Smith Not a Bad Ride

Stories from a Boomer's Life On the Edge
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9965488-1-6
Verlag: Eric J. Smith
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

A boomer memoir delivered in wry vignettes-edgy but never bitter. These reflections concentrate on the 1970s as I drifted through a turbulent swarm of events, buffeted by psychological conflicts, underachieving, drinking, and drugs. The memoir takes you on the inside of the boomer generation, life after that was up for grabs, shaped by one's youthful mistakes.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smith, Eric

Leseproben

Chapter 2 RITES OF PASSAGE 1963–1966 CROSS COUNTRY THE SUMMER BEFORE tenth grade I began training in earnest, hoping I might make the cross country team in high school. My brother Robbie told me about cross country guys. He said they ran an incredible amount, maybe too much, as if the sport involved some kind of pathology. It sounded exciting to me. I knew little about the sport and had no idea how far or fast I should run each day to prepare for it. I ran the same 2.2-mile course each night with a stopwatch in my hand. As the weeks went by, my times steadily improved. Each night, I’d sprint the final 250 yards uphill to the finish. I learned later this early training had turned me into a kicker, the kind of runner who could come from behind near the end of a race and outsprint his competitors. When the new school year rolled around, I wondered briefly whether I should go out for football as two of my brothers had. I stood 5'5", weighed 112 pounds, and didn’t excel at football, so I should have realized that sport was out of the question. I later heard the cutoff for football tryouts was 120 pounds, which made my decision for me: I’d be running cross country. I ranked between second and fifth man on the team that first year. Because we had five strong runners and a good coach, we easily won the county and state titles. My high school hasn’t won a state cross country title in the fifty years since then. STATUS When I lettered in cross country that first year, some of my friends told me what a big deal it was to earn a letter as a sophomore, and they badgered me into getting a jacket so I could display it. I didn’t recognize the letter’s significance but got the jacket anyway. I know a football or basketball letter would have made more of an impression on others in the student body. Still, my cross country and track letters no doubt kept me from getting shoved around or beat up a few times over the next three years. I hung out with guys from the team. We wore our letter jackets everywhere, even when we went out for burgers and subs on Friday nights after basketball games. Like the nerds we were, we ate lunch together in the cafeteria, too. Our group reminds me now of the television show Freaks and Geeks except our episodes occurred much earlier. One of the guys drove us around in his 1955 Ford. He’d turn off the ignition switch to make the thing backfire. They’d also given me a track letter the year before, in junior high, but I was such a dork I never bought a sweater to put it on. A popular girl in my English class kept bugging me to get the sweater so she could wear my letter. She’d never talked to me before that, so I assumed she wasn’t serious and let the sweater slide. I put the letter in a drawer, where it stayed for forty-eight years. I threw it in the trash. OCTOBER Since I wasn’t a hot-weather runner, I didn’t enjoy competing during track season. I couldn’t abide the heat and humidity that descended over the Mid-Atlantic region in late April. Every workout and race amounted to pain, torture, and agony. I preferred indoor track, even though you had to run in stuffy, smoky venues. No, without a doubt, I always favored cross country over track. I loved running in the fall. You could put forth your best performance without the impediments of sweat stinging your eyes and the sun sapping your strength even before the gun went off. The only weather-related problem I encountered during the fall season was rain. Running in the rain was tough going for a near-sighted guy like me with coke-bottle glasses. The lenses, once covered with rain, would fog up; I couldn’t see where I was going, and I’d lose my footing and sometimes run tentatively, my spikes catching in mud or roots depending on course conditions. But you can’t have everything, and rainstorms were only occasional. Cross country began in September, the last gasp of summer. The weather was still hot and humid for the first several meets of the season. Then, October, my favorite month, gently shouldered September aside—temperatures fell, the sun shone obliquely, and by month’s end the fragrance of rotting leaves flared my nostrils as I ran. October allowed you to run full bore without restraint from the climate. The cross country season ended in November, when you could see your breath, most of the trees had shed their remaining leaves, and your skin would chap up. Still, I preferred the cold Novembers to the spring and early summer months. I later decided my ideal running conditions were thirty-two degrees with no wind. So-called hot-weather runners must have a different metabolism. I never understood how they did it. IDENTITY During cross country season my sophomore year of high school, I began thinking of myself as a runner. I wasn’t a male, a student, an American, or a Marylander. I was a runner. I stopped worrying about grades and girls. Each day I thought of my next workout. Toward the end of each week, my thoughts turned to my next meet—who I’d run against, how good they were, whether I could beat them, how I’d do it, and how hard it would be. The workouts knocked my grades down a notch or two. Running my guts out every afternoon after school made it tough to go home and study; I fell asleep over my books. After seeing me run at a few meets, my father asked whether running so hard might be physically harmful. I assured him it wasn’t. I couldn’t even consider such a notion. Running was all I cared about. Unlike other sports, distance running didn’t fit neatly into a season limited to a few months. It lasted all year—cross country in the fall, indoor track in the winter, and track in the spring. I also ran during the summer so I’d be in shape for cross country season the next fall. Ideally, you ran 365 days a year, hard. I heard a teammate say he once went four days in a row without running. To me that was unthinkable unless you’d sustained a serious injury. Running wasn’t a sport or something I did for fun. It was who I was—a runner. THE MILE The mile, formerly a glamour event of track and field along with the 100-yard dash, has been all but purged by the metric conversion. Rather than the mile, athletes now run shorter races: the 1500 meters in college and international competition and the 1600 meters in high school. But when I competed, milers held a special place on track teams. People remarked I was too stubby to run the mile, and they were probably right. These people couldn’t help themselves. They had to mention my modest height and short legs and what a disadvantage they must have presented. Such comments motivated me; I enjoyed beating tall guys. I’m not talking about 5'9" or 5'10" runners. I didn’t give their height a second thought since they had only three or four inches on me. But when I ran against someone over six feet, I wanted to cream him to prove a point. The mile divided neatly into quarters—four laps around the track—each with its own character and requirements. The first quarter dictated largely how competitive you might be in each race. You had to tuck in with the other runners, otherwise you might “lose contact,” a psychological phenomenon that caused a runner to fall farther and farther behind the pace until he could no longer catch up to the leaders. At the same time, if you went out too fast that first lap, you’d burn yourself out. The second lap was also critical, as several runners in the field typically fell off the pace and the guys who were still a factor in the race often spread out a bit. The third quarter was often the trickiest and slowest lap since runners not only began tiring, but also had to gauge how much they had left in the tank for the last lap. Finally, when you headed into the final or gun lap, you had to avoid getting boxed in by other runners and decide when to begin sprinting for the finish without holding anything back. For me, the Wakefield invitational mile my sophomore year in high school was a seminal event for a couple of reasons. First, I ran a 4:27.1, which smashed the school mile record by over three seconds. That pissed off the previous record holder, a second-year senior, who hoped to secure a track scholarship at the University of Maryland. Second, and more significantly, that race led to a long-term, all-consuming frustration because I’d run over my head and never duplicated the feat during my high school career. So people regarded my performance as a fluke. It became my proverbial albatross and deprived me of any satisfaction I might otherwise have derived from running high school track. Everyone, including me, viewed anything less than a record performance, or at least a decisive win, as a failure. Until recently, my preoccupation with the Wakefield Invitational mile race was tied to the school record I set there and the disappointments and problems that ensued. I didn’t consider the specifics of the race until years later. It was dark and cool out on the black track; the stadium lights were dim. Running just behind the leaders, I felt cinders from their spikes hitting me in the cheeks and mouth. Since it was only the third mile race I’d ever run, I had no way of knowing how far in over my head I was. Somehow, I managed to stay right behind the first three guys for the entire race, picking one of them off down the final straightaway to take third place. I spent around forty-five minutes afterward throwing up. Two of the guys I ran...