MONDAY MORNING FINISH LINE

 

August 30, 2021

 

By Michael Newman

[email protected]

 

 

It was nice, despite the heat, to be at cross-country meets this week. The one thing that I was looking forward to seeing was the start of a race, the cheer of the crowd when the race started, and then the interaction of teams of more than two runners moving in unison.

 

We saw that have in random cases during the 2020 COVID-19 season. It was nice to see it this week where teams were challenging each other for early season team titles. I love that comparison.

 

I knew we were in a REAL cross-country meet was the first meet I was attending at Yorkville. People were chatting with each other talking about this and that not realizing they were standing in the middle of the course. Here comes the lead gator with runners right behind them. It took a lone soul to yell “GET OFF THE COURSE” for these people to move.

 

Mind you, it would have been great video to see a gator vehicle plow through the group followed by a few lawsuits. Seeing spectators move that quickly you would think they could step into that race just for a minute.

 

I won’t mind, while my eyes roll around in disbelief to yell GET OFF THE COURSE this cross-country season. It was something I missed doing a year ago.

 

November 7

 

I think the one thing that I say several times a year is that the only rankings that count are after the final team scores are announced for Illinois runners at Detweiller Park on November 6. Then we have November 7 to hash out all the stats about the day before.

 

I’ve already heard it through e-mails and social media. “We will show you” has been the cry from teams and more specifically parents. I then say to myself “Okay, show me”.

 

The rankings that I do every season give you an idea of who is where. This year these rankings will be fluid more so than we have seen in years past. I did not do rankings last season because the dependability of dual meet results and especially the way the races were run in 2020. I don’t like to guess. I think sometimes I am like a mad scientist in my “lab” looking for the right numbers for the Illinois teams. It was not about getting those clicks. It is about finding the answer.

 

I missed that thing last year going through the process. If it helps motivate teams that think they should be higher, that is great. I like the teams that show me and motivate themselves to reach levels that they do not think they can reach.

 

The Things You Do Not Think About

 

The one thing that you do when things are tough for you is you look for a comfort zone. When I had gone through my divorce and moved back to Illinois in 2011, the first place after I moved into my place was to go to a York practice to see Mr. Newton. He would bark at me “What are you doing here Newms?” I explained and he was happy. I miss those Monday afternoon conversations I would have with him where he would say something that would put everything into perspective. Even when I come back to my old school, there is that aura of him that surrounds that school, that track that puts everything into perspective for me.

 

I went to York’s Time Trial last Friday night because I wanted to see what my old school’s team had for 2021. I also needed to take a step away from everything to see friends and to ease my pain.

 

York put in a new track. The track was not resurfaced, it was torn down to the foundation and rebuilt. It something that all of us go through at some points in our lives. Tear down what is hurting us and rebuilding our foundation.

 

York Coach Charlie Kern made it clear to his team in their meeting before they went to work that by the end of the night, there would be a new track record on this new track.

 

I stood at the corner by the finish line talking to some of the younger York runners that approached me. Then a man from my past, Matt Fischer, approached me. We talked about life, talked about memories, and sometimes other things that made me laugh. He was there to watch his son Daniel run in this time trial and the workout that would follow then after.

 

Coach Kern split the group up with the Varsity runners running at the end of the time trials and then the rest of the team running in the first section. I watched the first section with Matt as he watched his son move through the pack to take the lead.

 

Varsity runners Garrett Schwan and Ethan Summer crossed the line together and now hold the track record.

 

They did not set the record. They broke the record that Dan Fischer set in the previous section. You may not see this young man written about again this season. He may or may not be part of the team’s top seven. He is part of the legacy of the “Long Green Line” where you are always part of this team.

 

Dan can say that for 10 minutes on the night of August 27, 2021, that he held a record on a track with the tradition that York has. Not too many people in this world can say that.

 

Cinders vs. Chevron

 

Jim Hedman is an assistant coach at York and is a part of the legacy of the Long Green Line as am I. We were teammates on a team that was ranked #7 to start the year in 1978. We ended up proving people wrong in winning a state championship. I look forward to seeing “Heds” when I go to a York practice. We will always be brothers especially the wars that we fought together on the cross-country course. The two of us will have some fantastic conversations about running and about life.

 

While the team was stretching towards the end of Friday night’s practice, Jim asked me “Do you think our times would have been faster if we had this kind of track to train on?”

 

It is a good question. The track that York has now is the Cadillac of high school tracks in Illinois and could be one of the top high school tracks in the nation. I would have loved to race on that track that these athletes get to run on now. I do not know if I would have wanted to train on that now. I would never give up what I went through when I attended this school in the 70’s.

 

My first three years at York I trained on a track that resembled a track. It was a cinder track at one time of its life. I ran on an oval that had a cement curve circling where we ran. I don’t think there were cinders on there. Maybe there was once upon a time but not during my time.

 

I have memories of running 25x440 on that track with a minute rest. I have memories of running with teammates while we were encircled by dust coming from the track. I would get home looking like a coal miner that had spent 8 hours in a mine covered in York track.

 

I wouldn’t trade training on that “track”. The track was soft. You had to put so much effort to run so fast on a surface that slow. It did develop our legs making us stronger. The workouts that Mr. Newton provided us to do gave us that opportunity.

 

My senior year in 1979-80 I did not have an opportunity to run on a track. York was in the process of taking out the old and putting in the new that you see now. We had to do all our interval training in front of the school. When all was said and done, we ran one of the fastest team times then that the IHSA state meet had ever seen at that time. My senior year team, though we did not win a state title, is one of the most memorable moments in my life. We did it without training on a fancy track.

 

I had shin splints my sophomore year that sidelined me for a couple of weeks. That was the only injury that I had while I ran. I had a bad hamstring injury my junior year, but I ran through it. Let’s compare that to now where we see more and more runners come down with injuries even with better shoes, better injury prevention, and better (?) coaching.

 

I will always wonder that comparison of cinder tracks to the newer tracks of today. However, I would not trade then for now.

 

The Talk of the Town

 

Jim Hedman and I have participated in many conversations that have gone down in the legacy of York High School. He got into an argument with his friend Steve Boyd in one of our summer runs on which World War II plane was the best. The argument got so heated that the two picked up the pace. The rest of us had to hang in there running a 5:20 pace to see who would win the discussion. Try running in that kind of a pace and laughing so hard.

 

The question that Jim proposed to me on Friday night relates in some ways to what I went through last week.

 

“Michael, would we have been the runners that we were if we had social media,” Jim asked.

 

Let’s look at 1978 compared to where we are now. If we wanted to find out how other teams ran on a  Saturday, I would have to wait until Sunday. I would use some of my allowance to go to the drug store to get the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times or the Chicago Tribune to see the invitational results. If we wanted to see deeper results, we would have to wait until Tuesday to see deeper results in Timely Times. It was the newsletter that showed what happened the previous week that has developed more into what we see right now in Athletic.Net.

 

That was it.

 

There was word of mouth after a meet when you talked with other teams. We saw this team, and this is how they ran were some of the discussions. We would see the coaches’ rankings but never ran against the teams until we raced them. We had never seen the names that we had heard about or the rumors that we were told.

 

Rumors and those little things made us work harder as a group on the team I was on. I drove us to run faster in workouts. How would we know what they were doing? It just motivated us to a point to where we ended up at the end of the year.

 

Maine East and Fremd were the top teams in the state in 1978. We would face them at Detweiller Park in the Peoria Invitational a month before the state meet. We got third in that race. Mr. Newton was so mad after the race that we went out slower than expected. Our team had to run 3 miles after our race, 8 x440 running it in 66 seconds. I remember the old coach telling us “You have to feel how that pace feels.” That was of course after we had run a fast 3-mile race.

 

That experience drove us. The Monday after that race we were to run 10x880 with a 2-minute rest. We were so upset that our four-mile warm up evolved into an all-out effort started with a six-minute first mile with us finishing in 21 minutes for the distance. You do the math. When my “brothers” talk about it, we call it the “blood-bath” workout. We still had to run the core of the workout.

 

Would that had happened now?

 

Race results show up as soon as the meet ends on Athletic.Net. There are videos out in the social cloud where we can go back and look at a race and dissect how your team ran. Parents and coaches put up videos of a race or the end of the race to give the runners more exposure and sometimes more motivation. So, in that way, social media has helped in a way with the improvement with running. A coach has an idea that others pick up on. It is okay to steal an idea to help your program.

 

The promotion of meets on websites or in social media has taken running in Illinois to another level. It was reported in 2019 that there was more than 18,000 people on the Detweiller Park grounds during the IHSA State Cross-Country Championships. More fans at a meet can mean more motivations for those young runners. When a runner announces an injury, there are their fellow teammates or runners through the nation/world that pick them up with positive thoughts. Those are the benefits that social media can bring forward. If used positively, how much better could we be?

 

At the same time, the use of social media has de-evolved our society. There are so many adults out there that have agendas to self-promote themselves. Look at what has happened in our nation the past couple of years. It seems that social media sites, such as Twitter, can disintegrate into a poisonous pit.

 

There are adults out there that put out some fantastic content that we can all feed off. There are some adults that have those agendas. It can be pathetic when someone has to put another individual down just to better themselves. There are individuals in this frame of thought that are the leaders of an “idiot-following” that can lead some that follow them to the same thinking. “I know you I am right” even though the facts beg to differ can spin off to something evil. Opinion is part of our First Amendment rights. When you push negative or incorrect thoughts to the minions that follow you, then only bad things can happen.

 

I don’t like going on social media. I will put up my social media up and get off. In mornings, I may retweet things, that is about it. I have found that there are so many “experts” in my field on social media. When I get to talk to them, I find some of them that have the intelligence of a squashed bug. Most of the people I get the opportunity to meet at a cross-country meet give me special moments. The others? Well….

 

The thing is in social media we find high school / college students behave better than some adults that are “out there”. Why can’t some of the adults follow the lead of some of our younger students that will be the leaders of our world.

 

You could just avoid some of the idiocy that is on social media and just stay away. The post and run philosophy suit me just fine.

 

That platform has the potential to be so positive. It just is not right now.