Horses and Water
Elizabeth wasn't so sure--but I was. Several times our first week of team practices, as runners grouped for the main course of the day's training(i.e. the hard part), I'd either nodded in her direction or pointed a finger toward another, faster, group. Reluctantly, she'd sidled over to the certainty of a more difficult morning.
It was Elizabeth's own fault. Her older sister had run modified for several years, where I watched her handily win dual meets and invitationals. That she chose not to continue on the varsity level did nothing to mitigate the high probability that good genes were in play for that family. Elizabeth joined the team late and didn't make our early summer team runs, but she then confirmed what I suspected at our mid-summer Wildcats 5k race on the home course, where a blazing finish was tacked on to a solid time. The cat was out of the bag. By the end of our first team practice week, Elizabeth knew there'd be no hiding out in our mass of neophytes. For our Friday interval hills workout, she probably just wanted to avoid the ignominy of being singled out again because she dutifully lined up with her new group-mates and waited. This transformation might, I thought, be easier than expected. But it was too early to tell.
Some coaches enter the team season knowing exactly where they stand. They have the summer mileages tallied by their athletes. Thanks to a sizeable number of voluntary summer runs, they've accurately gauged the talent level of each individual and the team as a whole. They've pegged the attitudes and the aspirations of their team members. They've already imprinted their team philosophy. And, thanks to Tullyrunners or Milesplit, they even have a pretty good idea of where they'll end up when the sun has shortened its daily stay and the temperatures dropped. The roadmap is drawn, everything set in motion. With institutional expertise at their disposal, they can almost phone it in.
I don't, in all honesty, envy them. Well, maybe a little, because who wouldn't want to enter a team season with a stable of known talent, experienced and dependable runners who will do what the prognosticators predict. That's certainly better than qualifying a roster-induced pessimism with the term, "a re-building year." Still, you can suffer from too much of a good thing. You can, as the 4th Chinese curse warns, "get what you wish for." Then you might be strapped with the burden of living up to everyone else's expectations, an especially vibrant element of American sports. And at the top echelon of teams, where our national preoccupation with winning runs strongest, local competitions run the risk of becoming boring. In those contests, it's a little like watching Usain Bolt sprint or Katie Ladecky swim the freestyle long distances. The excitement is limited to estimating how large the winning margin will be and whether a record is set. When the central question of the season for a team is reduced to can you keep them healthy, a little of the magic is gone. I prefer more uncertainty. With forty-six percent of my girls team arriving as freshmen, with others transferring in from different fall sports, and with a few who obviously made decisions to step up their games in 2016, team prognostications on the coming season are, at best, a risky venture.
But that's where the fun begins. Paul Theroux wrote, "The classic travel story is a tale of risk." For the runners, their cross-country 'journey,' June to December, dust to snow, stretches long, especially in relative terms. A lot can happen between departure and destination, which is, after all, one of the primary reasons for beginning. If the trip's worth it, you shouldn't expect to arrive the same person. Which can also be said for that collection of individuals who will, hopefully, become a team of travelers.
It's about ambiguous change. It's about communicating with athletes the simple fact that whatever lofty hopes they hold, you are prepared to go them one better, though you honestly don't know the outcome of that decision. This is what my colleague, Coach Delsole, means when he tells the runners that, for them, he holds "unrealistic expectations." To pursue those unrealistic expectations, you need to welcome the uncertainty that goes with it.
Just before she graduated, Marie gave me a note at our track post-season picnic and told me not to read it until I got home. We'd been through a lot in her eleven varsity seasons. I'd seen the potential long before she decided to achieve it. That made for some tough seasons and some difficult conversations. But in the end, she stood on several state championship medal podiums, and a college coach was happy to see her coming. In the note I read later, she acknowledged that, to her ultimate benefit, I'd balanced my loyalty to the athlete (her) with my loyalty to the sport. She wrote: "I will miss fighting with you…."
That, not so ironically, is what I'll remember the most about Maria--not knowing how things would turn out, but plugging on nonetheless toward the achievable.
Centuries ago, Homer suggested, "The journey is the thing." Even then, he knew what mattered.