Light Lifting (4 page)

I'd look and nod my head seriously and sometimes I'd even write the number down for them, a big loopy three on one of their little pads and I'd underline it. Then I'd hop right up onto their tissue covered table, rip off my sock, stick out my fucked-up foot, and brace myself for number 4 or number 5 or whatever came next.

It always got bad before the biggest competitions – like this one, or before the Olympic trials or if there was a big trip to China on the line or carding money. You'd get stuck with this feeling like when you're blowing up a balloon and you know you're almost at the limit and you're not sure if you should give it that little extra puff because there might still be room for a last bit of air, or it all might just explode in your face.

BURNER AND I started our warm-up jog about an hour before the race was scheduled to go. It took me a while to get started and for those first few minutes, I hobbled along doing the old-man shuffle until my body came back to me and my Achilles remembered what it was supposed to do. Burner was smooth right from the beginning. While I jerked up and down, fighting against the parts of myself that didn't want to do this anymore, he kind of hovered beside me flat and easy. We were like two people at the airport. He floated and seemed to move along without any effort – like one of those well-pressed, put-together guys who zooms past on the moving sidewalk – and I was like the slob with too many carry-on bags, huffing and puffing and dropping things, hauling all this extra stuff and just hoping to find the right gate. Even my breathing was heavier than it should have been.

We made a big loop out and around the stadium, winding our way up and down the quiet little side streets, past houses full of people who couldn't care less about what was happening just down the road. Burner and I had probably run thousands of miles together, but I was pretty sure these would be the last ones. I'd been thinking about it for a while, but I decided it there, during that last little warm-up jog. I think all those houses where nobody cared kind of forced themselves into my head.

“This is going to be it for me,” I told him, after about fifteen minutes.

“What do you mean ‘it'?”

“This is it. The last real ball-buster race for me. I think it's over. Time to get on with everything else.”

It was easier than I thought it would be. All you had to do was say it. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt better and calmer, but Burner didn't take it the same way.

“What?” he said and he looked at me with this kind of confused sneer.

“Come on, Mikey. What else is there for you to do? You can't be finished. You've got lots more in the tank. You can't be one of those guys who gives it up and sits on the couch for a year eating chips and dip. You'll never be the guy in the fun run, the guy with a walkman, the loser who wants to win his age-group. You can't just turn it off like that.”

I felt bad for springing this on him at such a bad time. It hadn't been part of my big plan, but it's hard to hide it when something that used to be important suddenly isn't important anymore. I felt like I was kind of abandoning him, dumping him out there in the middle of those empty houses and it was difficult and sad and correct all at the same time. Like when my mother and father finally broke up: difficult and sad, yes, but correct too, the right thing to do. Burner should have seen this coming from me. He could read the results sheets as well as I could and he knew where my name fit in.

“I've gone as far as I can,” I told him. “You know you can't do this if you don't have the feel for it.”

“Come on,” he said, “you're kidding me.”

He reached over without breaking stride and gave me a little shot in the arm like he was trying to wake me up and bring me back to the real world.

“Give your head a shake,” he said. “Think about next year. You'll heal up and be back good as new.”

We turned the corner and I could see the stadium coming back to us, getting bigger all the time. The stiffness was gone from my legs and I was rolling now, back to my old self, purring along. I felt fine, better than I had in months. The taper was giving something back to me too. But I was sure about this.

“Sorry, buddy,” I kidded him. “You're going to have to find somebody else to kick down in the last hundred.”

“Stop it,” Burner said. He was looking at me hard. His lips pressed together and his mouth made a tight straight line across the middle of his face.

“Seriously. Stop it. You can't quit now. You and I do this together. That's our deal.”

“No,” I said, “it's not.” I thought he already knew about this part of it.

“We have never done this together. It's one of those things that can't be done together. In the end we have to be by ourselves.”

I didn't want it to sound as bad as it did.

“Think about it,” I was smiling now, trying to show him that everything would be fine.

“Think about it. When you come around that turn today, you'll be alone and when you head down the stretch by yourself you are going to surprise a lot of people.”

“Fuck you, Mikey,” he said. “I don't need a cheerleader.”

His face was a little flush and he turned on me quickly.

“You're just covering your own ass. In about twenty minutes, I'm going to rip you apart and you can't stand it. You can't stand to lose to me and now you're making excuses. Fuck you and your retirement party.”

I wanted to laugh if off and make it slide away, but before I could even get to him, before I could say anything, he took off. Burner put his head down and shifted gears. In ten seconds, he had pulled away and opened up a gap that couldn't be closed. I had to save everything I had left and I couldn't go chasing after him so I let him go. It was just jitters, just nerves. That's what I told myself. After it was over, everything would be fine again.

When we got back to the field we split for good. He grabbed his spikes and his bag and went under the bleachers by himself. The last fifteen minutes is the most important. You want everything to feel easy. I put him out of my mind and lay on my back for a while, feeling the air coming in and going out of my body. I pulled my knees up close to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I held it all in like that for about fifteen seconds before letting everything go as slowly as possible. I rolled over on my stomach and did a few easy push-ups and when I got back on my feet, I put my hands flat against the wall and tried to get my calves and my goddamn Achilles to go out as far as they could. I didn't want to push it because you can only take as much as your body can give you on the day. I took off my socks and put on the ugly fluorescent spikes I'd been wearing all season. They were another Adidas freebee, and I was expected to wear them, but I didn't like them much. It had taken months to break them in and the red blood stains were still there around the toe and heel from all the broken blisters I had to go through before my feet finally hardened up in the right places.

When the announcer's voice called us out, I took off my sweats and did a couple short sprints down the back stretch, trying to keep it all quick and smooth and under control. All the rest of the guys were there too and we did our usual nervous hellos and our cautious smiles as we passed one another. When they called us to the line, I came up behind Burner and put my hand on his back, just kind of gently, so he'd know I was there.

“Have a good one, buddy, you little psycho,” I said and I smiled at him. The officials made us stand there, side by side, each of us in our pre-selected spot along the curved white start line while the announcer read out our names and listed all our best times and our biggest wins. He said this was shaping up to be one of the best 1,500 metre finals of the last decade. When the voice got to my name, he said I had the fastest personal best in this group and he named all the different times I'd made the national team. He said Burner was always dangerous and that he had put together a great season and was rounding into top form at the right time. Then the rest of them each got their turns and their compliments, Marcotte and Graham and Bourque and the others.

Burner stood still through all of this and didn't even acknowledge his own name. Instead, he closed his eyes and made this big production out of rolling his head all the way around in a big circle. He went very slowly – first down, with his chin touching his chest, and then way over to the side and then straight up and back again. I could hear the bones in his neck crackling as he made the loop. He kept his mouth wide open and when he looked up, it seemed almost like he was waiting to catch a snowflake or a raindrop on his tongue. They called us to our marks and we crouched down, bending our knees just a bit and holding our arms away from our bodies. When they fired the gun, you could see the smoke before you heard the bang.

The announcer's voice took over after that and he described everything that happened to us. We were bunched up around the first turn so I made a little move and went into second place, just trying to stay out of trouble. Even as it was happening, the voice said “There goes Michael Campbell, moving into second place, staying out of trouble.” It was like being inside and outside of yourself at the same time. I kept bumping back and forth with Marcotte and Bourque, trying to settle myself down and find a clear place on the outside of lane one. All the time the big voice kept going, describing how we looked and calling out the splits and telling the crowd what kind of pace we were on and our projected finishing times. I couldn't see Burner, but I knew he was close by because I heard the voice say something like “Jamie Burns is safely tucked in at fifth or sixth place.” I remember this only because the announcer used Burner's real name and it sounded so strange to me.

The pace was fine, not really too slow or too fast, and after a lap and a half there were still lots of people close enough to the lead and feeling good. The problem with feeling good in a 1,500 is that you know it can't last and that eventually, sometime in the next ninety seconds, everything you have left has got to come draining out of you, either in a great explosive rush at the end or some painful slow trickle. The kickers would've been happy to let it go slow and leave it all to some blazing last one-fifty, but the rest of us didn't want that to happen. As we went through 800, most of the serious guys were looking around, waiting and watching to see who would make the first move. After about thirty seconds, Dawson decided it would have to be him. He threw in this big surge coming off the turn and broke the whole thing open, dividing the race up between those who could go with him and those who could not.

The voice said, “Eric Dawson is heading for home early.”

Graham and Bourque and I hooked up a couple steps back and it felt like we were breaking free of the others. I never turn around when I race and everybody knows it's not a good idea to look back, but I was sure Burner must have been close by. Even then it was clear that Dawson didn't have a chance. He'd given it a pretty fierce try and the rest of us probably owed him something for being brave enough to go, but he didn't have enough left and I could see he was starting to break down.

People in the crowd always wonder why the guy with the lead heading into the last lap almost never wins. They wonder why he can't hold on and why he can't look as good as he did just a minute earlier when he came flying by. Some people believe that myth about Roger Bannister and John Landy back when they ran the Miracle Mile in Vancouver in 1954. That was probably the only time in history when the whole world actually cared about two guys who could run a mile in under four minutes. Bannister was the first to do it, everybody knows that, but by the time they met in Vancouver, Landy had gone even faster. He was the new world record holder and most people were betting on him to win. You can look it up if you want. The Miracle Mile was pure craziness, the Tyson/Holyfield of its time. Every country sent their reporters to cover the story and more than a hundred million people listened to the call on the radio. It was the first time CBC Television ever broadcasted live from the west coast. If you go to Vancouver today, the famous statue is still there, the one where Landy is looking over his left shoulder as Bannister comes by him on the right. The press and people who don't know anything always say that if Landy had looked the other way – if only he'd looked to the right – he would have seen Bannister coming and he never would have let him go by. They call it the phantom pass, as if Landy was just a victim of bad luck and bad timing. As if Bannister was like some ghost, slipping past unseen.

That's the story they tell, but it's not true. If you ever watch a tape of that race you'll see that poor Landy is dead before he even starts the last lap. It's one of those things you recognize if you've been through it yourself. When a guy is done, he's just done and no amount of fighting can save him. The exercise physiology people will explain that it's all about lactic acid fermentation and how when you push beyond your limit your legs run out of oxygen and the tissue starts to fill up with this burning liquid waste. We called it “rigging,” short for rigor mortis. When your body started to constrict, to tighten up involuntarily, first in your arms and your calves and then your quads and your hamstrings and your brain – when parts of you gave out like that, dying right underneath you at exactly the moment you needed something more – we called that rigging. Dawson was dying in front of us that day and we could see it in every broken down step he took. Look back at the grainy black and white video of the Miracle Mile. You'll see it. Landy wasn't taken by surprise. He knew exactly where Bannister was coming from – he just couldn't do anything to stop it. For that whole last lap Bannister is right behind, tall and gangly and awkward and just waiting, deciding when to go. When Landy looked to his left – in that moment they made into a statue – he wasn't trying to hold on for the win. That possibility was gone and he knew it. People forget that Richard Ferguson, a Canadian, finished third in the Miracle Mile. He's the important missing character, the one who didn't make it into the statue. Ferguson was the threat coming up from behind; he was the guy Landy feared. It's always like that. The most interesting stories in most races don't have anything to do with winning.