By Sean Quinn

It’s game day, but the ten thousand won’t start until the stadium lights are on. You want to stay away from the track for as long as possible. There’s no sense in rattling yourself to pieces before the gun even goes off, and you don’t need some poor student trainer to rub your calves down.

You’ll sit in the backyard and listen to The Beach Boys, just trying to think of anything else. Eventually, the wait will be over. It’s time. You will pack your spikes and singlet as if they are sacred vestments because they are. You will drive to the track to save your legs.

“Sure, sure bud. You ran 80 miles this week, but that’s what’ll blow up the whole operation, walking to the track, sure.”

You’ll pass through the gate and say hi to the guys and the ladies all milling about, readying for their own events or dealing with the aftermath of them. Finally, the call for the ten thousand meters will be announced. One of the guys will ask you how you feel. You’ll gently but rapidly tap your chest to indicate the fluttering of your heart. He’ll nod because you all know that feeling.

“It just means you care, man.”

You’ll silently clasp his shoulder as you pass by, thanking him for the sendoff. Years later you will still hear these words any time your heart starts to flutter like that.

You will find a spot in your assigned lane, surrounded by a menagerie of exotic animals. There will be the gazelles, the Kenyan types: calves like little stones tucked in just below their knees. The greyhounds will be much shorter but perhaps a little thicker than the gazelles: carbon fiber racing frames with a tuned-up, turbo-boosted V-12 under the hood. Between these two is the mustang: moderate in just about every attribute except for the ability to just keep trucking. You’ll always like to think that you were of this variety. Like a wild mustang leading the herd on untamed, Wyoming plains.

The official will approach the line, his starter pistol might as well be an executioner’s axe. They should just complete the look and get these guys black hoods. You’ll take a few deep breaths before you assume the position, until that gun finally cracks against the inky, black stillness of a Tallahassee sky.

And so begins the slow descent into madness. The first few miles are spent just trying to stay calm and hope that some jackass doesn’t go out in a 68. On the very first lap, you can hear the crowd scream, but that quickly fades away into the blur of pounding feet and controlled breathing. You shouldn’t be listening to them anyway. You have to slow your mind. By the end of the second mile, everyone has settled into the pack and you can read their respective body language like a book.

As you swing into the third mile the first twangs of discomfort begin to set in. Not pain, not yet, but discomfort. The crowd noise is still a mushy fog in your ears compared to what is going on in your brain. In an effort to just go somewhere else, you will start conjugating verbs in Spanish, go through multiplication tables, and recite lyrics that hold no special place in your heart.

The pack will finish the third mile and a horrible realization will start to creep in:

“We’re only halfway through.”

About 800m through the fourth mile, the darkness will set in.

“What the fuck am I doing here? This sport is so stupid: there’s no ball, no points. We’re just running in circles. I shoulda wrestled for the Naval Academy. At least I’d be jacked. I could just stop. I could just stop, right now. This isn’t boxing. Nobody’s gonna tune me up if I put my hands down. This isn’t hockey. Nobody is gonna take your head off if you’re lazy in the center lane. What the fuck.”

The fourth mile is important. It is not a kind teacher, but it is a good one. The fourth mile will prepare you for holding the hand of a woman you love as you watch the drugs from the chemotherapy bag slowly drip into her body, like the tick of a stopwatch. In that fourth mile you will learn how to solemnly acknowledge that every passing holiday with her is likely the last, so let’s make it a fucking rager. You will keep holding that same hand as she wilts before your very eyes, but she dies safe in her own bed. Polska mozna. The clock keeps ticking. The fourth mile. The fourth mile is where the magic happens.

During the fifth mile, the sun starts to come out. You don’t feel any better, but you’re surprised that you don’t feel any worse. Like swimming upwards from a sinking ship, towards the sun glittering off the water above. Maybe there is room for hope. Maybe it won’t always be like this. It can’t rain forever. The pack will have thinned out. People have fallen off. Not everyone survives the trial of the fourth mile.

The sixth mile is when you are allowed to thirst again, to be conscious. Just a few miles ago, you were a glorified set of organic rubber tubing and a fleshy computer firing electrical signals from a calcified housing unit you call a skull, but not anymore.  Your legs are pumping battery acid, but that doesn’t matter. You’re almost home. Everyone else has fallen off. You’re running on your own, but now you can hear the crowd again. The Kenyans have a saying. I don’t know the original Swahili, but supposedly it means “to light a fire in your heart”.

You will finish the sixth mile in a proud, steady, thumping rhythm. Because it all comes down to the bell lap. What a stupid sport. Six miles down, and you still have to throw down another 400m. Of course, you do. In this ridiculous pursuit of bells, fake guns, and running in circles, what’s one more?

The final four hundred. You’ve always had a strong finish, but you’ve never considered it an act of bravery. Anyone can do anything for one minute. One of the ladies’ assistant coaches knows you’re feeling it: “I want sixty Quinn!” Four hundred meters in 60 seconds. You’re so far ahead of everyone that it would take a starter pistol to the temple to lose, but you still think the same old shit talk as if someone were right on your ass as you open up and pump your arms.

“Money’s on the table, boys. Come and get it fucker. Chase me if you think you’ve got it in you. You think you’re brave enough to follow? Go fuck yourself.”

These words can be said in so few gestures as ragged breathing while one athlete hawks the other down or pulls away. Come and get it. You’ll enter the bend to begin the final 200m. Light speed. The crowd is growing louder. Light speed. Let’s go home. 100m. Let’s go home. 50m. Let’s go home.

The tape is broken. The job is done. You don’t immediately fall to your knees, but you think of Sir Roger Bannister explaining how he felt after conquering the four-minute mile:

My effort was over and I collapsed almost unconscious, with an arm on either side of me. It was only then that real pain overtook me. I felt like an exploded flashlight with no will to live; I just went on existing in the most passive physical state without being quite unconscious. Blood surged from my muscles and seemed to fell me. It was as if all my limbs were caught in an ever-tightening vice.

You will stumble into the fieldhouse, and you might even throw up in the showers. It’s fine. There’s nothing in your stomach anyway. The pH in your body is all fucked up, but you know it’ll end soon. You’ll look down at the veins in your legs, pulsing in anger, and you will thank them for still sending blood through your body, despite the ordeal you’ve put them through… but your brain will be throwing a party. Baddest dog in the kennel. You want proof? Scoreboard. Women lie. Men lie. But that beautiful, accursed stopwatch will never deceive you. The clock never stops ticking.

You’ll pound a Powerade, but you won’t dare touch a muscle milk. Some jumper or thrower will ask if you’re going to some party. Fuck that. You’ll saddle up and go home to stare at the TV, not even really watching it. Your brain doesn’t have the resources to make feelings.

The next day your legs will ache, but you will peel yourself out of bed to wince through a quick 30-minute jog. It doesn’t even deserve the title of a run. It’s a jog. You know it will speed up the healing process, and your biochemistry is back to normal. You can talk to people and not feel like a zombie.

On Monday, you will go to practice. Friends, trainers, and teammates will congratulate you. You will play the loveable rogue, saying that it was nothing, that it was a fun time, but you will be touched by it all more than words can express. It’s somehow even better when they weren’t there, but they “heard”. Because they love you and want you to know that they bore witness in some capacity. You will strive to love them back just as hard.

Those first Monday and Tuesday practices will be all about nursing the body back to health, healing battered quads and hamstrings. But Wednesday. Wednesday is light speed, 12x200m with long recoveries. Fast, swift, and light in the Florida sun as students walk by the chain link fence and hear the clatter of spikes and flats on that gorgeous, garnet track.

By the end of Wednesday, it will be like nothing happened, as it should be. We’ve got another in three weeks. There will always be another run. There will always be another track workout, another rep, another lap, another tick of the stopwatch. The clock never stops ticking.

Maybe you will stay that summer to power clean and bench press while you trot around a deserted Tallahassee cityscape. Maybe you will drive out to the trails sometimes, but you will probably always love running around town and hearing the blare of a friend’s car horn between the music pounding in your headphones.

You will remember that final 400m years later when you are running in the Himalayas. The fathers you work with will come out of their houses to scream at you as if you were some dark phantom they had to shout at to keep away from their front door. Knowing the cheeky Nepalese sense of humor, they probably told their daughters a similar story.

You will round the corner for camp atop the Roof of the World. You will see Everest looming in front of you, that mountain you drink your coffee in front of each morning and stare at in wonderment. You will pump your legs as you’ve done countless times. Last 200m. Let’s go home. You will again think to yourself that this is how that mustang in Wyoming must feel.