Smiling through mile six of the Schaumburg Half Marathon. But I don’t like my gut.
Having recently started work as a staffer at Dick Pond Athletics in St. Charles, Illinois, I’ve had cause to engage in consideration of my running career. The Dick Pond group of stores is celebrating 50 years of running, a fact that parallels my own career. Working a few retail hours per week has given me the opportunity to encounter all kinds of runners; elite and beginners, joggers and walkers, serious trainers and people just trying to stay fit.
My friend and the main proprietor of the St. Charles store, Glen Kamps, has worked at Dick Pond for just as many years. His appearance with the Dick Pond shoe truck at the local Turkey Trot in Batavia this week is one of the thousands he has done over the years. There is no one more dedicated to the sport of running than Glen.
We started doing some running together over the past year as he prepared for a half marathon race, in which he set a recent personal best time. He also won his age group at the Sycamore Pumpkinfest 10k with a 7:41 pace per mile.
But while we talk about racing during our training runs, we also discuss the sport of running as a whole. Glen keeps track of his “numbers,” things like resting heartbeat, cholesterol, and other life vitals. His sincere wish is that more people would take those numbers seriously. His main mission is to help people figure out the best path to personal wellness. He’s in a unique position to do so as manager of the Dick Pond store, but it’s still hard to reach some of the people that most need to hear that message.
Going into my own half marathon this weekend, I knew my fitness state pretty well. My resting heart rate is 47, a healthy sign. I manage my cholesterol with a statin thanks to a long family history of heart disease, and my doctor and I work together to keep that in good shape. My blood pressure is typically in the 115/78 region, and my body fat…well, that does need work. I have a bit of an unhealthy paunch, nothing huge, around the waist.
Part of the challenge for athletes over the age of 50 is wrestling with a slowing metabolism. The weight that used to shrug off with a few workouts now sticks to the waist. I don’t like how thick I look around the middle, and never imagined that I’d need to deal with excess pounds in my lifetime. As a young distance runner, I could not put a pound on my frame without extreme indulgence.
But those eating habits from long ago come back to haunt you later in life. The hard-wired love of carbs does not go away easily. That excess energy gets stored as fat. It takes real discipline to modify a diet built around providing fuel for distance running, cycling, and swimming.
So I weigh between 180-186 in any given month. UP and down it goes. Yet I got out there Saturday and felt really good running at sub-8:00 pace for the first eight miles. I wasn’t straining at all to hold that pace. My legs weren’t tired and my lungs could keep up. I did know that I’d likely pay for that early pace past the eight-mile mark because I’d done practice runs at that pace and distance in training, but hoped that I could keep it up through thirteen. My longest run before the race was eleven miles. I figured to tough it out beyond that.
Sure enough, the 1.5M run west into the wind and north to Golf Road through Busse Woods grew difficult. I slowed to an 8: 20 pace going into the wind in the ninth mile. Then an 8:17 going north. Then came the climbs, and I dropped to 8:26 on the way out and 8:39 on the way back. The last steep rise on the bridge over the highway forced me to walk three steps. Then I was back in gear coming home the last mile and welcomed a keen drop off the bridge. Was that a relief! But my hips were stiff and tired by then. That area of my body needs strength work.
My Garmin watch showed that I’d dropped to 8:05 pace on the flat, but that was not enough to make up for the extremely slow climb over the bridge. That hurt, dammit.
I came across in 1:47:05 on my Garmin watch. My goal was 1:45 but those hills and that wind crushed those objectives.
The winner of my age 60-64 age group was Christian Evans, who ran 1:25, an exceptional time for sure. No one in our category was within fifteen minutes of his time. I was seventh in our group.
I’ll take it. I was grateful to be racing and having fun. Those first eight miles felt great, almost like I was young again. Granted, I cannot race at the 1:10 pace I once ran for the half marathon. But take note: the world record for 60+ runners is 1:11. I’ve never been a world-class runner, and don’t expect to achieve that level for the rest of my life. I can admire that guy however.
All of us can (and should) do what we can to stay healthy no matter what the speed objectives are. Even if those early-life miles have trashed the knees or hips, it is still good to get out there to walk or cycle if you can. If it takes some shoe inserts to support your feet and knees, there are tons of options these days. I wear Aetrex insoles in my running shoes and they work great. Add in some occasional strength work and it is surprising what your body can do at any age.
Glen and I are both grateful to be running decently at our age. Our goal for every person we serve through the store is to encourage and help them find their best path to fitness and “better numbers.” We have one life to live. Why not make it the best life possible?
Hope to see you out there. If you need some encouragement, reach me at cudworthfix@gmail.com. This whole running and fitness thing isn’t just about me. It’s about us. That’s why I started werunandride.com, and why I like to write about Original Thoughts About Running, Riding (and Swimming.) If I can make you think or laugh, or give you reason to get out there, that’s the goal.
Happy Holidays. Let’s stay ahead of the cookies this year.
Coming off the two semesters that my friends called “Cud’s weird year,” I arrived home at the farmhouse where our family lived for a year and took a hard look in the mirror. My hair was so thick and long my thin face looked like a piece of dried fungus between two large shards of bark. The scraggly beard on my chin was doing me no favors either.
I took some shears and cut off a few locks, but that was not going well at all. I wanted to clean up my act, not come out looking like a criminal mug shot. So I jumped in the car and drove to the Avenue Two barbershop in St. Charles.
It had been a year or since I visited the shop, or any barber shop for that matter. Perhaps some co-ed chopped my hair a bit that year, but not by much. It was too thick to put in a ponytail or comb straight back. So it just stuck out, especially when I wore a hat.
I walked into the barber and told them, “Hey, I want to get rid of this hair.” They looked at each other in a bit of wonder, and sent me to the back of the floor where a young-looking barber stood nervously by his chair. The shop was a vocational destination for graduates from Mooseheart, a North Aurora school for underprivileged kids. During high school, I’d gotten my hair cut many times at Avenue Two, and perhaps some of the guys working there recognized me. But I couldn’t blame them for not knowing me with that knot of thick hair hiding my face.
The barber said, “Go ahead to the sink there and we’ll get your hair washed first.” So I sat in a chair and positioned my head face-down in the porcelain. “Um, no,” the kid instructed me. “You can lean with the back of your head.’
From there, I felt the hair fall away in layers. When it was finished, I stood up and thanked him, gave him a tip on top of the fee, and waved to the other barbers on the way out. “Hey,” one of them said to me, “Thanks for coming in, Chris.”
There was one other layer of persona I needed change as well. I was sick of my thick glasses. My prescription got worse during college and I tragically chose a rimless style of glasses that only showed off the thick goddamned lenses.
I went home and told my mother, “I need contact lenses.” And for once, perhaps because our family was starting to do a bit better financially, she said, “Yes, that makes sense.”
In the meantime, my parents decided that living on that farmhouse six miles out of town was a bad idea. They bought a house back in town and we gladly moved away from the farm. The people that owned the place were paranoid, it turned out, accusing us of having too many people living in the residence. Years later, a co-worker and former track teammate at Kaneland rented the same farmhouse with the same idea of gaining some country living time. Instead, the owners drove his family nuts with even crazier accusations. After he moved out of the house, he came up to me one day and asked, “Hey, do you want to come with me tonight? I’ve got a bowling ball in my trunk and I’m going to throw it through the plate glass window and hope they die of a heart attack.”
“No,” I told him. That’s a really bad idea.” It took me ten minutes to convince him that he should not go through with the act, but he was determined. Finally, he agreed not to go on the rampage.
I was glad to be back in town with access to more familiar running routes. On the first day that I wore the new contacts, I ran a nine-mile loop on Country Club Road. It was a warm day, and I absentmindedly wiped some sweat from the side of my face and the contact lens popped out of my eye. I stopped about twenty yards later realizing it was gone. The sole reason that my mother refused for years to buy me contact lenses was the fear of incurring an expense by losing them. Panicked at the thought that I’d already failed that test, I carefully walked back the road shoulder and looked down to find that sweet little piece of plastic glinting in the sun. It was tough to get it back in my eye, as I’d had little practice to that point, but finally, I could see again and ran home grateful for finding the thing. I made no mention of the incident to my mother.
Running without glasses was an absolutely liberating feeling. No more pushing glasses up my face or feeling the strain of a glasses band on the back of my head. Having less hair was also a relief. I’d kept the mustache in a tip of the face to Steve Prefontaine, but other than that, I looked like an entirely new man. Feeling my oats, I decided to jump in a June race in Glen Ellyn, only to find myself running next to one of that era’s greatest distance talents, Ken Popejoy. I lasted a couple miles and dropped out.
That summer I got a job working as a janitor at a building managed by my friend’s father. It was a one-hour drive one-way to get there, but I was grateful to be able to earn some money after my plan to sell artwork at the Swedish Days Art Fair got rained out two days in a row. Leading up to the show, I got in several arguments with my mother about the plan to sell artwork rather than work in some manual labor job.
My journal notes from June, 1978My journal lament about commuting and working 10-hour days.
For all my private complaining, I drove to work every day in the company of a sweet girl named Pam that I’d coached in summer track a few years before. She did secretarial work while I did chores under the direction of an embittered fellow named Andy. He despised the Polish cabal that dominated most of the workforce in the building. They also hated me for getting hired by the building manager when one of their own could have found work. Andy warned me, “Stay out of their fucking way if you can.”
I liked Andy. He was straight with me in every way. Our tasks were often grungy and sometimes difficult, but he never asked me to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. We got along fine.
Most days after work I’d get home and go for a run in the twilight hours. Sometimes I’d even run in the dark with the nighthawks calling overhead and the river bugs twirling around the streetlights. I could feel the fitness growing after a solid spring in track. When late July came around, I traveled up to Decorah to run the Elveloppet (River Run) 15K with Luther teammates. We stayed up a bit late the night before, and my eyes were exhausted from wearing the contact lenses so long, but I fell asleep quickly after chowing a late-night burrito and woke up the next morning ready to run.
In previous years, I struggled to get in the top ten of that race. But during the summer of 1978, I was feeling real confidence beginning to grow. I finished in the top five at 54:38 on an extremely hilly course and got a few hearty backslaps from the leaders on our team. That felt good.
Then it was back to the job for a few more weeks. The building was called International Towers, and there always seemed to be some sort of renovation going on. I hauled torn-up carpet out to the trash in big rolling bins. I cleaned the restrooms for both women and men and had a couple interesting encounters with bored women serving wine during their breaks. That was an era of secretarial pools and I was not wise to the ways of middle-aged women that were bored and horny. I took a bit of interesting teasing in several of those restroom encounters.
One afternoon Andy called me down to the office and handed me a tool and said, “Follow me, we got shit to do.” We strolled out in the parking lot under the blazing summer sun and Andy said, “We’ve got to find this piece of pipe under the asphalt,” he told me. “They have an electrical problem at the gate. So start chopping.”
I was good at chopping after spending a couple weeks the previous summer cutting sections of dried paint under the vats at Olympic Stain. But this was hot work, and Andy stopped fairly often to light up a cigarette and suck on it in the sun. Then he’d toss it down, crush it with his foot, and mutter another swear word or two.
Occasionally during the workday, Andy would get a call from his wife when we were both sitting in the janitorial room. I’d try to pretend not to listen but was able to gather that she was not a woman in good health. The normally acerbic and cussing Andy was patient and tender with her on the phone.
As we continued chopping away at the asphalt, Andy grew a bit tired. I was determined to find the conduit and kept chipping away black chunks of aggregate and tossing them into a growing pile. Finally, I hit something with a “tink!” noise and Andy bent over to inspect our work as if we’d found treasure. At that moment, the electrical contractor walked up with my friend’s father and they told us to expose the rest of the pipe and it took the rest of the afternoon. Frankly, I was glad to be outside for most of the day, hot as it was. So Andy let me finish the job while he went inside to check on the rest of the building.
One afternoon he sent me upstairs to gather loads of used-up fluorescent bulbs. I slid the 60″ bulbs back into cardboard boxes and placed them in the gurney to go down the elevator. There were stacks of boxes filled with bulbs by the time I was done. I’d piled them all in the garbage room next to the trash compactor. Andy was nowhere to be found because he needed to run home that afternoon to check on his wife. So I tossed all the boxes of bulbs in the trash compactor and pushed the button as I walked out the door of the garbage room.
The next thing I heard was a massive BOOM as all the bulbs exploded at once. It must have sounded like a terrorist attack within the building. I quickly escaped into the stairwell and raced up several flights to get as far from the scene of my idiocy as possible.
Andy protected me that day, but the next day there was a big discussion in the front lobby with a group of Polish men and women shouting at management. Someone was translating, but I understood that they were still angry about my presence in the building. “Relax,” my friend’s father told them. “He’s only here another week.”
For breaks, I’d often go up on top of the building that stood at the intersection of Cumberland and I-90. From there, I could look at the Chicago skyline a few miles away. The smell of car pollution and the sound of traffic were constant, but it still felt good to stand above it all even though going next to the edge of the building gave me the heebie-jeebies.
A photo of International Towers taken during a recent flight back into O’hare airport.
On the last day of work, I piled into the car with Pam and she almost immediately fell asleep in the passenger seat. It was a hot afternoon and she’d either purposely or forgetfully allowed a button on her blouse to fall open. The sight of her pretty bra and a glimpse of a freckled breast in the flashing summer sunlight was worth the otherwise loneliness of the drive home that day. I felt a bit guilty, but we’d flirted enough on our own accord to justify my lust.
A week later my friend Rob and I double-dated with Pam and one of her friends from the Catholic high school she attended. It was a classically joyful evening, and I made out with her friend in the back seat. Despite all the back-and-forth, we’d all found ways to make the summer fun. An August trip to the Indiana Dunes gave me a nice tan and some sun-touched hair. I felt attractive and confident going into that senior year in college.
In August, I did sell a couple hundred dollars worth of paintings to add to my summer earnings. By August 15, I’d run 425 summer miles, just enough to provide a happy base going into the cross country season. On August 8, I’d written down some ideas about the year to come. I read them again while listening to an entire side of an ELO album ending with Mr. Blue Skies. Then I packed up my Radio Shack turntable, receiver and Optimus 1-B speakers to wrap up the summer.
“My goal is to compete at 3rd man or above,” I wrote. “Track season indicated I am capable. 13 meets. I can be ready for each one. This is my last cross country season. Hah. Eight years of getting ready. I can honestly say I have never bee more prepared. Ready for once.”
My pastel painting (2020) of the running route we called Wonder Left, named after a sign pointing to Wonder Cave, a local geological attraction north of Decorah, Iowa.
The winter of 1977 was, like so many winters in the late 1970s and early 80s, as cold as hell and frozen over. We trained through the cold by running on snow-packed roads. We’d often leave in the near-dark and run traditional loops called Wonder Left and Mink Farm, named after signs or features found along the way. The gear we wore was primitive. Knit caps and nylon jackets as big as tents. Tube socks for gloves. Yet on we went for 70-80 miles per week. Through the night and back to campus.
There we’d stand around in the pale blue showers waiting for the water to warm up enough to stand in it. I’d grown my hair long that winter and sprouted a scraggy college beard along the lines of Lasse Viren, whom I idolized as a runner.
Then Christmas break came along and I rode home jammed into a van with eight or nine other Chicago-area kids eager for a college break. My mind was not in a good place at the time, and I had it in my head to take a pass on the next semester of college. There were no plans in place, just a hankering to pull away from the pressures of school and running. I was desperately trying to find myself in the dark, the cold and the running malaise.
My mother was having none of that. She was a huge supporter of my running, and had attended so many sporting events during my life that they couldn’t be counted on ten hands. She also understood my mind in ways that I perhaps did not understand on my own. My father, after all, had his share of “down” moments, and his father before him suffered from acute depression. There was a song by The Who that later captured the exchange in rock clarity:
I went back to my mother I said, “I’m crazy, Ma, help me” She said, “I know how it feels, son ‘Cause it runs in the family.”
Once I got past the negativity in my mind, things began to change. Heading back to school that winter, I grew excited about taking on a massive January Term project, painting four 4′ X 8′ murals for the Lake Meyer Nature Center in Calmar, Iowa. Back on campus, I threw myself into that project day and night, often working long hours as guys on the dorm floor sat watching me paint as they drank beer or pontificated in the middle of a strong pot buzz.
The murals generated a healthy amount of attention, including a big story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Luther Collage newspapers.
Cedar Rapids Gazette NewspaperLooking the artist part in 1977.
All the while, we’d be out training for indoor track. But I was fed up with running so damned hard every time we went out the door. On most days, we’d truck along for two miles and the pace would ramp up to 6:00 miles. That’s how it went, day after day. One night I finally made a comment about it and was talked down by a couple members of the team. I’d had it, and took off at 5:00 pace for as long as I could hold it. That lasted about two miles and I could still feel the team behind me by a couple minutes, but I dared not look back or let up.
That night, I was talking with a close teammate who suggested, in a statement of tough love, “Cud, you just need to shut up and run.”
Okay, I thought in anger. That’s what I’ll do.
From then on, I didn’t let much distract me from the mission of running as fast as possible. A few years later while training with a group of top-flight athletes in the Philadelphia area, I would learn that my instincts about too much hard running were correct. They taught me how to train in a strong yet sane fashion.
It was a fact that we had a bad habit of running too hard all the time in the Luther program. Lacking an actual distance coach for the track program, we trained according to our own devices and it was up to each of us to find our sweet spot if we found one at all. Last year while talking with my late friend and Hall of Fame Simpson College coach Keith Ellingson, he agreed that we’d all been a bit nuts in our approach. One dark February evening we ran a workout of 28 quarter-miles at 80 seconds with thirty seconds of rest between.
There was one relatively good thing going on that winter of 1978. I’d met a girl and was going steady. The raw comfort of companionship can carry a man a long way. I can’t say that I was the best boyfriend to her. I casually mocked the daily devotions she liked to read. In truth, she was a sweet Lutheran girl looking for a long-term relationship. I was a cynical expatriated Christan coming off a semester’s study in the Philosophy of Existentialism. We met somewhere in between and tried to make it work.
At that point in time, I was so determined to run better and break out of a terminal funk that I didn’t care that much who I dated. If that sounds dismissive or shallow, at least I’m being honest. There was plenty of conflicted behavior flying around the campus in the late 1970s. As a member of the somewhat revered Alpha Psi sorority, my girlfriend hung with an intense social crowd. They conducted an annual fundraiser on campus during Valentine’s Day. Students could purchase tickets that delivered either a Kiss, a Hug or a Slap to whomever one wanted to send it. And sure enough, those girls delivered kisses, hugs and slaps as ordered. That stuff would never fly these days.
My gal was obsessed with this strawberry lip gloss that she applied every day. I couldn’t stand the stuff, but didn’t dare say anything for fear of offending her. What I cared about, to be quite frank, was getting laid as often as I could.
Because that seemed to go right along with me getting faster that winter. I still recall climbing onto the team bus for a morning drive to the University of Northern Iowa with the fresh funk of lovemaking on my person. It gave me confidence. My indoor times in the 1500 meters dropped from 4:10 to 4:03. My mile time improved to 4:21. I won an indoor two-mile on a 176-yard track while going away with a time of 9:33. At that point, one of our coaches pulled me aside and commented, “It’s about time you made up your mind to run.”
He was right, but that was a sort of backward compliment. Yet I can still remember the feel of soaring around that track in complete control of my fitness and focus.
As the spring track season arrived, I concentrated on the steeplechase again and qualified for nationals a second time. I won the conference steeple title too, and dropped my three-mile time as well.
But things were getting weird with my girlfriend, as she showed some jealously toward my running as the weeks wore on. That was something I was not about to tolerate. Not when track success was finally mine. Granted, I was only half-committed to the relationship, and even dated a girl that I really liked when I was back home on spring break. But one night, as we were making out in the front seat of my car, I muttered my college girlfriend’s name. She pulled back, stared at me and said, “Okay, it’s time to go home.”
The mind of a hormone-obsessed twenty-year-old kid is not really rational. That’s why it helped to have outlets like running and art to keep me sane.
One of the four murals I painted that year for the Lake Meyer Nature Center in Calmar, Iowa.
In spring during a break in our track meet schedule, my college girlfriend and I decided to go on a trip to LaCrosse with another couple. They were not the sort of people with whom I normally associated, so I felt a little off from the get-go. Then we started drinking and my girlfriend was mixing really strong rum and Cokes. Before I knew it, I was plastered and staggering drunk. We somehow drove into town for dinner and I recall slumping to the floor in a McDonald’s in downtown LaCrosse.
That night was not a pretty sight. Nor was the feeling of our relationship after that. I sensed there was a bit of spite in the strength of those drinks. It almost felt like she was trying to destroy a part of me and take some control. Part of our relationship was like two rough surfaces rubbing together. It created friction.
A week later we dressed up to go to the formal held by my fraternity. She came dressed in a puffy mint-green chiffon dress that I instantly hated. It made her look fat, for one thing, but I didn’t say a word. We walked out the bottom floor of Dieseth Hall and were making our way down the steep incline of the icy driveway when she slipped and fell on her back. I tried to stop her from sliding but she outweighed me by ten pounds (I weighed 140) and it was no use. We slid all the way down the hill and stopped in a black, icy mud puddle. Her dress was ruined. We went back to the dorm and she changed into something less formal that I actually liked much better. In the back of my mind, I thought, God works in strange ways sometimes. We actually had a nice time that night.
By the end of the year, I came to the conclusion that our relationship should end. My father picked us up at college and we drove back to Chicago so that she could catch a flight to Cleveland. On the five-hour drive home, she kept reaching up from the back seat to rub my arm and by that point, it annoyed me. I wanted nothing to do with her anymore. My selfishness was rude, but that’s how it is when whatever love you had is gone.
We took her to the airport the next day and I gave her a long hug. “Promise you’ll write,” I think she said, and I nodded back and smiled. Back in the car, I turned to my father as we drove away and said, “Well, I’m over her.” In profoundly practical fashion my father responded, “Well, at least she kept you warm for a while.” I could always count on my father to put things plainly.
I’ll not claim that I was good to her. Mostly I was caught up in the ’70s psychology that dating was about getting what you wanted from someone. I wasn’t thinking about marriage at the time, or the fact that some young women might actually look at college as a place to meet a potential husband. Those were deep dives I was nowhere near ready to take. I was just a young kid pushing social buttons so that I could prove myself to others. In some ways, that relationship was a product of that attitude. If I ever meet her again, I’ll apologize for that.
For me, that need for approval was what so much of life was about. It was a cycle to which I submitted my self-esteem for far too long. Yet as the semester ended and I returned home with some running and art success under my belt, a renewed sense of confidence began to emerge within me. It was time to make some changes.
Luther Coach Kenton Finanger, Dani Fjelstad, Christopher Cudworth, Keith Ellingson, Steven (Duke Corson) and Paul (Moon Mullen).
The interesting thing about cross country as a sport is that teammates tend to spend enormous amounts of time together. Whereas athletes in track and field tend to split into training groups for mid-distance and long-distance training, in cross country it’s “all-in” all the time.
As freshman, our group of five classmates entered the Luther program and constituted much of the scoring for that year and next. We were the wild cards in a rebuilding program that helped achieve a perfect score in conference our first year and nearly repeat the trick the next, with 16 points.
That 1976 season is when we added a sixth joker to our deck. His legal name is Steve Corson, but we all called him Duke. He played Luther football his freshman year but decided to come out for cross country as a sophomore. He had already made a strong impression as a trackster competing in the half and mile races. Possessed of innate strength and speed, he needed to grow as a distance runner to compete in cross country.
That he did. He looked like our version of the late Steve Prefontaine with his Fu Manchu mustache, strong physique and ‘have-at-em” running style. He was admittedly a Wild Card in other ways, as cross country racing required a consistency of habit with which he was not always familiar. Plus he loved to live fast and fun and was popular across a number of campus segments.
Yet when he was on, he was very on. When the sport called for toughness, he was extremely tough. I well recall watching him finish a five-mile race against the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse in which he arrived at the finish chute with his white Luther shirt covered in a bright red spray of blood. His sinuses had dried during the race and the blood burst forth across his bearded face.Yet he finished, wiped it off, and uttered some sort of combination of disgusted and amazed profanity at the experience.
He was also funny in ways that really helped our team. Following one particularly long practice, Coach Finanger sent us into the pool to loosen up and splash around. Duke found his way to the high diving board and repeatedly flew off the board with dolphin-like-in-air gyrations and antics that can’t be described. I hung onto the edge of the pool laughing. He was simply a larger-than-life character. At least, in my estimation he was.
That was his nature. He seemed unafraid to try anything. I once watched him slide down the Union hill on a cafeteria tray and fly off a sidewalk mid-air through the woods and disappear among the bushes and snowbanks below. “Oh My God,” I said out loud. “Duke might be dead.”
Yet he managed to land safely and emerged from the drifts covered in snow, laughing loudly, and said something like, “Well, I better not try that again.” Understatement of the Year.
His companion in many of these antics was my cross country teammate and roommate during sophomore year and junior year, Paul Mullen, also known as Moon. The two of them were at times inseparable. When we weren’t all running together, there were foosball games in the college union, where Moon’s defensive skills and Duke’s fast and powerful wrist shots won the table many times over. That profound “THUNK” of a foosball slamming the back of an opponent’s goal when Corson sent it home still resounds all these years later. Sometimes he’d look up with a grin, and you could sense the satisfaction.
The voices of those two boys often mixed together in laughter. Moon’s laugh was typically low and growling, and always in on the joke. By contrast, Duke’s laugh was high and full of mirth, daring people to figure out what was funny in any situation. They quacked like ducks at people acting stupid, and we engaged in constant banter that was less than complimentary about the people we chose to criticize. Such is the language of the terminally competitive. We weren’t always kind, but we found our funny on many occasions.
Sometimes Duke and Moon got into minor trouble ramming about the way they did. One Friday night a group of us were headed to a dance club when we spied Duke’s tiny blue Mustang with its wheels on both sides of a ditch. One of them had turned too quickly on an icy Decorah night and plopped the car into the snow.
When it came to running, Duke had strong, muscular legs and a loping stride that always made it look like he was ready to start a finishing kick. Moon ran lower to the surface and drove forward with his arms. Our teammate Keith Ellingson had a smooth stride that seemed to defy gravity. Dani Fjelstad always clipped along, typically with a midfoot strike, always ready to apply a burst of speed at a second’s notice.
Christopher Cudworth leading a Mankato runner and teammate Dani Fjelstad in a dual meet on the Luther campus.
I prided myself on having good running form, something I learned as a freshman in high school after reading a Sports Illustrated article on the subject. Having good form was actually a necessity with my taller frame. The trick was putting it to good use…
Early in the season of 1977, all of us were clicking with fast times at the four-mile distance. At the Iowa State Invitational, it was Ellingson, 20:13, Fjelstad 20:18, Mullen, 20:39 and Cudworth 20:46. Luther finished fourth behind Iowa State, Club Midwest, and Central Missouri.
A week later, we took third behind Augustana and Hamline in our own Luther All-American Invitational, besting teams like LaCrosse, St. Olaf, St. Thomas, and Carleton in the process. It was Mullen, 20:39 in sixth, teammate Eric Lindberg in 8th at 20:43, Fjelstad 12th, Cudworth19th, and Corson 25th. We may have been a pack of jokers, but we were kicking ass and making a name for ourselves.
A week later we swept through the Grinnell invite with a perfect score of 15 points. Dani Fjelstad led our pack, followed by Mullen, Ellingson, Cudworth, and Lindberg. The team in second place was Central College with 90 points.
We moved up to the five-mile distance for the next meet, with Fjelstad leading again and Corson running as our fifth man. I had a relatively off race in 27:00, and finished out of our top seven. Then we won the St. Olaf Invitational the following week, beating LaCrosse by a narrow margin, 73 to 78. There was always a keen rivalry between our schools.
The next week at Carthage, I came down with a cold and finished as our 13th man in 27:40. Luther still won the meet, beating Northwestern University 65 to 76. I bounced back the following week to run 26:15 as our sixth man behind Ellingson, Mullen, Lindberg, Fjelstad, and Corson. We had five men under 26:00 that day.
Then came the Iowa Conference meet held at Waverly, Iowa on November 4th. That race turned out to be one of the most difficult moments of my life to that point.
What I recall from the race is that it was nearly dark by the time we finished. But a different kind of darkness had already swept over me that day. Something about the changing seasons or the loss of sunlight was affecting me.
Or worse, I’d struggled some that fall with the emotional aftereffects of working at that horridly depressing summer job at Olympic Stain. The verbal and physical abuse had taken a toll on my psyche. Whatever the case, my body and mind at the conference meet were locked in a struggle just to run. It was like one of those bad dreams where you want to run away and can’t. Looking back, I now realize it was the first bout of genuine depression that I’d ever experienced. Over many decades, I’ve learned much more about my mental health, depression and anxiety. And ADHD, which is often found in association with the aforementioned conditions.
I felt bad about that conference race because I’d finished ninth and twelfth at Conference as a freshman and sophomore. But darkness owned my soul that day in Waverly, and I struggled home in 25th place. I staggered to the bus embarrassed and ashamed that I’d failed the team after what had mostly been a solid season.
There were important team and individual triumphs to be celebrated, however. Keith Ellingson and Paul Mullen raced to a tie for the Conference Championship. The trophy was given to Ellingson, an honor that Paul Mullen explained to me years later: “He deserved the win. I was hanging on the whole way.” But you can see their mutual determination in the photo below.
Keith Ellingson and Paul Mullen pulling away for a conference victory in November, 1977.
We’d won our third straight Iowa Conference title that day, but I sat in the bus thick with anger and frustration. I went back to campus that evening wondering what had happened to my brain that afternoon. Perhaps I’d actually been sick and didn’t know it? That was always a possibility during all that intense training. It also probably didn’t help that in class I’d been studying the Philosophy of Existentialism and concepts such as the irreversibility of time and the hell is other people notions of Jean Paul Sartre. That probably didn’t help my emotional state much. But it has fueled decades of healthy cynicism about the human condition. So there’s that.
We all know that hell is feeling all alone with your most recent failure. Yet if anything marks the character of a distance runner, it is the ability to bounce back from a bad performance. On November 12 of that same year, I sucked it up and ran as our fifth man at Nationals, helping lead the team to an 8th place finish, the highest of our college career to that point. And we did it in thick snow covering the course in Ohio.
Our finishing order was Keith Ellingson in 38th place at 27:05, Paul Mullen in 50th at 27:12, Erik Lindberg 58th at 27:15 and Steve Corson 68th in 27:21. I was our fifth man that day at 123rd with a time of 27:46. The spread between our first and fourth man was only 16 seconds. We beat regional rivals St. Olaf and Hamline, Carleton and Augustana.
Sadly, for many years I let that one bad race color my recollection of a junior year college cross country season. Looking at the results, I realize that 1977 was not a bad season for me. There’s a lesson in that for all of us. Forgive yourself for failures recent or past. None of us is perfect.
We hung together that year winning four straight invitationals including the conference meet, and built lifetime friendships in the process. For a bunch of jokers and a few wild cards, we did all right.
The shitty little split level house in which we lived through 1976
The summer before my junior year in college, my parents decided to move from a tiny split-level house in a suburban St. Charles neighborhood to a farmhouse six miles out of town. They were both raised on farms in Upstate New York. Perhaps they thought it would be nice to live out in the country again. Whatever the motivation, it wasn’t well thought out. My younger brother was still in high school on the other side of the Fox River. That meant it was an eight-mile trip one-way for him to get to school and basketball practices.
Coming home from college that summer was a bit disorienting. The farmhouse sat on a thousand acres covered in corn and hayfields. Those first few days I wandered the property trying to figure out what it meant to live so far out in the country.
There was plenty of room to run. The hills were plentiful too. But I’d forgotten one thing about running in the country. The dogs weren’t on leashes. On one of the first warm June mornings I was flying down the south side of a hill on Denker road when a large Doberman dog burst through the bushes and planted his nose firmly in my crotch while growling. I stood completely still, fearing that the next move might result in jaws and teeth embedded in my junk.
Instead, the owner came out of the bushes and called his dog back. I stood there a moment, not really daring to say anything to either the man or his dog. They disappeared through the bushes and I went on my way. Something about that day felt like an omen.
A week later while playing basketball with my brothers, we were dunking on a short rim when a loose ball rolled under the basket. I came down on the ball and twisted my ankle in a moment of fear and pain. That left me hobbled for several weeks. I wrapped the ankle in an Ace bandage and couldn’t run. That made me worry about fall fitness and cross country.
The other worry was finding a decent summer job. My mom heard that a friend’s son was working at a factory for Olympic Stain. He was a former basketball teammate so it seemed like a decent opportunity to share rides to work for the last half of June and the month of July.
And then I walked into a nightmare. The factory work was a Sisyphean mix of repetitive tasks and mind-numbing boredom. The first week was spent lifting Imperial gallons of liquid stain on and off a conveyor belt because the bailer element of the machine that installed wire handles on the cans kept breaking. That meant the cans coming down the belt would back up, and I’d have to stack them on the floor and back on the rack when the mechanic fixed the bailer.
Back and forth from our country house to the factory I went. The days mixed together in a bad way. Plus the guy with whom I shared rides was terrible at being on time. Work started at eight a.m. and I liked to leave our house by 7:20 to have time to get all the way down to Batavia, a good twelve miles away. But Johnny Be Late would show up at 7:45 because he was such a sleepyhead and couldn’t get out of bed on time. It drove me so nuts I even called his mother to let her know what a dweeb he was being. He’d mutter and apologize some days but honestly, he seemed not to care that much that he was always late. My hatred for him grew by the day. He’d even be late coming out of the house on the days that it was my turn to drive. As time when by there were many mornings that I didn’t talk to him at all.
It drove me insane to punch in late at that job. And without being able to run for those first couple weeks due to the sprained ankle, I had no way to wick off the stress of the whole circumstance.
The factory was also a chemical experiment in progress, with a blue haze of fumes from the turpentine used in the paint floating around the roof of the plant. The air we breathed was rife with the stuff, and a week into working there, a few of the regular plant workers conspired to play a prank on me, the dumb college kid.
“Here,” one of them instructed me. “Hold this hose down in the drum while we ‘shoot the pig’ to clean out the pipe,” he said, pointing to the long transport system leading from the turpentine tank to the mixing station. I stood there holding the hose into a drum already filled with turpentine when a rush sound came through the hose and a dense sponge traveling the speed of sound plunged into the turpentine drum. Instantly I was coated head-to-toe with a layer of toxic turpentine. It stung, and I felt it running down my hair and back. I looked up to see the line worker laughing has ass off. Then the foreman came running over and grabbed me by the arm. From there, I got my first introduction to the industrial shower. Naked and scared that I might die from poisoning, I stood there in hot water trying to wash the color and chemicals off my body.
The culture inside the plant was built around constant teasing and verbal abuse. Mostly it was the divide between full-time workers and summer help that drove a form of spiteful commentary and behavior. It felt like a classic conflict between townies or locals. It was all a form of in-house bullying. I recall being mocked for not knowing what the term MoPar stood for. As the farthest thing from a motorhead the world had to offer at the time, I was disgusted to learn it was about nothing but car parts. It astounded me that someone could be so tribal and derisive about something so inconsequential to most of the world. While the people in my world were fascinated by Olympic aspirations, the people working in that factory were consumed with proving their worldview was superior in all its sordid details.
One of the guys I half-trusted was a former classmate from Kaneland High School named Phil. We took to making jokes with each other to pass the time and deal with the insanely toxic environment of that plant. Our humor took on a pattern of dark and disgusting jokes about different types of farts. Some of it was wordplay, like Brain Fart (not yet a colloquial term at the time) but I finally closed down the prolonged exchange by calling out “Blood Fart” across the sounds of the bailing machine and he replied, “Okay, you win.” I was way ahead of a future production of the same name.
Ywr ten years later, I randomly met Phil at a party of some sort. “Hey!” I told him. “Do you remember working together at Olympic Stain?”
“No. You didn’t work there,” he insisted.
“Yeah I did,” I reminded him. “We made up those fart jokes. That’s the only way that we could stay sane.” Then I looked closely at Phil. He was high as a kite. In fact, he was probably high the entire time we worked together at the paint factory. No wonder he didn’t recall a thing.
And yet, I saw him a few years after that and he recalled it all. Go figure.
After a few weeks of working on the paint floor, I got moved out to the shipping department and was glad for the change in routine. I learned how to use the handlifts to move skids of paint around. We loaded up trucks every day. Then an announcement came through the plant that the President of the company was going to pay a visit the next day.
We were all keeping busy when the President came out of the front office and was strolling down the aisle toward the dock when a guy driving a forklift came whipping around the corner with the forks raised. One of the metal prongs struck a stack of fifty-gallon drums three stories up and two of the giant cans flipped off and fell to the floor. The lid burst open and black paint went streaming down the aisle and washed over the President’s feet. He pointed at the forklift drive and commanded: “Fire that man.”
I went home that evening shaken by the idea that stuff like that could happen. I went
Finally, my ankle was improving enough to go for some short runs after work each day. But I noticed a strange fatigue that summer that I’d never experienced before. Was it the long days? Or was it breathing the chemicals in the plant all day long.
During work breaks, we’d retreat to the upstairs cafeteria to grab a Coke or in some cases, smoke a cigarette. The 30′ X 20′ space was nothing big, and it felt even smaller when people crammed in there smoking ciggies. I worried that the Blue Haze at the top of the plant ceiling might ignite one day from the tip of a lit cigarette. So I moved from the industrial blight of an open floor plan of a chemically compromised atmosphere to the enclosed spaces of a secondhand smoke science experiment. The wizened faces of the women sucking on on Kools and Marlboros seemed unconcerned that they might blow the place sky high. In turn, I pretended it wasn’t a risk.
For reasons unknown to anyone but the foreman, I was shifted back onto to the plant floor another week. He seemed to manage his job like a gopher filling holes that he’d already dug himself. So I dutifully moved into a position where the paints were being mixed and suddenly and briefly was given instructions on how to clean the pipe systems between the two 35,000 gallon vats of turpentine and liquid latex.
I just looked up the information about when OSHA laws were created, and it says they were put into place in1971. Yet here it was, in 1977, and I was being “trained” to conduct a highly dangerous industrial activity with one ten-minute session of training and no one to supervise me. Add in the fact that I am an ADHD learner and it was inevitable that disaster was about to strike.
The instructions were difficult for anyone to follow. The procedure required one to clean out the pipes on one side of the system, shut them down, then clean out the pipes on the other side of the system, and shut them down too. Then one had to conduct a pressure test, and that’s where things got weird. I turned the valve handle and liquid latex came shooting out from somewhere in that pipe system at an enormous rate. The fountain shot into the air and covered me from head to toe. I stood there in shock and recall trying to wipe the liquified rubber out of my eyes from behind my glasses, which were already stained a rust color from “shooting the pig” into a barrel of turpentine a few weeks before.
This time the plant manager came running over and shut down the pressure. Two people grabbed me and it was off to the industrial shower again. I could hear the floor employees laughing and saw them pointing at me. I was angry and scared and emphatically determined to pay them back for mocking me.
I stood naked in the shower until all the liquid latex drained down to the floor. My hair was matted and thick with the stuff, so I stuck my head under the showerhead for a few more minutes. Then I donned a set of company work clothes and went back out onto the floor.
All afternoon I heard taunts about the “Human Condom” while I worked the bailer in silence. I could not believe that I’d been put in the position of having to conduct a potentially dangerous activity like that. One guy in particular kep shouting insults at me, and I finally flipped him a gesture of discontent an he was so busy looking back at me that he’d forgotten to turn the Clarke floor cleaner in time to avoid driving off the railroad dock. The front-heavy vehicle tipped out the dock and sent him flying out over the tracks like a catapult. I stood there in shock for a moment, then shook my head and went back to work.
“Serves you right,” I muttered.
The next day I arrived late at work again thanks to my lazy-ass driving partner, and upon walking in the door was accosted by the plant foremone.”Listen,” he said. “If you keep showing up late you’re fired.”
Then he instructed me to go clean up paint under the main tanks at the west side of the plant. I walked over and inspected the area, which was coated with a fine layer of paint flecks and dust. I went to the closet and found a hoe-like device with a half-circle metal blade. For the rest of the day I chopped into the paint and found that there were layers of crusted, caked paint six inches thick.
I worked methodically chipping out the paint in six-foot squares. I was so sick of being late to work that I told my driving mate to fuck off and took my mom’s car to work every day. I’d punch in, walk to the closet to fetch the hoe-blade, chip away at the paint layers for several hours and slip off to have lunch at noon. Then I’d go back to work chipping paint again.
That went on for two weeks. I was deep into the rhythm of paint-chipping and relieved to be free of the insulting environment of the main plant floor. At night I’d go home to run a few miles before dinner, and worked my ankle and body back into summer shape. I’d lost four weeks of distance training thanks to the sprained ankle but decided that it was time to make the best of it. What I’d really missed was the stress relief that came from running. During that summer of working at Olympic Stain I’d begun to realize how important running was to my mental health.
Then one day I came into work and was chipping away at paint under the big vats when the foreman wandered back to find me doing what he’d told me to do. “What the fuck?” he asked, glancing around at the forty-by-forty-foot space I’d cleared under the paint vats. “Who told you to do this?”
“You did,” I replied.
“The fuck…” he responded. “Come on out here. We need you out on the bailer.”
I dropped the blade-hoe where I was standing and glanced back at the fine job I’d done clearing out that six inch layer of paint residue. If I’d done nothing else of value at that paint plant, I reasoned, at least I’d accomplished something visible and real.
The next day when I arrived at work, the foreman handed me a check and said, “We’re done for the summer. This is your last pay.” I snatched the check and walked out the front door of the plant. What a relief.
The next two weeks I spent trying to get in shape for cross country season that fall. But something creepy was going on with my body. I couldn’t get a full breath on some days. I realized that all those paint and turpentine fumes were messing with my lungs, my mind, and my self-perception.
I felt a heavy feeling in my head, like a sinking sensation at the back of my brain that both inexplicable and real. That was the first time in my life that I felt the effects of depression working on me. But it was time to go back to college. So I gathered all my stuff and rode with my older brother up to campus. He dropped me off with little ceremony and I hauled all my junk up the elevator to a dorm room in Dieseth Hall. On one hand I was happy to be back. On the other hand something felt vastly off about the coming year.
And then the fall training began.
Back home, my parents were having second thoughts about life on the farm. The commute to drive my brother to school and back was making them crazy. Plus the older couple from whom they rented the farm house was acting strange, accusing my parents of having too many people over to the house and weird things like that.
It all had an odd effect on my. Looking back on the entire circumstance, I recall that my closest friends recall the 1977-78 college period as “Cud’s Weird Year.”
And I can’t argue with that. Things definitely got weird in some ways.
Working summer jobs between school years was necessary to pay my way through college. That first summer I worked as a coach for the St. Charles Track Club but only earned $500 for the entire summer. The next year, I pulled myself up by the College Kid bootstraps and found a job through a friend as a delivery driver for a U-Haul distributorship in West Chicago. My job was driving all over the Chicago area dropping off trailer hitches and cartons of packing boxes to U-Haul licensed dealerships. Between deliveries, I’d sit in the back room screwing big oily nuts onto the knob and bolts of trailer hitches.
My supervisor was a guy that ran the delivery side of the business. His boss was a mustachioed quasi-executive type that worked in the front office with a bunch of secretarial types. He also had an extremely hot-looking teenaged daughter, just a year younger than me. I’d sometimes wander into the executive area to get a cup of water and check her out. Whenever I’d come back, the other two senior members of the delivery staff gave me crap about flirting with her.
In fact, they gave me crap about a lot of things, but I needed it. They reminded me to count the hitch orders carefully. Hinted that I should study the shortest route across the suburbs to save time. Every day there was a new round of instructions to obey. And frankly, I needed them.
I wasn’t always forgetful, but I was sometimes. Nor was I always spacey, but sometimes I was. Like the day that I was looking down at a map in my lap while driving and rammed into the rear taillight of a brand new car being backed out of a new car lot. That was actually the first car accident I’d ever caused. The bumper of the U-Haul van was barely dented, but the rear tail light of the new car was obliterated. I’m not entirely sure the accident was all my fault, but the daddy’s boy in a cheesy shirt and tie screaming at the top of his lungs about damaging the new car sure thought it was. By the time I left, I was glad I hit that asshole’s car.
With all the miles I drove that summer, I was lucky there weren’t more accidents. While driving a 20-foot truck loaded with refrigerator cartons, I approached a large intersection in Roselle only to see the light change as I crested a hill. I hit the brakes but it had just rained after several weeks of dry weather and the oil on the surface of the road made my tires slip and slide. The heavy rear-end of the truck spun around to the right and all I could do is turn the wheel in the direction of the spin and slide through the entire intersection. Blessedly, no one else had entered the intersection yet and as the truck’s front end came around I got it to go straight again and just kept on rolling. No harm done.
But a half-mile down the road, I pulled over and sat there with a death shiver. “I could have killed someone,” I muttered to myself.
A week or so later, while out on a run through the City of Geneva, I was standing on the curb waiting to cross Route 38 at Route 31 when a speeding car ran a red light and smashed into a Volkswagon Beetle. The car lifted into the air, and instinctively I grabbed the guy next to me and dove with him down the steps next to what used to be the Little Owl restaurant. I glanced back to see the VW resting on its side right where we’d been standing.
The man next to me climbed back to his feet and at that moment, a car waiting at the light honked its horn at him and a woman inside waved for him to get in. Without saying a word of thanks, the man opened the passenger door and got in the car. The light changed and they drove south together.
I stood there in a state of shock. Time stood still for a few minutes. Then the light changed again and I started running back east toward my house. About halfway across the bridge over the Fox River, I stopped and had yet another death shiver. “I could have died,” I said out loud.
That whole summer turned into a weird, hot dream in which I drove around in traffic all day and tried hard not to forget anything on deliveries. The guys at U-Haul kept up the teasing, and I kept learning from it despite how mad it made me at times.
The lead guy was genuinely a kind guy who worked as a clown in parades and such when he wasn’t busy with his real job. His main helper was a somewhat officious and brusque guy with a big frame, a prodigiously groomed red beard and a ton of advice about life in general. He was clearly well-educated, often weighing in on conversations with refined input about the quality of one thing or another. He was also well ahead of his time in being a connoisseur of fine beers.
The third member of the delivery management team was the wry joker of the bunch. I liked him most because he reminded me of a close friend with the same name. He was also the one who egged me on to ask for a date with the daughter of the big boss. “Get up there and do it,” he challenged.
Hint: 70s girls were hot, and she looked something like this
So I did. The end of summer was approaching and there was a Jackson Browne concert at Ravinia in late July. It took all the courage I had to ask her for a date, but she quickly said, “Yes, that sounds great” without any hesitation. We went to the concert and had a great time. That was a one-shot deal, but not every date needs to turn into a big romance to have a positive effect on your life.
The last weeks of working at U-Haul turned into strange ones. First, a big shipment of trailer hitches was due to arrive and we were all kept off the road to help unload them. But rather than arriving on an open flat trailer, they were crammed into a big semi-trailer. The load shifted during shipment and it was impossible to pull most of them out one trailer hitch at a time.
We tried several methods to unloosen the load, but finally, a tractor and giant chain were put to use. “Okay,” the bearded guy in our crew announced, “Everyone stand back.” Then the tractor fired up and tailer hitches came flying off the back of the semi. Nuts and washers flew off and struck the nearby fence. This was dangerous work indeed.
The next week a trailer came back from a rental job. It was filled with unlit fireworks and had been left in the lot to bake in the heat all day before someone got to look inside. “That whole thing could blow,” our lead guy warned. “Let’s open ‘er up and let some air in. Then we’ll see how it goes.”
Fortunately, there was no pyrotechnics that day. But on the last day, I worked at U-Haul that summer, the boys all gave me an extra hard time and when I went to start up my engine to leave, a cacophony of noise and whistles, smoke, and rattles came from inside my engine. They’d planted some sort of gag device in the engine of the ’67 Buick Wildcat I drove to give me a big sendoff. Actually, the daily fear of driving that thing to work was a gag all its own. The front-right ball joints on that car were shot and the car would shimmy uncontrollably if I hit a pothole on the way to work.
Somehow I made it through all that. And I thanked them for the summer work as sincerely as I could after the fake exploding engine gag. They were good mentors in many ways, especially given my considerable gaffes along the way. There were some that I never actually told them about.
There were also things I never felt the need to dwell upon at the time or since. All three of my U-Haul mentors were gay men. At that stage in life, it helped me understand that gay people are all about doing their jobs and living their lives like everyone else. They honestly tried to help me become a better worker and better person.
Knifing through
With a week left before heading back to school, I had time to get in a few more hard training runs after a summer of 30-40 mile weeks. I never did train that hard over the summer months, and perhaps I’d have been a better runner if I had, but somehow the intensity of the actual season was always enough for me.
As I ran past the spot where earlier that summer I’d almost been struck by a flying VW, I started thinking ahead to sophomore years in cross country and the track season beyond. I ran through town and was passing the Geneva Theater where I saw a group of kids hanging out and waiting for a movie. As I ran past on the sidewalk, one of them slid down to stick a foot out in an attempt to trip me. That might have been caused by the fact that I was wearing an orange and black tee shirt from St. Charles High School, and I was running through Geneva, whose colors were blue and white. But these kids weren’t exactly what I’d call rah-rah types. Two of them were smoking cigarettes, and all of them were dressed more like party animals than Be True to Your School color.
In any case, I easily jumped over the leg of the guy trying to trip me. A couple strides later, I spun sideways to give him a fist-up arm-jam gesture. Someone yelled, “Hey!” and I kept running.
A second or so later there were loud footsteps behind me on the sidewalk. I glanced back to see a huge dude trundling after me. His fat body was shaking around inside his shirt and his duck-feet strides were bad runner stuff. I trotted ahead of him and picked up the pace to leave him behind. I heard him grind to a halt, then a car door slammed and an engine roared behind me.
My spidey-sense told me the incident wasn’t over. I cut through the Jewel parking lot and was trotting down a set of aging railroad tracks to get out of sight when I saw a guy I knew from high school rolling by on a small motorcycle. I waved to him and he pulled over. “Man,” I told him. “Things just got weird back there.”
At that moment, a yellow Datsun pulled out and the kid that tried to trip me jumped out of the back seat. I saw him raise his arm and something flashed in the sunlight. He threw a large knife that quickly hit the ground and skittered past us. My acquaintance on the motorcycle kicked the starter pedal, shifted into gear, and took off with a roar.
I took that as a sign that I was on my own. For some reason, I ran straight past the car as the guy that had thrown the knife was busy searching for it in the grass. I heard doors wiggle as I flew buy and by that point, my pace was below 5:00 per mile and on the increase every step. I took off west looking for promising streets and found an alley between the houses. Glancing back, I could see the car just starting to turn around, so I swept into the alley and kept running.
Two blocks passed, and I noticed a garage door standing open. I ran inside and pulled it shut.
A minute or two passed, and I heard a car drive through the alley. I waited it out for another five to ten minutes, then came out the side door of the garage, crept out the gate, and started running for home. I was three miles away and never slowed down.
That was in 1976. In 1985, my wife and I bought a home in Geneva with a garage out back that faced an alley. The first time I walked inside the garage, I recognized its interior. It was the same garage where I’d hidden from the local toughs almost a decade before.
My painting of myself running past the Geneva house where we lived from ’85-’96
I’d move many times in life after college. Almost always, we rented U-Haul trucks to make the move. On move back from Pennsylvania to Chicago, I was driving up a long mountain incline in the west part of the state when the engine stalled. The truck had manual shifting, so the first few seconds after the engine stopped, the truck was in limbo. Then began a reverse freefall as I tried to start the engine up again. Finally, I got the clutch engaged and gave the key a turn. Mercifully, the truck revved up again and I was spared rolling backward down the Interstate.
I can’t see a U-Haul logo without memories of that summer flashing through my mind. Many years and many moves later, U-hauling ass is still what I’m trying to do.
One of the most challenging aspects of being a runner is building a self-perception conducive to improvement. For starters, you must believe that it is possible to improve. Secondly, you must do the work necessary to improve. And finally, you must execute in competition when given the opportunity to supercede prior efforts. That is the 1, 2, 3 of endurance event success.
During scholastic and college years, all that is plugged into the context of team dynamics and competition. There is the daily competition of training with teammates. In those circumstances, managing mental attitude and focus during workouts is the key to improvement. Then when races roll around, turning that fitness into results takes determination and concentration.
As distance athletes, we sometimes find ourselves trapped in cycles of self-perception. These bind us to a level of performance that seems satisfactory in some respects, yet really doesn’t rise to full potential. We get used to running in certain patterns, for example. When you reach the photo of our team starting a race later in this blog, I find it interesting that in the photo from the next year, the same seven guys are all starting out in the exact same positions.
We limit ourselves sometimes. Going out at a given pace to avoid early fatigue is one such habit. Running behind runners that have beaten you in previous weeks is another. We’re not always aware of these habits that hold us back, but they exist.
Unforced habits
That means it is vital for endurance athletes of all kinds to seek ways to break out of unforced habits. It’s far too easy to stumble into races week after week hoping that something special will happen. Occasionally it might. We might run faster on a given day because it feels goods. But that’s no real path to improvement, is it?
Times have changed in some respects when it comes to how high school and college cross country programs operate. Back then, we raced thirteen meets in college cross country, and from eighteen to twenty-one meets in high school cross country. Was that a bit too much racing to pile on top of fifteen weeks of hard training?” We even “ran through” some meets, not taking a break in training in hopes of earning fitness dividends down the road.
In college, we averaged between 70-80 miles per week, and some of us pushed that up to 90-100. That’s not huge mileage by the measure of many programs, but it was tiring on top of college life. And was it really necessary to race five miles effectively?
Some of us graduates from the Luther program have asked ourselves over the years, were we being sophomoric in our training tactics? The word sophomoric means pretentious or juvenile. Were we running too much, or running too hard all the time? Was that good for us? Were we overtrained? Or simply overwrought? We were certainly were that in many ways.
Personally, I look at results from the fall of 1976 and realize that while I typically wasn’t in the Top Five in many of our races, my times were only 10-15 seconds slower than our fourth and fifth guys. That pattern is simple enough to analyze. I was doing my best, and my teammates were simply faster than me most weeks. Our record that fall tells a compelling story. Our team took third against big college competition at the Iowa State University invitational. Then we won the Luther College All-American invite, the Grinnell College Invite, the St. Olaf Invite, and the Carthage College invitational. Our dual meet record was 4-1 and we took 1,2,3,4,6 to score 16 points in the Iowa Conference meet. I placed twelfth in that meet on a hilly course as our seventh man. All told, that is a really successful season for all involved.
My teammates Doug Peterson, Paul Mullen, Mike Smock, Eric Lindberg, Keith Ellingson, Steve Corson and Dani Fjelstad were all hard-working, exceptional runners. The fact that I didn’t often break into the top five that season was not due to any actual failure on my part. It was instead a credit to the quality of men that I ran with. And there were women runners on our squad to admire as well. That season our women’s team grew from two original gals to six dedicated people.
1976: The Luther College women’s cross country team
The women ran their own training modules designed by Coach Kent Finanger. They raced at many of the same meets as the men, and also a couple meets of their own.
The men’s team trained about 750 miles in ten weeks. It all looks objective in print, but we can’t forget that all those miles were accomplished while attending school and trying to stay healthy in the college dorm germ factory. That is no small feat. Add in the new dimension of social interactions of the small-school fraternity I joined with my roommate Paul Mullen, and one has to just shake one’s head and go, “Damn, I guess I made it through.”
Finishing the Carthage Invite in the bright October sunshine in 1976.
Of course, every cross country season is peppered with fine memories of a particular course or effort. Our last invitational of the season before conference, we traveled to Carthage College in Kenosha to race in a park called Petrifying Springs. It was a rolling affair, with places on the trails where passing other runners was not possible. The race started and finished across a wide grassy field, a fine opportunity for a hard start and a fast sprint at the end. Peterson and Smock both earned watches for finishing in the Top Ten, and I was less than a minute behind as our seventh man in 26:15 for the five-mile course. With our 76-point total, we beat schools from UW-Stevens Point, Carthage, UW-Parkside, UW-Platteville, and Northwestern University.
Luther runners, from left: Dani Fjelstad, Paul Mullen, Keith Ellingson, Chris Cudworth, Doug Peterson, Damian Archbold (over his shoulder) and Mike Smock (leading out at right)…Smock was a fearless competitor.
That next week we met our only dual meet loss to the powerful LaCrosse team led by the twin runners Jim and Joe Hanson, who won the meet in a tie at 25:20 on their home course. For some reason, I loved running against the LaCrosse team every year, and I ran as our fourth man that day in 26:10. The splits are interesting to study as I went 4:55 with our bunch through the mile, then 10:16, 15:35, 20:58 and 26:10 for five miles.
It’s hard these days for me to imagine running that fast. In my sixties, I can barely run even one lap at 5:00 mile pace without great strain. So looking back at nationals that season in 1976, I can’t beat myself up for running 27:07 to finish 152nd on a snow-covered route at the Highland Golf Course in Cleveland, Ohio. I was about a minute behind the 25th place (All-American) runners 25:55.
The other thing one remembers most from those day is the friendship and joking, the ridiculous stunts of running naked through town and the occasional drinking bouts that led to the occasional hangover the next day in training. Running ten or twenty miles with booze in your system is a character-building all on its own.
It was a heady time to be a runner overall. New types of running shoes were being introduced as fast as we could wear them out. We ran in blue-and-yellow Nike Waffle Trainers for workouts and competed in yellow and green Nike Oregon Waffles for races. Our guys hunted the running shoe market for new products all the time. We experimented with New Balance, Brooks, Lydiard, Etonic, adidas, Puma, Tiger/Onitsuka and others. As the heels wore out on our shoes from training, we put layers of athletic tape on the heels to keep them level and get more miles out of them. We were New School Old School, you might say.
Following our manic training trip out West to Yellowstone to start the season, we won almost everything we took on, and finished 13th at nationals. It was a sophomoric season to remember.
Heading into the cross country season of 1976, I elected to join the team training trip out west to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. The previous year’s trip to South Dakota provided compelling accounts of runs in the mountains. It also delivered a story that became legendary in the program.
One of the runs took the team to the top of Harney Peak, the tallest point in South Dakota. The site was renamed Black Elk Peak in 2016 in honor of the Native American tribe leader. But what interested the cross country team in the fall of 1975 was the challenge of running up a mountain.
The guys all gathered at the top and someone announced, “Now I’ve got to take a dump. And I want to do it over the edge of this mountain.” By various reports, the drop off the edge of the lookout where they stood was more than one-thousand vertical feet. Straight down.
Most of us are cautious in such circumstances. But not college kids with adrenaline in their veins or a full colon. So they held this guy by the arms as he leaned back over the edge of the mountain and let it rip. The laughter, as you can imagine, was uproarious.
The next part of the story is partly hearsay, but whether it is true or not, the concept still makes me laugh. Because after the guy wiped his ass and tossed the toilet paper over the edge, it remained suspended in an updraft that lasted until someone pulled up in their vehicle and wondered what it was floating in the air.
See, I don’t care if the second part of that story is true or not. I wasn’t there to witness. I only choose to believe it because it’s too damn funny not to want it to be true.
That’s the thing with college antics and training trips. They take on legendary aspects through the retelling of stories. This is also probably how 30-40% of holy scripture works, because people want to believe shit even if it isn’t true. Some stories are too good to be true, and others are too good not to be true.
So my expectations for the trip out west that next year were colored, you might say, by the cautious realization that crazy things could happen. But mostly I was excited to go west for the first time in my life. I’d never been further west than Iowa up to that point. Going past the 100th meridian meant the chance to see all new birds and pad my life list. And do some running too.
We piled thirteen of us into the pale green Luther College van. As I was getting into the vehicle, I looked down to notice a bubble sticking out of the tire. “Should that be like that?” I asked. But no one answered.
We drove through Iowa to western Minnesota and west through South Dakota. The further we traveled the more I pressed my face to the window in hopes of seeing new birds. I was a rabid birder at that point in life. All it took to get a new species was a glimpse of a wing or a pattern of plumage. That’s how I found my first magpie while traveling seventy-five miles an hour.
The rest of the team could care less about birds, so I was on my own in that venture. Then I finally fell asleep for an hour or so as sunset neared. When I woke up for a minute, I glanced out the window to spy an antelope running alongside us. I was mesmerized.
We drove all night and arrived to set up camp in the morning. Yellowstone was crowded with late-summer campers and we parked the van and found some suitable campsites. The park was loaded with warnings about bears. On one hand, I was thrilled at the thought of seeing one. On the other hand, I’d read about park maulings and figured it was best if a grizzly did not come visiting.
The first thing on the agenda that first day in the park was to go for a run. We took off at some insane clip toward a distant bluff. Hopping off the road, all thirteen of us clambered up a dusty, rocky trail to the top of a hill and posed for a first-day picture. My head was throbbing from the altitude and I was in a seriously bad mood. It is with much regret that I gave up the opportunity to keep the photo slides from that trip and other years. A team member named Bill Higgins was an avid photographer and his slide collection bounced around between teammates a few years. I wish I’d kept them.
But I recall the grumpy, depressed-looking visage of my own face that morning. I was boiling with frustration at being asked to run so hard so early in the trip. The drive had been long and sleep was weak. But we never ran slowly at Luther. Almost ever. Every run was like a geyser of energy erupting all over again. Day in. Day out. Like Old Faithful, running hard was a daily occurrence in all circumstances.
We kept ourselves so busy those first couple days of running there was little time for sightseeing, much less birding, as I hoped to do. But at one point we were headed into town or such to buy food and stopped on the roadside to look at a moose or bison on a hill above us. The van’s wheels sunk into the roadside gravel on the right side of the road and the entire vehicle tipped to a 10-degree angle. It quite well could have flipped and rolled down the hill if I had not jumped out and told everyone to push the backend while the driver pulled ahead. A tragedy was averted.
The next morning I awoke at 5:00 a.m. with a pre-approval to take the van out and go birding on my own. I grabbed my binoculars and started up the van only to hear the passenger-side door open. In climbed one of the older runners on the team. “Mind if I go with you?” he asked.
I was surprised, to say the least. But we drove down the road toward a wetland I wanted to visit and within a minute or two, I realized that my companion was not interested in birding at all. He pulled out a bag of weed and an apple. Then he rolled a joint and stuck it in a hole bored in the apple, and proceeded to eat the apple after the joint was smoked to a nub. I didn’t join him because I’d never smoked pot in my life. But I was fascinated at his apparent ingenuity.
He happily sat in the van enjoying his high while I walked around a small lake listening to the calls of kinglets and thrush in the woods nearby. By then, I’d added twenty new species to my life list just by keeping my eyes open, and it was relaxing to get away from the haggling crew of runners and soak up nature on my own.
Back in the van, my companion asked for a vow of secrecy and I promised that I would not say a word. We returned to camp in time for the morning run and I marveled that he could go out and run eight miles at altitude with a marijuana buzz.
To close out our time in Yellowstone, we set up teams within the squad and did a 50-mile relay within the park. I was paired with a big, tall freshman named Jeff Dotseth. He was running really well on the trip and I admired his ability and focus. But he was always hungry. One morning our breakfast was a big kettle of oatmeal. The stuff came out really thick and after one bowl, I was stuffed for the morning. Jeff was still hungry, and I recall watching him dig into that kettle with fervor. I don’t know how anyone could eat that much thick oatmeal. But he needed it apparently.
After the big relay, it was time to move south to the Grand Tetons for the second phase of the trip. I added a few more bird species on the way, and we delighted in spotting herds of elk in the meadows. The air each morning was fresh and clear. The mountains were sinking into our bones.
We camped at Jenny Lake at the base of the Grand Tetons. In town, we shopped for groceries and a few of us decided to go for a swim in the Snake River. The water was straight out of the mountains and the melting snow, so it was bracing to dip up to the shoulders in just our running shorts. Yet it felt so good compared to the hot western air we all splashed around. I dove in for kicks and came up for air after a few underwater breaststrokes. To my surprise, I was twenty-five yards downstream by that point, and out of reach from the bare beach where we’d entered. It was tough swimming and clawing my way back against that current. I realized that when it comes to nature and humanity, the West does not mess around. “It would be easy to die out here,” I said to someone upon climbing out of the water.
That night, we partied in town, playing pool and foosball at a local bar. As the evening passed, the games got more competitive and the mood among the locals got a bit darker. One of our younger team members, a freshman from Illinois, got a little mouthy after a foosball game and his opponents asked him if he wanted to fight. We all grabbed him and exited the bar and climbed into the van. “I could have taken him,” the drunken young runner, all 135 lbs of him insisted. “I wrestled in high school.”
We drove off into the night and immediately noted two sets of headlights following us up the road. We kept our eyes on them as the two trucks rolled up behind us. Then we turned into the park road and the trucks pulled to a stop. Apparently, they knew that the park rangers would not welcome a bunch of local toughs beating up some park visitors.
The final big run of the trip was scheduled and we decided to run from Jenny Lake up to Lake Solitude and back. The route was nine miles and the climb went from 6000 to 9000 feet and back. All of the route was on trails.
We took off running and the climb was gradual at first. Then it shot up some switchbacks and climbed some more. Nine miles in the mountain air was challenging, especially with the climbs. But the excitement kept us all going.
All of us, except a few tired members of the team that were feeling the week’s training. We’d already put in sixty miles of running, and one of the freshmen was feeling it pretty badly, but we didn’t stop to consider how it all might go for him. He lagged behind during a long climb in which a giant moose was lying next to the trail, and we arrived at Lake Solitude high in the Grand Tetons. The bigger peaks still towered above us. The lake water was freezing cold. Too cold to swim. But a small speckled trout swam past me as I sat on a rock staring at the calm turquoise water.
We couldn’t drink the water in the lake or any other source. All the streams contained giardia, the infectious parasitic germ that causes wicked diarrhea. None of us carried water either. So we’d run nine miles in thin air with nothing to drink. Now the task was running the nine miles back down.
The last two guys in our group were just arriving as we turned around to head back down. Perhaps someone checked on them, but I’m not sure to this day that anyone was paying much attention. So much of running back in the day was survival of the fittest and the devil take the hindmost.
We jogged and ran and clambered back down the nine miles toward camp. The sun was now behind the mountains and the shade started to mix with darkness. I don’t recall how long the total run took us, but we hadn’t planned anything about the trip well, so why start then?
I knew that I’d make it back down after six miles on the trail. But I began to think about the guys behind us. At some point, the fatigue got great enough that I cried a little. Not sure if that was relief, anger, joy or fear that made me cry. But I didn’t have much water to spare in my system, so it didn’t last long.
I recall my toes feeling like they were about to come out the front of my shoes. I’m pretty sure I wore Nike Waffle Trainers, those blue and yellow staples of mid-1970s distance running. They were not built for trail running. Coming back into camp, I was elated to realize the run was over and picked up the pace the last 400 meters to show that I wasn’t beaten. There was no need to do that. Everyone was clearly beat, if not beaten. “Good job,” someone muttered.
Then the waiting game began as we started to worry whether our freshman and a couple other less-fit guys would make it back before dark. We thought about running back out to find them. But it got dark. I sat on a rock eating a bag of Oreos that I’d purchased at the store because there were no plans for making dinner yet. I also downed three Mountain Dews.
Then came Tony, one of the last two guys on team, rolling out of the darkness like a ghost.
“How far behind is Matt?” someone asked him.
“Well, we had to climb up over a boulder to get around the moose. It was lying on the trail when we came down.”
“Holy crap,” someone muttered.
“Yeah, holy crap,” said Tony, wandering over to grab something to drink. He did not appear too happy.
And finally, the thin-looking freshman Matt came trotting into camp. He didn’t look all that tired, as I recall. Perhaps he’d paced himself? If so, quite intelligently. But he admitted. “That moose was big.”
And so it went. We’d all run eighteen miles with 6000 feet of climbing and descending in the Grand Tetons of Wyoming. With no water. No nutrition. No nothing. Know nothing.
That night, a massive storm came roaring over the Tetons. It rained so hard the drops hitting the ground at first sound like slaps in the face. Then the streams began through our campsite. I pulled my feet up off the tent bottom and held a flashlight up to look at the water pouring through our space. It was a long night, for sure. But even so, I finally fell asleep.
We drove back to Decorah, Iowa with that bubble on the van tire still whapp-whapping around like it was ready to pop any minute. I still don’t know how we didn’t get a flat, or let the van slide down the hillside. I don’t know how someone didn’t die up in those mountains or get beaten to a pulp by townies at the bar that night. The whole truth and nothing but the truth of the matter is that stupidity goes a long way in some circumstances. And the rest gets chalked up to legend.
As college cross country season ended in the fall of 1976, I started thinking about what to do during January interim. The previous year I drew nudes for six hours a day. That was enlightening. But my other keen interest in life at the time was birds. I loved drawing them, painting them, and I sold some artwork to friends and collectors.
A pencil drawing of a gyrfalcon drawn at the Hawk Range at Cornell University, January 1977.
Wildlife art as a genre was taking off at the time. Yet there was one bird artist that I particularly admired, a painter from the early 1900s named Louis Agassiz Fuertes. I’d first seen his work at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York. My father attended Cornell after World War II, and his sister lived in nearby Binghamton. During a visit there we took a trip to the Lab, as it was called, and I stood mesmerized by Fuertes’ paintings in a gallery dedicated to his work.
With a bit of bold and irrational initiative, I wrote to the Lab and asked if I could do an internship there. To my surprise, the facility’s director wrote back and said that I’d be welcome if I was willing to help curate the collection of bird art the Lab had on site.
That sounded exciting to me. My art instructor Doug Eckheart approved of the trip as a January interim project, so I contacted my parents to see about borrowing their car and it all fell into place in a few weeks. It’s a bit hard to imagine how all that planning took place in the age of expensive long-distance phone calls, letters sent back and forth, and no Internet. But it did happen. I made it happen.
My parents scrapped together $750 to send with me to Cornell. I climbed into the big old Buick LeSabre my parents owned and drove east to New York through the snow belt of Indiana, Ohio and Northeastern Pennsylvania. I was nineteen years old, a combination of eager and dumb at the same time. I knew nothing about real winter driving conditions, and the winters back then were typically brutal. My father warned me that the LeSabre could be quirky during really cold weather. He often sprayed starter fluid in the carburetor to free it up whenever the engine froze up from condensation. I didn’t even know what that meant. I was obsessed with getting to Cornell, and I was driving. That’s all I knew.
Buffalo and beyond
First I stopped to stay with cousins in Buffalo, New York. The snowdrifts in town were ten feet tall. Plows had to cut the streets open for people to drive around. The next day I drove over to Cornell and showed up with a grin to meet the Lab director, who asked a simple question. “Where are you staying?”
I stared back at him blankly. No one had thought to ask me that before leaving. Not even my parents.I didn’t think to ask about it either. Perhaps I thought there would be a dorm room waiting for me, like there was back at Luther College. Perhaps everyone assumed that I’d arranged to stay somewhere. Yet here I was, some dopey kid with a big head of thick hair, wire-rimmed glasses and a pile of expectations. The Lab director told me to wait a few minutes, conferred with an employee and came back to me with an offer I really couldn’t refuse. “Listen,” he said. “Mike here has a place a mile down the road. It has no running hot water, but it has cold water and heat. You can stay there for $150 for the weeks that you’re here.”
That sounded fine to me, and that’s where I stayed, living on a diet of waffles, frozen vegetables and pan-fried meats.
But I was happy. In the morning, I’d sometimes walk the mile from the house to the Lab on the quiet road covered with fresh new snow. It was a daily wonderland because it snowed almost every night that I stayed there. I’d go to the Lab at 7:30 in the morning and pore through bird art the entire day, making lists of what they owned while recording the images and their artists in a ledger. It felt like I was doing something important, and actually, I was.
Singular focus
Not once during that first couple of weeks did I worry about running, or fitness. Instead, I focused entirely on meeting everyone in Ithaca that knew about bird art. I interviewed a somewhat reclusive artist named Bill Dilger, who was kind and honest in everything we discussed. He was a bird illustrator by his own description and openly warned me that making a living as a bird artist was not easy.
I also wandered the halls of a giant museum collection of stuffed birds from all over the world. I’d learned some taxidermy already at Luther College, so I knew not to handle the skins much. But I could not resist viewing a specimen of the ivory-billed woodpecker, an extinct species that once was called the God Bird, for how big and impressive it was. I also found a passenger pigeon, another extinct species of bird.
Several days were spent drawing falcons at the Hawk Barn, a series of buildings and pens where peregrine falcons and gyrfalcons were being captive-bred to restore their populations in the wild. Those species had been devastated by the presence of DDT in the environment, so the opportunity to study these birds up close was prized. I stood face-to-face looking at a gyrfalcon through a small window. That image (above) is one of the prized drawings in my entire life.
A drawing that I did of myself peering into the hawk pens at Cornell
During those three weeks at Cornell I cataloged nearly the entire collection of bird art. Along the way, I made prodigious notes about the work of dozens of different artists. Years later, in curiosity about the state of the bird art collection at Cornell, I visited their website to look up a few of the drawings that I’d cataloged back in the ’70s. Finding them again was like visiting old friends. I also noted that a few of the newer pieces of art on the site were mislabeled by species, and sent emails to the curators. They thanked me for that.
As the weeks went by, I started to grow a bit restless with the spare accommodations. Every other day I bathed by heating water in a cooking pan and washed my long, thick hair with shampoo as well. I’d get it all sudsy and then step outside in the frigid air with a full pan of warm water to rinse it out in one giant pour of the pan. The house where I stayed backed up to the area where the university kept a pack of wolves. I saw one of them standing near the tall fence one night. That giant canid stared at me as I stood half-naked in the dark. Talk about recognizing the frailty of your humanity.
Most of my time was spent out on at the Lab, but I wandered into town to visit a childhood friend that I knew at Ithaca College. She and I had grown up together in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She was a skinny little thing back then, and we played together on long summer days and shared our childhood dreams. She’d grown into an incredibly beautiful woman in her late teens and I was intimidated beyond belief when she extended a close hug upon greeting me after all those years. To this day I find it funny that her family owned two dachshund dogs named Meg and Jenny. Later in life, I dated women by those names.
Cold nights
Toward the end of the three weeks at Cornell, the heat went out in my little house in the woods. I stayed overnight at the home of the Lab director, who was kind enough to host me for a night or two. I showered for the first time in days and decided to head to the Cornell University indoor track and get in a run.
Wearing my Luther College sweats, I started jogging around the indoor oval in the ancient old building where it was housed. A set of Cornell runners started out running across the track from me, and it became a competition to keep the same distance around the track between us. When they picked up the pace, so did I. That’s how it went for a few miles, and I finished exhausted, sweaty, and clearly a bit out of shape. But I didn’t care. My time at Cornell was worth a few lost weeks of running fitness.
The day came to drive home and I stopped to thank the director and finally meet the President of the Lab, who’d been traveling during the month of January. He looked through the paintings I’d brought to share and had compliments about some of them. He was also honest and realistic about my need to work on creating form in my work. He was right about that.
But I’d learned quite a bit studying those weeks at Cornell. One of the highlights was going through the work of an artist named Richard Bishop, whose estate donated an entire trunk of his preparatory drawings to their collection. His drawing technique was smooth and amazingly efficient. I copied his drawings to learn how he did it.
Outside in the parking lot, I went to start up the LeSabre and it wouldn’t turn over. Apparently the short drive from the house up to Sapsucker Woods created enough condensation to freeze up the carburetor again. The guy from whom I rented the house wandered by at that moment, and pulled out some starting fluid from his car to spray in the LeSabre’s engine. After a few shots, it fired up like a big old drag racer, roaring to life in the cold New York dawn. I thanked him and shook his hand, and thanked him again for letting me use his house. Then I climbed in and drove off. As I was leaving, he motioned for me to roll down the window, and said, “I’d try not to turn that thing off much. It might not start again.”
So I drove and drove west toward Chicago. South of Buffalo, it started to snow and continued all the way past Cleveland. I placed my wheels in the ruts of a semi-truck ahead of me and concentrated on its taillights. When the truck pulled off to gas up, so did I. But I didn’t turn the motor off. I fueled up with the motor still running. Dangerous, perhaps. But I kept on rolling.
Somewhere in Indiana, the snow let up a bit, but the road was still thick with inches of slush. So I kept on driving all the way around the southern part of Lake Michigan and up through Chicago to our home back in St. Charles. Pulling into the driveway, I felt a level of exhaustion pass over me that was completely unfamiliar. I’d driven straight through from Ithaca to Illinois, breaking only for Cokes and to fill up the gas tank. I had a Standard Oil charge card but the gas stations along the way, Sunoco and whatever, all honored it that night.
I carried my stuff into the house and walked into the bedroom at 1:00 in the morning. I’m not sure my parents even knew that I was home when they got up the next day. Finally, I heard my mother poke her head in my bedroom and ask, “Chrissy, are you okay?”
“Yes,” I replied quietly. “Just really tired.”
A screech owl drawing done from a live subject while studying at Cornell University in 1977.
I slept through the entire day until 3:00 that afternoon. My father was outside trying to get the car started again, without much luck. “What did you do to this thing?” he wanted to know.
“I drove straight through from Ithaca,” I told him. “I didn’t even turn the car off the fill up.”
He muttered and stuck his gloves back on and fired another shot of starter fluid into the engine. The car did not start for days. I’d really done a number on it.
My dad drove me back up to Luther College that weekend. The drive was six hours in the winter months back then. He dropped me off and turned back home, as I recall. That Buick LeSabre must have hated our family.
That winter my times in indoor track showed only modest improvement from year-to-year thanks to those weeks off from training while studying at Cornell. But formative experiences like that are worth some time off from running. Plus that day racing the Cornell guys on their own oval shot my heart rate up so high it probably made up for two weeks off from training.
I did round into shape that spring and qualified for nationals in the steeplechase. In the end, it’s all about outcomes. And having starter fluid ready when you need it the most.
There is nothing quite like setting personal records at any distance that you run. There’s no better feeling than running faster than you’ve ever run before. Heading into my sophomore year at Luther College, the goal was to achieve continual improvement, move up in team rankings, and qualify for the national track meet in steeplechase.
Competing against a pair of LaCrosse runners at the Norse Invitational. Note the grass runup to the steeple pit.
The problem with all plans to improve as a runner is that improvement is never a straight-line proposition. It can be so joyous to run a sub-21:00 four-mile race for the first time, only to wind up running slower the next week. Of course, so many factors determine the pace on a given day. The weather from heat to cold. The wind or rain. The ground surface. Hills.
Then there are the mental factors of daily life. Recently I attended the conference meet at my alma mater Luther College where their top runner ran a decent yet ultimately disappointing race, finishing in tenth place behind a phalanx of talented Wartburg runners. He looked so strong those first few miles, and we all hoped he could hang on through the fast early pace. His mom and dad came in from Colorado to watch their son race. I told them they should be really proud of their son, who is also a great student on top of being a top-caliber runner.
Apparently he’d been facing some hard academic work leading up to the conference meet, and I felt for him upon hearing that. The ups-and-downs of college life are many. Social commitments can lift you up or drag you down. Dating is another realm altogether. A good relationship can thrill and inspire. A bad relationship undermines the confidence needed to run well.
It is too easy to look through those mimeographed booklets of races and times from college years and question or wonder if things could have gone better now and then. In the best of all worlds, that might be true. But we don’t live in the best of all worlds all the time. We show up at the starting line as young men and women trying to do their best. So the question to ask ourselves all these years on is simple: Did we legitimately try to do our best? It’s easy to be self-critical and build up negative beliefs about yourself based on past failings. It’s just as easy to be dunned by dismissive slogans such as “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen…”
Kitchen up
It seems that all of us run into a coach or two along the way with a personal axe to grind…those coaches that pick out weaknesses rather than help us find our strengths. Those coache fuel our self-doubts if we’re not careful. They make ‘getting out of the kitchen’ seem like the thing to do. Granted, we all need our asses kicked now and then in sports like running, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. There’s a right and a wrong way to go about motivation. For the most part, I experienced the right ways.
I didn’t always succeed, but I could always take the heat. There weren’t many races where I flat out gave up if there was an ounce of energy left to still compete. There were no races where I absolutely quit trying, or purposely ran slow to back off the pain. These days while running much slower in races, the pain of the effort still feels the same. That feeling of running up against the best that I can do in the moment is still so familiar. That’s why I don’t second guess the progress made during those collegiate years. While I was often too anxious for my own good or let nerves get the best of me now and then, those failings are part of the learning process.
Finding ways to overcome fear (the heat in the kitchen!) is the life lesson we all learn from running. It is true that sometimes we build up these perceptions about ourselves and live by them rather than trusting our ability and finding ways to transcend our limitations. But when we do transcend those limitations there is always the fear of success that comes with it. “Now I’ve got to run that fast all the time,” we tell ourselves. Fear of success. So the cycle feeds back upon itself. That can happen in many of life’s avenues.
Up and over the steeple barrier and water pit.
So I don’t look back and think I “woulda-coulda-shoulda” run better at any point in my career. I know from the effort I feel today that I’ve always run as hard as I could. Were there times when my mental state may have limited those abilities? When I didn’t push through the pain enough? No doubt. But we can’t live with those regrets or they harms us in other ways.
Ups and downs
I ran as our sixth or seventh man most of that sophomore cross country season. My times were slightly better than freshman year, and we qualified to fun at nationals that fall. Unfortunately, the November meet was held in Cleveland, Ohio, where it snowed four inches the day before the race. Given that running tights were not invented as yet, and our sweats were to baggy for racing, we went to the department store the day before the race to purchase long johns and women’s nylons. Neither fit us well so we abandoned the idea of covering our legs and focused on having a warm turtleneck under our racing singlets. I recall finishing that race in a bent-over condition and feeling like I had to barf in the chute. I heaved up something hot and nasty that landed on another runner’s shoe. He punched me in the neck. I don’t blame him.
The Short Ride
Mixed in with all the serious stuff that year were so many laughs and goofy incidents. As a sophomore, I’d signed up for a fraternity along with my cross country roommate. One of the rites of passage was the Short Ride in which some brothers plucked us out of our rooms to be deposited twelve miles out of town with nothing to but our underwear, a shirt and a twelve-pack of beer that we were supposed to drink. Yes, it was a form of hazing, but fairly harmless by most standards. We stashed the beer in the ditch and started running back to campus. With our cross country fitness, the run back took us about an hour and fifteen minutes even through the darkness of night. The sound of our feet crunching on the gravel roads back to campus was satisfying, and we were both flying. We ran so fast that we actually beat our frat brothers back to the dorm (they’d gone out to the bars) and locked our door behind us. When they got back from the bars they pounded on our door and were playfully pissed that we’d made such easy work of what was supposed to be a long, cold and lonely night.
But when they arrived a few weeks later to take us on the Long Ride, we told them to fuck off because the conference meet was coming up a few days later. To their credit, they understood that we were far more serious about the matter than they thought.
Downs and ups
That spring in track I ran the steeplechase in 9:33 to qualify for the national track and field meet. A bunch of us traveled by van to Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the weather turned hot as hell after a cool spring. I raced in the 88-degree temperatures and high humidity to fade to a slow time. That afternoon we went out to dinner and then retreated to our motel room to lie around watching TV in the air-conditioning.
At 11:00 that night I awoke with severe nausea and started throwing up. The sickness lasted all night. My roommate counted the number of times that I got up to barf: 27.
In the morning our track coach Bob Naslund arrived to drive us back home. I told him, “Naze, I need to go to the hospital. I’m really sick.” By that point, my hands were tingling and I felt faint. Surely dehydration had caught up with me.
“I think you’ll be okay,” he offered.
“Take me to the hospital,” I demanded. “Or I’m gonna die.” I saw his eyes fly open wide and my roommate shook his head Yes.
So we checked into the emergency room and the nurses hooked me up to an IV and forced me to drink a thick orange electrolyte liquid to replace the fluids I’d lost overnight. I ate a banana or two and finally felt good enough to travel home.
Standing the heat
For many years, I credited that illness to a case of heat stroke. In the back of my mind, I was always cautious about running in the heat. Then I competed in a ten-mile race in the heat of July and ran so well that I took fourth place in the Melrose Park Run for the Roses in a time of 53:30. I felt so good the entire race that I actually laughed out loud at one point. I was having fun. During the last mile I sprinted past two other runners. I remember the winner Kevin Higdon turning around to slap my hand knowing that I’d run a bit above my standard performance.
That race in the heat made me think back to the national meet to figure out why the heat had affected me so badly. I through through the events of that day… and then it hit me.
It wasn’t heat stroke that made me sick that night after the national track meet. It was the medium Pizza Hut pizza that I downed almost all on my own.
I read an article later that year (in Harper’s, I think it was…) about the many times the Pepsico organization and Pizza Hut in particular get sued for food poisoning. It is estimated that 1 in 6 Americans gets sick annually from foodborne illnesses. The company employs an army of lawyers to protect against legal actions caused by the high number of food poisoning cases they face each year.
These days, there is a website devoted to self-reporting food poisoning cases across the country. It is called Iwaspoisoned.com. Browsing through the reports on that site is a sobering experience. All I know is that I really could have died that night in Grand Rapids. I’m obviously glad that I didn’t. But I’m also glad that I stopped fearing the heat for all the wrong reasons.
There’s a symbolic lesson of several kinds in that last statement.
