Running Joke

A cross-country alum looks back in exhaustion

Scientists have determined that the ideal temperature for running marathons is 55°F, which is why we have cross-country in August, when the temperature is twice as ideal.

We have just installed a new cross-country trail, 3.1 million miles long, or one lightyear, which will enable us to host meets on campus, hunt boar, etc. Rumors of a secret path behind a swiveling bookcase that cuts out the second mile of the course are unconfirmed.

In my day, before all this jazz about avoiding needless casualties, we ran along the service roads, through the ghostly streets of mid-naughts Las Colinas (where some of us who didn’t prefer wearing shirts were often mistaken for ghosts), and finally out to the peaceful shade and freedom of the Campion Trails, by which time I never felt like running anymore. Each year we jumped from a footbridge into the Las Colinas canals, which we believed would render us tireless and invulnerable, like Achilles after his dip in the Styx. Somehow we always made it home—at least, we never did a head count to prove otherwise.

I was not good at cross-country at all. Senior year I had an inhaler and two rules: Don’t walk, and sprint at the end. I still live by those rules, as any of my students will tell you who have seen me trying to get to class.

There is a lot of value, I think, in doing sports you’re naturally bad at. They will generally leave you humbler, make you more teachable, and give you an appreciation for the talents of others. On some level, we are all automatically at a disadvantage when we run. Look at the rest of Kingdom Animalia. Cheetahs. Polar bears. Lions. By comparison, a running human, unless it’s one of the Detroit Lions, who I already mentioned, is always going to look relatively awkward and slow. It’s odd that we even do it, unless it’s to practice getting to class.

Track season taught me to stay in my lane and turn left.1 Our runners still use these skills almost daily, but other things have changed. So many risky track events have been taken off the meet schedule over the years: shot-put dodgeball was probably the worst, followed by a version of ultimate frisbee we called “collaborative discus.” Of these sorts of events, only the steeplechase remains, because most people still have no idea what it is.

In many ways, the steeplechase is the Cistercian of races: it has a weird, liturgical-sounding name, it takes eight laps to complete, there is an honest-to-gosh water hazard similar to our parking lot at high tide, and you age visibly from the start to the finish.

The officials who time the steeplechase are, I suspect, just there to make sure you don’t try to climb an actual steeple and hurt yourself right as we were almost to the 4 × 4 relay.

One level of strangeness and difficulty down from steeplechase is the 300-meter low hurdles. “Let’s run three-quarters of a lap, with low hurdles,” thought someone who was running out of ideas. My time is currently the second-best in the school, because that’s how many people have wanted to run that event.

One of the sophomores is running a 44-something, so it’s not a question of “if” but “how soon.” This is okay with me. I swear. Honestly. My favorite track memories to revisit are not the exhilarating and sporadic Chariots of Fire moments but the frequent half hours lying on the sunwarmed high-jump pads with my friends.

Hopefully many other slowpokes will get to enjoy that. And if you’re ever on the new cross-country trail, look for the bookcase on the left at the start of the second mile. You have to pull out The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes and then it sort of swivels back. •