by Chris Lear
With the exception of Johnson, who worked out in the morning because he was teaching an afternoon kinesiology class, everyone is present for practice, and they are well rested. The mood is giddy, and the runners joke and laugh as they change into their spikes. They know that after this, there is no more work to be done, and Wetmore senses their relief. Wetmore attributes their excess energy to the fact that they are rested for the first time, but he is careful not to read too much into their mood.
The women were giddy like this before Big 12’s, and they performed poorly.
The runners line up at the beginning of the final straightaway and Wetmore explains the workout: 8 x 300m, alternating between 48 seconds and race pace (55 seconds), with one hundred jog in between.
Goucher’s assignment is the same as the others, only he will alternate between 46 and 52 seconds.
Everyone has trouble finding the pace early on, and Wetmore yells across the track at Ponce as he starts pulling away on the second 300.
“Now you’re on race pace, cruising, cruising, cruising, OSCAR!!!” He comes through two seconds fast. He can be forgiven since he was keying off of Goucher, who himself was three seconds fast. “That’s 4:24 pace,”
Wetmore informs Goucher. “I hope you can run that.”
Wetmore is animated and vocal today, perhaps more than ever. He has the men start the fast ones on the line, like they are starting a race, and as Batliner gets out slowly on the third interval, Wetmore yells to him, “Come on, Bat! You gonna get out like that in a race? You’ll get 300th!”
The runners hit the fourth one, and Wetmore is loud and clear as they approach the fifth interval, “Now it’s the middle of a race. You’re 230
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practicing your relaxation skills. Calm mind, you’re just floating. Get a picture in your mind, make a movie in your mind.”
“Halfway,” Wetmore continues, “let’s get a little tired now. This is a standing start. Let’s get aggressive in the first 30, 40 meters.” He turns his attention to Goucher. “Make a movie in your mind, Gouch, a picture in your mind. It’s easy! It’s easy!” He turns his attention to the pack as Goucher hits the 200-meter mark, “Make a movie in your mind — it’s the four-and-a-half-mile mark, you’re cruising, passing people.”
They approach the season’s last interval. Just one more interval at race pace. The guys struggle to catch their breath as they reach the line.
The CU ski team is on the infield, and they cheer on Goucher and the others as they run past. Reese leads the pack. Wetmore announces, “One to go! Pop right over there. Come on Tommy, take ’em, let’s go!” They pick it up, and Wetmore settles them down, “Just race pace, just race pace. Have that poised feeling, right on the edge, ready to pounce.”
The work is done. Everyone jogs two laps, and then single file, they all do two 80-meter accelerations, building up to full speed by 40 meters, then easing back down to the finish. As Goucher reaches full speed in his black shirt and orange shorts, he resembles a flying cheetah. His arms reach forward and rise to the top of his head with each stride. “Pop it, pop it, pop it!” Wetmore says. Wetmore scrutinizes each runner’s form as they pass, and when the last runner finishes, he says, “That’s it, the hay’s in the barn. The hay’s in the barn!”
Reese turns to JD as he walks off the track. “I only got two more nights of sleep in my bed.” “Then what?” “Then,” Reese says, “it’s go time.”
All that is left is to rest and defeat any negative visions that invade the mind. All week, Wetmore has hardly slept. He is consumed by the meet. He has been waking up with nightmares, and it is always the same one. Goucher is in the lead, all alone, and Wetmore races to the chute to meet him there. He waits for Goucher but Goucher never arrives. Wetmore cannot comprehend what is going on. Goucher was killing everybody! The field was nowhere to be seen! It is then that he spots Goucher, limping across the field.
“It’s not that he’s more important than anybody else,” Wetmore says, but Goucher finished second in 1994, sixth in 1995, redshirted 1996, and finished third in 1997. In 1995 and 1997, Wetmore and Goucher felt Goucher should have won. This race is all that is left for Goucher, and in some ways, for Wetmore, too. If Goucher does not win, he will not attain the goal he set for himself as a prep at Doherty High. Wetmore tells Goucher that it is just a race, but his thoughts and actions reveal that it means more.
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Wetmore has doubts about Goucher’s current fitness because of the training he has missed since mid-October while nursing his injured leg.
“On October 10th,” Wetmore says, half hoping he could go back to that point and erase any mistakes that were made since, “he was the best runner in the country. If he was rested, he would have killed him
[Mwangi].” But now, Wetmore is not so sure. He says, “Some coaches think it’s 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical. Well, let me train them 90 percent and then give me 10 percent mental. You get them as fit as can be, and the mental aspect will take care of itself.” Is Goucher even 90 percent?
Winning an individual NCAA cross championship takes a special athlete on a special day. As Wetmore says, “To win this meet, you gotta be ready 100 percent physically, and 100 percent mentally.” But the Buffaloes know that as a team, they are nowhere near 100 percent — physically or mentally. They will have to play the hand they are dealt.
Wetmore leaves at 5:30, and JD sits alone in Balch gym contemplat-ing the season. He thinks aloud, “Well, there’s not much we can do now.
I’m a pessimist. I was worried after last weekend — worried Bat wasn’t going to be able to run. And Ponce was grimacing about his leg today, but what’s he got to do, suck it up for a 10k?” But aside from Batliner and Ponce, everyone feels rested. JD noticed, “Before districts they all seemed tired and now they’re bouncing off the walls. If we’re fourth or better, we’ll be fired up. Shoot, even with Sev, I don’t know how we would’ve done with the way things turned out. Maybe with him and a healthy Bat, but not with the way things turned out. But shit, if you had asked me this summer about Jay Johnson going to NC’s, I would’ve thought you were on crack.”
If they can just put it together . . .
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Friday, November 20, 1998
Championship Week
Time Crawling
It is another easy day on the Front Range. But the decreasing physical stress is offset by the mounting mental anxiety. Each member of the team is in a very different phase right now. Batliner and Goucher’s journals provide us with a glimpse:
Adam Batliner
My shin is really sore today from running the last four days in a row. It hurts every step when I walk through campus and throbs while I sleep at night.
Three more days. I just looked up the trash-talking sites on the Internet and found a large amount of idiot babble and over-excited track geeks proclaiming their love for various schools and individuals; a huge archive that only served to jump my heart rate about twenty beats per minute without teaching me anything about Monday’s race. That’s America, though. Over-analyzed and under-trained.
The last workout of the season wasn’t what I had expected. Yesterday, instead of screaming and drooling on our shoes in an elaborate workout to make everyone dead tired, we did a fairly relaxed 8 x 300 workout with every other one race pace, the others more like mile pace. My leg is fine when it gets warmed up — I don’t feel a thing — but on the cooldown it’s usually a precariously tender pain from my ankle bone to the knee.
This is going to be my last cross race in college. I can’t decide yet what exactly that means for me. Barring a horrible injury or a prison sentence, that probably means a new beginning of running cross country for one of those vast o
ppressive merchandising empires like Nike or Adidas or Asics.
This is the last experience of truly being on a united team, though, and that is what I know I’ll miss. To some extent I am anticipating nostalgia for all those beautifully miserable Sundays I used to run with Chris — because I know that these are incredible people with the incredible and audacious agenda to discover their own talents. This team knows what it is to be invested in a plan, to be dedicated to a system that simultaneously scares the hell out of you and makes you so excited you can barely hold it in. Running, like Wetmore said once, is like getting up every morning and shooting yourself. You know that you are going to put yourself through something really painful, but you also know how much strength and speed are going to come with it. The passion of the runner is to force forgetfulness on that pain and embrace the benefits that will without fail make you a better person. I think me and all these guys have it down pretty well, too well even, RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
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since we keep managing to forget to listen to the despair that scrapes across our nerves and end up injured.
But it’s the respect and camaraderie that goes along with experiencing that together, that is priceless. Chris gave me clarity of understanding when he died. I’ll never take it for granted or forget how we grew together over four years of sweat and how we came to know each other the way people seldom do. These are some of the greatest moments of our lives.
We may not see it yet, we may not even know it, but I think that we will look back as withered elderly men upon these times as some of the most profound of our lives. And if I don’t, that’s even better, because it would take a hell of a life to cloud over the shining, glistening days of collegiate cross country.
Adam Goucher
(Three days to go!!) 40 min. easy
Feeling great! Everything with school is straightened out. A huge amount of school pressure has been lifted off for the time being. Anyway, I felt great on the run, nothing is hurting! Saw Al Kupczak for about a half hour. I tell you, that guy is a miracle worker, he has really put me back together! I had an awesome steak dinner with Reese, then some people from the team watched a movie. It was actually really funny, it really felt good to just chill out, laugh, and have a good time! Three days to go, and all is well. I can’t wait!!
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Saturday, November 21, 1998
Lawrence, Kansas
10:30 p.m.
Lawrence, Here We Come
The CU men’s and women’s teams flew today from Denver to Kansas City. They were on their own today, so everyone put in a couple of easy miles and some strides before heading to Balch to meet the bus to the airport at noon. After picking up their luggage and getting the rental cars, they finally arrived in Lawrence at 5 p.m. They were starving, so they immediately went downtown to dinner at Chili’s. Roybal called the dinner a “disaster” — it seems just about everyone’s order got Gouchered. The good news is that Goucher’s parents and some of the parents of the other runners happened to be eating there, so seeing them was an un-expected treat.
After a long dinner the team made it over to the Eldridge Hotel in downtown Lawrence. It is the oldest building in Lawrence, chock full of legends and ghosts from its less savory days in the 1960s and 1970s. It has been completely renovated, and now it is one of the nicest places in Lawrence. The guys are all impressed by the décor, and when Batliner gets to his room, he is amazed at what he sees. He writes in his journal: The two big rococo rooms separated by French double doors are more than I ever expected, all in an older style that is becoming rare in America.
It makes you kind of despise the newer hotels we stay at with all their un-differentiated sameness that has no character or style. I guess I’m a little romantic about the whole thing since I’m reading The Great Gatsby, and I feel like I just stepped into the book itself, complete with all its glamorous 1920s wealth.
As they try to get some sleep, though, their awe turns to dismay as they discover that the remodeling apparently did not include any work to soundproof the walls. Writes Goucher in his journal: “The walls must be paper thin, because I could hear people down on the street outside and traffic all night — and I’m on the fifth floor!”
The commotion he heard outside had to do with a tragic hit-and-run at 2 a.m. half a block from the hotel that left three KU students hospi-talized. According to newspaper reports, two of the students had to be airlifted to a hospital in Missouri. All of the activity — the whirring of the helicopter, the police sirens, the wailing ambulances — creates an electronic cacophony that lasts till dawn.
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Roybal and Batliner were treated to a more benevolent disturbance in the wee hours of the morning. Their neighbors, it seems, must have been newlyweds. Roybal says, “It was ridiculous. I had to call them at 5
a.m. to tell them to keep it down.”
Nevertheless, when the sleepy runners arrive at Rim Rock Farm to preview the course in the morning, they discover this evening’s hustle and bustle is but a prelude to a far more unsettling sound . . .
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Sunday, November 22, 1998
Rim Rock Farm
11 a.m.
A Push from Above
As if the course were not challenging enough, Mother Nature has decided to make her presence known. The team gets out of the van by the starting line and sees squads from all over the United States stretching, doing strides, and jogging the course — all in full sweats. The wind is howling, and if it continues like this tomorrow it threatens to dramatically slow the race, something that will not be to Colorado’s advantage.
There is a twenty-mile-per-hour headwind off the starting line, and as NC State coach Rollie Geiger surveys the scene, he wonders aloud,
“Who the hell’s gonna take this thing?” His assistant coach, Jason Vigilante, confidently answers, “Arkansas.” As a competitor and an assistant coach, Vigilante has been to the NCAA cross country meet the last five years, and as much as CU likes to race from behind, he has always seen perennial champion Arkansas get to the front in a hurry, and stay there.
After stretching, the CU team jogs quietly over the course. It is firmer than when they ran it at Pre-Nationals. The firm ground might help counterbalance the wind and keep the pace honest if these conditions persist. Goucher leads the way as the runners pay special attention to the new elements that have added an extra two kilometers to the course they ran in October. The team’s silence is broken by Goucher, who narrates the course for his teammates. Despite never having run the 10k course, Goucher knows exactly where each mile marker is, and he informs his teammates as they approach each one: “The two-mile marker is down here on the left . . . The three-mile marker is a quarter mile down on the left.” Asked how he knows the course so well, he says without hesitation, “Hey man, I know it. I studied it all week. I have to.” While his teammates will be biding their time, he knows where he wants to be: right at the front, dictating the race. He practically bounces along the course as they cross the quaint covered bridge that is one of the many elements that make this course so charming — for the fans.
After the team finishes their shake-out run, Goucher and Wetmore leave the course to get to the meet headquarters for some interviews at 1 p.m. By 1:30, none of the men they had asked to attend (Goucher, Mwangi, Abdirahman) have been interviewed yet.
The day ends with a pre-race banquet for all the teams, hosted by the NCAA. The dinner is as disorganized as everything else associated with the meet, and its brevity is its only saving grace. While the standard RUNNING WITH THE BUFFALOES
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chicken and pasta offering is OK, the banquet is so crowded that the CU
team cannot even sit together.
When the men get back to the hotel, Wetmore addresses them for the final time. Like Geiger, Wetmore thinks the wind could dramatically slow the race in the early going, and if this is the case, he tells them that they need to be toward the front of the pack. Again, though, Wetmore urges them to be patient. Their success or failure will largely be determined in the last 4000 meters of the race.
After listening to Wetmore, Batliner, and Goucher head to their rooms. They each write in their journals before going to bed. Batliner wrote:
This course, I realized while we jogged around on it, was the last place Severy competed. I hadn’t even thought about it until we were there, and then it hit me like a slap in the face. But I wasn’t depressed about it. It’s a sym-bolic measure that we get to finish this season the same place that he finished his. We all get to share a return to that course and put a positive stamp on the season. This team is not tragic, this season is not tragic; Chris’s death was tragic. We get to pay tribute to what he was about while he was around by finishing, in grand style, what he never got to finish. I know it’s on all of our minds, even though we don’t want to talk about it—
this is for Chris. That doesn’t mean we go out harder and run harder than ever (which isn’t possible), it doesn’t mean we do a chant on the start line.
It means we do what we always have done, which is train intelligently and methodically and race as hard as our bodies will let us. It means continuing the legacy that Chris was a part of. Run our asses off and do what we do so well that we defeat all kinds of people that are supposed to be better than us.
Wetmore gave us our last instructions, which are not much different from what we knew before — hit your splits, be calm, and be ready to start breakin’ necks from 6000 meters on. Well, the only change is that we need to be conscious of the wind, and if everybody goes out in 5:10 we need to be right up front. In other words, we need to listen to our legs, lungs, and pace and not our position in the pack. I’m going to run the fastest race I can on that course tomorrow, and the pack can all go to hell. If I have to lead or be dead last by 50 meters, I need to listen to my own sensory data and run intelligently. The game is on. I’m going to bed.