When we left CMC for summer break I drove straight home, unloaded the truck, then continued on to coach an evening track meet at CSU-Pueblo. It was a crazy evening and all of my athletes ran personal records, something I had never experienced as a coach. In addition Darren and I had on a whim entered Harrison in the college 10K at the same venue the following morning. The following morning we got up early to get Harrison to the track, but his performance was uninspired without his teammates there. Nevertheless, it was a good workout to kick off summer training.
We were suddenly on a totally different schedule. We took a short trip to Florida to visit my sister and her family. I finished my coaching season with a three-day trip to the state meet in Denver. Harrison’s grades trickled in and though he did not make the Dean’s List for second semester, he still did pretty well.
As we had done the previous summer, we treated Harrison’s training program like a part-time job. However this summer felt different.
The previous year he had been excited about attending college, and approached the training plan with a beginner’s mindset, or willingness to learn. Now he seemed to be powering through the summer training runs with some strange sense of vengeance, but I didn’t know if he would even go back to college in the fall.
There was a sense of brooding about him. He began to perseverate on a video clip from Moana, one of his favorite movies. In this clip the character Maui lays on the deck of a boat steered by Moana, and sings morosely, “What can I say except we’re dead soon, we’re dead soon.”
Moana asks Maui “Can you at least try?” He then lifts his hand, touches his magic fish hook and exclaims, “Giant Hawk!” But he does not manifest a Giant Hawk, and returns to glumly singing, “Hey, it’s OK, it’s OK. We’re dead soon, we’re dead soon.”
Harrison watched this video clip over and over again, for weeks. The troubling symbolism began to sink in. I knew deep down it had something to do with his ambivalence about going back to college. The magic was missing. I attempted to make light of this whenever a real hawk appeared while driving or outside running. I would point at the raptor in the sky and declare, “Giant Hawk!” This seemed to amuse him while helping make an association with the natural world as well as the idea we can manifest our own “Giant Hawks.”
He seemed stuck in a negative loop. I tried to have discussions with him about his ambivalence. His issues seemed based in the problems and challenges he’d encountered during his first year. I told him he didn’t have to go back if he didn’t want to, but he needed to do something else if he didn’t. I reinforced the positive experiences he had during his first year — new friends, supportive professors, independence, learning, running and competition, and the many things he had accomplished.
He really didn’t want to talk about it. My feeling was he didn’t want the pressure of conforming to expected norms, and that he found some of the academic work tedious. Yet, he clearly missed his teammates and friends, and wanted to run on the team. The bottom line was he could not have it both ways, and he was bored at home.
In the midst of this turmoil he decided he wanted to run in a pack-burro race. This notion added a new layer of anxiety for me. To run in a crowded field of cross-country runners was nerve-wracking for sure. Running with a quarter-ton-plus equine in a charging herd of up to 100 animal and humans with ropes and hooves flying was another thing altogether and actually could be dangerous. Harrison had run with our burros in training runs over the years but had never experienced the chaos of a stampeding mass start.
Racing with a burro and managing the animal through various challenges over a course requires considerable skills beyond merely running. Quick thinking and reactions are essential, as well as spatial awareness and ability to anticipate and adjust to how your burro might respond to certain situations. For Harrison burro racing would be more of a cognitive challenge than a physical one — ironically, like going back to school.
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Huzzah, Harrison!