Dark

*This post is a complement to my post "Light", written late last year*

 It was just after 10pm when I finished throwing on my running clothes. My legs were tired, my body was tired, and after a full week of teaching and coaching, I was ready for sleep. Nonetheless, I must run. Searching through my bag, I quickly realize I forgot my running headlamp at home. No big deal, I reason to myself, I've run these gravel roads in the dark without a light before! Having no GPS watch either, I tie up my Brooks and head out the door. With no wind and an overcast sky, it is quiet and quite dark.

I start jogging, unable to see the road or anything that it might contain. There are some folks at camp this weekend, and I immediately worry about hitting one of their vehicles in the parking lot, so I swing as wide as I think I need, and turn to continue down the road. I'm nervous. I go past a staff housing unit, with a yard light, and for a few moments, all is well. Then, I'm thrust back into the darkness. I can barely make out the outline of the gravel road, noticing the line between the gravel and the grass ditch. I quickly become terrified. What if an animal jumped out at me? I couldn't even see if it was there!

I stopped briefly to think. I used to run in the dark all the time- what changed? Well, I suppose living in a town where in the past there has been supposed mountain lion sightings has me realizing that I might not be as indestructible as I once thought. So, I quickly run back to the house to grab something to protect myself with. I go into the kitchen and open up the utensils drawer. I pull out a butter knife. Would this be enough to protect me? Nah. I open another drawer and grab a much sharper vegetable-cutting knife. Yes, this will work. I take a short moment to consider the unreasonable-ness of carrying a sharp knife with me while running for 30 minutes, but I conclude it's my only option and head back out the door.

Into the dark.

I start down the parking lot again, carefully monitoring my arm swing so I don't impale myself. I pass the staff house with the light, and plunge back into the absolute darkness. Why couldn't there be a moon or something to at least shine SOME light? I seize up with fear immediately again. Each step forward allows me another chance to picture a predator pouncing at my throat, tearing at my jugular, when I didn't even know it was there in the first place. My pace slows to a timid hop, until my shuffle stops and I listen. Every whistle of grass, every movement of the twigs in the slight breeze is a death sentence of a strong animal running towards me. I hear something and immediately call out "GO!", because I've heard that you are supposed to make noise to deter mountain lions and other predators.

But I am no big cat- nay, I'm a scaredy cat. I turn around and quicken my pace all the way back to the house. I'm angry. I recall a few years ago running this very same gravel road with no light assistance, and having to run in the ditch because a car was coming and I didn't want to die. Why am I so afraid now? Why do I believe mountain lions lie in wait around every dark corner? The most important question though: is this an irrational fear, or was I irrational to no-light run in the dark previously?

I take a moment to do what I always do: think about what people did before the advent of one of our joys today: electricity. Before our lights of today, what did people do? My first thought was that they probably didn't go running around at night, for risk of, you know, being eaten or falling somewhere without the ability to get up and no lifealert available. Heck, maybe it was so dark that they wouldn't even be able to get home. Even though it's completely dark here, there is still a slight glow in the distance from lights.

Of course, it then occurs to me that people had fire, and could carry it around like they do on Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones (right?). I mean, is that reasonable? Would people have torches that they would walk around in the dark with? Was there any other light besides fire? I would suppose not, but what do I know?

I was now faced with a problem that fewer people every year in the US are faced with: what to do with a legitimate darkness that cannot be overcome with simply our eyes. Most people these days live somewhere with street lights, or even if they are out of town, the glow from the city bouncing off the clouds can illuminate the area just fine. Fewer and fewer places remain that are truly dark, even to the point where places that are naturally dark can get special names (check this out). Western North Dakota- outside of the Bakken Oil Field- is one of those areas. On a clear night, I can look up in the sky and see the Milky Way streaking across above my head, with millions of tiny little dots that makes my head spin. Just the other night I was running and saw a magnificent shooting star go across most of the sky, destined for the west. And, like I've said before, there are times when you can go outside and not see your own hand in front of your face. This was one of these nights.

I then remembered that lately at track meets, I'll be running across the track-bound football fields with my phone, (it's my stopwatch ok, I'm a millennial) and suddenly the flashlight will turn on. It must be something to do with a feature. I picked up my phone and shook it left and right. It vibrated, and the incredibly bright flashlight burst on. I shook it left and right again, and this time it vibrated and the light shut off. I had my solution! I would carry my phone in my hand! Naturally, this solution wouldn't work in the winter because phones shouldn't be exposed to below freezing zero temps for long periods of time, and it also wouldn't work in the summer because I'd sweat so much that I'd break it (true story, RIP green iPod). But alas, with temperatures in the 40s, a light breeze, no sun, and only a 30 minute run, I could make this work!

I confidently strode outside and flicked my phone light on. The path ahead of me illuminated, and I was off. This time I cut through the darkness like a gazelle, my feet bouncing off the gravel, making that distinct scratching sound that only running on dirt and rocks can bring. Then, I encountered my scariest moment of the day: a bright light came flying towards my face. I immediately ducked out of the way, and struggled to breathe as my heart rate rapidly increased.

Alas, it was a moth. Even with a light, I had been scared by a moth. My weakness had now been fully revealed. I was a wimp, plain and simple. Humans have fought darkness for thousands and millions of years, and even with my in-hand lighting technology, I was almost brought to my knees by a tiny, flying light (a moth), that I only saw because my phone light was on. I decided that it was time to suck it up and go. I continued down the road with fervor, occasionally using my phone light to scan my surroundings for eyeballs sticking out of the tall prairie grass, but otherwise keeping it in front of me. I was reminded of a time I went for a 10 mile run at 11:00pm on a Sunday night, with school on Monday morning. Ingrid drove behind me with her vehicle and lights, because she was worried about my safety.

As I clicked off the first mile, I decided to give darkness a try again. After all, I hadn't seen any eyes in the prairie, and even if I did, they would likely belong to a white tail deer. I flicked my phone off, and for a few seconds, all was dark again. I was running, but the only thing I could see was the faint outline of the road where it met the grass. There could have been a brilliantly colored statue of Pope Francis in the middle of the road, and I would've slammed into it. After a few moments, I flicked on the light again and made a pass around me to make sure there were no animals. There were none.

I realized at this point that a few years ago I had come across a bull in the ditch right here. Somehow he had gotten through the fence, and when I came around the corner, he just stood there and looked at me. Naturally, I went and ran in the ditch on the other side and nothing happened, but I imagined if that had been in the dark and I was running without a light. These bulls happen to be black, and any hope to see it would be naught. I started to wonder if maybe it never was a good idea to run in the dark without any light. Forget mountain lions, I could be killed by an angry fugitive that was destined to be burger someday.

Towards the end of my second mile, my phone vibrated and the light shut off. I was instantly scared and flicked my wrist back and forth. With a sigh of relief, I watched the light come back on. I must've moved my arm back into my normal running cadence without realizing, and shut it off. That was a good sign for me, because I was starting to relax and daydream again. One of my favorite things to do when I'm stressed is to go for a run and let my mind wander. Eventually it'll settle on visions of past races, or visions of races to come. Today I was dreaming of the Maah Daah Hey Trail race later this summer, maybe the 10k. I ran the marathon last year, and it killed me (evidence here).

And so the rest of my run I alternated between turning my light on and off to see the dark, but also making sure I was safe. I saw no person, no predator. I allowed my mind to be freed from the fresh stresses of schools- the adults, not the students. And you know what? When I came back into camp, I thought I saw an animal cross the road ahead of me. I was nervous for about a second, but then I realized:

It was a moth. 

When the World Looks a Bit Different

One year ago at state track, one of my athletes and I were rested upon the fence near the high jump pit, watching Class A girls high jump. The first race of the day, the 300 hurdles, was coming up shortly, and I explained to my athlete that the winner of each of the races on the final day would be a state champion. The gun went off, the Class B boys exploded from the blocks, and began tearing down the backstretch. Josh Knutson, a senior from our region, ended up plowing through the finish line in first place, both arms up and a quick but strong celebratory yell. My athlete looked and showed me the goosebumps on her arm; I showed her mine.

Throughout the meet, the athletes I had brought along excitedly watched, as performance after performance showed them levels of competition they had yet to witness previously. All of a sudden, these small Class B meets they were accustomed to looked inferior compared to these incredible athletes. In a sense, their eyes were opened to new possibilities and new levels of thinking. At least for a day, the world would look a little bit different.

We all have our own stories of life-changing experiences that switched our perspective on things. We normally hear about this in the context of tragedy, such as death or near-death events. However, it can be in other ways as well. For example, my perspective on mathematics was forever changed during my junior and senior years of college, when I was introduced to proofs. Proofs seemed pretty straightforward until outside-of-the-box thinking was required. If we were talking about infinity, nothing made a lick of sense. Sometimes our professor would wonder why we didn’t just simply redefine something in our own way to accomplish our goal. It was mind-boggling and hard. I never could master how to do a good proof, but boy does it make me look at algebra differently. 

As runners, we have that moment too. For most of us, it was some kind of breakthrough in our own training or racing that allowed us to realize a potential we didn’t know we had. For others, it’s being witness to something incredible, like Eliud Kipchoge’s sub-2 marathon attempt or Usain Bolt’s 100m world record. For me, it was a race. I’d like to tell you the story. 

  

I was sitting on the bus, en route to Ames when it came out. I grabbed my phone and opened up to Iowa State’s track page, where they had the meet entries and heat sheets posted. I hurriedly scrolled down to the mile, and saw that I was put in the fast heat- the mile invitational. All of the other athletes were from Iowa State, the University of Iowa, Kansas State and the University of Minnesota. The slowest seed time in the heat was mine, 4:15. The second slowest? 4:09. I died a little.

For the first time since I started college, I had maintained healthy, strong training all through the summer and fall months. It was now January and I was ready to show off some fitness at indoor meets. Over Christmas break I had been training hard on the gravel roads outside of Horace, ND, fighting the brutal winter cold and wind. We did a lot of fartlek workouts, because few (if any) of us had access to a quality indoor facility, and those of us who were outside had to wear lots of heavy layers to stay warm.

I came off of Christmas break and had a great first meet at the University of Minnesota, winning the 3k with a time of 8:41, a new personal best. I knew I had more in the tank because I had too much energy left the last 200 meters. I had more hard workouts over the next two weeks, and I was ready to go to Iowa State and improve on my 4:19 personal best in the mile. My coach agreed, and seeded me at 4:15, not because I had run that time, but because he thought I was capable- I only needed to be in the right race. Well, I certainly got into a faster race.

All of this was sifting through my brain as I looked up on TFRRS (a track results database that all NCAA schools use) the previous results of all of my competitors in my heat. What I found was exactly what I feared- these kids were simply better than me. All of their times from last track season and the earlier cross country season demonstrated an overall better quality of runner than I was. I had run 4:24 for the mile in high school, and had worked my butt off to drag it down to 4:19 in college. These guys were going to run under 4:10. I activated panic mode.

You see, TFRRS is a double-edged sword. It’s great for finding results, researching opponents, and creating performance lists for different conferences and regions. In fact, TFRRS is basically THE resource used for entries into higher-level NCAA meets like Stanford and Mt. SAC. However, it also can cascade you down a dark hole of comparison, where you can write yourself off of a race before it even starts, or you can assert yourself as the easy victor before the gun goes off. For a stats guy like me, people were defined by their numbers: they were this fast recently, which means they were this fast now. A person’s personal bests were everything. Everybody at track meets would identify people from other teams not by their major or their hometown, but by their PRs. Of course, numbers can’t take into account illness, injury, training struggles, tiredness, weariness, class struggles, or family problems. You are what you race, and these guys raced pretty darn fast. 

 The bus pulled up to our hotel in Ames, Iowa, about an 8-hour drive from our starting point in Grand Forks. As we exited, I approached my coach and expressed my fear and dismay at my heat draw. “How can I race with these guys?” I asked. “You know, some people’s best races come when they just hang on to faster people for as long as they can and see if they make it.” He said, and then with a chuckle, “Who knows, maybe you’ll run 4:12?” This was absurd, of course, to think about running a more than 7-second personal best in the mile in college, but I resigned myself to getting mentally ready to hop on a really fast train and hang on for dear life. 

I approached the starting line with my other competitors. I was in lane two lined up next to a much taller, more muscular guy from Kansas State. While doing my warm-up strides on the track, all of the other runners were gliding past while going the other direction, and they all looked so FAST. I had to control my mind and keep telling myself ‘just hang on, just hang on’. The meet official stepped up to us and said, “I hear Minnesota has a rabbit, which of you is that?” A guy with a bright brown and yellow uniform that said ‘Minnesota’ on it stepped forward to present himself. The official acknowledged him and told us, “We’ve got some guys here trying to break the meet record and run 4:06. So the rabbit has been instructed to go out in 2:03 for the first 800 and then drop out. He’ll be in the lane six, so let him get to the front without any trouble.”

My jaw hit the track. FOUR OH SIX???? TWO OH THREE??? A RABBIT??? I had never been in a race with a rabbit before, but hearing how fast these guys wanted to run, compared to what kind of runner I was, led me to become instantly more nervous. My hope was that this race would be tactical: it is understood in the running world that tactical races run slower, because there is no one willing to go to the lead and pound everyone else into the ground. They simply run and look at each other until the end, when they sprint like crazy people the last 200 meters and see who wins. However, it had just been announced to us that we were running an honest-to-God time trial, because some people in my heat wanted to break the meet record. 

Well, crap. 

The starter had us step up to the line, stopped us, and the gun went off. The rabbit sprinted to the front, everyone else tucked into lanes one and two, and we were off. I tucked into the inside of lane one and felt the pack pulling me right away. I found myself having to turn the wheels harder than I ever had in the first lap of a mile, and I was still starting to lose some ground. Right away in the first lap I realized I had a decision to make: race smart and fall back a little to survive, or throw it down and fricken go for it. 

I immediately picked up my pace to approximately “suicidal”. Think about the joke of a small child holding onto the leash of a large German Shepherd, but really the dog is dragging the child along the sidewalk. That’s the image I want to convey for this race: the only thing that mattered was hanging onto the jersey in front of me. We flew around the track once, twice, and on the third lap we came up to the 800 split. 

Two oh Two

Two oh Three

Two oh Four

I passed in just under 2:04. The pack had about 1-2 seconds on me, but I was holding my own. The rabbit had dropped out, and the boys in front were fighting for that record. My teammates were cheering for me because they noticed I was putting it all on the line. I didn’t mention this earlier, but at a big D1 meet like this, most of the distance heats are run in the morning before the rest of the meet, so as to not bore the fans during the day. This generally leaves the fastest section- called the ‘Invite’ section- for the afternoon. I was in the invite section of the mile, the only one of our distance squad still competing. So whether they were bored or really wanted me to do well, they really didn’t have anything else to do other than cheer me on.

As we grinded through the second half of the race, I noticed that the gap in front of me was starting to shrink. With two 300-meter laps to go, I went around an Iowa guy. With one lap to go, there was a pack of four or five athletes within striking distance. I was all-out sprinting, and my tank was starting to run dry. The intensity of the pace was wearing me down, but apparently I wasn’t the only one. The runners who had held onto the leaders early on were drowning in lactic acid and starting to fade. I had teammates screaming at me and fired up, because they saw my opportunity to get some more runners.

I dug deep into my reserves and shifted to my last gear and put everything into my last stretch. As I pulled closer to the group, I came the last turn and got a view of the finish line. My brain wasn’t working, I was sprinting all out trying to catch a couple runners, and the clock was ticking away, 4:05, 4:06, 4:07. The leaders were finishing and this was the second group. I pulled up to a Minnesota runner and an Iowa State runner and pushed. They pushed. I pushed. The clock was ticking. People were yelling. I pushed. They pushed.

I crossed the line right before 4 minutes, 12 seconds. I took 6^th place and scored our only points for the men’s team at this meet, but none of that mattered. I saw the time on the clock: 4:11.97. I smiled and turned around. My teammates were coming towards me saying “HORACE!!” (my nickname, same as my hometown), excited about my time. I was on cloud nine. I never in a million years thought I’d ever run this fast in the mile, and there was still plenty of season left. During my cooldown with Dwight, I just couldn’t stop smiling.

After the meet, I remembered what my coach said about how maybe if I could hang on I could run 4:12. He was right.

My whole world looked different after that meet. 

What kinds of events had made your life look different? How have they shaped you into who you are? What your life looks like without these events happening? Some thoughts for your day!