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His concern heightens twenty minutes later when his calf and hamstring tighten considerably. If the race ends up impeding his development, he will think back to today’s third mile (when he got excited and ran a 5:03) as the cause of his setback. But you cannot fault him for taking the risk. NCAA’s are only 5 weeks away . . .
The out-of-shape
monster.
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FT. HAYS TIGER INVITATIONAL
PLACE
NAME
SCHOOL
AVG. MILE
TIME
1.
Eliad Njuhi
Dodge City CC
4:53
24:21
2.
James Karanu
Dodge City CC
4:54
24:25
3.
Likhaya Dayile
Dodge City CC
4:55
24:28
4.
Herbert Mwangi
Dodge City CC
5:01
25:01
5.
Boniface Ndungu
Dodge City CC
5:01
25:01
6.
Jay Johnson
Colorado
5:02
25:06
7.
Richard Jones
Dodge City CC
5:06
25:23
8. Matt
Elmuccio
Colorado
5:07 25:29
9.
Jason McCullough
Fort Hays State
5:07
25:31
10.
Jeth Fouts
Fort Hays State
5:08
25:35
14. Adam
Batliner
Colorado
5:12 25:53
17. Sean
Smith
Colorado
5:14 26:02
18. Chris
Schafer
Colorado
5:14 26:04
19. Cameron
Harrison
Colorado
5:15 26:06
21. Adam
Loomis
Colorado
5:16 26:15
23. Zach
Crandall
Colorado
5:17 26:20
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Sunday, October 18, 1998
Wonderland Lake Trailhead
6:30 a.m.
Into the Sun
It is a quiet run on the trail this morning. Conversation is kept to a min-imum as the upperclassmen run together in a pack that includes Goucher.
Most of the runners present are heading to Buttermilk Mountain after the run to attend Sev’s memorial service.
Goucher runs with a bit of a limp, but he mentions nothing of any pain that he is feeling. One suspects that maybe he is thinking of Sev, and how he would run through a brick wall before admitting he was hurt.
Sev relished Sunday runs. They were his proving ground. After his superb run at Mags on September 20th, when he ran 20 miles in 2:03, Severy, in his unassuming but slightly mischievous way, talked about how he had been crushing Sundays ever since he was a freshman:
I was a stupid freshman, but I didn’t care. [Jay] Cleckler was my biggest influence. I’d see him hammering and say, OK, I’m gonna hammer too. I was so tired from training, but I’d always kill myself. I loved Mags. I once ran 1:24 for 14, and I still haven’t gone as fast. Without fail, I’d see Mark at eight miles and he’d say, “Sev, are you going out over your head?” I’d say,
“no,” even though I was dying. I lived on Advil freshman year.
He trained himself through exhaustion his freshman year. Eventually, he was forced to call it a year because of severe patella tendonitis — he went so far as to take “twenty Advil a day” to make it through. But his biggest disappointment that first fall — not making the Varsity for NCAA’s — laid the foundation for his biggest success:
Not going to Nationals fired me up, and I trained harder than ever for Jr.
Nationals. Me, Tom, and Bat went up there. I hung back, and by mile two I was fifteenth. I kept hammering saying, “there’s no way this guy is beating me.” I ran out of distance, and finished seventh. But [Stanford’s Greg]
Jimmerson was too old, and so was another guy, so I was fifth for World’s qualifying purposes . . . Thus began my intense training.
But watching NCAA’s served a purpose of its own. It was a watershed moment not only for Goucher, who would finish second, but for Sev as well.
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I watched the race go off, and the Arkansas guys were way out ahead. The CU guys were in the back of the pack. Clint [Wells] was 50 to 100 meters off the back of the pack. We all said we hope he’s feeling alright. Then they disappeared into the woods, and when they came out, Goucher was in the twenties, Al was 30th, Cleckler, Coop, and Clint were in there. And at mile three or four, Goucher was just rolling people up. He used to hate foreigners, so we’d yell, “Go! Foreigner up ahead!” He was tenth by mile four and a half, and picking off people one by one. With less than a mile to go, he was in second. That was by far the best, gutsiest, most emotional race I’ve ever seen him run. Al was eleventh, Cleckler was 25th — which was amazing since he had exercise-induced asthma. Wells went from last to 33rd and Coop was 34th. But Gouch, that’s when he proved to us, he’s for real.
No doubt about it, he showed us he was something unique. That race set the tone for our collegiate careers. Every year, we want to match that performance.
Sev was as tenacious in his other endeavors as he was in training. A double major in biochemistry and molecular biology with a 4.0 GPA, he embraced, more than anyone, Wetmore’s dictum to be a renaissance man and attack all your endeavors with vigor. He embodied Mahler’s saying, Res Severa Verum Gaudia; the greatest joy is being serious. When asked about his study habits, he said:
I study a lot. Freshman and sophomore year, I would run, study, and that’s it. I’d go on eight hour bus rides and study orgo the whole way. I couldn’t live with myself unless I knew to the core the explanation of something. I’d get 100’s on orgo tests because I knew everything to a T. Through my sophomore year, I never got less than a 98 on a test . . . My junior year, I got my first girlfriend; she says I was always studying when I was with her.
[He was not exaggerating. The time the guys caught him out on a date with her is now a part of team lore. He was with her in a restaurant waiting for a table. Seeing that he had some time on his hands, he thought nothing of opening up his texts and doing some studying while they waited . . .]
That second semester we broke up and I went back to doing nothing but run, study, and ski on weekends. I hated to study, but I did it so much that now I love it. I love knowledge. I now regret not studying more that first semester. I would study so much that I figured out what the questions were going to be on the test . . . Biochem Two was really hard for me, but I learned more than ever. Last year I managed to get an A even though I had all the problems with my father during his long and ultimately fatal battle with cancer. In the lab, I started research the end of my junior year using 168
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atomic force microscopy — AFM — to image DNA and protein interac-tions — really cutting-edge stuff. I’m in lab twenty to thirty hours a week trying to get things to work . . .
Tessman puts in a surge with three miles to go, dropping Schafer, who is also running fifteen miles this morning. Sev would have liked that move.
Tessman pushes the pace until he reaches the top of the long steep climb that terminates along
a mesa overlooking Broadway to run’s end. After having already run twelve miles, the thought of attacking this climb seems absurd. Sev would have loved it.
Watching the men fight through this run, only hours before the memorial service, it is hard not to envision Severy charging up one final climb westward, blue eyes alight, an impish grin on his face, shaggy blond locks bouncing to and fro, legs churning impossibly forward, into the distance.
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Monday, October 19, 1998
Kitt Field
3:45 p.m.
Slattery, I Think You’re Full of Shit
As everyone files into Balch to stretch before running an easy hour and strides, a crowd gathers around the board. Tomorrow’s workout will be 300’s around Kitt. Tessman shakes his head as he sees tomorrow’s assignment. “I’m scared for Tuesday,” he says. “If it’s like Friday, man, I thought I was gonna die. I wanted someone to shoot my face off. I did maybe one or two workouts last year that felt that hard.”
On the bottom of the document, Wetmore has posted the names of those who are competing at Big 12’s in two weeks. Johnson’s name is on the list. He has made the top nine along with Goucher, Friedberg, Reese, Roybal, Ponce, Tessman, Valenti, and Batliner. At Big 12’s, Johnson will have a chance to stretch his season even further as the team shrinks to seven men.
After taking yesterday off, Batliner is going to run down on Kitt Field, the home of the injured and recuperating. Wetmore is still marveling at what he was able to achieve at Ft. Hays. “I was pretty sure what Bat could do. We’d talked about running splits for 26:00, but still, I was holding my breath the whole way. I wondered if someone could really take 5 weeks off, train for 2 days, and run 25:50 — that was good.”
Goucher, wearing jeans, heads straight for Wetmore. “I’m taking a day off,” he tells him. “My leg’s sore, I don’t know what it is, it’s going up my back and stuff, so I’m taking a day off.” His left thigh aches. “It’s just really tight,” he says as he massages it with his hand, “I don’t know what the deal is.” Wetmore says nothing, but he looks like he is trying to hide his concern, like he is thinking, “What’s next?”
Slattery joins Batliner for a jog around Kitt, and they debate the ef-ficacy of creatine for long-distance runners as they jog. Wetmore thinks it is “utterly useless, a waste of money.” Nevertheless, Slattery tells Bat that he has been taking creatine for two years now, and that the strength gains he attributes to the creatine definitely outweigh the potential decrease in performance due to the weight gain creatine causes. Bat asks him for more evidence that it works, and Slattery says his bench press increased from 185 to 215 while on creatine. “But how does that help your running?” “Trust me,” Slattery says flatly, “it does.” They run on around the field wordlessly for a few minutes before Batliner chimes in his verdict, “Slattery, I think you’re full of shit.”
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Tuesday, October 20, 1998
Christopher Severy’s Memorial Service
Mackey Auditorium
No Doubt about It
In the foyer of Mackey auditorium, people file past pictures of Severy. In most he is active — running or skiing; clearly, he was a man on the go.
“Try,” Wetmore later remarks, “to find one where he’s not smiling.” It is not possible.
Inside the auditorium, over a thousand people have packed themselves in for Severy’s memorial service. A program for the service has been distributed, with a picture of Chris on the front in full stride on the cross country course. Above the picture it reads, “A CELEBRATION OF
THE LIFE OF CHRISTOPHER SEVERY.” There is much to celebrate, for he packed in more in his 22 years than most people do in a lifetime.
A group of Severy’s teammates sits on stage waiting their turn to speak. Rich Cardillo, the associate athletic director, opens the service, calling Severy “the epitome of the student athlete.”
His chemistry and biochemistry professors speak next. Kathy
Rowlen, his chemistry professor, speaks about Severy’s efforts to syn-thesize a DNA molecule. She calls Severy a “talented experimentalist . . .
disciplined, yet free.” His loss, she sincerely says, “is a loss for humanity. ”
Regent Robert Sievers dedicates a sculpture to Severy called “The Chemist’s Book.” Earlier, when Batliner heard a sculpture would be dedicated to Severy, he struggled with the idea. How, he wondered, can you capture all that Severy is in a work of art without pigeonholing him as one thing or another? While the beautiful marble sculpture of a chemist’s book on a dais does not capture all that Chris was, it does symbolize, in Sievers’s words, “Chris’s love of knowledge. Chris spoke the language of science and those whose lives he touched will never be the same.”
Severy’s sister Robin, who has lost both a father and a brother in the past six months, speaks next. Through tears she speaks fondly of “my best friend.” She says, “His life’s mission was to defeat cancer. He offered the world so much hope . . . He was so unassuming and nonjudgmental. He worried about Bat’s stress fracture, Goucher’s training regimen . . . He worked so hard at everything.” She laughs when recalling how skiing was his biggest passion, and how he always said “ he would marry the first woman who can pull a 360.”
Wetmore introduces Severy’s teammates, noting that “few can
understand how close distance runners are, the brotherhood.”
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Goucher speaks of how Chris was “the hardest-working guy . . . he taught me how to push the limits . . . We became brothers through blood, sweat, and pain . . . I loved him. His memory is with us, and he’ll finish the season with us, just as he would want us to do.”
Batliner talks of how “nothing was superfluous or hidden” with Sev, and how, “he loved to work. He loved all of us. He spent every day wearing himself out doing that.” He compares Chris to a brilliant color, “in its complex simplicity. It’s the essence of Chris.”
Jay Johnson recalls how after Chris’s best ever race — his seventeenth place finish at NCAA’s two years ago — his thoughts were not on his performance, but on his teammates. He was concerned about Batliner, who dropped out, and Johnson recalls Sev telling his father how he wished Zeke Tiernan could have finished ahead of him. Johnson then mentions Sev’s courage “to snub society, and move up to a mountain.”
Through his achievements Chris made it higher than most even dare to dream. “Try,” Johnson says, referring to the legendary Chinese philoso-pher Han-Shan, “to make it to Cold Mountain.”
Tom Reese reads Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young” be-
fore recounting how when he was rehabbing over the summer, “Sev would kayak in the pool while I was doing pool workouts, just to keep me company.”
Wetmore then introduces Sev’s good friend, ex-Buff and Aspen High teammate Zeke Tiernan. Tiernan is the last of Severy’s teammates to speak. “They’ve shared innumerable runs, road trips and adventures,” says Wetmore. Tiernan plays a slide show of pictures of Chris set to music, and he narrates it as it goes along. Smiling images of Chris running, skiing, and relaxing with friends beautifully convey his openness and joie de vivre.
Mark Wetmore speaks last. He wears a tan western suit with a bolo tie, and he strides purposefully to the podium. He looks straight into the crowd, and begins:
No doubt about it, Chris was a special young man. Remember, however, our task is to let him go, and find a way to keep him. ‘No doubt about it.’ He used to say that a lot in my presence, and it says a lot about him.
Special? Perseverance, endurance, and courage. No doubt, no one better ex-emplifies those qualities of character. There is no one better in our program.
> Wetmore describes how he told Chris to be patient when he re-
sumed training in June, not to do 105 miles the first week. But by the end of August, Chris was doing 105 miles a week — fifteen miles a day. “He was in the best shape of his life, no doubt about it.” Wetmore asked him 172
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then, “If you, Tommy, Bat, Gouch, our guys click [at Nationals], we can do it, can’t we?” “Oh, sure,” Chris replied, “No doubt about it.” “That no-doubt attitude,” Wetmore says, “is what made him so special.”
Wetmore recalls how two days after his father died, Chris was back in the stretching circle, “hair unkempt, shirt crooked.” Wetmore asked him, “Chris, are you sure you’re ready?” “Oh yeah,” he replied, “no doubt about it.”
He characterizes Chris as a man “without a theology and maybe
without a God.” “Without a doubt he loved life,” he says, “and he embraced the uniqueness of his gifts. That must be the definition of faith. He had complete faith that life is good, and that his gifts were valuable.”
Wetmore closes his remarks by urging those in attendance to strive to embrace the qualities that made Chris special: perseverance, endurance, and courage. “Practice,” he challenges the audience, “his embrace of our gifts . . . Practice his embrace of life as good. If we do that,”
he concludes, “we can remember and honor Chris, we can let him go, and we can keep him, no doubt about it.”
No doubt about it.
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