From running log:
Cross country practice. 1 warmup, 4 workout, 0.5 cooldown (5.5 miles). Road LSD, I ran only 8:00 pace. Easy jog before tomorrow's race. Gotta kick a$$ tomorrow. Felt crappy this morning, don't know what I'd do without Tylenol. Legs feel okay. Left calf muscle a little tight. In today's paper, I was named Baraboo News Republic Athlete of the Week.
30 years later:
Not that it matters much in the history of the universe, particularly now from 30 year's worth of experience and perspective, but to me it was really a big deal to be named Athlete of the Week, for many reasons:
- I'd never earned such an honor before
- "Athlete" wasn't how much of the populace viewed distance runners; we were more like "the guys too small and too slow to be good at any real sport"
- Typically, the Athlete of the Week award went to someone on the football team, whoever scored the big touchdown or made some other big impact on the game; after all, football was where the fans showed up, not cross country (we'd be lucky to get more than half of our mothers to come watch us scamper around in the grass and dirt)
- and finally, because it was another step toward the goals I had set for myself; I wanted to be a force to be reckoned with that year in cross country, after falling miserably short the prior year
I didn't even care that the photograph used in the paper was clownishly ugly. What I cared about was that we, as a team, were building success upon success in a stepwise manner, with our eyes on the end of the season conference championship.
Clip from the paper:
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