Once a Runner (25 page)

"Might I inquire," he interrupted Denton, "As to the reason for your personal concern in this matter?" He had shifted, in the subtle manner of southerners of his species, from diplomacy to advocacy, disguising the maneuver with such sincerity and deference as to leave the object of his charm, whether hostile witness or cautious subordinate, unsuspecting until it was too late.

"Well sir, Mr. Cassidy is a friend of mine. I have been helping him with his training for some time now, and I feel he might be an outstanding competitor, perhaps even of Olympic caliber, given the right opportunities. I can't understand what possible reason there might be—and I know about the recent, uh, difficulties—possible reason that is, for keeping him out of the upcoming ..."

"Now Bruce—may I call you Bruce?—this whole affair has been extremely unfortunate for everyone concerned. Extremely unfortunate. But I'm sure that you, being an athlete yourself, must understand that insubordination must be dealt with firmly. Now I know some mistakes have been made—on both sides—but in the final analysis, rules are rules. Perhaps your sport is somewhat different, being individual and all, but on the playing field there must be a supreme commander, a man who must make life or death decisions right on the spot, A game can be won or lost on a split second's hesitation. There is no other way to function, my boy. If you had to gather a football team together to take a vote on every play, why there would be chaos! Anarchy! Pretty soon the cheerleaders would want a vote, too! This democracy stuff just won't cut it on the gridiron, my boy. Now in track and field, I don't know..."

"Sir, respectfully, I don't think anyone has suggested anything different. If someone had taken the time to talk with Mr. Cassidy, they would have seen he was not advocating, nor anyone else who signed the petitions, anything other than stopping petty harassment and invasion of privacy of the athletes...,"

"It's all a matter of discipline! Following orders! Dick Doobey may not have been right all the time, but he was still Dick Doobey! The general. He gave orders. And then what happened?
Petitions!"
He said it as if pronouncing the name of some loathsome disease that had just claimed a loved one.

"I suppose," said Denton very quietly, "that I just don't happen to subscribe to the militaristic sports metaphor. I don't believe that a football field or a basketball court are battlefields, except to the most simplistic and unenlightened observers. Even granting the analogy, I don't think a general at war would go out and order his army to eat shit just for the hell of it. Sir."

Denton had a vague notion he was no longer being listened to.
Sports and religion in the deep South,
he thought. When his last remark got no discernible response, he knew his time was up. Prigman was concerning himself with the lighting of a huge cigar.

"Well," the old man said at last, turning slightly to the side so as to look out his window across the windswept plaza, "at any rate, such insubordination and dissension cannot be tolerated among athletes. You have no idea the damage this whole affair has caused, not just to team morale, but to this university. I'm speaking in terms of our image among the people of the state of Florida. No idea."

Denton stood before the giant desk top, looking across at the gray, dapper old politico behind the desk. He had thought that surely sweet reason could be brought to bear, that somewhere an appeal might be fairly heard. But then, Denton was unencumbered by the knowledge of Steven C. Prigman's illustrious career as a jurist, and therefore was not prepared to meet an intellect capable of operating almost wholly in a bygone century.

"Sir, Quenton Cassidy has represented this institution honorably and well. He has been the Southeastern Conference mile champion for two years and the captain of his team. He holds numerous school records. He has a chance to truly excel now, and keeping him out of this track meet can serve no reasonable purpose whatsoever except..."

"I take issue with that," said Prigman, exhaling aromatic blue smoke. "You say that the boy might become a real blue chipper, eh?"

"Well, we don't use that term in running, but yes, he might very well become ..."

"Well,
he shall not do so using the facilities of this university.
" Very final sounding, this last.

"I was going to say: 'except possibly for revenge of some kind,'" Denton said sadly.

"Mmmm." Prigman was shuffling papers on his desk, impatiendy. Denton started for the door. "Your committee chairman, Dr. Branum," Prigman said suddenly.

"Yes sir?" Prigman was looking away from him, as if distracted by something out the window.

"Dr. Branum is very anxious for you to finish that dissertation quarter after next. You wouldn't want to get too involved in other matters and let that work slide, would you?" Denton considered simply walking out, but decided to stop.
All right little man, have it your way. But I'm going to
go
to school on you now,
he thought. With a crooked smile he turned back to Prigman.

"No sir I I guess I'd better keep my nose to the old salt mine."

"Fine, fine." Prigman was re-lighting his cigar, his mind obviously already on other treachery. Denton thought: My lord in heaven.

32. The Interval Workout

An interval workout," Cassidy once explained to a sports writer, "is the modern distance runner's equivalent of the once popular Iron Maiden, a device as you know used by ancient Truth Seekers."

Although overdistance laid the foundation, intervals made the runner racing mean. Quenton Cassidy liked them. Others preferred bamboo splinters under their nails. Cassidy figured that a natural affinity for interval work was the difference between those who liked to race and those who liked to train. And there is a difference. Racers express little enchantment with training.

An interval workout is simply a series of fast runs of a specified distance in a specified time with a specified rest. The variables are limited only by the imagination of the coach and the physical limitations quickly apparent in his athletes (it is one thing to write "10 quarters in 58 seconds with a 220 jog" and quite another to carry out those instructions). While a ten-mile overdistance run might be generally thought of as a pleasant diversion, very few of Cassidy's teammates thought of intervals as anything but a grueling ordeal, satisfying at best, horrifying at worst. It was precisely the kind of training, he knew, that tempered the body for racing. Though the distance runner is constantly striving for aerobic efficiency, the race itself is primarily an anaerobic experience. Everyone, the winner in his painful glory as well as the loser many seconds behind in his equally painful anonymity, suffers the physical bankruptcy of total oxygen debt. And since interval training is usually sharp enough to bring the runner to grips with oxygen debt very quickly in the workout, he learns to deal with the debilitating fatigue from the first repetition on. Other sports use an abbreviated form of interval training called "wind sprints," but where football and basketball players run 30 or 40 yards and take several minutes rest between each, the miler will run 220 yards, 440 yards, a half-mile or even three-quarters of a mile at a time. Each second of his minute or two-minute rest period is sweeter than life.

It was little wonder Bruce Denton took more interest in Cassidy's interval training than in anything else that made up his 140 miles a week. In the beginning of March, Denton began to come to the cabin on interval days, many times spending the night; after running early with Cassidy in the morning, he would drive directly to his lab. If such a program had a deleterious effect on his marriage, he never mentioned it to Cassidy.

"I hope you listened to me and took an easy day yesterday," Denton said as they jogged to the field.

"Okay, consider me psyched out. What's the program?"

"Twenty quarters in sets of five, 110 jog between the quarters, 440 jog between the sets, 62 to 63 second effort but no watch as usual. That's it. For now."

Cassidy was surprised. It was a tough workout, but nothing he had not done many times before. Denton had been talking ominously about this one for days, and now the runner actually felt a little let down. With Denton he never knew what to expect. When, weeks earlier he had instructed Cassidy to let his hair grow and not to shave, Cassidy made it a point not to act surprised. He knew it had something to do with getting into the meet, but he also knew that Denton was not about to tell him any more. If he had wanted Cassidy to know, he would have told him already. Now the sunbleached curls were around his ears and his chin had sprouted, of all things, a reddish beard which Cassidy was now becoming rather fond of. He pictured himself a gaunt viking.

When they got to the field, Cassidy removed his shoes and joined Denton in some striders to loosen up. It was a gloriously clear, warm day and soon the shirtless runners were wringing wet with perspiration. Although he knew few runners who did so, Cassidy loved training barefooted. Denton considered it an aberration, but since it seemed to cause no complications, he tolerated the practice.

There had been, in fact, a few world class runners who competed barefoot on the track and seemed no worse for it; and then there was Abebe Bikila who, incredibly, ran the 26-plus miles of the marathon barefooted at the Rome Olympics, winning easily. There were arguments pro and con about whether it could be helpful in training or racing, but Cassidy just did it because he liked it. It allowed him to be closer to the grass, the soil, closer to the deepest hidden yearning of the runner:
to fly naked through the primal forest, to run through the jungle.

They began. The first two or three always seemed somehow especially bad. Actually that was misleading. They seemed sluggish because the body was shocked by such a sudden demand for sustained speed. The heart rate shot up to the hummingbird levels it would have to maintain for a long time. The legs became prematurely heavy, and the central nervous system sent up the message that such punishment could not be endured much longer. But the central nervous system is overridden, of course, the runner knowing far better by now than his own synapses what his body can and cannot be expected to do. The runner deals nearly daily in such absolutes of physical limitations that the non-runner confronts only in dire situations. Fleeing from an armed killer or deadly animal, a layman will soon find the frightening limits that even stark terror will not compromise. The runner knows such boundaries like he knows the sidewalks of his hometown.

After the shock of the first several quarters, Cassidy settled into the pleasant, nearly comfortable rhythm of the workout, where each interval, though difficult, felt very much like the one before and the one to follow. After they finished the first set of five, the quarter-mile jog prescribed by Denton seemed almost too luxuriously long. During this time, once he had recovered his breath somewhat, Cassidy made a few remarks and generally tried to engage Denton in conversation; the older runner demurred, jogged on in what Cassidy thought a rather grim manner. They began the second set.

Round and round the field they went, each repetition so much like the one before they had to count out loud lest they forget how many they had done; Denton, the true obsessive compulsive, would assume they had done three rather than four and they would take a chance on doing an extra one. Cassidy, therefore, paid close attention to the tally. The only difference between one and the next was the slight increase in lactic acid in the lifting muscles on the top of the thigh that made each a little more difficult and started hurting earlier in the sprint. Otherwise, it was almost as easy to drift into the near neutral mental state as it was on their long distance runs. Denton was a perfect training partner; the pace did not vary more than a half a second from one to the next.

In the third set Cassidy felt as though Denton were picking up the pace, though it was unlikely. Becoming tired now, it simply required more effort to keep up the same speed. A miler, whose pace in a race was quite a bit faster than 63 seconds, could get a lot out of such a workout. The key was not how fast he could run, but how fast he could run while tired.

Cassidy did not allow himself to think of racing pace, for these 63 second quarter miles required so much effort it would have been heartbreaking to think how much faster a pace was required in an actual race. There were too many other factors: rest, a faster surface, and more importantly the incredible psych he would build up prior to running. Such comparisons were not helpful and were dismissed quickly. In training it was best to think about training. Circling this litde field 12 miles from Kernsville on a Saturday afternoon, a race seemed an exotic and glamorous prospect indeed.

Number 14 was especially poignant. Finishing it, Cassidy rasped: "Eeeow, that one hurt!"

"Little. Fast." Denton gasped the words. Occasionally during a repetition one of them would let his mind wander to a race, long since run, and as the old memories seeped in, the pace would inch up as adrenalin began surging involuntarily through the system. The other runner would respond and soon they would be flying around the worn path, racing different phantoms from the past. The price for such a lapse was steep. They would begin the next repetition still out of breath.

As badly as he felt at the end of the third set, by the time they finished jogging their quarter, he was recovered. Denton's training usually called for very short recovery periods and Cassidy had been amazed how he responded to the tiny snippets of rest. Recovery was the key; the faster one recovered, the faster he could race. "A race," Denton would say, is all go and no blow. So why practice resting?"