Once a Runner

by John L Parker

  But now in the vague recesses of his mind, Cassidy detected deep and sinister rumblings; storm clouds that chilled the air but were not yet visible on the horizon.

  And too, he did not do well with hospitals and infirmaries; repositories of laboratory smells, lethal-looking silverware; launching pads for flagging hopes…

  16.

  New Territory

  QUENTON CASSIDY had returned from his daily afternoon visit to Mizner and now sat in his darkening room feeling not so much despair as nerve-jangling emptiness. The scenery was closing in on him. Low blood pH, he thought; the trick is to keep from getting nervous in the pack, like Bruce says. Think of how anchovies must swim a thousand to a square yard with a perfect twin on either side and a tiny bung flitting up ahead.

  The Kernsville Sun lay in a heap at the foot of the bed. He had stopped trying to read when the sun got too low and he realized he was too tired to get up and turn on the light. So he just sat, staring out the window. It was slim pickings in the limp little sheet anyway; warmed-over wire stories, a hard-hitting editorial on sewage bonds, an irate letter from a lady complaining about a neighbor’s dog shitting in her azaleas, and sports editor Jack Hairlepp’s column urging full support for Dick Doobey’s next season. There was a quote from the coach about “some real fine junior college transfers who are going to be a real great help to us out there next year.” At that point Cassidy had tossed the paper, idly wondering if Hairlepp drew his salary from the newspaper or just picked up his check on Friday from the athletic department’s publicity office.

  Perhaps he was too hard on the local gazette. There was, after all, real news in the human-interest vein on page 2A under the “Smile for the Day” logo. It seems that somewhere out in the great American night a felonious ebony hand had skillfully slid a flat piece of steel down a car window, allowing a hopped-up connoisseur of spot remover to become the temporary (if illegal) bailee of a Ford Fairlane with transmission problems; thrown into the deal was a dark green garbage bag in the backseat, the contents of which were exactly: someone’s dead mother-in-law.

  Cassidy had thought: oh, this is a fun-loving citizenry.

  “HEY, how come it’s so dark in here?” Hosford wandered in, cracking his knee on the edge of the dresser.

  “I’m afraid if I turn on a light I’ll look in the mirror and see that I look as bad as I feel,” Cassidy said, but not uncheerfully.

  “Ah well. Mind if I sit down? Hey, the Sun. Anything in here?”

  “As usual the only important message is contained in Doones-bury.”

  “Well, as it happens, I bring news myself. I hope it’s not bad. Western Union guy just brought it a few minutes ago. I thought you were asleep, so I signed for it.”

  “Telegram? Thanks, Hos…”

  “I’ll mosey along, I guess. Hey, listen…”

  “Hey, this is open…”

  “…congratulations, Cass, all the guys think it’s just great.”

  “All the…Hosford! Come back here, you nosy son of a bitch…”

  “BRUCE? Sorry to call during dinner, but you’ll never guess—”

  “You got invited to the Sunkist Games next weekend,” Denton said. Cassidy slumped.

  “How the hell did you know?”

  “I talked to the meet director when we were at Millrose.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to know if I thought you could go under four minutes on his track in San Diego.”

  “And?”

  “I asked him can a fish hold his breath under water.”

  Cassidy yelped, then calmed himself.

  “Wonderful, Bruce. I haven’t even run that outdoors yet…”

  “Life is short, life is hard.”

  “You’re running the three there?”

  “Right.”

  “Good field?”

  “I don’t know what you call good. Just Shorter and a bunch of—”

  “Shorter!”

  “Mmmm. You’d think the little marathoner bastard would stick to the great outdoors. Unfortunately he seems to like the boards. And in case it slipped your mind, he once held the American record for two-mile indoors. On that very track.”

  “How, uh, do you think you’ll handle him, Bruce?” Was that concern in his voice? Denton rattled around on his end for a few seconds; Cassidy couldn’t tell what he was doing.

  “Why, Quenton, I’ll break his back…”

  BRAGGADOCIO HAS LITTLE TO DO with it, however, when the really good boys clash and everyone is feeling chipper. The two gold medalists broke away from the field early and were soon circling the track at a distressing pace that quickly found most of the other runners lapped. Although Denton’s credentials were in a race slightly longer than three miles and Shorter’s in the marathon, their training was remarkably similar. The crowd was standing during the last half mile; the lead changed three times as they probed at each other. Denton’s long powerful strides were matched by Shorter’s clipped, silky ones. The marathoner was so smooth as to give the impression of gliding on wheels. The strain of the pace showed around the edges of their otherwise unemotional faces. Cassidy watched in awe as they threw surges at each other. Sheeeitfire, Cassidy thought, this is awful. We need some relief.

  His shouts were lost in the general pandemonium as the two runners entered the final lap with Denton slightly in front and Shorter on his outside shoulder. Cassidy figured it was highly unlikely that a marathoner would be able to outsprint a 5000-meter champion, but his joyous victory whoop came just a trifle too early. It was a doubly painful revelation to watch the all-too-clear demonstration of mortality that was the last lap of that race. Frank Shorter had to break an American indoor record for three miles, and his margin of victory was exactly one tenth of a second, but there was no doubt whatsoever that when Bruce Denton reached the finish line, he had the unique experience of finding the yarn already parted for him. Cassidy was stunned.

  Despite the incredible effort of their contest, the two runners were soon coherent enough to be interviewed by a particularly irrelevant Howard Cosell. Cassidy waited outside the glow of hot television lights in a pale haze of his own confusion. He had never seen Denton lose a race and he wasn’t sure yet how he felt. When the interview was over, Denton and Shorter left the infield together and sprinted through a veritable tidal wave of little kids waving programs and pens. Denton turned, spotted Cassidy, motioned for him to join them. When the miler caught up to the pair of distance men in the hallway, they were already lost in the numerical shorthand of training talk. Shorter was reserved, shy, yet with a sweetness that seemed positively contrary to the aggression he summoned up for his competitors. His eyes reflected that irony. Cassidy wanted to ask him a hundred questions, but he bit his tongue. He was in truth a bit flabbergasted. First he had watched Denton outsprinted by a marathoner and now he and that marathoner were jogging along chatting about training like it was old home week. Denton had never mentioned that he even knew Shorter. Cassidy only half listened to the mumble of mileage figures:

  “…at altitude of course, and then 123, 132, 137, and 145, but with only two interval sessions a week…” “…and a long one on Sunday, about 20, Louise goes the first 10 with us…” “…step-down starting with a 4:12 mile and a 3:02 three quarters…” “…then 35 times 220 all of them pretty quick for me, 28 to 30 or so…” And so on. It was quiet for several seconds before he realized he had been spoken to.

  “I’m sorry?” Cassidy said.

  “I said Millrose. You won Millrose two weeks ago, didn’t you?” Shorter was being polite, trying to include him in the conversation.

  “Ah. Yes. The field wasn’t that strong, you see…”

  “Well, anyone who can run close to four on that track gets my respect. I think they made it out of pound cake dyed green.”

  “At least no one will get shin splints on the thing.”

  “I hate to interrupt a medical discussion,” Denton said, pointing to a clock on the wall, “but I
believe it’s time for the stud milers among us to be doing some striders. This is one meet they generally manage to run on time. Mr. Shorter here finished the three so quickly he put them several minutes ahead.”

  Cassidy held out his hand to Shorter. “Hey, it was nice to meet you. Uh, do you have any parting words for an aspiring young runner?”

  Shorter looked puzzled, amused. He looked over at Denton, then smiled back at Cassidy.

  “Well, no, not actually. Except have a good time.”

  Denton laughed and waved Cassidy off.

  “That one,” Denton said, tilting his head at the departing miler. “Keep your eye on that one…”

  Shorter nodded.

  THAT NIGHT Quenton Cassidy ran the best mile of his life and thereby changed his position in the tiny universe of runners nearly imperceptibly. He ran 4:00.1 and of course would never be quite the same. But his race was also a different kind of revelation.

  And although Denton tried several times on the flight back to put things into perspective for him, Cassidy knew he was on the fearful and nebulous border of new territory.

  He finished fifth, and was lucky to get that.

  17.

  Breaking Down

  CASSIDY HAD BEEN THROUGH IT BEFORE, every one of them had at one time or another, but it had never been quite this bad. Denton called it “breaking down,” although Cassidy preferred the nomenclature of certain Caribbean quasi-religious groups; walking death was much closer to it. Quite a bit more, really, than the simple exhaustion of a single difficult workout, breaking down was a cumulative physical morbidity that usually built up over several weeks and left the runner struggling to recover from one session to the next.

  The object, according to Denton, was to “run through” the thing, just as he maintained one should attempt to “run through” most of those other little hubcaps life rolls into your lane; everything from death in the family to cancer of the colon.

  Breaking down was not a required checkpoint on the road to competitive fitness. In fact, many coaches warned against it. But Denton viewed it as an opportunity to leapfrog over months of safer, less strenuous training, thus tempering survival-hardened muscles. The alternative, total rest, was too much the other extreme, the easy way out. That wouldn’t do.

  The toll on the runner—and those around him—was high, psychologically as well as physically. He became weak, depressed; he needed twelve to fourteen hours of sleep a night. He was literally desperate for rest, spent his waking hours with his legs elevated, in a state of general irritability. He became asexual, rendered, in the words of the immortal limerick, really quite useless on dates. He was a thoroughly unpleasant person.

  But then his life was most certainly focused on the Task. And hadn’t he decided at one time that he would do whatever was necessary to become…whatever it was he could become? Perhaps. But at this juncture, many a runner begins to reexamine some of the previously unexamined premises. The question that plagues the runner undergoing breakdown training is: Why Am I Living Like This? The question eventually becomes: Is This Living?

  From the crucible of such inner turmoil come the various metals, soft or brittle, flawed or pure, precious or common, that determine the good runners, the great runners, and perhaps the former runners. For those who cannot deal with (or evade) the consequences of their singular objective will simply fade away from it all and go on to less arduous pursuits. There has probably never been one yet who has done so, however, without leaving a part of himself there in the quiet tiled solace of the early afternoon locker room, knotting his loathsome-smelling laces for yet another, Jesus God, ten-miler with the boys. Once a runner…

  Cassidy always felt that those who partook of the difficult pleasures of the highly competitive runner only when comfortable, when in a state of high energy, when rested, elated, or untroubled by previous exertions, such dilettantes missed the point. They were the ones who showed up at the beginning of the season, perhaps hung on for a few rough periods, maybe ran a race or two. But Cassidy noticed that their eyes always gave them away; the gloom, one could tell, was too much for them. It would soon engulf them. They would begin to ask themselves the Questions too many times. Soon they would miss a workout. Then a few in a row. Then they would chicken out on themselves during the tough, stupid, endless middle of a bad race. And you don’t easily hide such things from yourself, much less your teammates. Soon when the questions were posed, there would be no answers. The runner would begin to feel self-conscious around the others, knowing that he was no longer one of them; eventually he would drift off, and be a runner no more…

  Quenton Cassidy’s method of dealing with fundamental doubts was simple: he didn’t think about them at all. These questions had been considered a long time ago, decisions made, answers recorded, and the book closed. If it had to be reopened every time the going got rough, he would spend more time rationalizing than training; his log would start to disclose embarrassing information, perhaps blank squares. Even a self-made obsessive-compulsive could not tolerate that. He was uninterested in the perspective of the fringe runners, the philosopher runners, the training rats; those who sat around reading abstruse and meaningless articles in Runner’s World, coining yet more phrases to describe the indescribable, waxing mystical over the various states of euphoria that the anointed were allegedly privy to.

  On the track, the Cassidys of the world ate such specimens alive.

  Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes. They came, when they did, quite naturally and he was content to enjoy them privately. He ran not for crypto-religious reasons, but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a tenth of a second, by an inch, by two feet or two yards, than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province). If he could conquer the weakness, the cowardice in himself, he would not worry about the rest; it would come. Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed, strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge. Such rites demand, if they are to be meaningful at all, a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.

  Anything else that comes out of that process was by-product. Certain compliments and observations made him uneasy; he explained that he was just a runner; an athlete, really, with an absurdly difficult task. He was not a health nut, was not out to mold himself a stylishly slim body. He did not live on nuts and berries; if the furnace was hot enough, anything would burn, even Big Macs. He listened carefully to his body and heeded strange requests. Like a pregnant woman, he sometimes sought artichoke hearts, pickled beets, smoked oysters. His daily toil was arduous; satisfying on the whole, but not the bounding, joyous nature romp described in the magazines. Other runners, real runners, understood it quite well.

  Quenton Cassidy knew what the mystic-runners, the joggers, the runner-poets, the Zen runners, and others of their ilk were talking about. But he also knew that their euphoric selves were generally nowhere to be seen on dark, rainy mornings. They primarily wanted to talk it, not do it. Cassidy very early on understood that a true runner ran even when he didn’t feel like it, and raced when he was supposed to, without excuses and with nothing held back. He ran to win, would die in the process if necessary, and was unimpressed by those who disavowed such a base motivation. You are not allowed to renounce that which you never possessed, he thought.

  The true competitive runner, simmering in his own existential juices, endured his melancholia the only way he knew how: gently, together with those few others who also endured it, yet very much alone. He ran because it grounded him in basics. There was both life and death in it; it was unadulterated by media hype, trivial cares, political meddling. He suspected it kept him from that most real variety of schizophrenia that the republic was then sprouti
ng like mushrooms on a stump.

  Running to him was real; the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.

  18.

  Meetings

  SITTING QUIETLY over his sandwiches, Cassidy chewed mechanically. He did not look happy. From the kitchen came metallic clatter and laughter; cooks, he thought, are a carefree lot after everyone has been fed.

  This morning had been typical of the past two weeks. Cassidy wondered quite seriously if he could (should someone put a big gun to his head) go out on the track and run a 4:30 mile flat out. The morning seven had been sluggish and Mize wasn’t there to commiserate with. While dressing for his first class he glanced at the mirror, shrugged, went back to bed. He slept soundly for five hours, woke grumpily, and stumbled downstairs for a late lunch. In the three weeks since the Sunkist meet Denton had taken a special interest in his training. They now ran together in the afternoons, an arrangement approved by Cornwall since Cassidy’s growing strength was beginning to dishearten the others in interval workouts.

  Denton then insisted on raising mileage. Tired as he was after the Sunkist weekend, Monday was a twenty-three-mile day. The week totaled 127 and it appeared they would not be slacking off any. He lived from workout to workout, hanging on like a crazed marsupial on a branch in a flash flood. Life was becoming, he admitted to himself, more than a little morbid.

  Hosford wandered over with his tray.

  “Sandwiches again,” he said, sitting down heavily across from Cassidy.

  “Fuel for the furnace, hardly makes any difference,” Cassidy said. To demonstrate his point, perhaps, he chewed as if it were an effort he could barely maintain.