The Woodberry Harrier 2012: Volume 4

When Skies Resume

These are the days when skies resume

The old--old sophistries of June--

A blue and gold mistake.

Emily Dickinson was writing about those ambivalent days between summer and fall, when nature can’t seem to make up its mind–just like those days early in the season, after we’ve returned from camp.  Every year autumn’s first breezes remind us that the cold has every intention of returning.  We dig out wrinkled sweatshirts from the bottoms of trunks, we keep our shirts on during long runs, and we linger in hot showers after practice.  Then, out of nowhere, the sun regains its strength and we lose our shirts again, except that we know, this time, it will not last.

With college applications, lab reports, and papers on top of papers, I haven’t stopped much to look around this fall.  I haven’t spent time watching the leaves–not consciously anyway–in their yearly display.  Even on long runs in the country, when trees are just about all we have to look at, I’ve only given them an occasional, accidental glance.  But the leaf blowers that keep me from going back to sleep in the morning suggest that the leaves haven’t given me much thought either.  They have turned and fallen without me.   In the weeks leading up to the State Meet, the frost began to grow thicker in the mornings.  It would soak into my shoes as I scrambled across the grass to make it to breakfast.  In the evening the heralds of winter–the earlier sunsets and harsher winds–would come to witness the dying breaths of autumn. 

Fall was over.  Its end always sneaks up on us, but it’s still surprising when it does.  A few weeks ago, we were caught in the thick of the trimester, bogged down in heavy work and sleep deprivation.  We struggled in workouts and strained in races.  We clung to our routines as we clung to our paces, and we managed to get through the days and weeks.  We were tired–but not the kind of tired we could fix with a sleep-in or a cup of coffee.  Like Bilbo Baggins, we felt like butter scraped over to much stale bread.  And before we knew what has happened, it was the night before the State Meet.

The Prep League Championship had come and gone, and for me it had been like too many meets this season.  I stood on the starting line, feeling more weariness than fire.  I couldn’t generate the heat I saw in Peter and Hines and Robert’s eyes as they took off at Panorama Farms that afternoon, but I followed them, pushing myself hard to run a time that I had already run there a year before.  In the days leading up the state meet, I didn’t dare let myself hope the final race could be different. 

          When Dr. Campbell announced a free day last Thursday, I had the rare chance to slow down and reflect.  It was fascinating to think about how I had come full circle:  the next day I would toe the starting line at my last State Meet.   I would look down at the same spikes I had worn in my first race as a freshman.  I would feel the same queasiness in my stomach, hear the same gunshot, and take off in the same barbaric stampede.  Later that night, just as I had before my first State Meet, I would listen to Mr. Hale read from Shakespeare’s Henry V:  “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers….”  And later, as I sat in his living room that evening with the rest of the team, I suddenly began to feel the magic again that only we happy few who run Woodberry cross country know.  If I’d had my spikes, I could have taken off running right then and there.

          The previous couple weeks had resembled winter more than fall.  We wore long sleeves  and socks on our hands, and we gathered inside on plastic mats rather than under our old Maple tree.  Then, out of nowhere, Friday was a perfect “blue and gold mistake.”  As the team finished warming up, I approached that starting line with the warm confidence of the Indian-summer sun.  The skies had resumed the old magic–that intangible, inexplicable part of cross country that I had known the year before.  And three miles later, as I approached the finish line, it had not faded. 

I’m not sure how long it will take for me to fully accept that cross country is over.  I know I haven’t yet.  All I want to do right now is keep running that race in my head.  I see myself chasing the ghosts of Kevin Bennert and Addison Winston.  I see Kevin this year, cheering us on from the sideline, and I see myself standing alongside him next year.  I see myself thinking back to last Friday when, for a moment, I got to experience those “old–old sophistries” one last time.
-- Nick Evans ‘13

Nick is not alone in thinking the end of the season arrived like a thief in the night, but there is also the sense that early camp was a whole age ago.  At dinner the other evening the guys were reminiscing about that first weekend, and the stories had that wistful quality of long-ago childhood memories:  Remember when….   Of course, the season was not very long at all, as a quick glance at the calendar will reveal, but calendars and clocks measure only the length of time, not its breadth or depth.  Clocks and calendars can foretell with great and precision when 4:00 tomorrow will arrive and Tuesday next, but the bulk of time can be measured only in hindsight and only by the heart and the gut.  The Greenwich Observatory has no instrument which can measure the volume of a single happy hour in the life of a single child.  Some time is measured well with clocks and calendars because it’s as thin and straight as a ruled line, but if time is great with experience,  its pregnant shape will be the size of all that it contains together, which is inestimably greater than the simple sum of its moments.  Nick finished the race on Friday in 17:40,  just four little digits on the stopwatch, but how can he fathom the full extension of an experience which will grow throughout his lifetime---not in sentimentality but in complexity and clarity and meaning?  It will, I hope, grow as he grows in wisdom, and become a different kind of measure, a way of discerning what kind of experiences should fill our time.

The night before the State Meet I have for many years read the eve-of-battle speech from Henry V.  Thanks to Stephen Ambrose and HBO, the speech has sadly become the source of cliché for many who have never read (or even heard of) it.   It’s a wonderful speech, however, about how a single day of unimagined greatness can expand in meaning and power far beyond even the lifetime of the man who lived it.    It would be hubris to claim that everything about the cross country season is this way.  So much is the tiresome routine and work-a-day effort, but all that is done in the very real hope that each boy will leave with at just a few minutes of memory which will become a philosopher’s stone his soul can use to make meaning in a life which will inevitably fill with baser experiences.

          This year I also read a letter I had that day from Addison Winston, who is doing a gap year in Spain.  I think the boys were more affected by his words than they were by Shakespeare’s:

Each Friday night, I have sat down on Google maps and measured out a 5-kilometer course, memorizing before going to sleep. Each Saturday morning I have run those five kilometers, with the goal of being able to imagine for one special moment that I can enjoy that clarity, and crispness which I have not enjoyed this fall.  I try to imagine a small hill to be Agony, or a brief stretch of curving downhill to be Parrott’s, but it’s never the same for any period.

I am standing here typing this because the dresser is the only flat surface in my room, and as I type, I cannot think of Spanish or Cataluña or the election or anything else, because the only thing on my mind is what I would do to trade in my sneakers for my worn-out spikes tomorrow morning. What I would exchange for the chance to stand on the line in the cold air and bad weather and be beside the rest of the team, nervously clawing at pine straw before that final moment of calm, which only arrives seconds before the gun. 

And while I would do anything to be back there listening to Shakespeare tonight, I feel no regret. That last race for me was the perfect race. That State Meet one year ago was the moment I cashed every check for every nickel that had been carefully put away for four years.  Tomorrow, I will be halfway around the world, unable to give anything to the effort, but if just one guy tomorrow can have that one special race, that one moment at the end, where there is nothing left but mud splatters and perfect splits, that would give me more pleasure than anything else in the world.

How could it be said better than that?

          Well, this is one of those rare seasons when Addison’s wish (and mine) came true for every boy on the team—and, even more rare, for the team itself.  We began the season at the Fork Union Invitational, as we have so many years before, and we went there rested and hopeful.  The first big meet of the season is always important because it will reveal the promise of the team and the threat of the competition.  Here’s what we learned that day:

 

Our #1 was 2:12 behind Trinity’s #2 and 1:06 behind FUMA’s #3;

We had a 1:06 spread between #1 and #5; 

Trinity had 4 runners in front of our #1, and FUMA has 3 runners in front of our #1;   

Trinity beat us by 185 points and FUMA beat us by 114 points.

A few weeks later, Collegiate was also ranked far above us after they had logged in some amazing times in Richmond.  By the time we were soundly defeated again by Trinity at Maymont at the end of September, we were happily—and firmly-- committed to ignoring stats and news and rankings and following Dr. Pangloss’ advice just to tend our garden.   Of course, since we had only nine runners--with three of those dealing with chronic injuries the entire season--we were far more careful than we might have been. There was every day that nagging fear of a rolled ankle or a pulled ligament.  One small injury could have wrecked us, so we had to work with great care. 

          But miraculous things happen in well-tended gardens.  We arrived at Panorama for the Prep League Championship simply committed to run our best race against whatever Trinity, FUMA, and Collegiate brought, and the outcome surpassed what we had dared to hope.    Here are the results:

	Prep League Championships
	Panorama Farms, Earlysville
	2 November, 2012
	Place:  2nd out of 5 teams 1-5  spread:  56 sec.
			Place out of 62 runners
	Singleton	17:16	6th	All Prep Honors;
	Shelton	17:19	8th	All Prep Honors;                         6-sec. lifetime PR
	Liles	17:28	9th	All Prep Honors
	Flory	17:41	12th	All Prep Honors;                       28-sec. season PR
	Evans	18:12	18th	6-sec. season PR
	Hammond	18:13	19th
	Osterman	18:40	27th	A 27-sec season PR
	In the JV race		Out of 35 runners
	Neath	1st	19:00	A 21-sec season PR, a10-sec. lifetime PR
Dameron		13th	21:14

Here we were at the end of the season and we had finally glimpsed our potential, and this glimpse was a powerful motivation in the week leading up to the State Meet.  They did everything right that week, from eating right to sleeping to focusing in practice, and the picture at the end of the State Meet was a dramatic contrast from the one we had at FUMA back in early September:

Our #1 was now just 28-seconds behind Trinity’s #2 and 10-seconds ahead of FUMA’s #1;

We now had a 22-second spread between #1 and #5; 

We had 5 runners in front of Trinity’s #4, and our #4 in front of FUMA’s #3;

Trinity beat us by 10 points and we beat FUMA by 154 points.

Here are the results:

VA Independent Schools D-1 Championships
Woodberry Forest
9 November, 2012
Place:  2nd out of 19 teams 1-5  spread:  22sec.!!!!!
		Place out of 203 runners
Singleton	17:28	7th	All-State Honors;               37-sec. course PR
Evans	17:40	12th	All-State Honors;             1:07 course PR (season)
Liles	17:40	13th	All-State Honors;               42-sec. course PR
Hammond	17:42	14th	All-State Honors;             1:14 course PR
Shelton	17:50	18th	All-State Honors;                27-sec course PR (season)
Flory	18:38	33rd	14-sec course PR
Osterman	19:03	51st	19-sec course PR
Neath	19:53	89th	23-sec. course PR
Dameron	21:11	145th	47 sec. improvement from EHS meet

And that seems to be a pretty good way to end a pretty good story.