September 9, 1979 (Sunday)

From running log:
Ran about 3 miles at 7:30 pace around Devil's Lake, a nice easy run with teammates Ben, Moose, and Steinhorst. Felt okay, knees feeling good, hip stiff, left ankle sore, back a little stiff. Connors ran a 16:09 at Portage yesterday. Must beat him on Thursday. Total weekly mileage = 36.6

30 years later:
It was a nice recovery run at an easy pace. You've met Ben and Moose before. Steinhorst was Larry Steinhorst, an underclassman taking a stab at cross country. He ran on the Junior Varsity team in 1979.

Despite my long litany of sore spots, I remember feeling pretty good. In the race the day before, I'd lowered my 3-mile time by 31 seconds compared to one week before, despite feeling the effects of allergies (I had hay fever, it wasn't severe but it would definitely make me feel out of sorts). If I could keep improving, I thougth I'd be doing well for the rest of the season. Of course, comparing times for cross country courses is an iffy business, because the difficulty of the courses can vary widely (for example, no one was going to run fast on our hilly home course). But in this case I'd run exactly the same course two weeks in a row, and shown that improvement.

However, there was my old nemesis Terry Connors of Wisconsin Dells, running another 22 seconds faster at a meet in Portage (that course was fairly fast, I'd run it once the year before). I was wishing that we'd gone to that meet instead of to Verona, because I wanted to see how he and I would stack up head-to-head (not to mention how our team would match theirs, man-for-man). We wouldn't have to wait long, though, because they'd be coming to our home meet in only four days. I was going to see just how tough he was; see how he'd deal with that killer of a course. And the rest of my teammates were already thinking about how they'd use our home course to their advantage.