Wait, what?
The next day I found myself on a train to Boston with a bag full of running clothes. I had never been to a track meet before. I didn't know what to expect. I met with my friend Danielle who had also never raced on a track, and we walked to MIT from BU. We were 45 minutes early. We expected a huge crowd of runners eager to meet Bill Rodgers. Nobody was there except a meet official and two men from the B.A.A.
Once the other runners finally showed up, we filled out entry forms and got numbers. The B.A.A was waving everyone's entry fee for the day. It was small, intimate. A lot of the runners knew each other from the other mini-meets. Bill Rodgers gave a short speech, and then we all ran a warm-up mile with him.
The mile was the second event. Almost everyone who showed up entered it, 34 if you don't count Billy. He made it clear he didn't want to run 6:00 miles, said he hadn't actually done that in a really long time. I got up to run in the second heat, and just before the start the B.A.A guys asked Bill to stand in front of the pack and take a picture. He put his arm around my shoulder which kind of made the reality of the situation sink in. And then the gun went off.
I was kind of excited because of the whole Bill Rodgers thing and went out at an 80, much faster than I intended. So for the rest of the race I just focused on finishing sub-6. At the beginning of the second lap I thought about how cool it must've been to be in the first heat and have Bill on the side cheering for me. Then I finished the second lap, and Bill was on the side cheering for me. He'd dropped out of the race. We could forgive him, but only because he was 61 and had won Boston four times.
I finished in a 5:59.28... Barely did it. Danielle and I warmed down a little and then went to talk to Bill. He was completely shocked that neither of us had run a track race before, and talked about the advantage you have in road races if you do track work. Then we took a picture with him, and he turned to us and asked "did I make a funny face? Because I always do." Sure enough, this is what we saw:
We all laughed for a good ten minutes, Danielle and the B.A.A guys and Billy and I. One B.A.A guy handed Danielle his card and said to send the picture. It was really, really cool to experience firsthand that a running legend wasn't a superhuman. Shortly after I was talking to Danielle about race photos, and how I always look like I'm dying, and Bill Rodgers joined in and said "But you ARE! And that's what's so beautiful." And that's when I knew the guy who had just made a really goofy face in a picture with us was in fact a 2:09 marathoner.
No comments:
Post a Comment