Flashes of Panic

When I toed the line for the 800 meters at my first state track meet, I was on the outside. Exactly where I belonged. I had run a PR the week before to qualify, but I was still the slowest of the 12 runners in the field. My plan was simple: to hang on for the first lap, and not to finish last.

At the end of one lap, I was floating along in 10th position, wondering why all the runners in front of me weren’t going faster. They were waiting for the final sprint to begin, but I was too inexperienced to know that at the time. So I moved to the outside and charged past all but the first three, who were far ahead of everyone else.

The feeling of being in front of the second pack was like standing on a tall building and looking down, realizing how high I was. I was euphoric about the view, but there were eight guys behind me who wanted to get me. I wasn’t chasing them anymore; I was being chased.

The first one went around me with 150 meters to go. I was scraping the bottom of my energy reserves, frantically calling on muscles I had already exhausted when I made my big move. I don’t remember much of the homestretch, just the din of shouting in my ears, the footsteps behind me and the anxiety of not wanting anyone to get by.

Just before I reached the finish line, eyes wide, mouth open in amazement, every muscle bursting, the runners coming up from behind caught me. But only one got by. That left me in six, the last scoring place.

I was too amazed to feel pain. I had taken five seconds off my best time, and it’s still the fastest I have ever run for 800 meters. Most surprisingly, I had stolen a place in a race in which I was supposed to finish last.

Before the state meet I had thought, “How could I possibly be that fast?” Now I had a new attitude: “Why shouldn’t I be faster?” It had taken me exactly two minutes, 2 and 4/10 seconds.

That’s what we printed. I loaned my camera to a teammate before the race, so I have grainy photos that tell me where I was after the first lap and what I looked like when I finished. The fifth-place finisher, who nipped me at the line, was the mile champion a few hours before. The fourth-placer, who went around me on the second corner, was the previous year’s mile champ, and he told me a few years later that when I went by, he thought, “What’s he doing up here? I’d better get moving!”

I also have a photo of me coming up the bleacher steps toward my team, holding up that sixth-place medal with look on my face saying something like, “Not bad, eh?” I would be less than completely honest if I did not also admit that the sweatshirt I am wearing in that last photo has a purple W on the front. I’m not really sure what eventually happened to that sweatshirt. I was only a junior at the time, after all.