Upload a Photo Upload a Video Add a News article Write a Blog Add a Comment
MessageReportBlock
Blog Feed News Feed Video Feed All Feeds
 

Folders

Featured (118)
Misc News (1227)
All (388)
All (4440)
 

 

Put Your Hand on Seven - Chapter 9 - 2021

Published by
ILXCTF - Mike Newman   Sep 14th 2018, 5:01am
Comments

Chapter 9: Running Scared

 

My Saturday nights were not exciting by any means during my high school days. If we had a meet on Saturday, I was just too tired to do anything. On those nights, it was to either catch up on work that I needed to do for school or any typing that Mr. Newton had for me.  He would give a couple of us meet information and results that he wanted us to type up for the year-end notebook. Yes, some of my friends would go out on those nights. For me, it was just a choice that I made. I did not want anything stupid to happen to me.

My high points on the evening were dull. I would stay up and watch Saturday Night Live. Back then, it was a new show. Then, it was Second City TV. I wish that VCRs were available back then. I think I would have gone to sleep earlier. In most cases, I would take a nap in the afternoon and I was wide awake at that point.

 

My youngest son Matthew, when he got old enough, asked me about everything I did in high school. All he would tell me is that I could have done this, I could have done that. With everything that I accomplished, I could have had fun while I was in high school. The thing I had to explain to him is that I did have fun. The only way that I could have achieved my goals was to take the road I chose to travel. To this day I look back at how I approached things and have no regrets. There would be time later in life to have fun. I realized there was only one time to accomplish what I was trying to do in high school.

There was one can’t-miss show that most of the guys on the team watched on Sunday nights. At 10 p.m. Channel 11, Monty Python’s Flying Circus came on. Classic British humor and very offbeat. It fit our team perfectly. There were little phrases that would show up in discussions that we would have on the runs. Once in a while in a run, someone would moan “My brain hurts.” We were a little nuts, but it was a good nuts. I think we had to be nuts for the workouts that we went through.

On this Monday, I was sitting in the lobby waiting for the meeting to start. I had two tests that morning that wiped me out and I was in a zone preparing for Monday's hard workout. Phil Williams came up and started to show me pictures. I was not focused and could not understand why he was showing me these. Willie would say “Here I am in front of the house. Here I am by the side of the house. Here I am behind the house, but you can’t see me.” I was thinking to myself, Why is he showing me these photos? He had me roped in.

He showed me the last picture … “and here is the Spanish Inquisition hiding behind the tree.” I smiled. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. The episode that was on the night before. Killer got me that time.

It was then time for the daily meeting. I told you earlier how Mr. Newton would sprinkle in a little Lombardi-ism, a little Plato, and a little Groucho Marx and mix that all together. That was a Newton meeting. Most of being a part of the York Cross Country team had little to do with running. Well, maybe 30 to 40 percent of it concerned running. His meetings prepared the young men that were on the team for life after high school, life after York cross country. There were rules on attendance. You had one unexcused absence and one unexcused tardy. If both of those allowances came and went, you were excused from the team regardless of how good you were. In the meetings, he would talk about running but it was more about life. Do not give up during a workout or no walking when you are supposed to be running. When times became tough later on in life, I remembered those lessons.

Since there was no internet back then, he would talk about the meets that were going on around us. He would tell us how good teams were running, perhaps as a motivational device to get us to work harder. He would go over upcoming meets, the time we needed to be checked in by, and where the meet would be. He was prepared. He wanted us to be prepared.

The worst thing that you could do in these meetings was stop paying attention or talk while he was speaking. It was a sign of disrespect to do that. In this particular meeting, it happened. A freshman who was sitting in the back was making a comment to his friend and Newton caught it. Uh-oh.

He stopped talking and stared into the back. On this day, his patience was completely gone. “If you do not want to listen to what I want to say, that is your decision. If you do not care so much about the team, then why am I here?”

He picked up his clipboard with his notes, turned, and went into the gym and to his office. There was silence throughout the lobby. The one thing that was going through my head was that the tone for the rest of this workout was going to be brutal. This had happened before, but not this year. The senior leaders quickly said something to the freshmen, but they already knew they had done something wrong. Then the senior leaders, Willie, Heds, Freegs, Rags, and Wags, went to his office and apologized for the team. It was a matter of taking ownership for our actions. It happened also in my senior year when I was one of the captains on the team. It was one of those life lessons. When I was in management, whenever something went wrong, I would not point fingers unless I pointed to myself. At the same time, when something went well, all the praise went to them. It was a Newton lesson.

This action in the meeting just bumped up the intensity in the workout and everyone knew that. He came back out to the lobby and simply gave us the workout. No Groucho Marx today. We headed to the front of the school. This four-mile warm up went at a brisk pace. Henry started pushing it but it did not come into an all-out sprint like had happened a few times. No signs of encouragement came from Mr. Newton as he watched us warm up. Usually there was. Not today.

We walked across the street to the track. Inside all of us, we knew we had to stay together for this workout. If one man dropped out of the pack, we did not know what would happen. 4 x 1 mile with a three-minute rest is an intense affair. The goal was to hit the first three in 4:52-4:55 (remember, this is a cinder track). The last one 4:45. We achieved that. There was a lot of talking in the pack throughout that workout, encouraging each other. No one was going to drop. 4:54-4:54-4:52-4:47 is what I hit. Mr. Newton was overjoyed after that. I do not know if it defined our season to that point, or defined our character, but it felt like that. Maybe it was his plan to do that. I’ll never know.

Our Thursday dual was against Hinsdale Central at a new park that we had never raced at before called Katherine Legge Memorial. None of us had been there so we did not know what to expect. All that Mr. Newton would tell us was that it was a hilly course. He said he had talked to someone at Lyons Township the day before. The week prior, LT had run against Hinsdale Central and the coach Mike Kuharic told Newton that several of his runners were spiked and a few pushed into trees. He told us that we needed to get out quick to avoid that. I do not know if that was true or not, but I was not going to take a chance. Neither were the rest of the guys on our team.

The park was beautiful. For me, it was like a dream. I was not a drag-strip kind of runner that liked everything flat. I was strong with no speed, so the hills I saw during the warm-up suited me just fine. The starting point back then was different than it is now. We started at the northwest corner of the park and headed east. We would pass the start-finish area twice. On the final lap, we would cut through the center of the park and head back to the finish. I was “kind of” paying attention to where we were going. I figured I would be with the pack. No problem.

This race would also determine who would run the following week at the DuPage County Meet, which was our first invitational of the year. The top seven would run varsity at county. I knew I had my mind set on being part of that. As we stepped to the line, I looked and saw the Hinsdale guys in their red uniforms. In my head I kept telling myself that I did not want to be spiked. I had been a couple of times in my life and it is not the most pleasant feeling.

The first mile we were together with a few Hinsdale Central guys close to us. The first lap around that park was like nirvana for me. Up and down the hills and my legs were agreeing to that. I was not tired. I was comfortable. We called roll at the mile and eight of us were together with a couple of Hinsdale guys I could sense were still there.

I was in front of the pack and I could feel Willie, Freegs, Henry, and Heds were close. It is a big comfort when you know that your teammates are near in a cross-country race and you have the team part of it won. Newton was ecstatic as we passed him at two miles. “Put your hand on seven. Put your hand on seven!” he screamed. “You look great!”

That thought of being spiked started to cross my mind as we went along the north edge of the park. I decided to pick up the pace just a little bit to make sure it didn't happen. I was focused ahead, and I was about to pass some of the younger guys on the team.

“Come on Newms,” one of them said. “You have about 70 yards on the pack.”

What?????

I made a right turn along the south corner of the park and looked. I had the race lead.

What was I doing in the lead? My quick answer was, “Why not?”

I started climbing up the hill and felt good. I was breathing hard, but I felt good. At that point, I saw a Hinsdale Central coach telling me to turn right. The course turned right. Oh yeah, I remember that … I think.

This was the part of the course I was unsure of. I figured that I would be with the team, but I was not. I was running and looking for flags. No paint on the ground, no line. Willie was starting to close on me and so was the rest of the pack. He told me afterwards he was a little worried because I was weaving around. I told him no, I was okay. I just did not know where to go!

I was scared. How could I get lost? All those things that you should not think about in a race were racing through my head:

Was I going in the right direction? Was someone going to pass me? Would I have enough energy to finish the race? Was there something hanging out of my nose?

I found a flag and saw the chute. The finish was over the creek and then up the hill. My first cross country race of my high school career was at Palatine and we had to finish up a hill then. It felt good to be chugging up the hill. It felt better because I was the first one in the chute.

There were a couple of times when I was a sophomore where I won sophomore level races on the track. I had never done that in cross country. I entered the chute. As they were taking my tag off, I looked back and saw a sea of green right behind me. I had run 15:46. Willie was five seconds back. Then Freegs, Heds, Henry, and Brother Mac came in close together. Hinsdale had a runner that came in just ahead of Lisy. We had just missed a perfect score, but 15-49 was pretty good. Rags was right behind Lisy, then Wags was 18 seconds back. We knew at that point who was in our top seven for DuPage.

As I was taking off my spikes, Henry came up and asked me what was happening at the end. He started laughing. He had won the week before, but that was on our home course. Heds overheard what I said, and he was laughing. I knew in my head I was not going to tell Newton what had happened. I knew for the next month I would be getting it in meetings: “Don’t let Newman lead. He won’t know where he is going!” It was an inside joke that stayed with us for the rest of the year. On that cool down, I stayed at the back of the pack. I had enough of the lead that day.

It hit me as I was walking home that I had won. It was my first time. More importantly, I was in the top seven. It was now a matter of staying in that group. The goal was to be there in November. That is all that mattered to me.

The weekend would be a rough one. We would have tough workouts Friday and Saturday. The Saturday workout would be the last one at East End for a while because we were heading towards the invite part of the schedule. Mr. Newton told us before the workout that everyone in the state was racing. We were still putting money in the bank. He also told us in that meeting that we had moved up to No. 6 in the Timely Times rankings. No one had noticed us because we had not raced an invitational yet. In our minds, we knew we could run with anyone.

Sunday was marathon day and it was the worst. The temperature for the marathon climbed into the low 80s. We were at the end of the route so the process of handing out water took forever. There were only 9,000 runners that entered that race. Quite a difference from now. Half the entrants did not finish. We got there at 9 a.m. The race started at 10:30. We did not get out of there until 5. It was brutal. We did get a run in, but it was not like running at Bullfrog Lake. 

I got home that night and my legs felt horrible. There would be no Monty Python on this night. I had an appointment with my pillow and eight straight hours of shut-eye. By 9 p.m., I was out cold. So were my brothers, who had also worked the race. The car ride back from Chicago was as quiet as it could be. I needed the rest. The coming week was a big one for me and the team.

More news

History for ILXCTF - Mike Newman
YearVideosNewsPhotosBlogs
2024 528 19    
2023 1035 171    
2022 1049 193    
Show 11 more