“You’re going to have a good one today,” I told him. Sometimes you can just recognize it in other people.
“Wait and see,” he said. “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
That’s what it’s like when you taper down your training in the right way. There’s just this weird feeling you get when you’re finally ready to race. It’s like you can barely keep your own body under control. In the beginning, when you’re pounding through those early weeks of training and building up your base, you can never get away from the ache of being so deep-down tired and you feel like you’re slowly breaking down, right to the core of your last, smashed cell. Eventually though, time passes and you get used to it. Everything balances out and you can kind of reset yourself on this new, higher level. Then, when you get close to the competition, you cut your mileage right back almost to nothing and start sharpening up and taking lots of rest. It’s the trickiest thing to do correctly but if you can lighten up at exactly the right time, then it all kind of reverses and the hurt you put in earlier comes back out as strength. All of a sudden you feel like you have more energy than you need and everything seems easier than it should be. That’s where Burner was now. I could see it. You maybe get that feeling three or four times in your life, if you’re lucky.
IF I EVER HAVE A KID, I think I’ll let them participate in the grade-school track meets when they’re little, but that’s it. Before it gets too serious, I’ll move them over to something else like soccer, or basketball, or table tennis. Something with a team or something where you can put the blame on your equipment if it all goes wrong. But when my child is still little, I’m definitely going to push for the grade-school track meet because it never gets better than that. In the grade-school track meet, you give the kids one of those lumpy polyester uniforms and they turn all excited. They get the day off school and they get to cheer for their friends and maybe they get picked to be one of the four that runs the shiny baton all the way around the circle without dropping it. At the grade-school track meet, they give out ribbons that go all the way down to the “participant” level and if you do well, they read your name over the announcements at school so everybody will know about it. You get to pull on a borrowed pair of spikes and go pounding down that long runway before you jump into the sand. It’s always hot and sunny and maybe your parents let you buy a drumstick or one of those over-priced red-white-and-blue popsicles from the acne-scarred high-school kid who has to ride around on a solid steel bicycle with a big yellow cooler stuck on the front. Maybe the girl with the red hair is there, the girl from the other school, the girl who wins all the longer races like you do. Maybe the newspaper takes a picture, you and the red-haired girl, standing on the top step of a plywood podium, holding all your first-place ribbons in the middle of a weedy field while all the dandelions are blowing their fuzzy heads off.
That’s how it should always be. The stands should always be full of parents who don’t know anything — people who can’t tell the difference between what is really good and what is really bad — but they’re there anyway, clapping and shouting their children’s names, telling them to “go” and “go” and “go.” You see why it’s so nice. The lanes are crowded with kids clunking their way home to the finish line and trying so hard. They go sailing way over the high jump bar — it looks so easy — and they come down on the other side, rolling softly into those big, blue fluffy mats. It’s sunny and everybody’s laughing and everything is still new.
All that disappears when you get serious. At the very top end — and, when you come down to it, Burner and I were still far from the real top end — it’s completely different. Everything starts to matter too much and there are too many things that can go wrong and everybody knows the difference between what is really good and what is really bad. It comes back to the numbers. At the top end, we count it all up and measure it out and then we print the results so everybody can see. The guys I raced against were the mathematical totals of what they had done so far. That was it. Nobody cared about your goal or about what you planned to do in the future. It might take two full years of training to drop a single second or just a couple tenths off your personal best but you couldn’t complain. We were all in the same boat. For us, every little bit less was a little bit more.
Really, it’s the opposite of healthy. People will do anything to make those numbers go down. Some of them gobble big spoonfuls of straight baking soda before a race even though they know it gives you this brutal, bloody diarrhea an hour later. That’s nothing. It’s even legal. They can’t ban you for baking soda, but I know guys who cross over, guys juiced up on EPO and guys who just disappear for a year and then come back like superstars. They say they’ve been training at altitude on some mountain in Utah, but everybody knows they’ve been through the lab, getting their transfusions, and playing around with their red blood cell count. Burner and I never did that, but we used to go to this vet, a guy who worked on the race horses out at the track. If you came at night and brought him straight cash he’d give you a bottle of DMSO and a couple of these giant horse pills that you were supposed to chop up into little chunks. It sounds bad, but this was all perfectly legal too. His stuff was nothing more than super-powerful aspirin delivered in massive doses. We’d go see him and he’d say “Now you’re going to have a big dinner and a full stomach before you touch this stuff, right?” and we’d lie and he’d give us what we wanted. As if he couldn’t tell that none of us ever ate a full meal. I used to pop anti-inflammatories like they were candy love hearts, going through a handful of Naproxen every day.
Even the dangerous cortisone injections in those big needles, the ones they fire right into that band of tough connective tissue at the bottom of your foot, I’ve had those. They say you’re only supposed to take three of those in your whole life — that’s all a regular person can handle — but the year before the trials, I got six in five months. I just kept going to different doctors, in different crowded clinics, guys who didn’t know where I’d been two weeks earlier. It was the same thing every time. They’d go through their whole spiel again, and I’d pretend to pay close attention as they explained it all out.
“You can only get three of these,” they’d say, “just three, you understand?”
I’d look and nod my head seriously and sometimes I’d even write the number down for them, a big loopy three on one of their little pads and I’d underline it. Then I’d hop right up onto their tissue covered table, rip off my sock, stick out my fucked-up foot, and brace myself for number 4 or number 5 or whatever came next.
It always got bad before the biggest competitions — like this one, or before the Olympic trials or if there was a big trip to China on the line or carding money. You’d get stuck with this feeling like when you’re blowing up a balloon and you know you’re almost at the limit and you’re not sure if you should give it that little extra puff because there might still be room for a last bit of air, or it all might just explode in your face.
BURNER AND I started our warm-up jog about an hour before the race was scheduled to go. It took me a while to get started and for those first few minutes, I hobbled along doing the old-man shuffle until my body came back to me and my Achilles remembered what it was supposed to do. Burner was smooth right from the beginning. While I jerked up and down, fighting against the parts of myself that didn’t want to do this anymore, he kind of hovered beside me flat and easy. We were like two people at the airport. He floated and seemed to move along without any effort — like one of those well-pressed, put-together guys who zooms past on the moving sidewalk — and I was like the slob with too many carry-on bags, huffing and puffing and dropping things, hauling all this extra stuff and just hoping to find the right gate. Even my breathing was heavier than it should have been.