Running with the Buffaloes
Page 27
Now the only thing left to do is celebrate the great occasion of Jen Fazioli’s birth. Eighteen years ago we were blessed with her and we’re very happy about that.
With that there is some cake, and everyone sings her happy birthday.
Everyone starts filing out, and several people linger around to chat with Wetmore, including Tessman.
Wetmore has had some experience with neuromas because he has
one himself. He tells Tessman that years ago he was diagnosed with a neuroma, and he scheduled the surgery so as not to put his consecutive days running streak in jeopardy. At midnight he ran a two-mile run, and he figured he would have 47 hours until he had to run again. But when the doc informed him that even if they performed the surgery that morning there would not be time enough time to recuperate and get a run in that next day, Wetmore decided against the surgery.
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Tessman is dumbfounded. “What!” he says. “How do you run?” Wetmore chuckles and tells him, “You gotta understand, you’re dealing with a person with a whole different pain tolerance than normal people. I just can’t sprint or run on really rocky ground. That day I ran on the Mesa Trail, I must have dinged it ten times.” Tessman stares at Wetmore incredulously. “This is not gonna be fun. This is gonna be the worst day of my life.”
The course record at Pioneer’s Park was set way back in 1992. Ken -
yan Richard Kosgei, then of Barton County Community College, ran the 8k course in 23:54. Goucher wants the record. The course record is listed in the race program, but no one sees it, because Wetmore does not distribute it at the meeting.
He does not distribute copies of the program because there is a prominent tribute to Severy in it, and he feels giving this to them will do nothing but engender unreasonable expectations and unnecessary enthusiasm as they try to win one for Sev. It is his best decision of the evening.
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Saturday, October 31, 1998
Pioneer’s Park
Lincoln, Nebraska
10 a.m.
The 1998 Big 12
Cross Country Championship
It is an hour until race time and the men stretch in their black CU sweats and chat on the grass next to the van. JD blasts some techno music from the van and the guys enjoy this very uncharacteristically Colorado move.
It is a perfect day for racing — 50 degrees and overcast. With these conditions and Goucher on the prowl, the course record of 23:54 is in jeopardy. Tessman only hopes he can compete.
Tessman stretches with the knowledge that he has had the cortisone shot, along with enough Advil this morning to numb an elephant. He does not divulge just how many Advil he has taken, but he later remarks, “I only took what anybody in my situation would take.” He cannot believe how fast his fortunes have changed: just a week ago he was the “X Factor,” and now his season, and his collegiate career, are in jeopardy.
He heads out with the team ten minutes later on the warm-up. He has not run since getting the cortisone shot, and he is apprehensive as they start moving. Three minutes later, his worst fears are realized. The pain is too great; he cannot go on. “Guys, I can’t do it,” he tells them as Ponce
prepares for
battle.
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he stops. “Good luck.” Reese turns and says, “OK, Brockford, nice try.”
The team jogs on. Tessman puts his hands on his hips and walks away in the opposite direction. He is inconsolable.
The team has no time to waste. Tessman lets Wetmore know he cannot run. In his place, the team has an option. Berkshire has made the trip out here to watch and he could go on a moment’s notice. Wetmore would have to file an emergency declaration for him to run, but seeing as they probably will not need him, Wetmore elects to go with the eight men he has left.
When the runners return from their warm-up, Goucher heads to the training tent to get a last minute massage from Tammy on his sore leg.
Her massage seems to help, because when the gun goes off, he heads right to the front of the pack — running hard. It probably would have been harder if the meet directors had their way. They approached Wetmore before the race to tell him they planned on having a moment of silence for Sev on the starting line. Wetmore quickly nixed that plan.
Goucher hits 1k in 2:45, with Andrew Hennessy, a freshman at Oklahoma State, right with him. Brian Jansen, a junior at Kansas, is also right there. At 2k, Hennessy has faded some, but Jansen is still there, challenging Goucher. More important, Oklahoma State is dominating the race. At 2k they have five runners in the top ten. But 6k remain.
At about 2.5k, Goucher starts putting some ground on Jansen, and at 3k, Goucher is all alone, 50 meters in front of the field. “I didn’t know who was with me,” he would say later, “but I lost him in a matter of seconds. One second I could hear him, then five seconds later, I couldn’t. He was out the back door pretty quick.”
Behind Goucher, CU runs a typically conservative race. At two miles, Friedberg is the second Buffalo, in eighth place, and Roybal and Reese run together in the twenties. Just then, Roybal looks over at Reese and Reese slaps him across the face — hard! It takes Roybal by surprise for he had forgotten that he had told Reese to do it. He would laugh about it later, saying, “I didn’t know he was gonna do it, but I was glad. I needed it!”
Goucher passes 5k all alone, running through a throng of supporters who have lined the area by the top of the course. Wetmore waits for his guys here, and Goucher looks positively effortless as he passes in 14:50—
ten seconds ahead of pace. “Let’s get that record!” he yells to Goucher.
“Let’s go!” His teammates have started to move up, and Friedberg is now in fifth, surrounded by three athletes from Oklahoma State.
Ponce has moved up to eighth, and he can see Friedberg up ahead.
He would say later, “I saw Friedberg surrounded by all these orange jerseys and I thought, ‘I gotta get those motherfuckers!’”
Meanwhile, farther back, Johnson has moved up to twentieth and RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
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Batliner is right on his heels. Johnson is following through on his pledge to get into it. But at this point, they have work to do, because Oklahoma State is threatening to run away with it.
Goucher cruises up the course’s most challenging feature — a gradual 400-meter climb followed by a steep 200 meter hill that crests about a half mile from the finish — with ease. He is on course record pace, and as he makes his way down the finishing stretch, he sees the clock and knows the course record now belongs to him. He shakes his fist in the air as he crosses the line in 23:45, over eight seconds ahead of the old mark, and a whopping 50 seconds ahead of runner-up Chuck Sloan of Oklahoma State.
Goucher is nonchalant about his win. He says, “I feel sharper. My legs are still tired for some reason, and I got a little complacent, I was looking around, but I definitely felt better than at Pre-Nationals. I had a lot left at the end. I felt like I was doing an AT, it really wasn’t bad.”
With Goucher in first and OSU’s Sloan in second, the battle for team honors is on. Finishing five seconds behind Chuck Sloan is none other than the Iceberg himself. Mike Friedberg has gone from the Junior Varsity a year ago to third at conference. He is ecstatic about the race: “I felt better than I ever have, ever. I didn’t even feel bad until the last 2k, and I was just, like, rolling the whole time, feeling good.”
One of Iowa State’s Kenyans finishes fourth while Kansas’s Jansen impressively hangs on for fifth. OSU gets their second man across in sixth, but Oscar Ponce finishes right behind him in seventh to keep CU a step ahead in the team competition. Right beh
ind Ponce, Roybal battles Oklahoma’s Rene Carlsen down the finishing stretch and neither is giving an inch. But thirty meters from the finish, Roybal stumbles, almost falling, and that gives Carlsen the extra step he needs to finish eighth.
Reese finishes two places and four seconds back in eleventh to round out the scoring for the Buffs, and seal another conference championship. Roybal is psyched with his performance, but Reese is not. “I didn’t take any chances,” Reese says. “I didn’t take any chance on switching gears, ever.” But nonetheless, he likes his chances in the season’s final races: “It usually happens like this with me. I need one race where I don’t take a chance, and the next race, I know I’ll be OK. I know I can be up there the next few races, if I just take a chance.”
Johnson and Batliner finish 20th and 21st for the sixth and seventh positions — in 25:19 and 25:23. Last night Wetmore had said running 25:20 would be, “a pretty good day.” Well, as their fifth man, Reese ran 24:57. Wetmore is pleased. He says afterwards, “I’m happy with the men.
It’s their first race in three weeks. I thought they did a good job.” He is particularly delighted with Friedberg. On his third-place finish he says, 194
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“That’s cool. It’s a great race for him, people gotta be scratching their heads over him, [saying] ‘Who is that guy?’”
For Batliner, the good news comes after the race, when his calf feels healthy. He says, “I finally got my running legs back. At 5k, I picked it up, and I felt like there was this little angry man trapped in me, somewhere, and I haven’t quite managed to dig him out yet. But I finally got my running legs back. It’s my first hard race and my calf’s handling the work now, so that’s good news.” He will continue to evaluate his progress from day to day, but he does not plan on missing any more hard workouts.
There are only a few hard ones left, anyhow. Says Wetmore, “We’ll run ten or twelve more hard days.” And then, well, it is like Goucher says,
“Then I’m gonna get ready to kill people.”
It is a joyous squad on the victory stand as the CU men are presented with the conference trophy. Wetmore does not join them, and neither does Tessman. Tessman stands alone off to the side watching his teammates. The twenty feet that separates him from his teammates feels like a mile. He cannot bear to even crack a smile.
THE 1998 BIG 12 CROSS COUNTRY CHAMPIONSHIPS
PLACE
NAME
UNIVERSITY
CLASS
TIME
1.
Adam Goucher
Colorado
Sr.
23:45.7 CR
2.
Charles Sloan
Oklahoma State
Jr.
24:35.5
3.
Mike Friedberg
Colorado
So.
24:40.5
4. Philemon
Too
Iowa
State
Jr.
24:42.6
5. Brain
Jansen
Kansas
Jr.
24:43.8
6.
Nathaniel Lane
Oklahoma State
Sr.
24:50.4
7. Oscar
Ponce
Colorado
Jr.
24:52.8
8.
Rene Carlsen
Oklahoma State
Sr.
24:53.1
9. Ronald
Roybal
Colorado
Jr.
24:53.4
10.
Brandon Jessup
Kansas State
So.
24:55.9
11. Tom
Reese
Colorado
Sr.
24:57.0
12. Brian
Young
Oklahoma
State
Sr.
25:01.5
13. Chris
Wells
Texas
Jr.
25:03.0
14. Ryan
Pirtle
Missouri
Sr.
25:05.1
15. Nick
Smith
Missouri
So. 25:06.1
16. Joe
McCune
Missouri
Jr.
25:06.4
17.
David Lichoro
Iowa State
Jr.
25:07.5
18.
Andrew Hennessy
Oklahoma State
Fr.
25:13.8
19. Ben
Dawson
Texas
Fr.
25:14.8
20. Jay
Johnson
Colorado
Sr.
25:19.4
21.
Adam Batliner
Colorado
Sr.
25:23.5
36. Chris
Valenti
Colorado
So. 25:50.8
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Sunday, November 1, 1998
The Grange
8:30 a.m.
Back to Work
Everyone is exhausted from the race and from a Halloween party that lasted late into the night at Robbie, Roybal, and Bat’s place. Robbie DJ’ed, and everyone dressed up in costumes and danced through the night.
Goucher and Reese had one of the best costumes, dressing as Chippen-dale dancers, complete with large tufts of chest hair.
But today is Sunday, and the long run is a ritual that must be observed. The pace mercifully stays controlled the entire way, and even the mileage hogs “only” run sixteen or seventeen miles. Everyone silently goes through the exercise, too tired to converse . . .
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Tuesday, November 3, 1998
Scott Carpenter Park
3:45 p.m.
Master Blaster
Tessman walks into the gym as the team stretches. It is the last anyone will see of him this season. “It was hard enough to watch the race,” he says. “I’m getting as far away from running as I can right now. I’m gonna take time off until December first.”
Despite the injury, he is still a convert to Wetmore’s system. Reflect-ing on the season he says, “It was going better than I thought it would go.
The fact that I didn’t race doesn’t change the shape I was in. I know what kind of shape I can get into with this type of training. This is definitely encouraging for track.”
The seven runners that are competing at regionals and alternate Chris Valenti are running 12 x 400 around Scott Carpenter Park. It is the first time this season that they are running here. The park is just down the Creek Path from the school and it is a grass loop that rises and falls.
Running clockwise, there is a gradual ascent followed by a steep downhill. Wetmore will have them alternate directions so that they practice running hard up both short, steep hills and more gradual hills.
The men are paired up with women into teams with names like
Slugs, Tapeworms, and Maggots. Goucher is a Maggot, and he is paired with freshman Jen Fazioli, the slowest member of the women’s squad.
Goucher sees his pairing on the board and says, “I always get my ass kicked in this workout. I might as well give up, I never win.” Now, he does not exactly get killed, but to his ire, in five years, his team has never won.
Wetmore still likes the Maggots’ chances. “She’s not out the back as much as he is out front,” he says. But this does nothing to calm Faz’s fears. “I heard about last year,” she tells him, and those in earshot laugh, including Goucher. “Hey,” he tells her
, “all you gotta do is win.”
The little red-headed freshman from New York is still apprehensive.
Last year, Goucher brought his teammate to tears. He says, “It just sucked. I was getting pissed because I thought she wasn’t being tough. I was being a competitive jerk. I’m a competitive person; I want to win. But shit happens. This workout is not meant for me to win.”
The other teams’ chances are helped by Goucher’s lingering soreness. Running 17.5 miles on Sunday at 5:45 a mile the day after setting a course record at Big 12’s does not help. But, in a continuing effort to get RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
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healthy, he ran an easy 65 minutes yesterday and then received another hard massage on his left leg last night.
Wetmore addresses the team as they finish stretching: “This is the last hard anaerobic workout significantly above race pace. It’s up to you to make it work. Meet me at Scott Carpenter Park in twenty minutes, psyched up and spiked up.”
When they arrive at the park, the air is chilly. The sky is threatening snow, and Wetmore greets them brusquely, “Hurry up! If it starts snowing, I’m going home, and you’re doing this alone.” Everyone laughs, knowing no matter the weather, he is not going anywhere.
As is his custom, Wetmore offers more information on the purpose behind the workout as they change into their spikes. “You can develop your own team strategy. You can tag each other, do any secret strategy, it’s entirely up to you. Everyone does twelve. The object is to get a deep anaerobic stimulus. It’s easy to do it on the track and have me yell at you, but this is more fun.” He emphasizes how much they should be hurting:
“Make sure we’re getting into debt. If we’re feeling good and controlled by six, you better get going.”
After the first interval, Goucher looks at Wetmore and says jokingly,
“What if you’ve already achieved the workout?” Wetmore smiles and says,
“Then you have eleven more workouts!”
Some of the athletes have stripped down to their shorts, and some are in tights. All jump in place to stay warm while waiting for their teammates.
Alan Culpepper jogs by as they are full into it, and Wetmore announces,
“Hey, Dung Beetles, here’s a former guest champion.” Culpepper smiles and waves hello.