"I can remember the wind whistling down the hill from St. Monica’s church, hitting me square in the face on the back stretch as I ran Coach Lananna’s 300's."
By Dena Evans
Even the most casual American track fan, flipping through the channels on a weekend afternoon, coming upon the familiar faces from the last Olympiad, and stopping for a few minutes to watch, probably has heard Larry Rawson challenge us to try what we're looking at. I wonder if anyone, in an effort to experience and understand the feats of the world’s greatest athletes, has actually taken him up on his admonition. Has anyone really gotten up, laced up the trainers, and headed down to the local high-school track to attempt to run a four-minute mile, 25 consecutive quarters in 65 seconds apiece, or throw a broom handle the length of a football field?
One early morning, I found myself out running a few months post-partum after my second child. I was overwhelmed, stressed out, in the midst of figuring out whether or not to leave my job as Stanford's women's cross-country coach. Our lifestyle left me with little time for reflection, and I leapt at every chance to run without the stroller. Often, that took me to the track to run laps. I kind of looked at myself from the outside in, laughing at the mess I was and making up commentary as if I were a competitor on a televised meet.
"Folks, now you will want to keep your eye on the woman running reverse direction in lane eight with her iPod. Notice the shuffling stride, the mismatched clothes, the way her leftover baby tummy jiggles as she goes. She is covering each of these laps in an amazing 2-minutes-15 per. Unbelievable. Just try going down to your local track and running even one lap at that amazing pace ..."
I thought of all the time I had spent through the last 30 years at these venues. When I type the keywords “local track” into the search engine of my memory, I come up with a fairly accurate record of myself.
One of my earliest memories takes me to a long-jump pit alongside a dusty dirt track at South Mercer Junior High on Mercer Island, a Seattle suburb. While my dad played Saturday morning pickup soccer with a group of then-young fathers, now grandfathers, I goofed around with some of the other kids or myself. My family has always had a pretty athletic bent, and I can picture my parents going to the other 400-meter facility in my hometown, at the high school, and my mom running steps while my dad ran laps.
The original Mercer Island High School cinder track was replaced in the 70’s with one of the county’s first all-weather tracks in a bowl directly next to it. So, a public school with an abundance of educational opportunities had the additional bonus of having two 400-meter tracks at its students' disposal. My high-school years included playing dozens of highly memorable (at least to me) soccer games on the fairly narrow pitch on the infield. I can still remember having to adjust the strength of corner kicks not to overshoot the goalmouth, my cleats against the hard track, lining up in lane six in order to run up and throw the ball into the center of the field, warming up with the team in our ramrod straight two lines, jogging back to midfield together after someone scored. I can smell the grass.
Outside the sticky chalk lines on this dewy field, I can remember the countless laps I ran around the track in competition--fast laps and slow laps, lazy laps, attentive laps, laps in the lead, laps following behind, my sole appearance in the 4 x 200 meters during the driving rain (no rainouts in Seattle!), my open 800 personal best freshman year when I went from a 2:25 interloper to a 2:16 serious high-school competitor in one race. Further back still, there was my first track-and-field race ever, in the annual elementary school meet where I was dusted year in and year out by a future high-school teammate who did club track and actually trained. Those were all important moments. However, I wonder if that place shaped me more in all the time I spent there outside of actual competition?
Navigating the perils of middle-school socializing, milling in crowds, trying so hard to be cool on that upper track while essentially ignoring the high-school football game being played below. The (now highly embarrassing) slow laps spent walking as a freshman, hand and hand with my super-cool older boyfriend around that upper track after I had finished my events at home meets. The lap in the back of the convertible at homecoming halftime senior year, when the awkwardness of the milling middle-school crowds had strangely and unexpectedly turned to acceptance. The endless sets of sprints--10's, 20's, 30's, 40's, 50's, and 120's--I ran on the upper-field grass trying to carve myself into soccer shape each summer while in college, interchanged with a session of two miles hard in preparation for the preseason Cooper fitness test.
To this day, during a hard and sustained effort of any kind, I will picture the panorama visible as one would skirt the contours of the upper track, and that will settle me down. I can remember the wind whistling down the hill from St. Monica’s church, hitting me square in the face on the back stretch as I ran Coach Lananna’s 300's, again trying to mold myself into shape for track while home for winter break.
II.
Each family has its own set of traditions, and ours always has us at the track. Driving almost yearly to my cousins’ ranch outside of Klamath Falls, Oregon, my family would stay in Eugene, where the first item on the agenda would be to head over to Hayward Field. During the years when I did not have much to train for, these trips would be just a couple of laps to say we did, a kick-around of the soccer ball, and off to dinner. Later, as athletics further formalized for my sister and me, this turned into a run through the cemetery behind Mac Court or over to Pre’s trails while my dad ran the steps of the homestretch grandstand and my sister played on the infield, or that week’s sprint workout for soccer on the bark-circled field behind the stadium.
Somehow my husband has fallen into this pattern as well. The historic Stanford Stadium track, complete with velodrome effect on the first curve, six narrow lanes, huge bubble in lane one as you come off the last curve, was the home stage for three years of track for me and five years of football for him. After a road trip to watch his girlfriend run in the Pac-10 meet, he posited that running the 1,500 just looked “so easy--like you were jogging! That cannot be that hard.” A few weeks later, that turned into an attempt to run 8 x 400 meters at 68 seconds on two minutes' rest with the aforementioned girlfriend at the newly renovated Cobb Track & Angell Field, just west of the Stadium. In contrast to the breathtaking and record-breaking performances yet to come at this facility when the lights were on and the stands were filled, a slightly less glamorous event unfolded and a new respect for distance running was born as the clock read (for one of us) 68, 73, skip one, 82, OK that’s it.
A summer or two later, we found ourselves at his old track, at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland, where he was training for the free-agent football life he was to lead for the next year or so. One of his best friends, David Goldman, had come along for the ride to hang out since they had been so rarely at home at the same time. An erstwhile high-school hurdler who had spent more aggregate time since high school in the stands watching Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers at IU than exercising, Goldman suddenly challenged me, upon arrival back from a short run, to a 400, as I was supposedly “good at track.”
In what will go down as one of the most ridiculous iterations of athletics I have ever witnessed or been party to, I agreed, with Marlon as the starter. With the malaise of having completed a season, with a few weeks before the next begins in earnest, I started out with a gait more appropriate to doing multiple 1,000-meter repeats with short rests. Goldman, however, took off like he was running a 150 and I remembered the power of manly pride. Now under obligation to respond, I picked it up, buoyed by the appearance of the top of his head as it tipped back around the 200-meter mark, the jig already up. Still, he had about a 30-meter lead that not even pride could maintain as I shuffled along, making up most of it in the last 80 meters and crossing the line with him in what will go down in history officially, and for the sake of both our egos, as a dead heat. Goldman, who is now a financial-sector attorney in New York City, still brings this up every time I see him. Rarely in our carefully manicured lives do we strip away the inhibitions and just race like little kids. Nothing keeps it real like the most basic of athletic contests in the most basic of scenery, a deserted high-school track.
III.
I was recounting that episode at the Brooklyn Diner in midtown Manhattan, where my husband and our two kids were staying with the Stanford track team on its trip to the New York Armory Invitational in February of 2005. My older daughter, Adrienne, who had a plus size portion of 3-year-old energy, had also come to see the local track as life’s backdrop. She had spent a huge amount of time at practice, at meets, in airports, in airplanes. As a result, she could not pass the airport on the highway without expecting to be actually going on an airplane. She would assume that all people in our immediate vicinity in public places like airports or hotels are “with us” since she was used to traveling with the team. She retained a spectacular memory of which rental van we had each weekend.
My love of laps and my husband’s preference for sprints over distance running as the way to spend 30 minutes of working out has led us back many times to Cobb Track & Angell Field, and now, in our new neighborhood, to Sequoia High in Redwood City. Adrienne will play in the long-jump pit at Sequoia as any kid would, but she'll also yell “splits” to people running by (glancing at her wrist where a watch would be and yelling "46!!!” or a similarly random number), and she likes to just run as far as she can as fast as she can, sometimes starting with a toe on the line as one would a race, again activating the imaginary wristwatch.
In this first trip to New York’s historic Ar
mory, from which her grandmother, my mother, still claims to have splinters from running (and falling) on the old wooden track surface in the 1960's, Adrienne, thus far cooped up on the upper level during the first day of the meet, was set free on the track as the last participants cooled down. After proceeding to run four straight laps (800 meters), she then headed to the end of the long-jump runway and, extending her hands over her head, demanded that we clap for her, emulating our outstanding triple jumper Erica McLain earlier that day. This practice has transformed our hallway at home into a makeshift runway where almost nightly we are instructed to clap as Adrienne sprints from the front door, and where couch cushions are set up to pad her landing. Although Erica is the favorite field event role model, we have also seen former Stanford NCAA champion and Olympic silver medalist Toby Stevenson’s pole vaulting (wrapping-paper cardboard core as pole) and fellow Stanford alum Jill Camarena’s shot-putting with a nerf ball after a week plus of Olympic Trials the summer prior.The laps that Adrienne ran in New York, the ones that got us kicked out of the warm-up area at Sacramento (due to potential endangerment to herself and the Olympic hopefuls moving at full speed), and the many she runs around the playground at preschool, are physical exertions. I believe they are also expressions, in a way, of what she has absorbed from family culture--that such exertions can be considered fun. Her footfalls become mine. Mine become hers. Little-kid laps watching parents, followed by workout laps, competition laps, cool-down laps, high-school boyfriend laps, college-boyfriend laps, pregnant laps, stroller laps, laps chasing kids, happy laps, sad laps, laps at sunrise and earlier, laps at sunset and later. In my family, all these footprints on all these tracks, although not always visible, mark the stages of our lives.
IV.
During the years I coached at Stanford, I loved to see the facility filled on a hot competition day, high school athletes teaming in the backstretch stands with their tents sprawled across the grass, or an electric, record-setting night such as the Cardinal Invitational, fans packed on the homestretch and coaches lining the curve by the hammer cage, sipping their Starbucks. I loved even more the day before a meet, when the track virtually hummed with the unlimited potential of the participants shaking out, striding, stretching, and preparing for battle. But I loved most of all the cold, crisp stillness of the track after the meet had concluded, the people at home, hotel, or on their way while we broke down the equipment.
In those moments, I was sometimes elated, sometimes extremely upset, and almost always numbingly tired from the production and the emotional buildup. The razor-sharp edge of anticipation now blunted with the reality of what had just passed, as yet unexaminable, with work still to do. Carting boxes back to the their storage under the bleachers. Hunting through garbage cans with Marko Koers, a Dutch 800-meter specialist who had only hours before hit the Olympic A standard in his event and now was bereft of backpack with wallet and ID, car and hotel keys. Perhaps watching the Stanford guys in the last race padding around the infield in bare feet or picking up hip numbers stuck to the track after being discarded in the heat of the race or maybe in disgust afterward (rarely do you find a hip number discarded in joy).
Hayward Field at sundown. Hornet Stadium when the lights go out and I am waiting for an athlete at doping control, their performance ringing in my ears so loudly it feels as if someone is shouting. Franklin Field in freezing silence, left only with the empty cups and hot-dog wrappers discarded by the rowdies at the water-pit corner. Even in the exhale of an amazing athletic moment, these tracks revert comfortingly to their ordinary selves.
The local track hosts soccer and football games, tailgates and field days, wind sprints by the basketball team, PE classes. It absorbs the sweat of those resting between sets of steps run in surrounding stadiums, hears the gossip of the women power-walking in its outer lanes. It keeps our secrets. It treats us as equals. It never turns us away if we failed in our last efforts, whether those were to reach a personal best or simply to lose a couple pounds.
My laps around the Sequoia High track were slowed by my agonizing decision to leave my coaching job, and by the insufficient sleep of a new mother. Then they picked up a little as I decided to run a marathon. I haven’t tried to do too much training, lest I set up a schedule I can't keep. Beside the obligatory weekend long run, I try to just have one day where I go out to the track and do something pretty hard, just to see if I can. I call this training plan the Larry Rawson.
When I am on a plane descending into Seattle, I like to sit on the left side. On a U-turn over the northern part of the city, the flight plan will often take us under the cloud cover and offer a perfect view. If it's nighttime, the lights of my high school’s track are the most visible detail in the mostly residential area. At that moment, I don't think of sweat, tears, or triumphs. I just see home.
Dena Evans is the former women's cross-country coach at Stanford University, and, as an undergraduate, was on Stanford's track and soccer teams.
Modified photos. Original images from stock.xchng.
