September 1, 1979 (Saturday)

From running log:
Race: Ran 4.5 miles total, including warmup and cooldown. I did the three mile race in 17:02, including first mile in 5:04, then second mile in 5:58 and final mile in 6:00. Hot and humid, 89F. I finished 19th out of 140 competitors, 4 places away from a medal. Not too bad, really. Wanted to run 20 seconds faster. Creamed Murphy and Hill (75th and 53rd, respectively). Ben finished behind Todd, both can run much faster. Hill and Murphy beat both of them. Very hot. Right knee feeling good, right hip a bit stiff. I need some hillwork and intervals.

30 years later:
The course at Verona High School was a combination of open, grassy fields and a mad dash through a section of adjacent woods. To make things interesting, they used to put a couple of hay bale jumps along the flat sections. I loved the obstacles, but there just weren't any real hills on that course, which helped my competitors more than me.

Once again, you can see that I ran the first mile way too fast, causing me to slow way down over the remainder of the race. I should have known better. My goal of finishing in the top 15 and taking home a medal went unrealized. Note that in those days, we wore letter jackets to school, and our mothers sewed onto the varsity sports letter all of the medals we'd won. Top athletes jingled their way down the hallways when the doors opened in the morning, I wanted to be one of those guys. I'd managed to win a couple of medals, but I wanted to be heavily laden.

Murphy and Hill were two runners from Portage High School. I was convinced that team would be our major competition throughout the season. They had won the conference title the year before, and were returning most of their varsity runners (with the exception of Ross Bennett, their number one man and a truly outstanding high school runner in the late 70s - and, no, not the b-list comedian with the same name). We were focused on putting as many of our guys in front of theirs whenever we crossed paths, which was going to be rare in 1979 due to a fluke in scheduling. True head-to-head competition between our two teams would not take place until the conference meet.

If you've ever seen the movie Meatballs (which just happened to come out in 1979, starring Bill Murray), you can get an oversimplified version of how we felt about Portage. We were Camp North Star, they were Camp Mohawk. To us, Portage sports teams seemed straight-laced and stiff. They had better uniforms, matching black-and-orange warmup suits (holy cow, same colors as Camp Mohawk in the film!), more-expensive matching racing shoes, and they dressed up in jackets and ties when they traveled to away games. They warmed up in lock step, like military cadets. By contrast, our teams, especially cross country, were poorly-funded. We sported mismatched gray cotton warmups, baggy yellow uniform tops, borrowed shorts from the track team, whatever shoes were on sale the week we bought them, and we never dressed up as a point of pride. We never gathered ourselves into tight formation and shouted out the count of our jumping jacks and pushups like some football team; in fact, we would laze about chewing on blades of grass and make snide comments about teams who did. We tended to warmup in our own individual ways, some guys liked to run, others lolled about in the shade like lions before the next big hunt, and we didn't care - that is, it was cool with us however you wanted to warm up, it just didn't matter. (Remember the scene in the movie, when Tripper gives his rousing speech, telling crestfallen North Star campers that it won't matter whether they win or lose the intercamp competition, because the good looking girls will still go out with the guys from Camp Mohawk because "they've got all the money", mixed in with the chant, "It just doesn't matter!") Like in the movie, we saw ourselves as polar opposites, and we wanted to be the ones to knock the prim and proper guys down a notch.

The USTFF meet was run in heats, pitting runners against others within their grade level only. In other words, I was running in the Senior Boys race, against only 12th graders. Other classes had their own races. In the Sophomore Boys race, Mike Bennett of Portage, Ross's younger brother and a major threat to my plans to win the conference individual title, finished in 6th place and ran 9 seconds faster than I did on the same course and same day. That worried me, a lot.

If you look at the results of the Junior Boys race, you see Joe Stinzi and Tim Hacker running first and second. Those two outstanding Wisconsin High School runners would end up running together at the University of Wisconsin and help garner an NCAA national championship in cross country for the Badgers in 1982.

Article from the Baraboo News Republic, replete with spelling errors:



And the article from the Wisconsin State Journal: