Runnerville

A note of explanation: I wrote this piece in the summer of 2006 when Taylor was working on getting a different iteration of runnerville off the ground. The site didn’t come together, and this column never ran. Well, I found it knocking around in one of the dark corners of my computer and figured the central message still rang true even though the sports references are horribly, and to some extent hilariously, dated.

—

How did I get here?

My head (well, most of my upper body really) is in a trashcan. One of those big thirty gallon jobs; grey, with Roughneck written on the side. It’s the middle of the summer and schools are out, so the trashcan is more or less empty. I guess that makes me lucky. It smells like hot plastic and spilled sports drink and dust.

How did I get here?

I’m not wondering how I ended up in the trashcan- that part is easy. I walked across the track and leaned over it because I thought I was going to puke. I’ve decided, however, that I won’t puke. That would be one indignity too many. I’ve already checked off “running like absolute ass” and “letting them see me hurt” but I’m determined that “puking in front of kids a decade younger than me” will be saved for another day. No, what I’m wondering is how did I get here, to this moment. To this night, this local all-comers race on a high school track in the Valley.

“How did I get here?” I mumble to a half empty bottle of Gatorade (Fierce Grape from the looks of things) which was probably tossed there by one of the aging weekend warriors that competed in tonight’s race with me. I’m 24 years old, not yet at my athletic prime, but here I am in the track and field equivalent of the Carolina League (assuming of course that the Carolina League let middle-aged fat guys in spandex speedsuits play right field and bat cleanup). I just ran a time slower than anything I’ve run since high school. So much for the first race of my comeback.

The Olympic Trials finals were exactly two years ago to the day, practically to the hour. Exactly two years since I raced in a packed stadium with immortality on the line. Seven hundred and thirty days since the proudest moment of my career and what I thought was the launching pad for fame, success and glory. Not to mention women and money, but mostly the fame and glory part. If only I had the slightest clue about what had happened between then and now.

How did I get here?

—

Success is a funny thing. When you’re having it, it feels so natural that you can’t imagine things going any other way. When you’re not having it, you wonder if you’ll ever experience it again. This is true for life in general, but it seems to particularly apply to the sporting world. Baseball players, for example, live in constant fear of slumps. Take A-Rod: he’s practically being run out of New York because of the funk he’s in. We’re not talking about some journeyman middle-infielder that the Yankees got a couple years ago as a throw-in when they swapped relievers with the D-Rays; we’re talking about the highest paid player in baseball. This is a man that, from an economic standpoint, is supposedly the best player in the game. A player who on his own, is paid more than the Pirates entire lineup (I invented that little factoid, but it sounds true). Yet the fact remains that A-Rod is in a slump. What is he doing wrong? God (and Bill James) only knows, but let’s assume that it’s something unconscious, otherwise he’d make a correction. Slumps are often inexplicable and unexpected. It’s not just baseball either. Shooters go cold, receivers hear footsteps every time a ball comes their way and soccer players start finding the crossbar instead of the back of the net. In any sport a struggling athlete is often mystified as to why he suddenly went from being Dirk Nowitzki to Kwame Brown.

The saving grace for many slumping athletes is that they’re on a team. A-Rod is stinking it up, but as of this writing, the Yankees just massacred the Red Sox in a five game series in Boston and stretched their lead in the AL East to nearly six games. You can go out there and boot grounders and wave in futility at breaking balls, but as long as the team wins, all is more or less forgiven. Athletes in individual sports don’t have this safety net. In track and field, when you’re struggling, you’re hung out there naked for all the world to see. This compounds the question of success even further. Well actually, by “compounds” I mean to say “simplifies”, because it is in fact simple- it’s all on you. You can’t blame a bad race on crappy relief pitching or sloppy passing. On one hand, this has its advantages because technically you control your own destiny. You can get out there and put the work in and mentally visualize your race and do all things that we as runners do and there is no one other than yourself that can screw it up for you. But when it does get screwed up (and invariably it will), what then? It’s hard to look at yourself and wonder whether you worked out enough or made a move too soon or should have stopped after the first case of Busch Light. Not succeeding in track can be a confusing and demoralizing process, a process often lacking definitive answers.

So what do we as runners do when we’re catching bad beat after bad beat? Nothing. We do absolutely nothing. We keep training. We keep doing interval workouts. We run repeat quarters on an empty track at twilight. We go on easy runs and picture the home straight of some stadium in Europe, the field stretched out behind us and the crowd on its feet. We feel that surge of adrenaline and know that next time… next time things will go differently. And the truth is, sooner or later they will. Sooner or later, we all get back in shape, sooner or later we all improve our PR or at least run well enough to forget our last bad race. Track offers infinite chances for redemption. Every race is a blank slate, a chance to just feel it with 300 to go and tear one off. Ultimately, it’s tough to have the weight of success on your shoulders alone, but personally I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I don’t know if this column has a moral or even a point. But one thing it does have is an epilogue. The epilogue is that I pulled myself out of the trashcan and stopped feeling sorry for myself. I looked around and laughed about getting worked up over running poorly in a meaningless race that I ran as a workout. I watched a ten-year old kid run towards his parents sitting in the stands, beaming in pride of the race he just ran. That ten-year old didn’t realize it, but he had as good an understanding of success as he’ll have for the rest of his life. Success is relative and momentary. The moment will always pass, yet will unfailingly bring another moment of limitless possibility. It’s true- I don’t know how I got here, but I do know where I’m going.

I’m going back to work.

—

Afterword: So let’s recap. The D-Rays aren’t called that anymore, A-Rod had a monster season for the Yankees last year and there’s no way Dirk would be currently be my first choice for an example of a stud NBA player, especially not with his busted ankle. At least Kwame still blows. On a personal level, that epilogue rings kind of hollow. I moved back to DC from LA a couple months after I wrote that piece, had surgery to repair a sports hernia, and never really got back in the swing of training. Competitive track is 20 pounds behind me (thankfully that’s easier to hide when you’re 6’6”), but never far from my thoughts.

Stamos is a runnerville.com contributing writer. He enjoys self-indulgent navel-gazing almost as much as he enjoys watching Battlestar Galactica.

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