Welcome To Race Club
By Rory Gilfillan
The first time it happened was in the early spring of grade Three. Maybe it coincided with the return of the light, the angle of the sun, or the position of the stars. Or maybe it was just some kind of illness peculiar to children in grade 3. It would start in the morning before I went to school. One of the days when the snow was furiously melting, the day when my parents finally gave up forcing me to wear my winter boots to school. How could they not see that I was a cheetah not a mule, a runner of vast distance at great speed not a slogger of snow banks. I was a climber of trees, a runner of the woods, canyons and deserts if only in my own mind?
It was on this day that I felt I could run and never stop.
Run and never be tired.
And so I did.
Up and down the playground, over the hills, into the ravine and around the fields. Taunting and often swearing at the grade sixes so that they would chase me. An early precursor to Forest Gump in pull-on sneakers. I remember my shoes that day too. Dusty, red coloured, laces mercifully omitted in order to spare an eight year old who could not tie a double bow.
But most importantly they had a picture of Steve Austin, the bionic man himself stencilled onto the sole. The Bionic Man!
These were fast shoes indeed.
Test runs up and down the drive-way proved beyond a doubt that these were not merely shoes but winged chariots. Oh the places I would and could go! Within their confines I deeked, weaved, sprinted, slowed to a trot, and sprinted again. I was king of Spiderman tag, lord of British bulldog, king of the castle. I was Icarus flying too close to the sun but my hubris was unchained to any consequence. The more I ran the more I wanted to run, and amazingly, the more I could run, my endurance was a well without bottom.
Those days never lasted long enough and in the passing years they came fewer and far between and eventually I forgot all about them.
But one day it came back…at recess. I was on my teaching placement, learning to instruct grade 1 to 4, elementary school. Earlier in the day I had heard word that Breanna, a grade four student, was the fastest kid at school. So I asked if she wanted to race to the fence and back. Without acknowledgement, without so much as a handshake she took off like a scared rabbit, a veritable trajectory hurtling down the tarmac, bouncing off the far wire fence, and returning to the start not merely in record time but significantly ahead of me.
On a good day the laughter and jeering of grade ones is difficult but with it directed at me, it proved impossible to tolerate. No sooner had the words; re-match left my mouth than a club was born.
I called it Race Club, a not-so-subtle nod to the movie, Fight Club. We met every morning at recess. The kids would gather around me, waiting for the words that would light the fuse.
Welcome to race club. The first rule of race club is you do not talk about race club… The kids would look blankly at me, permitting me this idiosyncrasy.
The second rule of race club is everyone has to race. Finally, I would say, races go on as long as they have to…ready, get set, GO!
No one was obligated to run, yet no one sat out, no one had a bad knee or a weak back, a headache or a sore stomach, the asthmatics would drop their inhalers in a desperate bid at school yard glory. The skipping ropes would drop; spent basketballs would roll discarded onto the grass. Kids would be doubled over gasping for air but always, always lining up for just one more race, one more kick at it. There was no split in the genders and I swear that every girl and boy out there believed that they just might be the fastest kid on earth.
Eventually Race Club would get shut down. The powers that be believing that it made the kids too excited upon their returned to class. That sad story is for another time. But what it did was help me remember.
Remember what it feels like to be in elementary school before the voices of self-doubt take such precedence, and to be unaware of any sort of self- limitation.
I remembered too, that Terry Fox ran halfway across this country on a prosthetic limb. He ran 26 miles a day, a marathon every day simply because he thought it needed to be done; running through rain, and snow, and early public indifference because he believed, believed in the justness of his cause, and profoundly because he believed in himself.
Am I a running zealot?
Oh yeah…
In my mind I have planned out exactly how I will react to the next Run Forest Run called from a speeding vehicle or the, nice shorts buddy! from the group of meandering pedestrians referring to the unfortunate length of running shorts.
I will pause in my exertion and turn to them with a thoughtful, concerned look that will crease my brow in short order. I will tell them that they do not mock me much less Steve Prefontaine, the late and great middle distance runner. I will tell them that no shame is brought to Jerome Drayton, the fastest Canadian, the fastest anything, on the only day that ever mattered: race day, Boston, 1977.
I will say that there ignorance cannot touch an endeavour that requires no bike, no stick, no ball, no skates, not even shoes and socks when you get right down to it because Running’s only requirement is having the will and the guts to stand at the start line—if only the one in your own mind.
As an educator I will tell them to go run a mile or 2 or 3 or even 20 and see where it takes them. I will tell them that energy is not a finite thing; that the more they send out, the more they get in return. I will tell them that it will change their life—swear to God–like the first time they tasted chocolate ice cream, saw a Chevy Camaro, or heard the buzz of an electric guitar…
Only better.
And besides, the short shorts, feel very, very fast.
I want to pause here for a hymn.
Please stand for a hymn that reminds me of early mornings–good runs and calm sunrises in a canoe.
So why do I run?
My reasons, perhaps, are not so profound.
The simple answer is I run because it is easier not to.
Easier to stay inside when the rain and sleet comes down. Easier to say to myself that I will go further tomorrow and forgo the day.
But most mornings I pull my shoes on, don my toque, and get out the door, if only to assert my independence, perhaps my defiance…
…and certainly my freedom.
I also run because on April 17th, 2000, I ran the Boston Marathon and I can’t let it go.
If the Stanley Cup is hockey’s Holy Grail than the Boston Marathon, steeped in mythology carved by hundreds of thousands of runners is the promised land of the distance athlete. It also stands as one of the hardest athletic endeavours yet devised. You can take your Ironmans with their 4 000 dollar bikes, and your made-for-tv-eco-challenges. They are not in the same league.
Boston isn’t about merely running 26.2 miles but running 26.2 miles as fast as you can.
Standing on the line, shifting nervously from to foot, feeling every bite of the cold wind as it makes a mockery of your fragile singlet, looking down the barrel of a race that is going to try it’s best to break you is to experience humility but also to touch purity.
Just to stand at this start line one has to qualify for the privilege. The race is a throw-back to an older, less forgiving time. A race over a hundred years old, on a course so hilly and demanding that they no longer design them like this.
It begins with a moderate, rolling descent, just enough to tear your quads, finding equilibrium on the outskirts of Boston. But the real race begins at Heart Break Hill. A devastating steep hill located at mile 17, 9.2 miles from the finish. And this is just the beginning of an ascent that will level out just before the balloons and crowd that will announce the end.
Most people, push come to shove, could cover the distance and many qualifiers are simply glad to be present; their run an elongated victory lap, an acknowledgement of their arrival at running’s sacred circle. But to race Boston?
That is something else altogether.
To race Boston is to live monastically for 6 months. It is to frighten friends and family with your intensity. It is to sacrifice your social life beyond the world of the track, to dream in mileage, and to live frugally for that one day, that one moment when your back will be to the wall, when all the training has been completed, the excuses excised and the fuse lit. It is to live in diminishing anticipation of months of preparation counted down in seconds leading to the single report of a starter’s pistol.
I couldn’t just run it, I needed to race it. I needed to sidle up to the Kenyans, narrow my eyes and think maybe…maybe today… I needed it more than I will ever be able to explain or rationalize. It was both less and more than me. It activated the very best in me—my faith, my dreams but also a darker obsessive, intensity-driven shadow.
That which could propel me out of bed in the early hours of the morning, send me to the track even when I felt shattered was also an energy that could turn against me. I could never run far enough in a week or fast enough at the track. Members of my team were wary of me and I never seemed to be able to stay on our pace at practice, choosing instead, to rocket ahead, needing to go faster, needing to get a lead on the furies that pursued me.
People who succumbed to injuries confused me. I saw this not as fate or accident but as a decision and an incoherent one at that. Not to run through an injury? How could you not?
These are episodes and feelings that I am not proud of.
Despite the obsession and the flirtation with dream-ending injury on April 17th I stepped to the line.
Plato believed that as imperfect humans we live in a philosophical cave and that what we see is merely a shadowy reflection of The Real and perfect world that exists just outside our perception.
I prefer the eastern philosophical angle that states that the perfect race, the perfect exam has already been run, already been written, that it is a matter of finding the path and falling into the groove.
I do not know if I ran my perfect race that cold day in Boston. There is a part of me that cannot accept that. I need to believe I can run, further, faster and better.
I do know that it is the fastest I have ever run. My feet that day, again, felt like the wings of Icarus, but instead of feathers and wax or nylon and rubber they were made of the place where speed meets will, and flight touches determination.
But it was only at the very end that I came to understand.
It is hard to remember the pain now but there are still rare times when I do. I have never died conventionally in this lifetime but after Boston I think perhaps I know what it feels like. I can tell you that, as I passed across the threshold that is the finish line, I really crossed the demarcation that separates this life from the next, the place where death becomes life again. It is here I found my own personal crossroad; the place where past, present and future collide, the place where I remembered who I am, and who I could be on my best day.
Linear time unravels at mile 21. Time here begins to spin, arcing forwards and backwards. Memories are slow but vivid. Physical collapse is like that. It’s not all bad.
Sometimes it offers a window.
In the throes of exhaustion I am at once the runner in Ecuador pushing to win an impromptu race on an old forgotten track against a guy who does not speak English, does not know my name or where I come from but knows there is no way in hell he is going to let me pass him.
I am the six year old running beside my father as he faces the final stages of the National Capital Marathon.
I am running into a Utah sunrise scanning the horizon for the familiar sillouettte of the deer who has taken to pacing me fifty yards from the road.
I am an athlete in the final meters of the Boston marathon when a man pulls beside me and calls to my bib number, hey 1292 let’s break 2 hours, 40!
I am the child of 8 tearing through the school yard.
And, I am a kid called Rory who thinks he has magic shoes…
So why do I run?
I run because of the polarities.
Because I hate the early mornings but love the feeling when I get back.
Because I hunger for it but will never be full.
Because in a cynical time where I struggle with faith, I come to believe.
But mostly, I run because in the discord of exhaustion, the slow fade out of near complete collapse, in the place where all finite resources have been spent I feel the dimensions of my soul and know the place where my spirit touches… and spills into this world.
A coaching colleague speaks of a choice that we all make in a game situation concerning what kind of player we are going to be. Thousands of these decisions occur every game: the decision to go after the ball or the puck with all that we are, with more than we have left. Roosevelt went even further delineating two types of people, giving credence to:
those who are actually in the arena, who strive valiantly; who know the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, and spend themselves in a worthy cause; who at the best, know the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if they fail, fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Or to paraphrase the movie, Gladiator, what we do in life echoes in eternity:
So study hard.
By taking valiant risk you court disappointment but never disaster.
By striving for excellence, though you may never stand on the podium, you become a contender.
By challenging your own status quo you embrace victory.
So, try out for the varsity team.
And should you get cut, jog away with honour.
By seeking your potential, by doing your unabashed, unfiltered best,
By daring to be great,
you bring honour to your school,
to your peers,
to your opponents on the field and above all
you bring honour to yourself.
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