Don't let the poop get to you (Redux)
(a short story about a friend)

It is a sad, sad story that needs to be told. He decided to give cross-country a try, knowing that there were many months until baseball season began and the conditioning might do him so good. As with most eighth graders, he approached the first cross-country practice with the laser-sharp intensity of an ADD kid without his Ritalin. But that would change.

Growing up in his comfortable South Jersey town, running was not the sport of choice for either the ambitiously encouraging parents or their under appreciative kids. Folks in his community could afford the hockey equipment, the basketball camps, and the private coaches; his parents were no different. Running, it was thought, was something you did to prepare and excel in another sport; it wasn't a worthy sport in and of itself. People in M-land where he lived weren't running to escape their abusive parents or crack-infested neighborhoods. These families all had cable with HBO and Showtime. They didn't want an escape, they wanted more time to watch Batman and still make it to the Flyers game sitting in their father's corporate seats.

The other fall sports failed to interest him. The star soccer players have been playing on traveling teams since kindergarten, the esoteric sports like crew were still a few years away from catching-on at the middle school level, and football was forbidden according to his over-protective mother.

So cross-country became a sport of last resort, but also a depository for his dreams of stardom. He watched the 1984 Olympics and saw what success did for Carl Lewis and Edwin Moses. Maybe he was to be the country’s next great runner. He did, after all, do fairly well in the elementary school field days. Granted, he knew nothing about the sport, a 3.1-mile race through woods and over hills and across uneven plains of grass. What he did know was that he wanted to succeed, to be a star.

His first practice began sharply 15 minutes after the final bell at school. Harriers were to get into their gym clothes and muster in the gymnasium for a pep talk from coach. Like many of his fellow classmates, he was not wearing the newest running shoe from Nike. He was outfitted with large boxy white basketball shoes that made his spindly legs even more awkward. He knew this to be the case, but he thought of Secretariat and Seattle Slew. They once were gangly colts themselves and needed time and the proper training to win. This stage, too, would pass.

The course they would run that day would take them around the perimeter of the middle school and adjoining high school. Coach wouldn’t run with them. He was heavy and unhappy. He wanted to coach varsity football but couldn’t land a job. He did this for the $1,500 stipend and nothing else.

The young runners, about a dozen in all, darted across the field at an unusually rapid pace. Arms flailed, legs swung haphazardly, and heads bobbed. It was obvious that everyone shared a few common traits. First, they had no idea how to run--the pace, the fluid motion, the economical strides, all lost on them. And secondly, they all wanted to be the best. If effort were results it would be a 12-way dead-heat for first.

He got off to a good start, all things considered. He wasn’t with the lead group (who would be walking in another quarter-mile) but he wasn’t with the back-packers either (they’d be walking in another quarter mile, too). The group he was with would be turning onto the high school property in a minute and the burning in his lungs convinced him that gold medals would not come without a little pain.

Hitting the long stretch that ran parallel to the soccer fields, he and his fellow runners glumly encountered their next obstacle. It sounded its presence on the heel strike and spread its terror through the harriers gasping mouths and noses.

The green, green fields they were traversing didn’t get so lush by accident. True to the community’s agricultural past, natural treatments were used to treat the grounds, and if he wasn’t again recalling Secretariat and Seattle Slew, he should have been. They were running through a field of horse manure.

The weaker yearlings around him already halted their strides, sensing that manure was like quicksand, the more you struggle the worse it gets. He would not be shaken-up by equine waste, however. Just he and another boy, an equally awkward kid who appeared more at home in a science lab than a dual meet ran shoulder to shoulder.

The course was now ¾ done and he was amazed at how a distraction like horseshit could erase the pain. Looking down at his shoes, now no longer white but a scuff-filled prism of brown to gray, he wondered what his mother would think.

As the flittering thoughts of a scolding mom came and went, he now thought bigger thoughts--of victory, triumph, and adulation…all things that would soon be his.

His pace quickened with anticipation of the finish and he gulped in oxygen as if it were golf balls to be swallowed. His running mate, super geek, was now but a shadow on the ground. He had fallen behind by several links and would not be a challenge today.

Knee lifts were getting higher, heels were hitting hamstrings, and oxygen debt was just a mere inconvenience for the next 45 seconds. He was in the homestretch.

Coach would probably recommend he run with the high school varsity, he thought, even though his races would be limited to the few schools that fielded a middle school cross country team.

“I’ll progress so much more with the varsity,” he gasped between strides. The finish was but 200 meters away. “Villanova’s good but if I really want to be great, I should go to Arkansas.” To him, it was not to early to think of colleges.

In actuality he floundered to the finish, but with his heart racing so fast he felt like one of those Japanese express trains: sleek and steel, silent and swift. With his final strides, he bounded in self-adulation. He had done it. He had finished first. It would not be his last time victorious, he thought, but there can only be one first, first. How could he mark the occasion?

Other students—cheerleaders, and dententionees waiting for the late bus started to stare at him in amazement. “Probably saw my finishing kick," he thought, hands on knees struggling to catch his breath.

Actually, it was his apple red face and back full of horse feces that engaged the other students. His shoes were now caked with muddy horse slop…an inch added to the bottom, a half-inch around the edges.

He couldn’t find coach outside so he hustled toward the locker room. If anyone beat him to the coach, it might be assumed that they finished first. He couldn’t let that happen. He worked too hard for this and wanted to reap the rewards: an ‘atta boy’ from coach.

Inside the locker room there was silence, except for the leaking faucet and hum of the air conditioner. The only sound he would hear was that of his own groan. A note was on the chalkboard.

I went home. Don’t mess up the place. See you tommorow (sic) --Coach

“Burning lungs!
horse dung!
rubber legs! s
mell like rotten eggs!
and now coach is gone!
what went wrong!

He would learn that the solitude and loneliness of running extends beyond the run itself and weaves itself into the fabric of one’s life. He needed more. Coach would not see him tomorrow or the next day. He would never return. His running career was over, and with it went the dreams of glory.