And So It Begins--The 2013 Track & Field Season

"I had as many doubts as anyone else. Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards".
-- Alberto Salazar

"You must realize one thing. In every village in the world there are great potential champions who only need motivation, development and good exercise evaluation"

--Arthur Lydiard 

"A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways as they’re capable of understanding".
--Steve Prefontaine

"The will to win is worthless, without the will to prepare."
--Juma Ikangaa

"I still bother with runners I call hamburgers. They're never going to run any record times. But they can fulfill their own potential."

--Bill Bowerman

     So, today it begins. At around 3:30 this afternoon, I will walk out the double doors of our Upper School building and make my way down to our little version of a track and will attempt to say something inspiring and motivational. And then I will send the runners to do their half mile warm up and it will have begun. The "it" I am referring to is track season. To be completely honest, I begin this season with fear and trembling. I guess, I always begin each season feeling like this and there are always good reasons to do so. Nine times out of ten the "unknowns" far outweigh the "knowns" at the beginning of the season and that makes it a little scary. Each season holds the possibility of being the best season the school has ever had, but also shows signs that solving the world's food scarcity problem would seem a little more reasonable than putting together a full team. And in today's sporting/cultured climate, getting kids and their parents to commit to anything is sort of like me dunking a basketball. (If you know me, you get this. If you don't, I am a good 5'7'' on a good day with about a 5-8 inch vertical. Slam dunking is just not going to happen without a trampoline.)  So, this could be the year that my JV and Varsity teams win Region and State and mop up the competition, but it could also be the year I spend 2 months begging, borrowing, promising kids the world only to have them say no and then see them spend the time when we have track practice sitting in front of the school playing games on their phone while waiting for their parents to get off work and pick them up or watch them sit the bench and never get a second of playing time several years in a row in another sport. Oh', the delicate balance! 

    Track shares many items in common with cross country and that makes it hard to compete with the other sports at a school of any size. And to make matters even harder, I live and coach in the South. Boys and girls would rather be on a 0-13 football, baseball, softball, or basketball team than have a spot on a state champion XC/Track team. That is just the cold hard truth and I spend a lot of time trying to convince kids that running track is just what they want to spend some of their afternoons doing. And another obstacle I have to hurdle is the fact that in Macon, as with much of the South, several of the track meets are on Wednesday's and that makes it extra hard because kids love going to youth group and parents love them going as well and both parties guard Wednesday night like it is a bag of rare jewels. And so a student athlete would rather miss a whole track season than be late to youth group about three times. I know this sounds crazy, but after coaching track for five seasons, this is very, very true. I understand it, but I don't understand it. And then there is the length of a normal track meet. I am not going to say that the meets are just the right length because that is far from true, but I do find it odd that the same people who are willing to get on a bus, travel a couple hours, play a two-three hour football/baseball game, and then travel back another two hours are the same people with the same parents who say the meets are too time consuming. I understand this, but I don't understand it. Such is my life.

   And so today we begin conditioning and it is my job to get kids who have been immobile or semi-immobile to begin getting back into shape. I, myself, will also have to get back into shape. I have not run even a half mile in over 40 days. It is hard, but I will attempt to make it enjoyable. This is a part of the always-present delicate balance. The hardest item to get across to my runners is that working really hard in February will make you a flying missile come late April/early May and this is the task I have before me. And I am ready. As I have already stated in my other posts about running is that there are few things more rewarding in life, for me, than to watch someone struggle through the first couple of months of track and then watch them stand on a podium to accept a ribbon or medal later on. I am ready to do this. I am ready to scream my head off watching the last leg sprint into the curves of my 4x400 team. I am ready to speak to my long distance runners and tell them what to do and how many laps they have left. I am ready to do my best to run a couple stop watches at once.I am ready to try to distinguish, with the naked eyes, the difference at the finish line a thousandth of a second can make. I am ready to cart coolers and tents to ovals all around the city and the state. I am ready to play ultimate frisbee on Fridays. Track is here and I think I am ready, but we will see.  I will hope and plan for the best and in three months we will if I have done it correctly or not. The jury is still out about last year. We started with high hopes, but we ended up taking a skeleton of a team to state and winning a few things here and there, but it is hard to win big when you bring 10 kids to race/compete against teams that have 30-40 kids. 

  Track season is here and I will try to coach/run the race that is set before me,

     David