This is the halfway point,” Bill announced. They popped out of the woods beside a three-acre pond, its edges sporting cattails and arrowheads. Lily pads and their large white blossoms floated on the pond’s surface. Dragonflies hummed and frogs went mum, splashing into the water as the runners circled.
Bill checked his watch, pushed the pace a bit as they ran the pond loop, and announced, “Seventy-five.”
“What? Seventy-five seconds? It seemed like two hundred yards around! And we were moving!”
“This place is amazing, Sarah. I measured the pond loop at 450 yards, just past a quarter-mile. How do you like this surface?” he said and took off.
As they ran, unseen creatures scurried for cover in the pine needles and leaf litter. The path weaved and rolled, and in a few minutes, they emerged onto the meadow again.
“Thirteen minutes,” Bill said, checking his chronograph. “Seem like two miles to you?”
“Close enough for me,” she smiled.
Bill dropped down to one knee to snug up a shoelace before resuming his workout. He heard a soft laugh and glanced up. Sarah was striding toward the far corner of the meadow. “Catch me if you can!” she shouted.
It took nearly a mile before Bill caught up with her. He snagged her by her t-shirt and gave her a sweaty hug. They ran the final two loops together.
Today was December 23 and today Sarah was running fartlek on the Nurmi Loop. Surge, ease, sprint, jog, stride, shuffle, push up the hills, stride down the hills. The cattails were brown, the frogs were asleep in the mud, the pond lilies had rotted and sunk. The wildflowers were dead and all the leaves had fallen to the forest floor. But the arboretum was still beautiful. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” she thought.
The woodchip trail was still pushing back. The city was still at bay.
Winter had arrived – the winter solstice, that is – two days before. But winter weather in St. Louis wasn’t bad at all. Sarah had enjoyed her best December of training in memory. Running around the frozen lakes in Minneapolis had been a body-numbing affair, with little to look forward to but training indoors on Sunday morning at the U. It was easier to get in quality workouts in St. Louis.
Tomorrow, she and Bill were flying to the Twin Cities for Christmas. The Herringtons wanted to meet this Bill fellow with the Polish last name. Today, she was running the Nurmi Loop, putting the cap on a seventy-mile week. A good indoor season, she hoped, would lead her to a sub-four 1500 in the summer and a spot on the Olympic Team. She jogged across the meadow behind the Nature Center, pranced for a few seconds, then accelerated into another lap.
Chuck Madras parked his red Mustang within one hundred yards of the seashore, strung his car key through his shoelace, and jogged southward on the sand. It was December 23 at Ponte Vedra Beach, a nippy forty-five degrees, and there would be no northern girls in bikinis to distract him. Madras was taking a break from Coach Benlehr and his torture camp in Colorado.
“Go home for Christmas,” he urged them all. “I’ll rendezvous with you on the 29th in Dallas.”
Madras had driven Nikolas home to North Dakota before joining his brother and sister at their parents’ home in Florida. Diana Bailey had stayed on at Portsea Sierra with Coach and Patty.
“Chris,” asked Madras, “do you really think we’re getting any better?” He had phrased the question several different ways on their two-day, twelve-hundred-mile drive across Colorado, Nebraska, and the Badlands. “I mean, we only do stinkin’ speedwork once a week.”
Chris Nikolas was convinced. “I’ve been training hard for ten years, man. This is the strongest I have ever felt.”
“Yeah, but you think running ten-minute miles in the sand and eight-minute miles up those trails will prepare you to run five-minute pace in a marathon?” Madras, the skeptic, had failed to endear himself to any coach or fellow runner – ever.
“Man, look at the big picture, Chuck, like Coach B says. Running is mental, too, not just physical.”
“Yes, but I’ve been training fast since junior high and it’s paid off with lots of wins. I’m thinking none of the other dudes are slogging along at half the pace they need to be racing.”
“Why’d you come out to Colorado, then?” Chris was tired of hearing the whining.
“Look, here’s what’s happened to me since I came in June. Number One, my blood chemistry is way better than before: my hemoglobin is up 25%, my RBCs are up 30%, my MCV is up by a third. I’m a physiological marvel, man!
“Number Two, I’m logging 120 miles a week and I haven’t broken down. Running on dirt roads and trails is keeping me healthy and I am feeling strong.
“Number Three, I’ve dropped my road PR in the 10K from 31:05 to 29:30. I ran that in Colorado Springs, so take at least a minute from that at sea level. I’m a much better runner than I was six months ago. I know you are, too, Chuck.
“Anyway, in two weeks, we’ll put our training to the test in Brazil. Meantime, why don’t you just enjoy your family in Florida and forget about it.”
Chuck Madras was twice a Foot Locker national finalist. Seven times, he won Florida state championship races. He had earned NCAA All-American twice indoors and twice outdoors. But he was always difficult to coach.
Chuck ran with a tailwind for forty minutes. It was good to be home, although he had not trained on this beach since high school. The dull Atlantic Ocean blended with the dullness of the December sky. Decomposing jellyfish and the gull-pecked carcasses of unidentifiable fish lay on the beach. A salt mist hovered above the sand. Madras imagined his lungs burdened with the thick, oxygen-rich, sea level air.
At a row of rotting pilings, he cut a tight 180-degree turn to confront the north wind and a light December drizzle. A few beach combers hunched along the high-tide mark, bundled against the morning chill. Madras ran in swimming trunks, shirtless, his lightest racing flats on his feet. Like the plovers, he ran within inches of the moving foam at water’s edge, veering left, then right, with each wave. He ran hard over the last mile.
“Dig deep when you are tired,” he heard Benlehr’s voice in his head. “The Great Ones would train to exhaustion and then run a little more.”
Madras drew a bead on the pier, swung away from the shore into the softest sand, and sprinted as hard as he could. Sea gulls scattered, skreeing in panic from this madman running on the beach. In seconds, he’d recovered his breath. Then Chuck Madras waded into the Atlantic for a swim. He had the entire ocean to himself.
* * * * *
Tia heard Pedro bark and noticed it was already light outside. She had overslept, a rare occurrence. She shuffled into the kitchen. Maria Wapiti had filled the house with pleasant smells.
“Good morning, Mother. Why’d you let me sleep so late?”
“Hello, Sleepy Head! I wanted you to catch up on your rest. You had a busy semester and you deserve a break. There is plenty of time to train today.”
“Where’s Kivato? Is he still in bed?”
“He’s been gone about an hour and a half now. He wanted to put in twenty miles before breakfast. I jogged the first two miles with him – up to the Community Center. He was running to Yucca Mountain. Would you like some toast or fruit?”
“No thanks, Mom. I’d better get in some miles this morning, so I can do my hurdle work this afternoon. Is Dad working all day?”
“He said he’d be coming home early and taking tomorrow off. Maybe you can get him to go to the track with you. He needs a training partner to keep him going.”
“O.K.” Tia said. “I’m going to jog the mesa course. See you in about thirty minutes.”
Tia Wapiti walked into the cool New Mexico morning, feeling like the proverbial ‘sack rat’ that Coach Animas always warned them not to become. She walked and skipped and pranced along for five minutes, then broke into an effortless trot. She was barefooted, clad in the flannel Olympic pajamas Animas had given her. The short pants were white with the five Olympic rings emblazoned across her rump. Her top was decorated with the names of every Olympic city: Paris 1924, Helsinki 1952, Melbourne 1956, Tokyo 1964, and the rest.
Tia loved to run at home. The soft brown desert soil felt good between her toes. Eighteen years of barefoot running had fortified her feet against any insult caused by plant or animal. Her stride was short and economical – except for her rapid tempo, it would have been difficult for a distant observer to tell that she was running.
“Hello, Conejo!” she said. “I see that you eluded your brother Coyote again last night!” The rabbit hopped off the trail and pivoted to look at her.
The mesa course was four miles around. Tia ran past a few other houses but all her neighbors were still abed. It is as it should be during the holidays, she thought. People should relax and permit themselves a little leisure.
On the far side of the course, Tia startled a family of antelope that grazed on the shady side of the mesa wall. They sprinted for a few seconds then stopped, realizing that she was no threat. She mimicked them, sprinting for a few seconds, her effort sending spurts of dust straight out behind her. Rounding the mesa, she emerged into the sunlight and had to jump over a pale green rattlesnake stretched across the trail.
“Hello, Culebra! Don’t bite my brother when he returns.”
Tia lined herself to confront a series of bundled piles of sagebrush her father had built on the run-in to the house. Like an antelope, she hurdled all of them, three-stepping. Maria awaited her in the bare front yard, a large glass of iced orange juice in her hand.
“Are you awake, now, Sleepy Head?”
“Yeah, Mom. It’s great to be home. I love you.”
“Take a few minutes to stretch, Honey. Then I’ll fix breakfast for you and your brother.”
As they stood in the front yard, they could see the dark form of a runner, backlit by the sun, as it approached from the southeast.
Kivato was still a quarter-mile away but he spotted the two women and a dog in the yard. Home again. What greater joy than to run to the sunrise and then turn for home, pushed by sunbeams?
There awaits Mother, Tia, and Pedro. Kivato smiled broadly in his heart. Wakantanka had blessed his world with love.
* * * * *
Jeremy Stanfield ran the five miles out Prairie Road. Harold Bond’s son, Ray, was visiting the farm and would help with the work. Jeremy could have run in any direction, but the familiar route drew him through the village of Wellston and into the country.
Winter clutched Ohio in a mailed fist of white ice and it was not yet Christmas. The first snow fell on Halloween. It didn’t stick, but Thanksgiving’s storm was still un-melted, the basement layer of a three-foot accumulation. The road surface was clear but running was hazardous because there was no place to go when a vehicle approached. Snowplows and cyclic freezing and thawing had created a four-foot embankment of ice on both shoulders.
Jeremy trotted the first mile as a warm-up, throwing in some high knees, butt kicks, and skipping to limber his muscles in the twenty-degree air. He wore a green hooded sweatshirt, black tights, and black mittens. The landscape was white, decorated by brown weed tops and black tree trunks. The occasional house boasted a cluster of evergreens but they were frosted white and added no color.
The sky was opaque, a duller shade of white than the snow-covered land. A smudge of yellow was the only sunlight, the clouds’ thickness hinting that more snow could fall today.
Jeremy accelerated at the City Limit sign and began two miles of tempo running. Farm folks in cars, trucks, and vans headed to town for last-minute Christmas shopping. Most of them waved or honked encouragingly as they sped past, familiar with the area’s only serious runner. Twice, however, Jeremy had to stop and drape himself over the snowbank to avoid being hit. His two-mile time was a modest eleven minutes.
The remaining two miles to the farm was utterly quiet. No wind blew. No vehicle passed. His footstrike was silent.
The runner was a green fleck moving across the white land. He inhaled oxygen and exhaled steam. His eyelashes frosted from the cold moisture and he closed his eyes for a few seconds to thaw them.
How long, I wonder, could I run with my eyes closed?
Jeremy selected a flat stretch of road, moved close to the centerline, and mashed his eyelids closed. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three – he opened his eyes after five seconds.
The world seemed new. The usual continuity of flowing from one place to another was broken. Like time-travel, he had leapt from one place to another. He repeated the exercise, this time for ten seconds.
One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three…
The blast of an air horn shook him from his blind running; he veered for the snow bank and the truck driver shook his fist. The surreal mood was shattered and Jeremy trotted nervously to the Bond farmstead.
He crunched through the crusted snow and entered a low barn.
“Good morning, Ray!” Jeremy said as he approached the stocky man, who directed a stream of ground pig chow into the trough. Fifteen greedy porcine mouths vied for the best slot at the bar.
“Jeremy! How goes it?”
“I’m fine. How’s your family?”
“They’re all still asleep in the house but doing great. Dad tells me you are running like a young deer. When are the Olympics?”
“The Games are in August but the Trials, where the team is selected, is in July.”
“Who picks the team – you’re trying out for the steeplechase, right?”
“Well, the team is self-selected, actually. I have to run a qualifying time, then at the Trials, if I place in the top three, I’ll make the team.”
“My dad says you’ve got a girlfriend.”
It was the first time anyone had referred to Mary as his girlfriend and Jeremy was unready for a smooth reply.
“Yeah . . . well . . . I am seeing someone, mostly on the weekends. She lives up near Columbus.”
“She a farm girl?” Ray asked. Jeremy was hoping for a change of topic.
“Nope – a city girl – works in nutrition. How’s your little boy?”
“Jared’s growing up so fast, I think he’ll be as tall as his mother before summer. He’s in fourth grade now. You should see him play soccer!”
“Ray, I gotta get running again before I get chilled. It was good to see you. Have a nice Christmas.”
“Good luck, Jeremy. And thanks for helping out my dad.”
The steeplechase Olympic hopeful stepped from the farrowing barn, the sweet smell of ground grain in his nostrils, and returned to winter. He swung left onto Prairie Road, intent on five miles of brisk running.
Thirty minutes later, the nineteen-year-old sprinted the final blocks to his house on Oak Street. A familiar car stood at the curb. A cluster of helium-filled balloons, struggling to stay aloft in the sub-freezing air, was tied to his door handle.
He walked through the doorway and a black-haired woman wrapped her arms around him.
“Happy Birthday, Jeremy. Did you have a nice run?”