Running Full Tilt

by Michael Currinder

  He looked at me with a confused expression. “What the hell is an emotional affair?”

  “Well,” I began, “Mary says it’s kind of like a crush that—”

  He shook his head. “Enough!” he said sharply. “It’s Sheila’s job to know her customers. That’s how waitresses make tips, Leo. Now if I were you, I’d keep your mouth shut and start studying the race form.”

  We watched the horses and jockeys trot past the grandstand on the television, and Dad made a closer inspection. The number 4 horse got excited and started kicking, and the 7 took a huge crap. That set Dad dashing back to the windows to place another bet. “If anything, he’s running light now,” he informed me upon his return.

  “What the hell is it between you and Grandma?” I finally asked him.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. “I’m not good enough for their daughter,” he finally said. “Never was and never will be.”

  “What’s up with that?”

  “She’s their only child,” he told me. “I’m not sure if anyone is good enough for their Elise.”

  “You can’t be that bad, Dad,” I assured him.

  “I’ve made a few mistakes, Leo.”

  He had to know what I was going to ask next. “What did you do?”

  Dad bit his lip as the tinny bugle call on the television sounded, signaling the start of the race. “Let this be a lesson to you, Leo. If you like a girl but her mother doesn’t like you, don’t bother. You’ll be in for a world of pain, my boy. Trust me on that. Now let’s watch the race. Enjoy a little break from home.”

  Dad got two of the three horses right that race, but his other horse finished a distant sixth. “Shit,” he muttered, tossing his ticket on the floor. “That was the one that was supposed to be the sure bet.”

  Dad didn’t end up winning a single race. We drove home most of the way listening to some country-and-western radio station.

  “How’s school going, Leo?” he eventually asked me.

  “Fine, I guess,” I told him.

  “You like Ladue more than Central?”

  “Definitely,” I assured him.

  “Feel like this was a good move for the family?”

  “For sure.”

  Then Dad suddenly shifted the topic. “I’ve been thinking over what we talked about on the ride over here.”

  “About what?”

  “About you and your brother.”

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “You seem a little angry sometimes,” he observed.

  “Am I supposed to feel guilty when I’m angry at him?”

  “Christ, Leo.” He sighed. “Of course not. I guess all I’m saying is, we’ve all got our own stuff we have to deal with, son—your mother and I, you and Caleb. Trust me on that.”

  We drove the rest of the way home in silence. When we pulled into the garage, Mom’s car was gone.

  Dad plucked his cell phone from the glove compartment and checked his messages. “Shit!” he yelled, smacking the steering column. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Your brother had another seizure,” he told me. “I’m heading to the hospital. You stay here.”

  Grandma told me about Caleb’s seizure after Dad left. Caleb wasn’t breathing for several minutes. His face was still blue when the ambulance hauled him off to the hospital, and she hadn’t heard anything from Mom since.

  Around midnight I heard the door slam. I headed upstairs to find out what was going on. Dad came into the kitchen, went directly to the cabinet, and poured himself a drink. “I think Caleb is going to be all right,” he said finally. “The doctors figured he had another ‘tonic-clonic’ seizure, the kind that takes over the entire brain and causes convulsions. This one was more extreme and lasted longer than that last one.”

  That Monday Mom spent most of her birthday at the hospital with Caleb. His neurologists ran a bunch of tests with crazy names and abbreviations and prescribed new medications with so many syllables, I couldn’t even pronounce them. When Mom and Dad asked the doctors about what the outlook was for him, there were no definitive answers. The seizures might continue to be few and far between but severe, or the medicine might keep him seizure-free. If he was lucky, he might outgrow them after his teens and never have one again, or they might get worse. The bottom line was that they didn’t have a clue.

  Caleb came back from the hospital a couple of days later, after Grandma and Grandpa had already left. It didn’t take long for Caleb to get his energy back and return to his routines. He understood that the seizures knocked him on his ass for a couple of days and he needed to take his medication, but he didn’t want anything in his life to change, or anything to get in the way of the things that made him happy. I think Mom and Dad felt the same way. For all my parents’ differences, at least they were in agreement about that.

  34.

  THAT MONDAY ALSO MARKED the first day of the track season.

  Maybe it was an omen that the sky dumped a thick blanket of wet snow. The baseball diamonds, soccer fields, and track were a mess of white slush. About fifty guys gathered in the gym in a section of bleachers. I spotted some guys from the cross-country team and recognized a few of the football players and some wrestlers. Rosenthal and Stuper were there, but Rasmussen and Burpee said they were over their heads with their AP classes and upcoming mock exams, so they were going to skip track to focus on school. I looked around, kind of expecting to see Glusker, thinking he might be a guy who liked to heave heavy objects, but I was relieved to see that wasn’t the case.

  I spotted Curtis seated amid a few guys I didn’t recognize and made my way up the bleachers toward him.

  “Coughlin, allow me to introduce you to Koprovika and Isenberg. They’re in my AP Physics 2 class,” he explained. “I think I’ve persuaded these promising juniors that track and field provides them with a unique opportunity to apply the laws of mechanics and physics to human athleticism.”

  Koprovika was a tall, lanky guy wearing Coke-bottle glasses who I recognized from the library. Isenberg was short and muscular, dark in complexion, and one of those guys who seemed to have a permanent five o’clock shadow. They seemed skeptical of Curtis.

  “I’ve recruited Koprovika as a potential high jumper,” Curtis continued. “Because of his body structure and keen intellect, I’ve encouraged him to explore the connection between center-of-mass and aerodynamic forces involved with jumping vertically,” he told me as I shook Koprovika’s hand. Koprovika rolled his eyes.

  “Isenberg has a slightly more challenging task with the discus,” Curtis continued. “He must integrate centrifugal force, potential energy, and optimum angle, not to mention endure endless conversation with Gorsky.”

  Koprovika cut to the chase. “We’re basically doing this to put it on our college applications,” he explained.

  “What about school spirit and pride?” Curtis pleaded. “You two might provide us with the few points we need to avoid another last-place finish in conference!”

  Gorsky went over basic expectations and the season schedule and then announced that due to the crappy weather we’d work out inside, alternating between running hallways and lifting weights.

  “This is bullshit,” Curtis moaned. “Only wusses run indoors.”

  Stuper glanced nervously at Rosenthal and nodded. “Then we’ll be joining the wusses today, Curtis,” Rosenthal said.

  I followed Curtis outside to the custodians’ building. He demanded two snow shovels from an old guy behind a desk, who handed them over with a simple “Be my guest.”

  “I’ll be damned if I spend the first day of track season running hallways,” Curtis told me. Wearing only our sweatshirts and shorts, we spent a half hour clearing a lane on the track, then tossed the shovels and began an eight-lap warm-up.

  The early-March air was still bitter cold, with a crosswind that belted the breath out of us. It stung our hamstrings and calves from one direction and whipped our faces from the othe
r. After the warm-up, we ran sixteen 400s on a minute recovery, switching the lead each time to give each other a break from the wind. Curtis wore his watch, and after glancing at our split after the first lap, he cursed. “We’re not paying attention to times today. It’s only going to piss us off.”

  Curtis couldn’t resist his obsession with data, though. I heard his watch beep at the start of each 400, and again as we crossed the finish line. He cursed nonstop because our times weren’t meeting his expectations. When we finished, our cheeks and thighs were seared red and swollen from the elements.

  “Between this miserable wind and the crap snow on the track, maybe we should just be happy with finishing this workout, Curtis,” I offered.

  He said nothing as we began an eight-lap cooldown. “Perhaps,” he finally said. “But we’re going to have to do a shitload better than this. Especially you.”

  March often delivered its nastiest weather to St. Louis. Just when you thought spring might be arriving, it would turn cold again and sometimes snow. There was even the occasional tornado. The fields, streets, and track were wet and slushy. Our shoes and feet were numb from the cold and wet, and our quads were tight and sore from the constant backsplash of slush.

  Gorsky managed the large track numbers by posting the week’s workouts for sprinters, jumpers, throwers, and distance runners on a large bulletin board outside his office on Mondays. While I always took a glance at the board to get an idea where we were headed, I knew Curtis would revise the plan with Gorsky to make our workouts more challenging. We’d be doing something similar to the group, he assured me, but he always tweaked it. That meant we would be going slightly farther, target interval splits a bit faster, and suffer recovery periods a bit shorter. There were days when I questioned the pain and suffering, but Curtis confirmed it would all be worth it once the season broke open in three weeks.

  As much as I hated that queasy, nervous feeling I got before racing, I kind of missed it at the same time. I started looking forward to once more stepping up to the starting line, hearing that pistol crack, feeling a rush of adrenaline, and pushing myself to the limit.

  35.

  I WAS SLATED TO DOUBLE in the 800 and 1600 in the first meet of the track season on Saturday at the Webster Groves Dan Sebben Invitational. Curtis would run the 3200, the next-to-last event of the day. We left early from school, and athletes segregated themselves on the bus by events. Sprinters, hurdlers, and jumpers occupied the back of the bus, and throwers spanned the middle. Most guys used the journey to catch a few more winks or to zone out to music on their headphones.

  Curtis and I got wedged into the front of the bus, sandwiched between Stuper and Rosenthal in the seat ahead of us and Koprovika and Isenberg behind us. I sipped from a thermos of coffee as Curtis lectured me on the nuances of track.

  “Track is a completely different animal, Leo,” he told me. “Guys who couldn’t catch me on the cross-country course last fall can kick my ass on the oval. And I can accept that, knowing that I can still look in the mirror each night and remind myself that I am the reigning state cross-country champion,” he said sagely.

  I lifted my thermos to him. “Long live the king,” I toasted. “You sound a little melodramatic. Shouldn’t you be a little more confident?”

  “Young Leo, my mission during my time on this planet was completed in November,” he told me.

  I laughed.

  “Oh, don’t you worry, Leo. Alas, I, too, will have brief, fleeting moments of glory this track season,” he told me. “But my finely tuned machine was designed to conquer distances longer than the mere thirty-two hundred meters offered by a track competition. And much more challenging terrain than the flat four-hundred-meter oval.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That I know for sure,” he said. “However, young Leo, you might just have a shot at excelling at track’s glory event. So I do bequeath the oval kingdom to you.”

  I humored him. “Tell me more, o wise one.”

  “The 1600. The metric mile. The marquee event for track aficionados the world over. Sprint enthusiasts might beg to differ, but runners of our ilk believe the mile is the true demarcation of athletic supremacy on the track oval, for it requires both speed and stamina.”

  “Qualities you think I now possess?”

  “Mind you, I can certainly kick your ass in any longer distance, Leo.”

  “You never fail to remind me.”

  “But you have the tools to dominate this race. You’re strong enough, and you’ve got raw speed.”

  “So why not the 800? It seems a whole lot easier to run two laps versus four.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, laughing. “You’re fast, but you’re not that fast.”

  “Seriously, what’s your real advice for today?” I asked him.

  “When the gun goes off, run as fast as you can.”

  “That simple?”

  “Yep. It’s your first track race, Leo. Just run and learn.”

  Things were looking up in Curtis’s world. The previous week he’d finally made a commitment to run at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Although he was tempted by an offer from a small college in the Rocky Mountains, he told me he’d decided to consider his life beyond running. Haverford had a top-notch Division III cross-country program and excellent academics, a perfect match for him. The school had a pretty hefty price tag, but they managed to assemble a package for him that he couldn’t turn down.

  The bus dumped us out beside the track. We schlepped our bags to a section of bleachers, then ran a few slow laps to shake out the cobwebs from the bus ride.

  The track oval felt like a three-ring circus. High jumpers were at one end of the tarmac, marking their steps with white medical tape, and the long jumpers did the same on a slice of runway adjacent to the homestretch. On the opposite side, pole-vaulters were gauging the precise location for their takeoffs. And on the far corners, the throwers stood around concrete rings heaving shots and discs. While some sprinters executed drills over a compressed sequence of hurdles set up on the backstretch, others just hung out in the bleachers listening to headphones and tightening spikes. Some guys did nothing at all but lie on benches with closed eyes, trying to absorb a little warmth from a sun still making its way up the sky on a chilly April morning.

  “Nervous?” Curtis asked.

  I surveyed the scene again. “I am now. There are a hell of a lot more people here than at your typical cross-country meet.”

  “The track oval is an athletic stage,” Curtis noted grandly. “Unlike cross-country, you’re on display for everyone, my friend.” He swept one hand across the entire venue. “Consider this your grand debut.”

  The 1600 was the fourth event, following a relay and a couple of sprints. I was a mess. The butterflies were beating against the walls in my stomach, and by the time they announced the first call for the 1600, I tasted the orange juice I drank three hours ago snaking its way up into my throat.

  I was going nearly out of my mind before my race when I spotted Mary across the track. She was looking supercool but relaxed in her old faded jeans, black Chucks, and a gray hoodie. I waved and jogged over to her. “What are you doing here?”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “I came to watch those big thugs over there whip heavy objects,” she said, nodding toward the shot ring. “What do you think I’m doing here, Leo? I came to watch you run.”

  “You didn’t have to come all the way out here to see me run a mile.”

  She stepped forward, put her arms around me, and pressed her nose to mine. “I wanted to come, Leo. Why can’t you just be okay with that? I don’t care if you’re running for only five minutes. I like to watch you.”

  “Hopefully it will be less than five minutes,” I told her with a grin.

  She kissed me quickly. “Good luck,” she whispered in my ear.

  “I’ve got to get ready,” I finally said to her before starting my last warm-up, one that included a quick pit stop behind an equipmen
t shed to puke up what was left of my breakfast.

  The meet director kept the order and the tempo of the day with clarity and precision. The announcements for first, second, and final calls for track and field events were constant. When I heard the last call for the 1600, I did one last stride on the backstretch, then jogged over to the starting line and checked in with the marshal. The morning air was still crisp and cold, so I kept my sweats on until the last minute.

  They crammed twenty-four of us onto the curved line, three to a lane for a waterfall start. I looked up into the bleachers and spotted Dad sitting alone two rows in front of Mom6. My heart was pounding and my gut was churning. I reminded myself to get out quick and not get boxed in by the pack, but when the pistol cracked and the race started, it was clear that every other guy in the race had a plan just as urgent as mine. We ran as a herd, flailing knees and elbows, stretching hands, tapping and shoving shoulders and fists, in order to keep balance and hold position. After two hundred meters the pack thinned out a bit, and I was able to thread my way to the front with five other guys. A space opened and I lengthened my stride and focused on breathing. The butterflies were gone. Now I was locked in and just running.

  We passed through the first lap, and the counter on the inside posted a large number three, a reminder of how many laps remained. A timer inside the rail showed the seconds that had elapsed so far: 67…68…69…70.

  I saw Curtis at the turn, standing beside Koprovika and Isenberg, who was gripping his discus in one hand and a hot dog in the other.

  “It’s slow, Leo!” Curtis screamed. “Pick it up.”

  I thought the pace felt a hell of a lot faster than any cross-country race, so I hung with the pack another lap, only to be yelled at again by Curtis as we passed through the half in 2:16. “You’ve got to be kidding me, Coughlin,” he wailed.

  Part of me was tempted to tell Isenberg to smack Curtis in the head with the discus, but instead I decided to find some guts and take the lead. I waited until we completed the first curve, surged to the outside until I had a couple of strides on the pack, then slipped back in along the rail. Since no one went with me, I held my position and didn’t press the pace. I stayed strong and calm as we ran the back turn, then accelerated as I strode into the homestretch. The lap counter on the infield signaled just one more to go. As we approached the final lap, the clanging bell pierced my ears. I didn’t hear a split, Curtis’s voice…anything. But some of the other runners must have gotten juiced on adrenaline from the sound of the bell, because suddenly three of them swallowed me. It was like the race was starting all over again.