The 'cruellest month'

53

The poet T.S Eliot wrote that “April is the Cruellest month.” I sometimes wonder if ol’ T.S. had a side-job coaching track.

April in Colorado brings arguably the most unpredictable weather on the planet. We can get freezing temperatures, wind, snow, scorching sun, rain, dust storms and lightning, sometimes all in the same day. And spring track meets can be exhausting, lasting entire days when they don’t get called off entirely by one or all of the above.

There’s typically an order to the day’s events but there’s no clue how long any of them will take and only a vague idea of when they will actually go off. High school meets operate on “rolling schedules” because they have no idea how long each event will take. College meets, with fewer entrants, run close to a clock schedule, but then the entire meet might get postponed or canceled, or the events reshuffled.

Now I was bouncing back and forth between long days coaching high school track and also running support for Harrison at the college and his competitions.

Darren had originally planned to take the CMC team to the University of Colorado–Boulder for the Colorado Invitational early in April. However, just a few weeks before the event, CU pulled the plug in order to resurface the track for the PAC 12 Championships the following year. I was disappointed because I thought it would be poetically cool for my son to compete on the track where I graduated from college, and where Mary and I first met.

With the CU event out the window, Darren did not have a lot of in-state options. Colorado School of Mines was offering a couple of meets in Golden, which was a relatively short trip from Leadville. The first was the Kit Mayer Classic on the second Saturday of April. However, the meet schedule was wonky. Harrison and Ben would be running the 5K but we didn’t know exactly when because the schedule kept changing. First the 5K was in the morning. Then it was moved to late afternoon. Events for middle distance runners were now scheduled to begin in the early afternoon.

I drove to Leadville the day before and arrived to find Harrison and Nate playing guitar in the multipurpose room. After a night in the dorm, I followed the CMC bus through heavy slush up the Eisenhower Tunnel approach. Darren let Harrison ride shotgun in the bus and he seemed thrilled. The roads cleared on the long descent on I-70 to Golden. The track stadium at Mines is located on a picturesque mesa just below the foothills where a huge “M” is embossed on a slope.

We watched the middle-distance men and women run in their events throughout the afternoon. Finally it was time to warm up for the 5K. Darren had his favorite route for a pre-race warmup in Golden — basically a jog down to the Coors beer plant and back.

By the time the 5K runners were lining up on the track, the stadium lights were on and the sky was looking stormy to the east. Rain squalls were hanging like curtains, creating a surreal backdrop of dark gray, silver, blue and gold as the sun slipped behind the nearby foothills. There were about 20 runners from NCAA Division II schools in the race — and a cut-in at 100 meters. Harrison and Ben had been assigned outside starting lanes.

Harrison bounced up and down on the starting line while awaiting the gun. Then suddenly they were off. I am always astounded how Harrison consistently gets a clean start, then instinctively angles toward the inside lane through the mass of flying elbows and legs, most of them with spikes on the business end. In this case, Harrison went out too hot and quickly found the inside lane too stacked to cut inside. Instead he sprinted through the first 400 meters in lane 2 in 76 seconds. He still had 11.5 laps to go. I watched this and realized I was witnessing inexperience meeting overconfidence. He could have instead trailed off and drafted the pack in lane 1.

Over the next couple laps Harrison settled into a more conservative pace. Ben caught up to him and passed. I paced back and forth across the artificial turf , encouraging both of them, taking pictures and checking split times with Darren.

Over the course of the race several runners dropped and only 14 finished. Mines placed six runners in the top-10 with four of them running sub-15 minutes. CU-Colorado Springs placed three in the top-10 as well. Ben and Harrison brought up the rear at 18:04 and 18:50 respectively. Though the Mines track is thought by some to be slow, Ben was 20 seconds faster than the previous week at CSU. Harrison was nine seconds slower.

Once again the CMC team got thrashed, but it didn’t matter. They were living a dream few others would ever experience.

Notes from The Blur

Waiting for hours to run the 5K at Mines was agonizing, but I knew that I needed to deal with it because that was just how the track schedule was. However, there were a few entertaining moments during the down time.

My friend from Westcliffe, Brooke Flynn, stopped by to say hello. Brooke grew up with me in Westcliffe and we went through preschool to 12th grade together, and ran on the cross-country team. Now she was a student at Colorado School of Mines studying chemical engineering. She came to the track for a little while to say hi but wasn’t able to stay to watch me race.

Since it was Lexi’s birthday two days before this meet, her mom brought cupcakes for the whole team. Of course I could not eat any of these because I still had to run. All I could do was wait.

I watched some of my teammates race. Korben and Abby ran the 1500, and Paulo ran in the 800. When I was taking pictures of Paulo running, Ben’s cheering and yelling coaching clichés like, “You gotta be hungry!” made me laugh so hard I about peed my pants. There was also a dramatic spectacle when Ana collapsed to the ground after running the 800.

When it was finally time for my race I went out a little too fast at the start. A few laps in I felt the effects and started to lose speed. I ended up missing a PR by just a few seconds, and several of the D2 runners lapped me twice. I was a bit frustrated by this, but fortunately I wasn’t too mad. I was just happy to be racing in a college track meet.

When we finally loaded up on the bus to leave, Lexi spilled most of her cupcakes. I helped her clean up the mess. Luckily I got one of them that didn’t hit the floor.

---

The Blur Goes to College is a free online book published as a series. Subscribe to receive future chapters delivered by email. If you would like to support our writing, we appreciate upgrades to paid subscriptions.

---