While we are shuffling through this streak of Arctic air that has settled upon our area – and, indeed, all across the Midwest – by necessity I am spending more time indoors than out. While I have forbidden my son, Charlie, from taking his two-mile morning walk, I, on the other hand, have continued to run just not so long nor so far. Yesterday, when it was -27 below with the windchill, I did 3.5 miles. As I took a deep breath and ran out the door, I roused myself to the task with this thought: "I'm the guy with Running the Antarctica Marathon on my 'bucket-list' so what's my excuse for staying indoors?" Afterward when I came in the back in and looked at my reflection in the window of the basement door it appeared that I was working on my ZZ Top-look such was the frost beard that had accumulated during that 30 minute run. This morning was a tad warmer – only -25 below – but I chose to busy myself with some other task than running (yes, I wimped out.) Tomorrow when the mercury reaches above zero I'll be back out there but even when I do I'll still be thinking of warmer days and better runs.
This post is something of a reverie, a remembrance of another time when I was a lot sleeker and faster than I am today.
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| Jillian would have a fit |
When I was in high school back in the waning years of the twentieth century, I went out for Cross Country simply because I believed it would make me a better wrestler. What I found, however, was a sport I fell in love with. Wrestling is a long season and for those like myself who were always having to cut weight, it became marathon-like in its length. The night before a match, I fasted just to ensure I would make weigh-in. But the night before a CC race, a few buddies and I would walk over to the donut shop down the street from our high school and “carbo-load” as we referred to it. Eating pastries may not be a conventional pre-race activity but for those of us wrestlers running cross country it was nigh onto mandatory. As October wore on we all knew the lean months were coming fast.
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| Coach Tom today |
I was only average running-wise. As I recall, my best race ever was 17:35 for 3 miles (a 5:51 pace or 18:10 5K equivalent). I usually was vying for those coveted final slots on the seven-man Varsity team. But by my senior year my real strength was comic relief. Coach Sisulak was a very good coach but he was a math teacher and he fit the part - lean and nerdy-looking in his dark-rimmed glasses. While I never had a class with him, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he actually did carry a slide-ruler in his left-hand shirt pocket. He wasn't a gregarious, “atta-boy” kind of coach. He was more serious and sober-minded but we wanted to run for him (actually, we wanted to win for him.) So, I made it one of my goals to get him to crack a smile or, better yet, laugh now and then. It was challenging (and yet a few of my teammates and I were successful from time to time.)
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| Now this is cool... |
Anyone who has ever been on a Cross Country team anywhere in America knows this: when it comes to fall sports, football rules. Even if your team sucks with an 0-8 record, come year book time several pages of the annual will be taken up by the football team. However, the guys and girls Cross Country teams may merit only one page each. Your CC team may be conference champs and qualify for the State meet perennially, but it is only Cross Country (or so, I presume, the year book committee people must feel.) Going into our junior season, a few of the guys and myself set to change all that. Coach S was a quirky guy who, when he spoke, liked to laud the virtue of zucchini. He grew a lot of it. And that's how the Zucchini Running Club got its start. We embraced that vegetable as our real mascot (as opposed to the Lancer who was the official one), had t-shirts made up and even buttons that we wore proudly. We put up placards all over school with nonsensical sayings like, “The Zucchini is coming” or “Beware the Zucchini”. It was an ad hoc advertizing campaign whose sole purpose was to raise awareness that our school of 2000 students actually had a Cross Country team (and record-wise were a whole lot better than our grid iron locker room fellows). I don't recall if it was that year or our senior year but at the Homecoming game after the band did their thing, we did ours. Five members of our squad – our ace, John, the Mitchell brothers, Dan-O and myself - ran “Indian”-style around the track carrying a very large, very long zucchini. It was – or so I'd like to believe – a real crowd-pleaser. Vindication came our senior year when in the Statesman we were granted two pages under the auspices of the Zucchini Running Club (not LaFollette Cross Country). (The Madison LaFollette running teams of today probably don't have any problem with visibility given how successful that program has become.)
Our girls' squad was coached by Coach Heime (well, Jim Stevens was his name but for some reason all the girls called him by the Spanish-equivalent of his Christian name.) Jim was a devout follower of Christ who prayed with his girls regularly – not just before a race like I pray with my kids but frequently before practice was over. When we would travel to races we would ride the bus together, however, Coaches S & S would not allow our squads to mingle with each other. For one meet, the boys would have the back of the bus and for the next the girls would. And it was a code they strictly enforced. The season that my girlfriend was on the team, I made it my endeavor to sneak back to sit with her even if it meant crawling under the seats. It was all in good fun and I knew I would eventually be caught but the challenge lay in seeing how many miles would pass before Coach Sisulak discovered that the seating arrangement had been altered.
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| I looked nothing like this guy back then |
I have this distinct memory: Following our return from a Saturday meet, five of us ran to the guys' shower, threw off our shirts, socks and shoes, got ourselves wet, grabbed a towel and wrapped it around our shorts so that it appeared that we had nothing on but our birthday suits. While Coach Stevens and the girls' team were still on the bus having a post-race talk, we ran out into the parking lot and said – in unison, mind you,
Rooty-toot-toot
Rooty-toot-toot
We are the boys from the Institute
We do not smoke
We do not chew
And we don't go out with the girls who do – YU-HOO!
And at that moment, to their great chagrin, we whipped off our towels. Yeah, somehow I can't even imagine a scene like that playing out even at our local elementary school today. But that's the kind of team we were – silly, nonconventional and yes, a tad nerdy. But those three seasons of LaFollette Cross Country left their mark on me indelibly. In fact, I love the sport so much that a few years ago when they were taking applications for the position of head coach at our local high school, I applied for it. I have been blessed to coach both our boys' and girls' teams for Chetek-Weyerhaeuser High School for the past five seasons now. Back in high school days, I began my association with CC as a means to an end, to help me on my quest to become a state championship wrestler. In retrospect, that white race line I began to follow back in the fall of 1977 led me on a serendipitous detour to a far greater prize. And I have Coach Sisulak and my fellow members of the Zucchini Running Club to thank for that.
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| Somehow knowing that this race is out there makes me want to run this some day |
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