Camillus NY - After the success of Jim Vermeulen's XC Journal in the many falls of Cross Country, we've asked again for him to provide some news and notes once a month this summer. Think of these as the thoughts that cross the mind of your average coach. Up from Section 3, we present you with "Thoughts From Three."
Homage to March
I don't know about the rest of the country, but here in upstate New York, a lot of coaches tell their Outdoor Track & Field teams roughly the same thing in early March: the next few weeks are going to suck. Forget the unavoidable excitement of first-practice crowds. The moment they step outside into a sideways snowstorm or 38o rain, a fair amount of that early reverie fades.
That's the natural order of things during the early-season stretch: chaos. One March, the hopeful hordes sweat aerobic intervals in T-shirts; the next March we organize a snow-shovel party so the track can be cleared for a scrimmage just days before April Fool's. Weather is the first marker of our seasons, a determinate in play long before place finishes, performances or overall attendance averages. It exerts its authority without shame or guile, and it is first to demand an answer to the most essential question: how badly do you want to be here?
Weather sets the stage for both predictable and unexpected human drama during this, the annual Season of Conflicts. My long-time assistant shivered through a clear but brittle thirty-nine degree dual meet in early April one season, and on the bus ride home he told himself: that's it. The athletes, the parents, the hours--they didn't tilt his decision to retire from outdoor coaching. The weather did. Cerutty famously claimed that pain is the purifier. Around here this time of year, it's not. That would be the weather. "Thank god for March Madness," one of my runners said during opening week, already planning ahead. He'd figured it out.
Of the three running seasons, outdoor track's early going is also the most theatrical. Outdoor is the magnet that draws in fitness-challenged students who have accomplished nothing more aerobic since the previous summer than formation drills in Fall marching bands or chorus-line steps in the school's winter musical. But it's spring; they want something to do, and track is available. When curiosity and 'interest' collide with physiology, however, there is no shortage of dramatics. First week groans, grimaces and contorted body language from some athletes implores us to feel their self-inflicted pain. "Hey Carrie," I said after she'd visually signaled, with thespian virtuosity, her displeasure for all the effort required of a ten minute warm-up jog. "No one notices that but me--and do you know what?"
"What?' she answered my benevolent grin expectantly.
"I don't care."
Un-fitness and those questionable commitments are the early-season realities which also prompt the most memorable lines. Tammie waited after practice one March day to inform me she was quitting because she honestly didn't realize "there was so much running in track." Jackie, when pressed after a few begrudging weeks of cold-weather workouts, could tell me with a straight face, "I'm just doing this to get in shape for the prom." And Mrs. Smith e-mailed early to formally notify me her daughter would be leaving the team during spring break but would be "running every day on the beach!" That instead of competing in two dual meets. No one knows for sure if those folks practiced their lines or performed extemporaneously.
And in March, some team members even become magicians. Now you see them, now you don't.
So it comes as ironic reassurance that our only constant in the early going is change. I find it eminently reasonable that no scholastic coach where-spring-comes-late should ever completely have that part of the season figured out. Certainly, no one will ever be able to 'phone in' those first weeks. Anyway, why miss all the fun? Outdoor in March rejects any comfortable level of predictability beyond the passing of days and some semblance of a temperature progression. Thanks to the third month, our institutional library of been-there-done-that expands yearly, thus always proving incomplete. It's week one. A janitor strides into the gym and, concerned with his floors, forthrightly questions why we are using indoor shots indoors. Just when you think you've seen it all--you ain't.
The naturalist John Muir is reputed to have climbed into Sierra Nevada trees during storms so he could sway back and forth to heighten the glorious fury of it all. Maybe he was on to something. Outdoor Track in March--ya gotta love it. Seriously, you just have to love it.