Watercolor of track and field distance runners by Christopher Cudworth

By Christopher Cudworth

Sometimes you don’t choose a sport, it chooses you.

Such was the case with track & field. As a kid the track was a strange and foreign environment, mostly because we all ran on cinders years ago. Cinders were both the worst and best surface in the world to run on. They were, after all, cinders. Black little chunks of crumbled gripgrap. Who the hell knows where those cinders came from? Were they the tilings of mining operations in the hills of West Virginia?

The Wiki world says they’re pyroclastic material. All we ever knew is that they were hard to get out of your skin when you fell on the track. They’d also pile up in deceptive little heaps near the curb of some tracks, causing you to weave or swerve if you hit them wrong. I’ve come to realize now that cinders were nothing more than a pyroclastic form of tarsnake, an early attempt by those evil demons of the road to take you down when you were young and impressionable.

8 laps in 12:00

My first real track competition was a 2-mile time trial during gym class in 7th grade. Actually, it was a 12 minute run test, during which I covered 8 laps on a 400 meter track, discovering then and there that I might have a small talent for distance running. Nothing appealed to me more than running away from all but one guy in the 7th grade class. He later turned out to be a track and cross country guy too.

When I got home to tell my older brother about my exploits on the track, he punched me in the arm and called me a liar. Perhaps he didn’t want a challenge to his own legacy, which was formidable. As a freshman in high school in the mid-1960s, my elder brother Jim Cudworth ran a 4:40 mile. You still see very few freshman cover that distance in so fast a time, and my brother did it on cinders in who knows what kind of shoes. I suppose he wore spikes.

The glory and horror of spikes

We all wore spikes on the track. Some of those spikes were a full 1/2 inch in length. They looked like raptor teeth sticking out of the bottom of your shoes. I’m not sure today’s high school runners can conceive of wearing such a thing, unless they still do for cross country. I don’t see that much anymore.

Getting spiked in track and field by another competitor was an inevitable rite of passage. You’d either get kicked during the hurdles or clawed from behind during a distance race. The blood would roll profusely from you skin, draining down your leg into that socket of your achilles tendon and pooling in your shoe. Or else someone would tramp directly on your foot and put a hole in your shoe, in which case the blood would ooze out like a scene from the show Spartacus on the Starz Network, where blood splashes liberally all over the screen.

You’d look down and think “Shit, I’m bleeding.” But you couldn’t stop for anything in track & field. It really was and remains a gladiator sport of sorts. Few other sports are so raw in context. Wrestling perhaps, which my father considered an ugly sport and I always agreed. At least you weren’t clinging to another guy’s sweaty whatever with you clenched fists in track & field. You could run away from them instead. That would be considered feckless and weak in wrestling. God Bless those who love it.

Wrestling for your life

In fact I also won the 7th grade wrestling contest, defeating everyone in a broad weight class. The final match was held during a lunch hour, refereed by the gym teacher who was also the high school wrestling and gymnastics coach. We did what he said and showed up for our noon gladiator matches because we feared him.

But his disciplined style and demand for fitness did teach me that I was likely a runner. It took years to really find that out.

Baseball dreams

Baseball was my sport as a kid. I loved pitching and still keep baseballs

My take on baseball. Click to enlarge.

around the house just to pick them up in that familiar grip, remembering what it was like to throw hard enough to make people miss. Or to trick them with a curve, or cause them to swing over a sinker, or ground out. Pitching was awesome.

I never got to play high school baseball because our family moved to a new town and school where the athletic director was also the track coach and baseball wasn’t offered as a spring sport. So having run well in cross country as a freshman, I turned out for track.

That was yet another cinder masterpiece. A black, sullen oval out in the cornfields and the persistent wind. Goddamn I hated that track some days. You’d be fit enough to run well only to be blown around by the wind. It wasn’t like cross country where you’d get a break through the woods. The track meant you hit the wind for a full stretch and suffered like mad through the effort.

I high jumped all the way through college. That was an anomaly for a distance runner. Also triple jumped 40’4″ in high school. Some meets (most, actually) I’d do four events. Run the 2-mile. High jump. Triple jump. Then run the mile. I only won all four events one time.

In college I turned to steeplechase, the ultimate outsider’s event. By then baseball was left far behind. I was a “runner” through and through, but did compete in high jump and finally cleared my own height at 6’1 1/2 inches. That same meet a gymnastic jumper cleared 7’1″ using a somersault technique that was later outlawed. It was like a freak show.

Track and field can be a freak show at times. It’s like a carnival out there with weight men and distance runner and pole vaulters and long jumpers and discuss tossers and cookie tossers too. Track and field events like the 400 meters can make you throw up.

It’s a love/hate sport, track and field. When you’re fit it was a thing of beauty to run around a well-groomed track. When all-weather surfaces took over the sport we longed for those tracks. But secretly some of us loved the romance of a prepared cinder track. The sound was delicious. The atmosphere always had a tinge of cindery dust to it. Kicking home in long spikes was an amazing feeling.

So was running at twilight under the lights on the best all weather track around. If you were feeling good and got the lead, the track seemed to call you to higher speeds. There is absolutely nothing comparable to being fit and running your fastest time on the track. The first time I broke 4:30 in the mile felt like magic. But then I ran the same time 6 weeks in a row. Torturously, I could see the seconds winding up to 4:29, the state qualifying time, and I made it, but placed 7th in the race and only 6 went downstate. That’s track and field, a merciless sport.

It’s okay. Track and field gave and it taketh away. It was like God in that respect. Many times I lay on the infield praying to some sort of god that the cup could passeth from me. The hours spent waiting for an event could seem interminable. You began to wish you could be almost anywhere else but huddled under your sweats in a cold wind on an April day.

Then you’d strip down to your shorts and stand in line with a cadres of other anemic-looking athletes and wait for the horrid snap of the gun that meant you had laps to suffer through. We were slaves to obligation. Prisoners of our own long distance penchants. Masters of our own destiny, still. That made it all the worse, and all the better when you succeeded. Loved it and hated it, track and field. Loved it and hated it.