Once a Runner

by John L Parker

  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 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 half a second from one to the next.

  In the third set Cassidy felt as though Denton was picking up the pace, though it was unlikely. It simply required more effort now to keep up the same speed. A miler, whose pace in a race was quite a bit faster than sixty-three seconds, could still 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 sixty-three-second quarter miles required so much effort it would have been heartbreaking to think how much faster he needed to run in an actual race. There were too many other factors: rest, a faster surface, and more important the incredible psych he would build up prior to the race. Such comparisons were not helpful and were dismissed quickly. In training it was best to think about training. As he circled this little field twelve miles from Kernsville on a Saturday afternoon, racing seemed an exotic and glamorous activity indeed, the “trial” part of his Miles of Trials.

  Number fourteen 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 adrenaline 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 bad 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?”

  The last set felt very much like the one before and when, at last, they finished number twenty, Cassidy let out a whoop. They had been running very hard for an hour. He looked over at Denton, expecting to see the happy relief that follows a hard workout, but Denton jogged on grimly.

  “What now?” Cassidy asked cheerfully, thinking they would perhaps finish with some striders or a mile warm-down.

  “Another twenty.” Even though Denton said it seriously, Cassidy had to smile. After they did a few more strides and Denton did not dispel the grimness of his pronouncement, Cassidy knew he was serious. This, he thought, was a dirty trick.

  And they began it all again. In their minds they took up each set separately, as if it were all they had to do. Five little quarter-mile circuits to be conquered, a mile and a quarter of hard running interspersed with those nearly cruel bits of rest, each quarter becoming in its own way a milestone, a feared and adamant obstacle that had to be dominated and put away so that its brother, now looming, could be faced. The sun was soon at tree level, splashing much of the field with dark cool shadows from the surrounding oaks. But for the desperate nature of their struggle, it would have been a remarkably pleasant scene; to the runners, however, it might just as well have been sleeting, so fierce was their attention to their toil.

  Although as they finished the second set his legs were merely numb, Cassidy’s arms and shoulders ached. When on occasion he slipped out of the trance to look at Denton, he saw no sign of unusual fatigue at all. This is how he puts the fear of God into them, he thought, he just keeps going and going like this.

  They had both long since stopped speaking except to call out the number of the repetition as they finished, both of them gasping finally: “Twenty!”

  The trees were now steeping in the beautiful dusty pink orange glow of sundown, the color of ripe mangoes filling the sky behind dark oaks. They jogged on, saying nothing; their deep hearty gasps echoed across the field. It did not really dawn on Cassidy until they were halfway around the field. By this time their breathing was getting back to normal, but they were still in considerable distress.

  “Bruce, you’re not going to…I mean, this is…” His voice faltered, weak with self-pity and resignation.

  “Twenty more, Cass.”

  They jogged on quietly. Cassidy felt close to tears, and wasn’t even ashamed about it.

  “Bruce. Sixty quarters. Bruce, you can’t be serious. Nobody does that kind of stuff anymore. Arthur Lydiard—”

  “Screw Arthur Lydiard. Quenton, this is where you find out. This is the time and place. All the rest is window dressing.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Quenton.” He smiled for the first time all day. “You can do very nearly anything. Haven’t you figured that out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Look, runners deal in discomfort. After you get past a certain point, that’s all there really is. There is no finesse here. I know you can do this thing because I once did it myself and when it was over I knew some very important things.”

  “That you’re a lunatic?”

  “Maybe. Maybe we all are. But I expect you’ll find out in your own way. That’s why I’m going to let you do them by yourself, just the way people do everything that’s important. You can slough off if you want, but by God, you’ll sure as hell know when you’re doing it, won’t you?”

  “I suppose,” he said glumly.

  “I’m going back to the cabin. I’ll be back about the time you’re finishing up.”

  “Swell.”

  HE BEGAN THE MELANCHOLY RITUAL as night was falling. After the first five he was running by the soft glow of a huge clear moon. Cassidy thought, Bruce thinks of everything.

  Then he sought out the mental neutrality that is the refuge, the contained wan comfort of the runner. He grooved his mind upon the thin platinum rail of his task, a line that stretched out in front of him and disappeared into the gloom, further than he could contemplate all at once, even if he had the desire to, which he did not. When his trance broke and a word or phrase popped into his mind, his dizzy mind played with it like a seal with a beach ball, in a disturbing, gibberishly mad way, the way your mind acts in the druggy twilight before sleep. In a very controlled, abstract way, he knew how much he was suffering; the slightest break in his concentration allowed self-pity to well up in him instantly.

  He was, in a manner of speaking, accustomed to this distress in the same manner that a boxer is “accustomed” to being struck; but the familiarity of experience in no way lessens the blow or mitigates its physiological effects. It merely provides the competitor a backdrop against which his current travail may be played, gives him a certain serenity and coolness in the face of otherwise overwhelming stimuli, allows dispassionate insight where otherwise there would be only a rush of panic. In a hail of killing blows, the fighter’s quiet center of logic, schooled in brutality, will be calmly theorizing: We are hurt pretty badly. If we do not cover up and take up the slack we will soon be unconscious.

  Not that this quiet center of logic particularly fears unconsciousness (indeed, how welcome it might seem at times), but it knows that one does not win while unconscious. In the same way, no highly trained runner slacks off because he fears the pain, but because the quiet center of logic tells him he will win nothing if he runs himself to a standstill.

  All of this availed Quenton Cassidy not at all. His deepl
y ingrained conditioning and his mahogany-hard legs merely allowed him to push himself that much more. He had the mental ability to literally run himself right into the ground like Sambo’s tiger. He knew that Bruce Denton expected him to do exactly that, and, just as each repetition made the next seem more and more impossible, he knew that without question he would do it. There was no refuge in injury, his body could not be injured in this way. There was no refuge in mercy, there was nothing to forgive and no one to issue dispensation. And at last he saw: there was no refuge in cowardice, because he was not afraid. There was no alternative, it just had to be done.

  He finished number seven, somehow running it too hard, which caused him to take deep and painful gasps and to spend a few seconds bent over grasping his knees before beginning his weak jog on to number eight (in his mind number three, and after that only two to go—beyond that he did not think). It was becoming harder and harder to get his breathing anywhere near normal in the 110-yard rest jog; he was starting the next interval gasping as if he had not stopped at all. Into the next one he charged, down the straight, around the turn, by a pine tree slashed in half by lightning (that to him meant only the halfway point), into the last turn, and then the last fifty yards of straightaway, legs, arms, shoulders, jawbone, ears, chest, fingers, all battling the strained numb pain of the lactic acid, all striving for that normality of motion that would preserve—should heaven and hell fall into each other in a cosmic swirl—the integrity of the stride. Let others flail; the runner runs truly to the end.

  He finished and rasped, “Eight. You. Bastard.”

  But the ninth took special revenge, reduced him to such a level that he had to spend several seconds holding his knees and sucking in sweet but maddeningly unsatisfying air. When he finally trotted on, he looked up at the bright clear stars and his eyes welled, mixed with the hot sweat of his face, tears ran down to the spittle around his mouth and chin, and he felt quite literally that he was melting, turning to human slush as he jogged along. Only when he started a repetition did he become solid once more.

  His mind had now taken up a melody, Für Elise, and played it constantly without apparent pattern except that as each new quarter mile began, so did his fragment of Beethoven; whereas the stars were cold specks of illuminated space dust to him, those haunting notes reassured that there were at least others in the universe capable of understanding. Each new quarter now began in a kind of physical sorrow and ended in nothing less than spiritual despair. He remembered suddenly the one marathon he had run. On the twenty-third mile he had looked around and discovered that everything seemed unfamiliar.

  Convinced he was lost, he ran on like a forlorn child, blubbering and wailing. When he finished the race in 2:33 he saw he had been on the right course after all. But he still couldn’t keep from weeping; he just didn’t know why any longer.

  After his fifteenth quarter he would have had to think for a moment to recall his own name. But now he had his full quarter mile of rest, that he took in mincing little steps, savoring every instant. His mind came out of neutral, reveled in giddiness. He was incredibly thirsty; his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth and he no longer had to spit out the thick white fluffs of congealed saliva; there was none. He dared not think of water, or of the first beer. Parched to the marrow, wobbly, near mad, he took his tiny jogging steps and waxed (so he thought) poetic:

  Somewhere they fox-trot madly

  While in lunar shadows sadly

  I keep pace with crickets gladly

  And Moon rises with my bile

  Lord Godamighty, he told himself, launching into number sixteen (in his mind number one). Für Elise cranked up again and he wished it would go away. He hardly felt anything at all now. He hardly cared. As he was putting seventeen away, Für Elise degenerated into a kind of steam calliope gone haywire. Misplaced notes made what had been haunting, ugly; what had been precise and logical, mad and horrifying. As if to keep pace with the crumbling music, his form occasionally broke and an elbow would flap out wildly, a knee would catch its brother instead of sliding by. Poor Elise, he thought. Poor everyone.

  Eighteen was a shambles. Nineteen required all his effort to keep the pace from slipping down to a stumble. It had fallen off badly during the last few sets, but there was nothing to be done about it. When he finished the nineteenth, he let out a slight, wild, but oddly unjoyous, whoop. He was vaguely aware that Denton had returned, but it quickly slipped his mind. His mind was devoid of any thought save finishing the last one.

  On the last he simply sprinted away the life in him. The thin sliver of monorail that had once stretched out to forever now dropped off into a sheer abyss just over the horizon. Once more down the straight, around the far turn, past the pathetic half-pine, into the last turn, flailing now a little, and (all slow motion now), feeling each step of the last fifty yards until it was over.

  He staggered about, tightly grabbing his knees, eyes clenched shut, painfully, for the tears could not get out, while the sweat seemed to seep in easily. Denton stood beside and held him steady, with a gentleness of a medic treating the newly wounded. And like a casualty, Cassidy seemed not to notice him.

  Denton walked him back slowly, talking to him quietly all the way. Cassidy, still deep in his anguish, said nothing. Denton fed him from the blender, let him drink all the liquids he wanted, then gently put him to bed.

  “Quenton, you—”

  “I know,” Cassidy said. His eyes were still moist; he turned away. “But it is a very hard thing to have to know.”

  Denton nodded, smiled at him as he swatted him once on the fanny (the muscles there were quivering, he thought, just like it was for me), and left. Cassidy was in a deep sleep by the time Denton was out the door.

  Cassidy awoke only once during the night, filled the toilet with bloody urine (something Denton told him might happen), and went back to bed. He slept seventeen hours altogether and when he awoke at last, the runner, paragon of fitness and efficient mobility, this runner at least, had trouble getting around. He went back to bed.

  33.

  Orchids

  I MUST HAVE HUMAN CONTACT,” he told Denton. “And I’m not talking about your standard Newberry barmaid who mixes better metaphors than drinks.”

  “Chasing it,” Denton said, “is more of a pastime than a runner can handle, generally speaking.”

  “Well, if you don’t get me out of here among people who talk with recognizable syntax, I’m liable to do something rash, like set fire to your little dream retreat and then I hop a freight train.”

  And that is how Cassidy found himself at, of all things, a cocktail party, beginning to admit to himself a certain degree of social ineptitude of the variety that can culminate with your pants cuff inexplicably in someone’s lemon meringue pie. Yet there it was: people clearly made him nervous.

  Denton had abandoned him early in the evening—intentionally, he now suspected—and he had struggled through several conversations with guests who, though sincere and intelligent enough, gave off a carefully cultivated aura of university-town bohemianism. Though they would surely rise in the morning, gargle, and proceed to their offices to fill teeth, draw wills, grade papers, and otherwise keep the cogs of the republic whirring away, still they might at any moment (given the appropriate pep talk) grab a thirty-aught-six and a slab of jerky and take to the hills to fight the good fight. Most of it struck him as bizarre, and at the same time he was observing it, he was worrying about the fact that even after several days of light workouts, he still had not recovered fully from Denton’s interval ordeal.

  And he tired quickly of the standard party fare that goes: “You run twenty miles? Without stopping? I couldn’t run twenty feet, har har har har…” He would have to bite his tongue to keep from saying that it had been real humorous the first thousand times he had heard it. He had forgotten what it was like, this thing with the stupid jokes. And too there were the questions: What did he eat? Did he believe in isometrics? Isotonics? Ice and heat? How
about aerobics, est, ESP, STP? What did he have to say about yoga, yogurt, Yogi Berra? What was his pulse rate, his blood pressure, his time for the hundred-yard dash? What was the secret, they wanted to know; in a thousand different ways they wanted to know The Secret. And not one of them was prepared, truly prepared, to believe that it had not so much to do with chemicals and zippy mental tricks as with that most unprofound and sometimes heartrending process of removing, molecule by molecule, the very tough rubber that comprised the bottoms of his training shoes. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials. How could they be expected to understand that?

  When he finally heard the one about how “I couldn’t drive as far as you run…” he thought, Death on a plate. Fleeing to the kitchen, he was fishing around in the ice tub for a nondiet beer when he noticed that the dark-haired girl had followed him in. She stood with one fist on her hip, watching him with faint amusement, but in a nice way, her head cocked curiously, and this: a flash of white carnivorous teeth against her dark face. I’m not up to this, he told himself.

  He was fumbling around in the tub a little more than was called for and since he figured she was waiting for him to get his ass out of the way, he dived in with both hands and finally speared a normal beer. His hands were stiff and numb from the ice.

  “Good old fattening kind,” he said lamely (oh aren’t we just the conversationalist?). He heh-hehed good-naturedly, wondering when he had become a total moron, and was about to make his hasty escape when she laughed. It was a remarkably unaffected laugh, throaty and real. It stopped him.