by Various
In the end, it wasn’t as close as it seemed. Burner came up and around the corner and he kind of ran me over as I tried to catch him. We had about ten or fifteen seconds to spare before the train came roaring through and that was enough time for us to take off and scramble through the hole in the fence. We knew they’d be making their calls and trying to track us down, so we spent the next half hour running and hiding behind a few dumpsters and trying to make our way back to my car. We never had any time to talk about it until later that night when it became, like everything else in our pasts, a kind of joke. We called it “The night when Burner pulled a train out of his ass.”
But that’s the image I keep of him – Burner running in the light and getting away. That’s the one I keep. For those few seconds, he was like one of those fugitives trying to break out of prison and they just couldn’t catch him. The train kept coming down on him like some massive predator and he shouldn’t have had a chance, but he was like that one stupid gazelle on the nature show, the one who somehow gets away even though the cheetahs or lions or hyenas should already be feasting. Burner was one of those fine-limbed lucky bastards, but he was still here and his life, like mine, kept rolling along, filling in all this extra time.
We got our stuff together and left the hotel at around four o’clock with our bags slung over our shoulders. We took a shuttle bus, one of those big coaches with dark tinted windows that ferried the athletes back and forth. On the day of any big race, those buses are tough places, crowded with all kinds of people who just want to be alone. The big-shouldered sprinters are the worst. You don’t want to be anywhere near them in the last hours. For them it’s going to be over in ten seconds, good or bad, so they don’t have room to negotiate. You’ve seen them – some of those hundred-metre guys are built up like superheroes, or like those stone statues that are supposed to represent the perfect human form, but when the race gets close, everyone of them is scared. As Burner and I squeezed our way down the aisle, we passed this big black guy sitting by himself, completely cut off from everything else. He had the dark glasses on and the big headphones so that nothing could get in or out and he just kept rocking back and forth, slow and silent and always on the beat so you could almost see the music he was listening to. He looked like one of those oriental monks, swaying and praying and perfectly out of it.
Burner was at the jumpy stage now and he was nearly shaking because we were on our way and it seemed like things had already started. We dumped ourselves into an unoccupied row and right away he started drumming his hands on the seat in front of us.
“I am feeling it, feeling it,” he said, almost singing, and he had this big goofy grin on his face. It was impossible for him to be still even for a second and he kept drumming along on the seat, hands blurring.
“It’s the big one today, boys,” he shouted, revving it up.
“Got to bring everything you got.” Again, way too loud.
“No tomorrow.”
The clichés dribbled out of him, but this wasn’t the place for it. There were too many other people around and they all had their own things to take care of. After about a minute, the tall, long-haired javelin guy who’d been sitting in front of us got up and turned around like an angry bear up on his hind legs.
“You touch this chair again,” he said, and he put his finger directly on the spot where Burner had been banging away on the back of the headrest. “You touch this chair again, and I swear to God, I will twist that skinny piece of shit neck right off your skinny piece of shit body.”
You could tell this guy wasn’t one of those macho bodybuilder, roid-raging throwers. He just wanted his quiet and needed his time like everybody else. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but most of the throwers are like that, quiet and turned in. They try to make it look easy and some of them can spin a discus on their pinky finger like it’s as light as a basketball, but if you watch you see they never let it go. Some of the others just sit there, rolling the shot from hand to hand, getting the feel for its heaviness as it thuds down into their chalky palms. Those guys are faster and smarter than you think. I heard someone say that all the best throwing performances come from guys with good feet and good heads. I bet the bear in front was one of the good ones. Burner couldn’t retreat fast enough.
“I didn’t think, man,” he sort of stammered. “I didn’t know you were there. Sorry. Sorry.”
I looked the bear right in the eye, just like you’re supposed to, and I tried to show him that I sympathized and understood. I said “Nerves” as if that single word could explain everything about Burner.
The guy nodded and he said he knew all about that but, come on. He wasn’t happy, but eventually he settled back down, sort of deflating back into his seat.
When it was over, Burner gave me this wide-eyed look of relief and pretended to wipe the sweat off his forehead and fling it off to the side. Then he rested his head against the window and just watched the traffic going by.
I looked over at him and thought about all the buses we’d been on together. Almost since the early days as juniors, he’d been on every trip I had ever taken. At first, it was only short hops up to London and back or maybe Toronto, but after a while, as we kept at it and got better and better, we eventually hit the bigger circuits. Now we were only home four or five weekends a year and the rest of the time we were exactly like this, squished up against each other on a bus or on a plane, trying to sleep sitting up or trying to read our books under those little circular lights in the ceiling and always waiting for the next fast-food stop or bathroom break.
I used to think that a bus full of track people on their way to a meet was like one of those old fashioned circus trains, the kind that used to roll into a small town carrying the big top tent and pulling a bunch of different crazy looking cars, each one painted with curly red and gold swirls. You know the one I mean? In the Fisher Price version of that train, every animal gets his own car and the necks of the giraffes stick out through a hole in the roof. All the freak show people live in that train: the strongman with his curly moustache and Tarzan outfit; the little girl contortionist who can roll herself into a perfect circle; the guy who can take anybody’s punch and never get hurt. I used to think that’s what we were like, the track people. Each of us had one of those strange bodies designed to do only one thing. The lunatic high jumpers who talked to themselves could leap over their own heads, and if you gave the pole vaulters a good, strong stick, they could put themselves through a third-storey window. The long jumpers could leap over a mid-sized station wagon and the shot putters could bench press it. Even the fragile-looking, super-thin girls with their hair tied back in harmless looking pony tails. Those distance girls might be iron deficient and anorexic and maybe none of them have had a regular period in years, but they could all run a hundred and twenty miles in a week, almost a marathon a day. Those girls had pain thresholds that hadn’t been discovered yet, and if they tried they could slow their heart rates down so far you’d actually have to wait between the beats. We all had our special skills, our fascinating powers, and we just barnstormed from city to city, performing them again and again in front of different people. Back when Burner and I started with this, every trip seemed like it was part of the tour, part of this bigger adventure, but I wasn’t sure anymore. Sometimes I thought it might be better to be able to eat fire, or swallow a sword, or hang upside down on the trapeze and catch my cousin as he flung himself through the air.
The hydraulic door hissed open when we got to the stadium and everybody bounced off and split up into their natural groups. Burner and I blended in with a bunch of distance people we knew from other clubs and we checked the schedule to see if everything was running on time. The air was perfectly still and the temperature was right where we wanted it, just inching its way over toward cool. Burner breathed it in deeply through his nose and I caught the way he smiled his small, secret smile.
“You’re going to have a good one today,” I told him. Sometimes you can
just recognize it in other people.
“Wait and see,” he said. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
That’s what it’s like when you taper down your training in the right way. There’s just this weird feeling you get when you’re finally ready to race. It’s like you can barely keep your own body under control. In the beginning, when you’re pounding through those early weeks of the training and building up your base, you can never get away from the ache of being so deep-down tired and you feel like you’re slowly breaking down, right to the core of your last, smashed cell. Eventually though, time passes and you get used to it. Everything balances out and you can kind of reset yourself on this new, higher level. Then, when you get close to the competition, you cut your mileage right back almost to nothing and start sharpening up and taking lots of rest. It’s the trickiest thing to do correctly, but if you can lighten up at exactly the right time then it all kind of reverses and the hurt you put in earlier comes back out as strength. All of a sudden you feel like you have more energy than you need and everything seems easier than it should be. That’s where Burner was now. I could see it. You maybe get that feeling three or four times in your life, if you’re lucky.
If I ever have kids, I think I’ll let them participate in the grade school track meets when they’re little, but that’s it. Before it gets too serious, I’ll move them over to something else like soccer, or basketball, or table tennis. Something with a team or something where you can put the blame on your equipment if it all goes wrong. But when my child is still little, I’m definitely going to push for the grade school track meet because it never gets better than that. In the grade school track meet, you give the kids one of those lumpy polyester uniforms and they turn all excited. They get the day off school and they get to cheer for their friends and maybe they get picked to be one of the four that runs the shiny baton all the way around the circle without dropping it. At the grade school track meet, they give out ribbons that go all the way down to the “participant” level, and if you do well, they read your name over the announcements at school so everybody will know about it. You get to pull on a borrowed pair of spikes and go pounding down that long runway before you jump into the sand. It’s always hot and sunny and maybe your parents let you buy a drumstick or one of those overpriced red-white-and-blue popsicles from the acne-scarred high-school kid who has to ride around on a solid steel bicycle with a big yellow cooler stuck on the front. Maybe the girl with the red hair is there, the girl from the other school, the girl who wins all the longer races like you do. Maybe the newspaper takes a picture, you and the red-haired girl, standing on the top step of a plywood podium, holding all your first-place ribbons in the middle of a weedy field while all the dandelions are blowing their fuzzy heads off.
That’s how it should always be. The stands should always be full of parents who don’t know anything – people who can’t tell the difference between what is really good and what is really bad – but they’re there anyway, clapping and shouting their children’s names, telling them to “go” and “go.” You see why it’s so nice. The lanes are crowded with kids clunking their way home to the finish line and trying so hard. They go sailing way over the high jump bar – it looks so easy and they come down on the other side, rolling softly into those big, blue, fluffy mats. It’s sunny and everybody’s laughing and everything is still new.
All that disappears when you get serious. At the very top end – and, when you come down to it, Burner and I were still far from the real top end – it’s completely different. Everything starts to matter too much and too many things can go wrong and everybody knows the difference between what is really good and what is really bad. It comes back to the numbers. At the top end, we count it all up and measure it out and then we print the results so everybody can see. The guys I raced against were the mathematical totals of what they had done so far. That was it. Nobody cared about your goal or about what you planned to do in the future. It might take two full years of training to drop a single second or just a couple tenths off your personal best but you couldn’t complain. We were all in the same boat. For us, every little bit less was a little bit more.
Really, it’s the opposite of healthy. People will do anything to make those numbers go down. Some of them gobble big spoonfuls of straight baking soda before a race, even though they know it gives you this brutal, bloody diarrhea an hour later. That’s nothing. It’s even legal. They can’t ban you for baking soda, but I know guys who cross over, guys juiced up on EPO and guys who just disappear for a year and then come back like superstars. They say they’ve been training at altitude on some mountain in Utah, but everybody knows they’ve been through the lab, getting their transfusions and playing around with their red blood cell count. Burner and I never did that, but we used to go to this vet, a guy who worked on the racehorses out at the track. If you came at night and brought him straight cash, he’d give you a bottle of DMSO and a couple of these giant horse pills that you were supposed to chop up into little chunks. It sounds bad, but this was all perfectly legal too. His stuff was nothing more than super-powerful aspirin delivered in massive doses. We’d go see him and he’d say, “Now you’re going to have a big dinner and a full stomach before you touch this stuff, right?” and we’d lie and he’d give us what we wanted. As if he couldn’t tell that none of us ever ate a full meal. I used to pop anti-inflammatories like they were candy love hearts, going through a handful of naproxen every day.
Even the dangerous cortisone injections in those big needles, the ones they fire right into that band of tough connective tissue at the bottom of your foot, I’ve had those. They say you’re only supposed to take three of those in your whole life – that’s all a regular person can handle – but the year before the trials, I got six in five months. I just kept going to different doctors, in different crowded clinics, guys who didn’t know where I’d been two weeks earlier. It was the same thing every time. They’d go through their whole spiel again, and I’d pretend to pay close attention as they explained it all out.
“You can only get three of these,” they’d say, “just three, you understand?”
I’d look and nod my head seriously and sometimes I’d even write the number down for them, a big loopy three on one of their little pads and I’d underline it. Then I’d hop right up onto their tissue-covered table, rip off my sock, stick out my fucked-up foot, and brace myself for number 4 or number 5 or whatever came next.
It always got bad before the biggest competitions like this one, or before the Olympic trials or if there was a big trip to China on the line or carding money. You’d get stuck with this feeling like when you’re blowing up a balloon and you know you’re almost at the limit and you’re not sure if you should give it that little extra puff because there might still be room for a last bit of air, or it all might just explode in your face.
Burner and I started our warm-up jog about an hour before the race was scheduled to go. It took me a while to get started, and for those first few minutes I hobbled along doing the old-man shuffle until my body came back to me and my Achilles remembered what it was supposed to do. Burner was smooth right from the beginning. While I jerked up and down, fighting against the parts of myself that didn’t want to do this anymore, he kind of hovered beside me flat and easy. We were like two people at the airport. He floated and seemed to move along without any effort – like one of those well-pressed, put-together guys who zooms past on the moving sidewalk – and I was like the slob with too many carry-on bags, huffing and puffing and dropping things, hauling all this extra stuff and just hoping to find the right gate. Even my breathing was heavier than it should have been.
We made a big loop out and around the stadium, winding our way up and down the quiet little side streets, past houses full of people who couldn’t care less about what was happening just down the road. Burner and I had probably run thousands of miles together, but I was pretty sure these would be the last ones. I’d been thinking about it for a while, b
ut I decided it there, during that last little warm-up jog. I think all those houses where nobody cared kind of forced themselves into my head.
“This is going to be it for me,” I told him, after about fifteen minutes.
“What do you mean ‘it’?”
“This is it. The last real ball-buster race for me. I think it’s over. Time to get on with everything else.”
It was easier than I thought it would be. All you had to do was say it. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt better and calmer, but Burner didn’t take it the same way.
“What?” he said, and he looked at me with this kind of confused sneer.
“Come on, Mikey. What else is there for you to do? You can’t be finished. You’ve got lots more in the tank. You can’t be one of those guys who gives it up and sits on the couch for a year eating chips and dip. You’ll never be the guy in the fun run, the guy with a walkman, the loser who wants to win his age group. You can’t just turn it off like that.”
I felt bad for springing this on him at such a bad time. It hadn’t been part of my big plan, but it’s hard to hide it when something that used to be important suddenly isn’t important anymore. I felt like I was kind of abandoning him, dumping him out there in the middle of those empty houses, and it was difficult and sad and correct all at the same time. Like when my mother and father finally broke up: difficult and sad, yes, but correct too, the right thing to do. Burner should have seen this coming from me. He could read the results sheets as well as I could, and he knew where my name fitted in.
“I’ve gone as far as I can,” I told him. “You know you can’t do this if you don’t have the feel for it.”
