Flashes of Panic

When I was a high school runner, with no sense of tactics or proper training, I managed to squeak in to the state championship 800m race. I was the 12^th and last seed with some silly time like 2:07. (That kind of time wouldn’t make it to States nowadays, but this was in the pre-Webb era.) On a sunny spring Saturday in Bangor, about this time of year, I ran a race I shouldn’t have been capable of and stole 6^th, the last scoring place, in 2:02.4, which is still my PR for the distance even though I ran 55 for 400m twice the following year[0]. Mine turned out to be the only point my team scored that year.

When I got home, I had to call my coach (no cell phones, of course, so I couldn’t call from the track,) and tell him how the race had gone. He was the head cross country coach but only an assistant for track, because the head coach didn’t really “get” distance runners. He missed both my regionals race and the state meet because his wife was expecting their first baby “any day now.”

Today, my mother pointed out that his daughter is now a high school freshman. Next year, my 800m PR will be old enough to drive.

Now I feel old and slow.

[0] 55 might have been a competitive time for our in-conference quad meets, but it wasn’t going to get me anywhere state-wide. I went back to the 800 and got a better place (4^th) with a slightly slower time; one of the underclassmen who finished in front of me went on to be a 1500m finalist at the ‘96 Olympic Trials. It seems odd that a 55 wouldn’t be competitive, but so few 800m runners were in the sub-2 range; I’m forced to conclude that the 800m was a “soft” event. Most likely the 400m runners didn’t want to run that far, and the field was made up of the few milers willing to hurt that much.