TKO

It took me a while to write this post; it’s hard to write consecutive blogs about disappointment, but sidestepping it or ignoring it outright seemed wrongheaded, so I’ve given it some thought and revisited what I originally wrote last week. Before I do, I should mention that I can’t wait to watch Furman Elite chase some standards at Indy tomorrow before taking on the nation’s best at the USATF Championships, and I wish that I were able to join them on their road to Des Moines and hopefully to Moscow.  It’s been a privilege to train with such motivated and accomplished athletes.Here's my account of June 1st and 2nd.

  

I lay in an unfamiliar bed watching the digital clock shift shapes in the early hours of the morning, the diodes blinking like an insomniac’s distress beacon presaging the depression sure to dawn beyond the coming sunrise. Though motionless, my heart thumped away, burning a potent blend of caffeine and anxiety that fueled the racing thoughts keeping me awake. Casting a grimace to the ceiling, I hoped that I might forget that the time read 3:54, the closest I’d come to seeing sub-4 all season, a season coming to an abrupt and unceremonious end.

Some performances are simply so awful that everything starts to acquire an air of unreality, the time and place on a results sheet only comprehensible through contortions of dream logic. They are the shadows at the edge of a runner’s mind, the ugliest manifestations of failure, and they covered the Vanderbilt track that late Saturday night in Nashville.  It was all I could do to limp through the line in a woeful 4:11, but it might as well have been an eternity over those four excruciating laps.  

              

            I cooled down along the downtown perimeter, peering out of my wreckage toward the bright skyline and wondering, like so many before me, what had gone so horribly wrong; Nashville is the place where dreams are made, but no one likes to talk about the legion of faltering voices and broken strings lighting out on I-40 or burning out in dive bars. As I continued my patrol, I couldn’t stop ruminating on a bar fight from a novel I read recently, William Gay’s The Long Home, where we find the young protagonist reeling from a beating at the hands of the sinister proprietor’s bouncer: 

“Mark him up a little. Mess them smooth jaws up,” Hardin said.
“Then let him get up,” Jiminiz said. “I don’t like hittin’ a man already down, and I don’t like hittin’ a man already out on his feet and don’t know when he’s whipped.”
“He’ll get up,” Hardin said contemptuously. “You couldn’t keep him down with a logchain. He ain’t got sense enough to lay down and quit.”

“You getting’ up or stayin’ down?” Jiminiz asked.
The price he paid was dear, but Nathan got up.

            I  can now say without a doubt that there were times when I shouldn’t have gotten back up this year. I took a pummeling and hid my wounds pretty well—unfortunately, overtraining is bloodless, and you’re the only one who can call the fight. I paid dearly for my pride, and now instead of blazing through the most competitive month of the post-collegiate season, I’m taking my weeks off to regroup and reassess, to learn the painful lessons that sometimes only self-inflicted wounds can teach.

But I have more than just the scars. Uninjured and in by far the best shape of my life, I made it over 250 days without missing a run, and, for good or ill, completed workouts I never thought imaginable; I can breathe easy for a few weeks, catch up on LSAT prep, reading, concerts and fishing. Sometimes it takes getting your ass kicked to find out how much something means to you. You learn the most from the fights you lose, and I intend to come back swinging in the fall.

                Sincerely,

                Lee