The 800

I feel slow now when I run and that's fine. It's fine because at least I am running. I went for a 5 miler the other night while listening to the new Broken Bells album, which I highly recommend. Jason you should check it out. My run was a nice slow plod through Hancock Park, but it was hip pain free and that's what really mattered.

At some point during my run I started thinking about running track while growing up, and how much less fun that experience was than cross country running. I though about how running 8 laps around for the 3200 was monotonous, to the point where it was possible to observe the spectators actually losing interest while waiting for the participants to finish. I thought about the one time I ran a mile in under 5 minutes in competition, in Salina, Kansas. I wondered, would be possible to do again?

Then I thought about an event that I had tried to wipe from my memory. The 800 and the 3200 meter relay, where 4 guys each run 800 meters. That distance and the mental and physical agony that accompany it are still vivid memories. I hated the solo 800 meter, as much as I loved it for the challenge. The real kicker though was the relay, because it wasn't just you. Three other guys were going through what you had gone through and every second you lose to the competition is a let down. I usually ran the third leg of this relay, because that's where the slowest guy goes. The hand off wasn't as practiced or precise as it needs to be in the shorter relay, usually the tricky part was that the guy handing you the baton wanted nothing more than to fall down and die immediately after handing you the stick, so I needed to grab it on the first try and let him get out of agony.

By the third leg of the 3200 meter relay the competition was usually spread out. It was tough to gauge where I was in relation to the other teams so I would always just try and run as fast as I could for as long as I could and then when the death of the spirit and the body comes it's just a game of holding on for how ever long I had left in the half mile of hell. If I did die during my leg it was important to find the drive to resurrect myself as much as possible coming down the last stretch into the hand-off. At this point the anchor runner was in sight. Standing there with his hand out, waiting for my slow ass to barrel down that last 100 meter straight to hand him the baton. This is when time to dig deep and realizes I'm not going to die and that i have more to give than I thought. Most often in this event I got to hand the baton to a fellow cross country runner and all around athlete Justin Robinson. I knew that whatever pain I put myself through for my leg was somehow just a fraction of what Justin would go through, and that always made me put more into it. He would usually yell something halfway between admonishment and encouragement in my direction once I got within earshot.

There are very few feelings finer in this world than handing a relay baton to a fast anchor runner of the 3200 meter relay. For two minutes this baton has been an albatross. The single mission to keep it in my hands and transport it around a 1/4 mile track twice and hand it to the next guy. By the time I had circled the track twice and approached the hand off I felt the baton to be an extension of myself, an embodiment of my better self containing my hopes and dreams of glory. I usually felt this so powerfully that in the first few seconds after the hand off as I would watch Justin's amazing display of speed recede before me I would actually feel as though it was I moving that fast. That moment and that feeling is worth the hell of going all out for 800 meters.

Then I would snap back into my body that hurt. All the while watching the anchors do battle, waiting to see if I would I get a medal.