The Woodberry Harrier 2013: Volume 2

Good Days

The last day at early camp we stopped to cool off in the Maury River. Some splashed right in, while those preferring clean, blue swimming pools hesitated on the bank. I moved away from the swimmers’ dares to a deepish pool in the middle, braced against a smooth rock, and stared at the mountain face (which I’ve been told is the spitting image of Nixon in profile if you look at it from the right angle, though I missed that altogether). As the water rippled by, I thought, This has been a good day — and that thought actually startled me.

I’d begun the morning on the porch of the cabin with a cup of coffee, watching the sun light up the dew, enjoying the quiet before the boys stirred. We’d cooked oatmeal and sliced Shenandoah Valley peaches and toasted bread from the local bakery. We’d had a lively circle discussion about what we expected of each other in the season ahead. We’d learned a complicated new warm-up in a field surrounded by dense woods. At lunch we’d competed for the best sandwich (each man’s testimony being the only evidence). We’d run around Lake Merriweather without seeing a living soul and stretched out in the sloping yard of a tiny little church at the end of a dirt road; now we were resting in the river, and I knew that later we would break off chunks of the meat that was roasting back at camp, and slice and salt the last of the big Cherokee Purples, and pull the browned sweet potatoes out of the oven and heap our plates, and argue about which dinner had been the best of the weekend, and end the day holding marshmallows on sticks over a big fire outside. I don’t really like marshmallows anymore, but I love roasting them because I loved doing it as a child; I remember my grandmother teaching me how to get them gooey without melting them, and to enjoy the taste of the char mixed with the sweet. (That’s a good lesson, I believe, to enjoy the char mixed with the sweet.)

            

 I got to wondering why had I been so surprised to notice that I was having something as simple (and you’d hope as common) as a good day? Then I remembered Annie Dillard saying, “Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen, and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.” Maybe it had been a good day because we had been without television or phones or computers, but I fear  this is the glib answer. I fear that before we stared mindlessly at screens, we stared mindlessly at something else. Dillard isn’t dissing TV itself as much as our willing somnambulism in whatever forms it takes. Is frantic busy-ness any less narcotic than a hi-def screen? Is chasing “success” less addictive than a video game? Maybe it’s more addictive — and more dangerous — because, while we are in that drugged sleep, we dream that we are vibrantly alive and often never know (or want to know) the difference.

Maybe the chilly water rushing past my ears was like the shake of that gourd, but that day at camp was not a dream. It was the real McCoy, the genuine article, what the Germans call the ding an sich, the thing in itself. The funny part is that the day would have looked dull by most reckonings. There was nothing dramatic or exciting or mystical or mysterious or even vaguely profound. It was, no more and no less, just a day in which we’d been, well, awakeall day. We’d been conscious of what we were doing, had known why, had been glad in the doing, and so we had been delighted by such common things as the taste of a slice of sweet onion next to the sharp cheddar cheese on a sandwich, the rudimentary ecclesiastical windows of a backwoods church, the slow stretch of a tight hamstring, the smells of pine needles and lake water mixing in a breeze. It doesn’t take much to remind you that you are awake, and, when something does, it becomes a wonder.

I could list a hundred things right now that I hope these guys learn from this season, but maybe all those things are contained in this one thing: I hope they learn to be awake. Runners are known for enduring pain — and even for cherishing it in a way — not because they like it for itself, but because the pain reminds them that they are alive right here, right now:  They are doing something, trying something, feeling something. They are running as fast as they can over God’s green earth, and every step throbs. But every throb is a shake of that gourd, and that’s the music that carries them along.

I recently read that in France, when an apprentice gets hurt or tired, the old craftsmen say, “It’s the trade

entering his body.” You could say, of course, that an athlete’s pain is the sport entering his body, but for a runner it’s more than that. It’s life itself entering the body because life itself is what the running requires of you. You don’t run your best cross country race on talent or skill or training or experience. You run well only when every cell in your body is dancing to the beat of that shaking gourd. The ball of your foot rips the grass and your pulse thumps your eardrums and sweat stings your eyes and stubbornness juts your chin — and all of these are moving at once to the rattle of that gourd, not parts of you anymore but one thing together and utterly alive. This, I remember, is why we do this, and it’s as good a reason as I know to do anything. It may be the only reason.

And the guys were very much alive at Mercersburg last weekend. Even the ones who’d been fighting injuries ran well. Here are the results:

2013 Mercersburg Invitational
Mercersburg Academy (Mercersburg, PA)
21 September 2013
4th place out of 11 teams
	Time	Place out of 80 runners
Robert Singleton	16:49	8th	All-time PR
Hines Liles	17:33	18th	Season PR
Billy Osterman	18:16	29th	All-time PR
Perry Hammond	18:16	30th
Cameron Finley	18:25	33rd	All-time PR
Averett Flory	18:31	36th	1:16 down from previous race
David Dameron	20:31	63rd	18-sec. from previous race
		Place out of 154 runners
Brandon Neath	19:25	23rd	1:32 down from previous race
Church Humphreys	21:13	66th
Jared Engh	21:58	81st
James Carrington	DNR
Jared Engh	DNR

And after a week of hard work and tenacious rehab on some very stubborn injuries, we hosted St. Christopher’s here Friday for our annual dual meet.  Here are the results:

WFS vs. St. Chris
Woodberry Lower Course
28 September 2013
WFS – 22 St. C – 33
	Time	Place out of 12 runners
Robert Singleton	17:20	1st
Hines Liles	18:04	2nd
Cameron Finley	18:19	4th	a 6-sec. all-time PR
Averett Flory	18:21	5th	a 10-sec. season PR
David Dameron	19:47	10th
Brandon Neath	20:02	11th	A 26-sec. all-time PR
Bily Osterman	dnr
Perry Hammond	dnr
Church Humphreys	dnr
Jared Engh	dnr
James Carrington	dnr

This was the first meet on the long-anticipated new Lower Course, which takes in the woods, the fields, and the stunning new loop around the lake.  It’s may be the prettiest and most interesting cross country course I have ever seen; however, the addition of two new hills and a long stretch of grass make it much slower than the old course, which was flat and almost all on well-packed farm roads.   

The other “good news and bad news” part of the day was this:  we had four guys out with injuries, including Billy and Perry, our 3 and 4,  but Avery, Cam, and David took that as a call to step up, and they had an amazing race, as you can see from the PR’s.    It was, all around, another good day.