When Burner surfaced for the last time, when he came back for good, he looked over at me and said, “Do you know what your problem is?”
I took a breath and waited for it.
“You can’t see,” he said.
“You don’t have vision. If you want to do this right, you need to be able to see how it’s going to happen before it actually happens. You have to be in there, in the race, a hundred times in your head before you really do it.”
I nodded because I had to. This season, unlike all the others, Burner was in the position to give advice. For the last three years I had beat him from Vancouver to Halifax and back a hundred times and in all that time I had never said a thing about it. He’d never even been close. But this year — the year of the trials, the year when they picked the team for the World Championships and they were finally going to fund all the spots — this was the year when Burner finally had it all put together at the right time and I couldn’t get anything going. For the last eight weeks, in eight different races in eight different cities, he’d come flying by me in the last one-fifty and there was nothing I could do about it.
I don’t know where it came from or how he did it, but Burner had it all figured out. For the last year he’d been on this crazy diet where it seemed like he only ate green vegetables — just broccoli and spinach and Brussel sprouts all the time. And he hadn’t had a drop of alcohol or a cup of coffee in months. He said he had gone all the way over to the straight edge and that he would never allow another bad substance into his body again. He broke up with his girlfriend and quit going out, even to see a movie. He drank this special decaffeinated green tea and he shaved his head right down to the nut. I think he weighed around 125 or 130. He practiced some watered-down version of Buddhist mysticism and he was interested in yoga and always reading these books with titles like “Going for Gold!: Success the Kenyan Way,” or “Unlocking Your Inner Champion.” Whatever he was doing, it was working. Out of all that mess, he had found some little kernel of truth and now he was putting it into action.
“The secret is to think about nothing,” he said.
“Just let it all hang out. Mind blank and balls to the wall. That’s all there is. Keep it simple, stupid. Be dumb. Just run.”
IT’S HARD TO TELL anybody what it’s really like. Most people have seen too many of those CBC profiles that run during the Olympics, the ones with the special theme music and the torch and all those fuzzy soft camera shots that make everyone look so young and radiantly healthy. I used to think — everybody used to think — they were going to make one of those little movies about me, but I know now it’s never going to happen. It’s timing. Everything is timing. I was down when I needed to be up. If we were both at our best, if Burner and I were both going at it at the top of our games, he would lose. We both knew this. My best times were ahead of his, but I was far from my best now. There were even high-school kids now, coming up from behind and charging hard. I don’t really know what I was waiting for in that room. I might cut the top five, maybe, but I knew I wouldn’t be close enough to be in the photograph when the first guy crossed the line. It wasn’t really competition anymore. For me, this was straight autopilot stuff, going through the motions and following my own ritual right through to the end.
“What about Bourque?” I said.
This was the last part for Burner. I’d say the name of a guy who was going to be there with us and he would describe the guy’s weaknesses. Burner needed to do this, needed to know exactly why the others could not win. There were maybe ten people like us in the whole country, and no more than five or six who had a real shot at making the team, but Burner needed to hate all of them. That was how he worked. I couldn’t care less, but I did my part. I kept my eyes on the sprinklers and didn’t even look at him. I just released the words into the air. I let Bourque’s name float away.
“Bourque? What is Bourque? A 3:39, 3:40 guy at the top end of his dreams. We won’t even see him. Too slow. Period. We won’t even see him.”
“Dawson is supposed to be here,” I said. He was the next guy on the list.
“He ran 3:37.5 at NC’s last month.”
“Got no guts,” Burner sort of snorted it.
“Dawson needs everything to be perfect. He needs a rabbit and a perfectly even pace and he needs there to be sunshine and no wind. He can run, no doubt, but he can’t race. If you shake him up and throw any kind of hurt into him, he’ll just fold. Guy’s got tons of talent, but he’s a coward. You know that, Mikey. Everybody knows that about Dawson. Even Dawson knows it, deep down. If somebody puts in a 57 second 400 in the middle of it, Dawson will be out the back end and he’ll cry when it’s over. He will actually cry. You will see the tears running down his face.”
“Marcotte will take it out hard right from the gun,” I said. “He’ll open in 56 and then just try and hold on. He’s crazy and he will never quit. There’s no limit to how much that guy can hurt.”
“But he can’t hold it. You know how it’ll be. Just like last week and the week before. It’ll be exactly the same. Marcotte will blow his load too soon and we’ll come sailing by with 300 to go. If we close in 42, he’ll have nothing in the tank. He’ll collapse and fall over at the finish line and somebody will have to carry him away.”
THAT’S HOW WE TALKED most of the time. The numbers meant more than the words and the smaller numbers meant more than the bigger ones. It was like we belonged to our own little country and we had this secret language that almost nobody else understood. Almost nobody can tell you the real difference between 3:36 and 3:39. Almost nobody understands that there’s something in there, something important and significant, just waiting to be released out of that space between the six and the nine. Put it this way: if you ever wanted to cross over that gap, if you ever wanted to see what it was like on the other side, you would need to change your entire life and get rid of almost everything else. You have to make choices: you can’t run and be an astronaut. Can’t run and have a full-time job. Can’t run and have a girlfriend who doesn’t run. When I stopped going to church or coming home for holidays, my mother used to worry that I was losing my balance, but I never met a balanced guy who ever got anything done. There’s nothing new about this stuff. You have to sign the same deal if you want to be good — I mean truly good — at anything. Burner and I, and all those other guys, we understood this. We knew all about it. Every pure specialist is the same way so either you know what I am talking about or you do not.
“In the end, it’s going to come back to Graham,” I said. I’d been saving his name for last.
“Graham,” Burner repeated it back to me.
“Graham, Graham, Graham, Graham.”
It sounded almost like a spell or a voodoo curse, but what else could you say? We both knew there was no easy answer for Graham.
WHEN WE WERE KIDS in high school, back when we first joined the club and started training together, Burner and I used to race the freight trains through the old Michigan central railway tunnel. It was one of those impossible dangerous things that only invincible high school kids even try: running in the dark, all the way from Detroit to Windsor, underneath the river. When I think back, I still get kind of quaky and I can’t believe we got away untouched. It didn’t work out like that for everyone. Just a few years ago, a kid in the tunnel got sucked under one of those big red CP freighters and when they found him his left arm and his left leg had been cut right off. Somehow he lived, and everybody thought there must have been some kind of divine intervention. The doctors managed to reattach his arm and I think he got a state-ofthe-art prosthetic leg paid for by the War Amps. The papers tried to turn it into a feel good piece, but all I could think about was how hard it would be for that kid to go through the rest of his life with that story stuck to him and the consequences of it so clear to everybody else.