Today I bumped into a longtime friend, Dave Pichik, who as a young man worked for his father’s grocery store, the Blue Goose in St. Charles, Illinois. The store was not part of a chain, but was a family business that to this day has survived the wholesale changes in grocery story marketing wrought by national chains and megastores.

As high-schoolers we’d tear off campus at noon, riding in Sandy Birkinbine’s orange Mustang or whatever it was…down the hill four blocks to the Blue Goose to buy lunch and go crash at the Power Keg, a community center one block away. It was our refuge and our daily habit.

Every afternoon we’d say hi to Dave at the Blue Goose.  He was one of those gregarious community types that seemed to know everyone. In those days, it actually seemed possible that he did. He always kept up on local sports and even read articles about us cross country runners in the local papers. “Hey, you had a nice meet the other day,” he’d tell us if we won. Or, “Sorry you guys ran into a buzzsaw at Dekalb. Guess those guys are kinda tough, huh?”

We’d thank him for the attention because like most small towns in America, St. Charles was nuts for football and sports like cross country didn’t really matter. It also did not seem to matter that the football team was 1-9 and the cross country team was 9-1. Football always ruled the roost. Even losing football.

But our cross country team was working some magic.

I’d moved into the community from the even smaller town of Elburn and Kaneland High School further west, where I’d led the team in points my sophomore year. I’d always thought it was the economy and the gas shortage that forced us to move so that my mother would not have to commute 25 miles round-trip to the school where she taught in St. Charles. But years later I addressed that issue by asking, “Dad, did we move to St. Charles because of the gas shortage?”

He said, “No, we moved because I didn’t want your younger brother (who turned out to be an All-State forward) playing basketball for George Birkett.”

The coach at Kaneland High School ran an annoyingly slow offense called the “Hokey Pokey.” The team had placed second in the Class A tournament my sophomore year, but my dad could not stand the idea of enslaving my younger brother to a system of slowdown basketball.

Dad was probably right about my brother, who turned out to be 6’6″ with a 36″ vertical leap and a beautifully soft left-handed jump shot. He could also run and dunk with the best of them. He went on to play Division I basketball at Kent State University.

When I expressed astonishment that my father would pull up my roots as class president and #1 cross country runner for the benefit of my younger brother, he replied: “Oh, you were a social kid. I knew you’d survive.”

Thank you, dad.

But he was right. The move really was good for me in many ways even though I missed my old classmates and never got to adequately explain the reason why our family moved. I think for a while they thought I didn’t like them. I did finally go to a 20-year reunion to possibly patch things up, and show I cared. Which was true. Only 20 years is a long time to wait to explain yourself.

Fortunately my hyper sociability and tremendous need for approval drove me to make new friends at the new school, including my co-captain buddies Walk and PJ, shown in the photo in this blog.

It’s not evident from this photo whether my friends had the sense to eat better than I did during cross country season. I don’t really recall what they ate when we went to lunch. I only remember that every day we’d head out the door at noon to hit the Blue Goose and this is what I’d bring or buy:

• One baloney sandwich on white bread.
• One regular bag of Fritos.
• One packet of Suzy-Qs.
• One regular Coke.
• Perhaps once a week I’d actually have an apple.

How I ran well on that diet I do not know. It has convinced me in retrospect that what you eat the afternoon of a race probably doesn’t matter much if your gut is used to it. Really, that’s the most important thing. For me the regularity of that diet was far more important on race day than its contents. It is likely I might have been a better runner in some ways if I’d eaten better overall, but I seriously doubt it. Most of the time my mother fed us a diverse menu with all sorts of vegetables, meats, milk, bread and cheese. She was used to cooking for four boys and we generally ate like hogs. If anything I should have eaten even more. I weighed 132 lbs at 6’0″ tall in high school.

My previous coach at Kaneland High School was much more concerned about diet. He handed out printouts every fall encouraging us to eat well. But I forgot about all that at the new school, probably to my detriment. The Kaneland code of dietary ethics ruled out soda completely, for one thing, and it certainly would not have recommended Fritos, Suzy-Qs or my daily diet of a baloney sandwich as a pre-race meal, either.

But somehow it actually seemed to work for me. I seldom got side aches or stitches from my lousy diet. We ran well and beat plenty of teams that we had never beaten in our school’s history. I won my share of races and we qualified and won the District Meet for the first time in the school’s history.

Still, though it worked for me, I cannot recommend my training diet to anyone in any earnestness. Better to pay attention to the volumes of dietary experts available now to tell us how to eat to win.

But given my experience, I wonder if some of that advice isn’t the real baloney.