Here’s a story: Except for illness, injury, Nordic ski season, a couple ennui-riddled winter months in middle school, and very few other exceptions, I’ve run every single day for the past ten years. From the start it was just a way to make friends and kill time and maybe get a little ego boost when I made a personal best, so no real team commitment. The uncomplicated individualism was part of the sport’s draw, actually: it was everyone for themself, whatever colors you wore were incidental. Things changed when I came to Grinnell, when the team table became my home base in the dining hall and the cross country house was my relief from campus-bound stress every weekend. Slowly, the score we got as a group began to matter to me. At around the same time, I became a potential person to change that score: first as a spare part if someone more competent fell back, then as one of the scorers myself. Going into the end of my first decade of running, I knew I could make a difference, and I knew that it really mattered this time. Will and Evelyn Freeman were retiring from their forty year tenure as the men’s and women’s cross country coaches, with a thirty year winning streak at the conference championship on the men’s side, nearly unbroken save for the past two years. Will claimed that it didn’t matter, but I knew that another loss would end things bitterly, that he left the team in decline. Fear for conference had been a nearly constant background whine since the summer, adding urgency to my recovery when I got hurt and adding stress whenever I didn’t have anything better to worry about. But in the week leading up to it, it rose to nearly consume my life. I couldn’t sleep well the night before, I couldn’t breath evenly, I couldn’t help from shaking. We all knew that the race would be a fiasco: a good layer of snow had collected over the past few days. It had mostly melted by race time, but that just left the ground swampy, with wide, ice floe-filled puddles. To make it worse, the wind was cold, and strong enough to push you off your feet if you didn’t have both of them on the ground (which you rarely do when running). But once the gun went off I hardly felt the wind, and running through puddles didn’t feel much different than solid ground. Adrenaline took over, I guess, replacing logic with a blind impulse to pass as many people as I could before my legs gave out. They gave out in the last kilometer, but by then I was in tenth place, and I only fell back one spot. As soon as I stopped moving I collapsed, immobilized by how cold I just realized I was. Luckily my parents and girlfriend were right there and offered me spare coats and snowpants as I shuffled off to the golf club, which had a strict no-runners policy, but they seemed okay looking the other way when they realized how hypothermic I was. Once inside, I asked my parents if we’d won, and they said they didn’t know. We had a tight top four, but a long gap after that. Worry heated me up again, as I realized that we might just lose by a single point, a point I could’ve caught if I’d held on a little while longer. But, when I was unfrozen and steady enough on my feet to go back outside and watch the women’s race, I asked the first teammate I saw who won, and learned that we did. Content, I watched the women demolish the competition much more handily than the men had.
I planned on writing about disappointment, on how victory passes so quickly and then you need to move on to the next shiny hope. But, writing this, I don’t think that’s really true anymore. Yes, I was struck with an intense “Now what?” feeling as soon as I heard we’d won, a feeling of drifting pointlessness now that we’d gotten what we’d wanted. But, writing those 619 words above, I don’t think I need to philosophize about what to do after winning. It’s fine just to enjoy it, even to gloat a little bit, and to rest up. Of course, I can’t rest just yet, we’ve still got regionals, which we’d be on track to win if this were really a story worth bragging about, but we don’t have a prayer. Which I guess is the real truth of these sports stories: neither victory or success are really lasting, and neither do the glory or shame that come with them. But you can feel these things and perseverate on them, for a time. Not necessary, but highly encouraged.
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