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!