August 21, 1979 (Tuesday)

From running log:
Cross country practice: Ran 6.3 total miles at 6:45 to 7:00 pace, plus 7 sprints of 50 yards. Todd Crary showed up at practice today, excellent. I sat in the whirlpool for my sore right knee for 10 minutes. Maybe this team can win conference, but what about Ben? Moose was impressive today.

30 years later:
Ah, how the sails of youth are easily filled with the winds of tomorrow. The day before, I was concerned that we wouldn't even have a varsity team ... now one day later I had ridden the pendulum all the way back to "we can win conference". I'd like to think that 30 years has given me better judgment, and allowed me to be less extreme in my immediate reactions. Not so sure, though ... and part of me kind of misses the passion of the teenage years, where one day's disaster can be erased by a night's sleep and a single good omen the next day.

Todd Crary was a friend of mine and a good soul. His passions were not with running, at least not like mine were. He played electric guitar, and quite well. I think he probably would have preferred to stick with his music, but I knew he had a talent for running and I'd worked hard to convince him to join us on the cross country team. Todd was a funny guy, he could imitate the BHS teachers perfectly, and in some ways he filled the role on the 1979 team that the late Charlie Nelson had filled on the 1978 team: able to cut tension with comedy, friends with everyone on the team, impulsive and sometimes silly with his running. I was both relieved and happy that he had showed up for practice on this day. I knew that he would be an integral part of a winning team. The fact is, he'd play a bigger role than anyone, including he and I, could have known.

It was great to see Moose fit and ready. Ben was a wild card. We probably needed him in order to complete the team, but you never knew what you'd get with him. Here one day, gone the next. I remember once seeing him working on his car, making a thousand little hammering knocks. When I went over to see what he was doing, I found that he had decided to re-carpet the floors of the car, and we was hammering in carpeting tacks ... that's right, hundreds of little tacks being nailed right into the metal floor of the car!

A word on the whirlpool: we had this primitive contraption in our athletic locker rooms, a sort of stainless steel pig-feeding-trough with an electric motor on one end. You'd fill it with cold water, squeeze yourself into it, and hit the switch. Currents of water would blast you from one spot, so you'd angle your body around until it seemed to be hitting the sore muscle. Aside from ice and white athletic tape, that was about all the injury-treatment we had in those days. When confronted with an injury, we were typically urged to "shake it off" and get back to work, whether in practice or competition. I recall a game when I played football as a Freshman. I was the starting free safety, and our team was quite competitive. Late in the third quarter, the opponents pulled off an excellent screen pass, and the lead blockers took out our linebackers, leaving me one-on-one with the running back who was coming at me full-blast. As I charged to make the tackle, he ducked at the last minute, and my right index finger somehow managed to get stuck in the ear hole of his helmet. Of course, as we both went down, 3 or 4 other guys piled on, and my poor finger was twisted and mangled by the sheer physics of it all. By the time I came out of there, my finger was dislocated at two joints and turned around, so that looking at the palm side of my hand seemed fine, except that the fingernail of my index finger was right there. That is correct, the finger had been twisted 180 degrees at the tip, and was quickly turning a deep color of purple. I ran off the field and showed it to the coach. He grabbed it, immediately twisted it back into place (yow!), put some tape on it, and told me to "shake it off". I ran back onto the field and played the rest of the game. Of course, I had to write left-handed for six weeks after that, and to this day that finger bends at funny angles. Maybe I should have whirlpooled it!