The running had no redeeming qualities./Young legs churned out more horsepower/than young lungs could fuel./But later, when it hurt even more,/then, ah, then it was essence,/and in the dark at the high school track/you could kick the last lap/without pretense that it mattered except to you.

One hamstring went in '70,/the arches in '78,/the other hamstring lately./The lungs never quit protesting./They always held you back./The knees and hip are into the act now,/yet the call comes so strong sometimes/it breaks your heart.

The smell of the fresh cut grass/hints September at the start,/and the helmet sounded like somebody/hit it with a hammer./The team slapped you on the shoulder pads,/and some of them were friends of yours./High fives hadn't been invented then,/and nobody held hands in the huddle./The cheerleaders wore their teenage skin/like they didn't know what it did/to the dads in the stands.

A whiff of charcoal starter on the back stretch/from somewhere in the tract housing/leaves you smiling satisfied over the remains/of one of your father's steaks./Nobody could grill them quite like that,/and you grin at your mother and then run sad/with sudden remembering.

But coming out of the turn--/you always liked the corners best--/coming out of the turn up on your toes,/a little headwind cools and makes that sound/in your ears/that says speed and strength and youth/until you stumble toward the truck with your stomach/saying you've overdone it again/and the lying stopwatch whispering truth/ever so faintly fron the kitchen drawer/where you left it,/and you know you are wise to run now,/and the track is your friend/as it has always been.

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), December 03, 2003

Answers

J -- so very very glad you joined us, this is great!

-- helen (count@down.to.g.day), December 03, 2003.

Fleet, graceful and strong

Each foot step brings us closer

Bright ribbon beckons.

.

Thanks for the memory recall, J. Very powerful!

-- Tricia the Canuck (jayles@telusplanet.net), December 04, 2003.

J your writing makes me wish that at some time in my youth I had run as hard and fast as I could. Much too late now. Very stirring.

-- Carol (c@oz.com), December 08, 2003.

Carol--Being from small-town Texas, football was almost a religion. Football coaches expected you to play basketball, too. And my dad was a great athlete, a legendary basketball player in his part of the country. Track, as I said, had no redeeming social qualities. It is a sport for masochists. But it, too, was expected. I spent a LOT of my youth running as hard and fast as I could, which was not that fast. I wasn't alone, it was the lot of the male child, and my buddies all ran. Misery and company, you know. Such activity in such quantity demands its due as I age, but mostly because I played the young men's games long after everybody else quit and never properly paced myself. Yet the physical pursuits are addictive (I read a news article this week confirming it in some sort of experiment with mice!), and the track is so hard and lonely that you have to respect it:

Respect

It's humid, and the heavy air/reflects the lightning from the northwest/like a flashbulb getting your/attention but gone before you look.

You walk to warm up,/and it doesn't take long in Houston in August./And you run to get tired,/and that doesn't take long either.

But you continue because there's a time to run./And the turns pull you down/like some sort of vortex/to the sacred inside lane

to which you apologize for the pace/because you're out of shape/and unable to do it justice./It ignores you there in the dark, a pouting date.

Then the wind kicks up a little/as the storm inhales,/and you hear it in your ears roaring/as if you were running faster,

but you know better than to fool yourself,/and you're too out of shape to think it./You remember reading that lightning/can precede a storm by as much as 10 miles or more

which is an illogical way to unlimit the limited/and oddly improper for a scientific statement./You think on the static that must be generated/by the breeze on big galvanized light poles that moan.

And you think on being struck by lightning/and what might happen if you were actually/quick enough to jump horizontal off the ground/before a bolt hit you.

Would it still, or would it go on by/to the ground? You think it would/still hit you. You wonder if your hamstrings/would pull your heels against your behind.

Would contraction revert you to the fetal position?/If so, would that mean your stomach muscles/were stronger than your back? Your biceps/stronger than triceps? Would your shoes be blown off?

You double knotted them because the laces were too long./Would lightning track you by the faintest/vacuum left by your passage as you leapt--/like those guys who fired little rockets and recorded

the strikes on film and in fused sand?/Maybe the lightning was attracted/to the trail of carboniferous rocket exhaust/or directed by some turbulence in the wake?

Maybe it has warrior reflexes and counterpunches/or just likes the smell of cordite./You speculate on getting old, being buried./The antleope, some say, is fast due to evolution

caused by extinct North American cheetahs./Nobody wants to believe anymore that God made/antelope fast and they survived or God made/North American cheetahs fast and they didn't.

Nobody except believers, and they're fanatics, you know./Folks think them mad for refusing to compromise, as/of course they can't because everything evolves from/something, and creation from nothing cannot be evolution.

Our lot is not to contribute to the benefit of the chosen/by the covering of our bloated bodies with swampy organics/to be pumped up as oil or mined as black heat/for furnaces and air conditioners.

If I fell to the storm or heart attack/or dimentia that somehow made me unaware/that I was out of shape until I'd killed myself/and lay no more panting on the rubberized surface,

my hazwaste polluted body wouldn't be fit for a worm./Which is OK because I'd be guarded in a casket/that cost more than my first new car/but wouldn't be nearly as red or have those great stripes.

And I'd hole-shoot it something fierce and be gone/before it even got to the line./The phlegm sits suddenly on your soft palate/and you start to spit it on the infield.

You didn't used to spit on the track/because it was ugly and you wanted to favor it/and hope for respect in return. You felt/the same way about the football field.

It seems odd to you that many baseball players/degrade the footage of line, mound/and box, the paths with which they are so intimate/and so hope to grace with heroics.

And you decide to swallow it instead/because at your age the infields and ditches,/the stands and fairways and parking lots are/as much your nest as the courts and streets.

That, and because it's salty and because you are alone/and untroubled by thoughts it may contain some/opportunistic microbe violently exhaled by/another athlete crowding you in the press.

And at the last you think that the storm may go around,/that you strained something in your thigh. You've lost track/of the laps and slowly recalculate. You're sorry you/walked again, but at least you got out of the inside lane to do it.

-- J (jsnider@hal-pc.org), December 08, 2003.