|
from Running
March, 1958
Spring. Watery lemon sunlight in the afternoon,
throwing a false warmth that’s gone by twilight. Clouds
unrolling in high sinister patterns, casting a strange greenish
light as I sit in study hall tense and filled with foreboding.
Then cold driving rain for days at a time and something hurting
in me like a spiritual toothache. In the mornings I wake with
despair. The days are asking something of me, but I don’t
know what it is or how to reply. I’m sixteen years old,
and I feel caught in a fine mesh net. A tremen-dous power
is flowing underneath me, but I don’t know how to touch
it. Lyle sniffs the air like a dog, grins at me with wry satisfaction.
“Track season,” he announces, as though that statement
justifies everything, as though our lives have rolled down
to that one meaning: to run.
Track season had begun for Lyle during Christmas
vacation. He’d run, bogged down and panting, through
calf-deep snow up the steep hills behind his house. His method
of training was simple: he ran himself into exhaustion. When
the weather broke and the snow began to melt, he hitch-hiked
each Saturday and Sunday to our school to run alone on the
sodden track. But now that the track season has opened officially,
he has me—his flabby, untrained, and apprehensive protégé—to
intro-duce to the rites of his personal religion.
It’s the first day of practice. It
might as well be January, drizzling with malignant insistence,
half rain, half snow, the temperature in the forties. The
coach issues us uniforms, makes a speech about the season,
and tells us to go home. That’s not for Lyle.
“Let’s go,” he says. “What?”
“Let’s go. You aren’t going
to let the weather bother you, are you?”
I feel like a fool as I dress, pull on jock
and sweat suit, lace up the tennis shoes. Lyle is bounding
up and down, swinging his arms. “What a godawful day,”
he says gleefully. We trot from the gym to the track. I feel
as though someone has turned me out in the middle of winter
in my underwear. Following Lyle’s example, I’ve
wrapped a towel around my neck and ears. “Let’s
warm up,” he says at the track.
We begin jogging on the wet cinders. Above
us a sky like dirty whipped cream is on its way somewhere
else, moving fast. Soon the snow has misted my glasses so
that I can barely see Lyle in front of me. He’s muttering
to himself, turns to make sure I’m behind, calls back,
“You jog a lap and then walk a lap until you’ve
finished ten. I’ll do a couple slow miles.”
We jog one lap together. I stop, and he
trots on. I’m panting, discovering to my amazement that
I’m warm enough. He laps me as I walk, calls out, “What’s
the matter?”
“I’m tired.”
“Tired,” he snorts as though he
isn’t sure of the meaning of the word, and he’s
gone down the track.
After five or six laps, even though I’m
walking every other one, I’m getting sick at my stomach
and dizzy, feeling alternately chilled and feverish. There’s
a pain in my side like an ice pick. I’m scuttling along
like a crab, clutching at my chest. Lyle’s finished his
two miles, yells at me, “Run it out. Take the pain and
run it out. Don’t let your form go to hell.” He
gives me a sample of how I should look: feet pointed straight
ahead, long clean strides, hands carried up and reaching as
though winding string into the body. “When it hurts,
stretch it out.”
I finish my last lap. My side is on fire.
My lunch is attempting to come up. Lyle supports me with one
arm and pushes me along in a fast walk through the wet snow.
“Jesus, it hurts,” I say.
“Of course it hurts. That’s the
point. Keep at it. You’ll be great. Look at your chest.
Good lung capacity. You’ve got the desire. You’ll
be really great.”
I’m keeping my thoughts to myself.
I don’t give a damn whether I’ll be great or not.
What I’d been doing out there—although at the moment
it doesn’t any longer make the least bit of sense—had
been trying to make myself into a real boy, but now I just
want the pain to stop and I never want to feel this bad again.
“A year ago,” I say, panting,
“if somebody had told me… that I’d be out for
track… I’d have laughed in his face.”
Lyle gives me a playful push and a sly smile.
“You’ll be an athlete yet. You’ve got the spirit.”
I only groan.
Back at the gym, naked in the showers, he
yells to me, “Mens sana in corpore sano, right?”
The evening has turned colder when we begin
to hitch-hike into town; the air feels as brittle as if we’d
stepped back a month into winter, but I’m beginning to
enjoy my tiredness. My feet ache with each step; my legs ache
all the way up to my hip joints. By the time I get home, all
my used muscles will be shaking with light fluttery spasms.
“This is what the church fathers talked
about,” Lyle is saying. “We don’t have a desert,
but we have a track.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Were
they after the same thing?”
“Of course they were. Labore est
orare. It’s the only way we have to get at what they
were after… or the hills.” He sweeps one arm up
to the distant snow-covered skyline just edged with twilight.
“I climb the hills back of my house. I need to be alone
to think… to pray. It’s all got to come from here.”
He pats his uniformed chest in the vicinity of his heart.
“Even running. Concentration. Prayer. It’s all the
same thing. They tried to tell me that I couldn’t play
sports by concentration, but they were wrong. That’s
how I learned everything I know. But you’ve got to do
it too. That’s been your trouble.” He pats his forehead.
“All here, nothing in the lungs and legs. But you’ve
got a good heart.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever
be that good. I started too late.”
“No, no. You’ve got the spirit.
That’s the important thing. If you’ve got that,
everything else will follow.”
“The spirit’s willing, but the
flesh is weak,” I say, smiling, meaning it as a joke.
“That’s what all this is for,” he answers in
complete seriousness, “to make the flesh match the spirit.”
Up and down the National Road we can see the snow in the air
shaking out like bright splinters.
That was Lyle and I, the beginning of our
friendship, track season, our sophomore year. After all these
years I still remember that night clearly. By the time I was
walking through downtown Raysburg, the ache of my body had
turned to joy; tired as I was, I could have run again, laughing,
through the streets. I remember crossing the Suspension Bridge
over the dark river where the city lights were caught and
repeated, the weight of my book bag in my hands, my uniform
collar turned up around my ears, the sound of snow crunching
under my feet, the sound of automobile tires on the pavement,
the tremor of my loosening muscles, my glasses steaming in
the moist air of the kitchen when I came in from the cold
just in time for dinner.
|
