My Track Record

Different aspects of running are enjoyable to different people. My favorite encapsulation of this basic fact comes from Don Kardong in the essay “Collision Course” as published in his 1985 book Thirty Phone Booths to Boston. Kardong, a Stanford alum, recounts a “fun run” at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), where electrons are brought remarkably close to the speed of light, the one true speed limit in the universe.

(As a side note, I have a family connection to SLAC: my cousin Knut is an engineer there, as his father Knut was before him.)

Here is the key passage:

“…I thought of something that had once happened to me at a Sunday fun-run back in Spokane. The organizer had always stressed health, cardiovascular fitness, and easy running, and was dismayed at those of us who ran fast.

“On that morning he cornered me after the run, striving to be good-natured, and said, ‘What are you doing, running like that? This is a fun-run, you know.’

“I looked at him, and said words that came back to me as Brook and I sprinted along the electron path at SLAC.

“‘It’s fun to run fast,’ I told him.”

Yesterday while running, I found myself thinking about Kardong-running-at-SLAC thinking about Kardong-running-in-Spokane. It was almost time to drive up to my son’s ultimate frisbee jamboree in Burlington, but I had time to run 3.5 more miles. I could take the blue loop, or I could take the red loop.

OK, I’m being melodramatic; the blue loop and the red loop are the same loop. What I really mean is, I could do the loop slowly, or I could do it hard.

In the context of my current casual training schedule, this might have been just about the least consequential choice imaginable. There was no yesterday’s run to analyze, no tomorrow’s run to worry about, no race on the horizon.

Nevertheless, as I weighed the options, I found myself interested in the outcome. If there was no incentive whatsoever to run fast, aside from fun, would I choose speed over comfort?

Reader, I chose red. To be specific, l opted to time-trial the 2.2-mile Jackson Park perimeter loop, with 0.6 miles of jogging on either end.

On the tough Jackson Park terrain, recovering from a mild respiratory infection, I struggled through the lap in 15:14 — barely under 7-minutes-per-mile pace. Still, that was 44 seconds faster than the 15:58 I had managed three weeks earlier. I jogged home depleted but happy to have made the effort and to have gotten encouraging-under-the-circumstances results.

It’s this sort of experience — infrequent these days, but still recurring — that makes me think that someday — maybe next year, maybe the year after that — I will once again toe the starting line of a local “fun run,” determined to make the fun as concentrated and as brief as possible.

Another academic quarter of teaching (Summer 2022) has just ended, meaning that it’s time for me to make another quixotic attempt to get back in shape, eat more healthily, get adequate sleep, etc. etc.

Often I like to kick off these attempts with a modest track workout like 4x400m, just to see what my new baseline is. At the moment, though, I’m so unfit that I don’t think my body can handle the track. Instead I’ve had to find excitement in the time-honored tradition of out-of-shape city dwellers everywhere: running for the bus.

The most dramatic version of this occurs when, trying to get home from Everett, I arrive at Everett Station just after the 512 bus leaves for Seattle. This sounds hopeless, but the 512 has to snake its way out of the station and go through a couple of traffic lights to reach its first stop, about four blocks away, on 34th and Broadway. Sometimes if I get to Everett Station within 30 seconds of the 512’s departure I can still beat it to 34th.

Such was the situation today. With some help from the lights, I managed to reach that Broadway block about even with the bus, flailing my left arm as it passed in the hope that it would stop for me. It did! I had made up the stagger!

My satisfaction lasted for about one second. “That was really stupid of you!” the driver greeted me. “This bus comes every 10 minutes!” (Not true; it’s every 16 minutes.) “You should have waited for the next one! All you did was slow me down and make me late!”

“I’m sorry,” I panted.

“No you’re not!” the driver replied. I fumbled with my bus pass. “The card reader isn’t working — just sit down!”

“Uh, yes — I am sorry,” I said, a bit more sharply.

“No you’re not!” the driver insisted again. “You were thinking only of yourself!”

I considered proposing that I might be a more competent judge of my own emotions than a public-transit employee who resents customers for daring to come aboard. Not wanting the road rage to escalate any further, though, I stayed silent.

Every comeback has its hiccups, right?

Maybe next time it would be safer to just go to the track.

My wife and I just spent a long weekend at the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon. 

For most of the visit, I felt rather like a track-and-field tourist, interested in the sights and sounds, but not particularly invested in them. I saw a few old running friends, but felt no strong connections to the athletes competing. Many of the names familiar to me — Johnny Gregorek, Joe Klecker, Eilish McColgan — were familiar mainly as offspring of runners who were famous back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was more attuned to the running scene.

And then this morning there was the women’s marathon. My wife was keen to see as much of the race as possible, so, like a few dozen other attendees, she and I rode our bicycles alongside the marathoners for several decent (2-mile) chunks of the race where this was feasible. It was a nice way to experience the race — a big change from standing in place while the runners stream by — but still felt a bit touristy. I could imagine a guide saying, “To the left of your vehicle you can see Sara Hall, the former American record holder in the half marathon, currently in 9th place…”

By mile 24, Sara, now the lead American, had advanced to 6th, about 20 seconds behind Angela Tanui of Kenya. As she turned onto Centennial Boulevard for the last time, about 50 of us mounted our bikes again and started the final cruise to the finish. Sara’s husband Ryan was among us, pulling over every minute to bark out exhortations (“16 SECONDS BACK! YOU’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE!”), then weaving through the peloton to reach the next pull-over point.

The cyclists around me seemed to share Ryan’s sense of urgency. They abandoned their previous generic, polite cheers in favor of slightly unhinged shouts and shrieks. A chorus of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” reached a volume that might have alarmed the Kenyan runner just ahead.

To a casual fan, the hubbub might not have made much sense. Sara no longer had a shot at a medal, and there was no formal team competition to magnify the importance of exact times and places. Did it really matter whether or not she caught the 5th-place runner?

We in the peloton knew that, for Sara, it most certainly DID matter. When you are a serious competitor at a race that is important to you, you want to walk away from it knowing that you gave it everything that you had. To get to that point, you engage in all kinds of desperate negotiations with your body as it withers from the effort. Just one more mile and then you can have some Gatorade! Just half a mile and then you’ll get a nice downhill!

Often the final deal to be offered is, just try to catch one more person. Just this one last person.

Today, Angela Tanui was Sara Hall’s one last person, and we knew it. We knew it because we had made this plea many times before to our own faltering bodies in our own sub-world-class races.

We also knew that such contracts are between an athlete’s brain and their muscles, with spectators only getting a 1% stake in the deal, if that. But if Sara was going to keep working on her 99%, we were damn well going to do what we could with our 1%. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Half a mile to go. 5 more seconds to make up.

I’m not the most overtly patriotic guy, but I found myself joining in the chanting, solidarity and sentimentality finally overcoming shyness. U-S-A! U-S-A! It’s what everyone else was chanting, so it’s what I needed to chant too.

Sara pulled ahead and finished in 2:22:10, five seconds ahead of Tanui.

Had we made a difference? Had we willed her to 5th place?

Perhaps not, but we had been there with her, and it felt great.