First Meet...

The final bell punctuating Mme Suhr's sixth hour sounds like a funeral dirge, the oak on the classroom doors blasting opening, student’s rushing into the lockers, exchanging books. Sprinting to vectors of the school for extracurricular actives and athletics, a line leading into the downstairs locker room.The first meet is a dual meet, against both Farmington and Woodruff.  A couple of years ago Woodruff was a powerhouse. I think about Digreggorio who said he has run Cross-country for them the past three years. Coach uses the word fledgling. He  says that they are both fledgling programs and that this should be a solid opening match against us.

I look at my cousin’s record one more time before leaving the locker room and heading up the Hans Lagrotto hill, up to Madison Golf course where we will wait for the opposing teams to arrive in yellow buses, exiting in droves.

“Good Luck Von Behren." Coach Tells me. "Just run like you’ve been running in practice and everything will be aright.”

There are appx. 30 spectators. My parents are watching along with my grandmother and two sisters. As he did every time I ran a race in  Junior high, before my track meets, my father pulls me aside, shields his arm around my bare shoulder and tells me the same phrase.

“God give you a good run.”

We are doing warm-ups. We do 100 yard sprints. We are getting psyched. We have our team. 

There is the plenary announcement of five minutes. There are flags connected like a regatta to stakes forming the chute where we will finish. The neon digit of the clock winds down to zero and then starts fresh with the crackle of the gun. Beano’s mom is watching him as is his girlfriend who attended CLS with me and is only a Freshman. When Beano’s mom tells us to “knock em dead, guys,” he looks the other direction and pretends he doesn’t see her. Hans Lagrotto father is a professor at Bradley and arrives wearing a smoking jacket and tie. We give each other  knuckle dabs before lining up and going all out, all seven of us, forming a sentence of knee-caps and short-shorts glues to the interior paste of our thighs, each of us, on Jose’s lead taking off, firing off into the coniferous meadow blur that is Madison golf, each of us hulking, inhaling, sucking it up, giving one final thrust as a team before gathering in a tetrahedron of shoulder blades and brotherhood, Jose leading us the first time, some of us clad in almost monkish warmups, each forms a plank with our hand, Jose saying the word Manual in twin  elongated syllables the fourteen other members of our teams responded by intoning RAMS. We do the ritual several times in a row before start clapping as one, a carousel of sweats and spikes and tank tops, ready for our first race of the season.

We punctuate our pre-meet ritual by inexplicably letting go of a woof before cantering back to the starting line where, as is cursory, we shake hands with our opponents.

I have worked all summer for this.

 We line-up at the start and together forming a run on sentence of youthful limbs.  

There is a crack of a gun and the stampede of pattering feet. thrust into the green welcome matt of the planet.




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Cross country is man against the earth. There is no rubber sphere to jostle like a vestigial globe through the aperture of an end zone or hoop. There is no dugout or signs. There are no plays or time outs or commercials. There is the topography of the earth, the abutted atolls of golf courses and highly manicured city parks. There is the fresh morning blanket of grass, wet with adolescent dreams of the earth sticking in clods and asterisks to the bottom of cleats.    In cross-country your adversary is the coastline of time. Time with its unforgiving bastions of age and pain, time removing a sprinkle of cells from the frame of your body into an inevitable cairn of ash.

Time abrasive, the planet that will one day hold fallen oxygen of your anatomy.

 Cross country is man jousting against the skin of the the earth, hurling himself into the subatomic vacuum of space in front of him sprinting like hell to skim seconds off of the one variable that one day will swallow him whole.

                                                                       ***

We break into the first 200 yards forming solitary herd. I am next to Peacock and Jose. From Coach Ricca’s periphery on the grassy knolls I can only imagine that he group looks like some sort of arrowhead slowly beginning to disperse in pointillism inflection. I lag behind. Peacock tells me to get up here. I am next to my mentor, the Mexican with the flattop, at the half-mile mark we have more than segregated ourselves from the park. We hit the corer of Madison parkway and Sterling, taking a right. Coach is ahead with the Coach from Woodruff reading splits from his stop watch.

Our first mile clocks out at 5:32. I am on course to break my cousin’s record.

At a mile and a half it is clear no one is going to touch us.  We run together. We take turns leading.  We are forming an errant trinity .For some reason Jose keeps looking back. Near the gingerbread clubhouse I look back and see that we are almost a minute ahead of our nearest competitors.  I can see Hans LaGrotto and Beano behind me.  Briefly I break away from Jose and Peacock and fall behind. I can hear Randy mandating that I get up next to him. I look down.  There is a constant metronome splatter to the rhythm of my cleats gnawing into the perimeter of the golf course. I push on. I meet up, It is the three of us again. The freshman and the two seniors. The veterans and the pleab. 

The sun is the color of a pitcher of domestic ale and the three of us, running as one,  pushing our way down Martin Luther King drive, like ships, both Jose  and Randy are sailing into the port of the finish chute.

We are three ships and we are each going are separate direction, each destined for ports unknown.

I am a freshman. This is my inaugural race. As we skim the sand trap behind the Elks Club Jose is gently in front of me.    

We hit the second mile slower but we are still well ahead of the pack.

Coach is looking down into his stopwatch which looks like it has ears. He is reading out 11:48. 11:49, 11:50, 11:51.   We are trying to quash time. We are trying to skitter past the vicissitudes of blinking hyphen at the finish line.We are trying to quash the intractable dominance of time.

My mom is screaming louder. It seems weird to hear her cheer the name of my high school

For a minute I take the lead. 

For a minute the only thing I am focused on is the digits at the finish line, three minutes left of the race. If I push it here and get ahead and kick the last 400 meters like I have never kicked before I should be able to come close to eclipsing my cousin’s record, finding my name heralding in diminutive white-block lettering in the lapsing echo of the pool atrium of the new school I have somehow found myself attending.

 

At roughly hole 5 I take off without looking behind.  There is a half-mile left. I turn wide and beginning a push counting 200 steps, breaking into a surge.

I hear both Peacock and Jose screaming out my name. At first I think that they are cheering me on. That they understand my quest, why I feel the need to surge ahead and empty everything that is inside of me on the forgotten felt of Madison Golf Course during the first race.

I take the lead. I break away. I can feel myself floating first across the flagged arteries of the chute, can feel myself looking up at the neon digits heralding the results of my time.  The group is one, I’m not trying to break free but it feels like Jose and Randy gradually being reeled back by vicarious reins.

 I make the final swerve. There is 1000 meters left. I begin to kick. To pick it up. I can feel myself accelerating. I can feel myself plowing ahead. There is a sand trap and then the final stretch. As I take a left I hear Peacock’s voice from behind me.

“Dave, wrong way, man. other side, “ I am confused. I am halfway around the sand trap, I realized that I have gotten of course. Rather than circling the entire dome of the egg-shaped sand trap I back pedal, before a moon walk. The golfers are looking at me like what’s that boy doing. I have gotten off-track. As I skid back on course Peacock has taken a healthy lead. 

I catch Jose in a few strokes.

“Thought we lost you for a moment.”

There is laugher. Peacock is blasting ahead. I continue to push.  Cheers erupt from the finish. I look at the neon digits heralding my time. I am close. I am ten seconds off. While this is my first official meet I should have known the course better since I have been training on it all summer.

I can hear the nasal octaves of my mothers voice chanting secular hosanna’s in the crowd. I can see my father, A smile beaming below the brow of his derby cap.  I can see where Peacock has already shotgunned through the chute and is bent over his hands welded on his hips out of breath.

Jose and I finish at the same exact time, though the paper the next day will list that I am a second ahead of him  As I bend over I feel Jose’s hand massaging the back of my neck telling me good run.

As I look behind me I see Hans Lagrotto finish strong. Followed by Beano and Quaynor. Our top five has swept the top five from the two opposing school.My time is 18:02. Just over six minute miles. Had I not had gotten off course and had to hustle to get back to my teammates I might I have had a shot at breaking the record. 

Have I not gotten off course I might have won the race.

Our teammates are giving each other hugs. Coach says he can't imagine a first race where a Freshman almost won. 

There is botherhood. We are doing cool-downs. We have swept both Woodruff and Farmington. The season is just beginning. Our team is starting to weld as one. We feel like we are immoral.

I still have three more shots to break my cousin's record FROSH record of 17:20. I still have two months to prove my worth as an athletic asset to squad I have wanted to be a part of since I started running when I was six years old.

It is the only dual meet our team will win all year.