This is the fifth in a series of articles about the Sweet Season of 1978, my college senior year when our Luther College team placed second in the nation in NCAA Division III cross country. To follow the chronological narrative in full, please begin in order by volume.
Volume one • Volume two • Volume three
After a personal fifth place at the Grinnell invitational September 23, 1978, I noted in my running log that “Hantsbarger outlasted me. Dani first again.” We won the meet and my mileage topped 90 miles for the week.
My method of record-keeping and mileage was not sophisticated, just a pen on paper chart mapping mileage in a converted college composition book. But it worked as well as any modern data tracker today. In the log shown, one can see the difference in the mileage I ran in the spring track and field season and cross county in the fall. In spring I raced steeplechase and 5000 meters, no more than three miles total. In fall we raced four and five mile races in the Division III category for the NCAA.
The weeks ripped by as the typical mileages for each day told the story: Sun 9-6, Mon 5-9, Tues 5-10, Wed 8-9, Thur 3-7, Frid 5-3 and Sat 3-7. Morning workouts were done with a teammate or two. We’d get up at the first light of dawn and run 4-8 miles before our 8:00 a.m. college classes.
Evenings we joined the entire team for longer workouts, much of it done at 6:00 mile pace or under. We trained right through races and raced right through training. Perhaps it wasn’t the ideal approach for a thirteen week season. But that’s how we rolled.
Our sixth meet of the season was held in Waverly, Iowa, between Luther, Wartburg College and St. Olaf, whose top two runners Mike Palmquist and Matt Haugen were perennial All-Americans. In thinking back on running against them, I reached out to both of those runners via email to ask how much mileage they did in college. Palmquist wrote me back: “
I recall running about 60 miles per week in cross country and 40 miles per week in track. I bumped up those miles during the summer, but the intensity was much lower. I tended to be a low-mileage, high intensity trainer. Matt, on the other hand, ran quite a bit more than I did, mostly by adding morning runs and doing a bit extra on the weekend. I ended up running higher mileage after I graduated and started competing as a full-time runner, but I seldom ran more than 100 miles per week. I seemed to do much better at 80 to 90.
Matt Haugen, who went on to complete an 8:40 Ironman Triathlon after his All-American career at St. Olaf, had some interesting mileage tales to tell. He wrote:
So were were all living on the edge in one way or another. My daily mileage totals soared hight the very next week to Sun 8-11, Mon 6-8, Tue 3-7-5, Wed 7-7, Thur 3-10, Friday 4-4, and Sat 8-8 for an estimated total of 99 miles, give or take a few. That would be the season’s high mileage. Accurate or not, it likely topped 100.
Staying grounded
My journal from those weeks also recorded consistent efforts to stay grounded through all that running. Sometimes it was just a question of looking around while running through the scenic Oneota Valley in Decorah, Iowa. “Within the last two weeks I have seen two pileated woodpeckers. One flying across the valley below Silvercrest Golf Course. The other I saw on Phelps road just along the river. He called like a cross between a crow and a flicker. Clarinet-like ‘heah-heah.’ A green heron landed along Lindeman pond.”
So my brain was trying to absorb something other than the irreversibility of time while running all those miles. The relationship with my girlfriend continued to deepen in emotional and physical connection. Every week we seemed to immerse ourselves in richer conversation about things that mattered to both of us. We even discussed religion as she was studying Judaism with a Professor or Religion named Richard Simon Hanson. She was somehow drawn to the story of Israel and the Judaic tradition. In truth she even looked a little like what some might call a prototypical Jewish girl with her deep black hair and bright green eyes. Plus she was fiery and tough and musical and determined all at once. I’d never met a woman like her before. It seemed we were meant to be together.
Missing her
One weekend she flew home to visit her parents. I wrote in my journal: “(She’s) gone for the weekend. I’m a little lonely. I ran well today and have dorm duty, thus no one to share it with. 99 miles this week. I just want to stay healthy and run well. I miss her, although I sort of value the time alone. Now her flight’s delayed.”
The flight mentioned refers to a trip back by private plane from an airport northwest of Chicago. They’d fly her to a small airstrip on a hill east of Decorah. Somehow the flight was arranged through her well-connected parents. So I went to bed in my dorm room alone wondering if this is how love always felt. Like you’d just about die when you were apart from the one you loved.
Daily pressures
But I couldn’t moon around long… wondering what the next day would bring. The pressure to perform well each week was now firmly on my shoulders. I’d been our second man in all but one meet, so there were now expectations to meet. No longer was it good enough to go out and race and hope to crack the Top 5.
Granted, my rise in the team architecture was partly the result of injuries to two of our formerly men. But the fact of the matter is that timing is everything, and my relative ascendency coincided with a need for someone else to step up.
The same held true with our top runner, a runner who led our distance guys in track and field. He’d previously been one of our Top 5 in cross country, but never the true team leader. That all changed fin the fall of 1978 and he’d won a string of meets in a row.
Plus we were roommates. After every meet when we got back to the dorm, we’d crack open a ceremonial Michelob beer that he kept in his fridge as a reward for good performances. So far we’d not missed an appointment with those black cans of beer.
Rising stars
As a team we were also the beneficiaries of two stellar freshman that had joined the squad. Both were placing in our Top 5 each week. That meant there was a tinge of the bittersweet in the sweetness of the 1978 season. We’d now won all but one of our meets thus far, but how much better would we be if everyone was healthy? Could we place at nationals? That remained to be seen.
That said, there were also signs that the training was taking its toll on us all. I noted the presence of a sore calf on October 1. That day we ran thirteen miles in the morning and five at night. Just your average Sunday…
Then came a Monday workout on the hills of Palisades Park. We gathered at the base of a long incline of perhaps three degrees that featured a sharp rise right at the end. Our two-mile warmup to the base of the hill felt great despite the calf soreness from the day before. Then we jogged to the top of the hill, trotted back down at a fair clip and ran hard back up the hill.
“It’s up to you”
After the fourth of eight such intervals, my former roommate came up to me during a rest phase at the top of the hill. “You have to run great this weekend at St. Olaf,” he told me. “We’re counting on you now.” I found his urgency a bit surprising as I’d not had a faltering week thus far. But I literally looked him in the eye and said, “I know. I’m ready.”
We ran the rest of the hill repeats side by side, almost sharing the same oxygen as we lifted onto our toes on each rise of ground. At the end of the workout, we quietly slapped hands.
It seemed like he was finally coming around from the toe injury that was causing him so much trouble in training and racing. That next spring at track nationals, he’d only miss All-American in the steeplechase by one second. He was one of the best runners ever to come through Luther College, earning individual conference championships in both track and cross country. He’s now a well-deserved member of Luther’s Athletic Hall of Fame. So I appreciated his call to arms in trying to motivate me for the upcoming race.
Dangerous camber
Original marker drawing by Christopher Cudworth
That next day we ran a loop called Freeport. Coach had us doing 100 yard pickups back and forth on the road to sharpen our speed for upcoming meets. But the camber of the road was too steep as the drop from road center to the gravel edge was probably a full foot. That afternoon, I noted in my running journal the next day: “Sore Achilles.”
Nearly the whole team wound up lame from that workout. Indeed, I skipped the next two morning runs, settling for runs of six miles in afternoon workouts to let my leg recover.
In fact the leg was so sore that I visited the campus doctor. He looked me over and prescribed a set of pills that I picked up at the local pharmacy. The bottle read:
Butazolidin
While taking that medicine, I wandered around campus in a complete daze for two or three days. I couldn’t find my way across campus on several occasions. Just by happenstance I hardly made connections with my girlfriend those few days. She was particularly busy with rehearsals for the Godspell musical in which she was starring.
Our coach was so freaked out by the Achilles problems vexing the whole team that we made a trip up to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota to visit a prominent doctor who was a Luther graduate. When he asked how I was doing, I handed him the bottle marked Butazolidin and said, “This is what I’m taking.”
He pulled his glasses down in front of his face, then looked back at me in wonder and said, “Stop taking this immediately. This is how much they give to horses.”
In fact, that campus doctor could well have killed me with the amount of medicine he had prescribed. This is how the Medline website describes the relative effects of that drug on humans:
Butazolidin is an NSAID (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug). Butazolidin overdose occurs when someone takes more than the normal or recommended amount of this medicine. This can be by accident or on purpose. Butazolidin is no longer sold for human use in the United States. However, it is still used to treat animals, such as horses.
Now, that last sentence is rather funny because our coach always liked to call us his “horses.” It was his way to compliment the way we ran. But now we were all lame as thoroughbreds, and needed to do something fast. So coach took us to a running store in Rochester and purchased us all a brand new pair of Brooks shoes called the Varus Wedge. It was one of the first orthotically designed shoes with an outward camber built into the sole to control pronation. That was our raw prescription for Achilles problems. For many of us, it helped, but a generic prescription of running shoes does not heal everything. There would still be trouble to follow.
Life tectonics*
As if the Achilles soreness and dangerous prescription I was given were not enough of a challenge, that following Monday an incident that took place in the college union that felt like a social earthquake. Walking out of the cafeteria with my girlfriend, I felt her hand suddenly tug backward in mine. I turned in time to see her toss a glass of orange soda straight into the face of a guy that I recognized as a track teammate. She said something on the order of…“Don’t you ever…” and the rest I did not hear because the scene erupted into multiple voices shouting and pushing and confusion.
I did recognize the instant anger on the face of my teammate, and adrenaline quickly pumped into my system. I pulled her toward me wondering, “Will he hit her?”
Quickly I stepped between them and tried to calm the situation. “What’s going on?” I asked half out of fear. I certainly wasn’t prepared to fight the guy. He stood 6’3”, weighed 195 lbs. and was one of our best sprinters in track and a star middle linebacker in football. I weighed 139 lbs. at the time and had 3% body fat. He’d have torn me apart if it had gone that direction.
As calmly as I could, I apologized to my track teammate. He stood inches from me at that moment. That’s when I realized that in all the time we’d spent together in three years of track and field, through countless practices and even competing on the basketball court in intramurals, we’d never been so near to one another. Now we stood face to face, and he was staring over my shoulder at my girlfriend.
Something in me stood still. At that moment some unspoken bond worked through us both. He looked me in the eye, and then moved away. So I stepped back from the scene of the confrontation. Then I turned to him and said, “I’m sorry man.” I could see that his face was still wet from the orange soda that she’d thrown at him. His companions, including some women, were uttering low threats that I could not really hear. Then the stairwell door closed behind us and I walked away wondering what had just happened.
All apologies
“Why did you say you’re sorry?” she demanded to know. “Weren’t you going to defend me?” All I could think is that I had not truly heard or seen all that had happened. Part of me greatly wanted to protect and defend her. Yet part of me honestly trusted my teammate as well. Competing loyalties are a strange thing indeed.
This much I knew: she was feisty like me. Competitive as I was, I’d flown off the handle for small and large offenses on my own in the past. Thus I truly did not know what to think about something that happened so suddenly. Without information or explanations to determine all that, my instincts told me to not judge anyone, to remain calm as possible and to not make things worse by taking sides.
Change of subject
So we walked back to the dorm together and the subject rapidly changed. We strolled through the pretty campus with its massive oak trees changing color. A cool breeze was coursing over the Oneota Valley and life seemed to return to normal as fast as it had changed. I felt like we’d just lived through an earthquake.
Over the years, I’ve thought back to that moment in the union. To this day I am not sure exactly what transpired. My track teammate was one of just over 100 black students on campus at the time, several of whom shared rooms with me on track trips. Some were inner city kids that had taken the risk of heading out from the inner city of Chicago to attend college in the cornfields of Iowa at a school of 2400 kids primarily suburban and rural kids from the Midwest. The haven of cultural identity on campus was the Black Student Union. That seemed a blessing in some ways and a curse in others.
Matters at hand
All I wanted to do after all that upheaval was focus on the meet ahead. The weather had cooled for a few days, yet as we traveled to St. Olaf the temperatures moderated and it turned out to be a dank yet relatively warm day for a race. We stripped down to our Luther singlets and everyone on the team had a serious air about them. It all came down to one thing: We wanted to win again.
Our hill training came in handy on the St. Olaf course. We won the meet against tough competition, specifically the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, whose D3 runners were some of the best in the Midwest. With 800 meters to go, the teammate that had provided focused inspiration earlier in the week ran right on my heels. Finally we closed on a LaCrosse runner ahead of us, a guy that neither of us had likely beaten before. But there was literally no stopping us now. My teammate said “Let’s go” and we started a kick with 400 meters to go. As we came up behind our competitor,Limy teammate said, “Let’s close him off.” So we swung around either side of him and cut back in to form a perfect duo as we sprinted to the finish line. I finished 8th overall in the meet and Luther won the title. Our nearly unbeaten streak in the Sweet Season continued.
But bigger challenges still lay ahead.
*”Life tectonics” is a term I originally coined in 1981 for a fiction book titled “Admissions”.” That book accurately predicted social, political and cultural issuesthat would come true in the decades to follow. My son and I are now editing the book for release as it was set in the future, a period we’re living in now.
During the summer months we often wake quite early to run or ride before the wind and heat pick up. A few times this summer I even rode in the morning on weekdays. That required getting out the door by 5:30 am to get in a thirty mile ride before work.
Sleep needs vary, and in some ways I sleep a little less than I did even back in college, when getting eight solid hours was vital while training 300-400 miles a month in distance running.
d in this case, wound up hung on meat hooks where their blood apparently flowed eternally, because every new queen who opened the door got washed with the blood of the previous victims. Only this time, the queen had given notice to her brothers that if she ever called to them from the tower they should come running to her rescue. So when the king warned her that she was about to become a member of the Meat Hook Clan inside the door protected by the Golden Key, she asked if she could go say her prayers in the tower. First.
The trolls are so popular and so profitable that the system to admit visitors has been overwhelmed by the amount of traffic entering the facility. As we experienced last Sunday, the lines to get in extend for a mile.
It’s also not the Arboretum’s fault that the preserve is surrounded by really big roads, especially to the south with Interstate 88 and on its east side with I-355. When those roads were expanded some thirty years ago, the project provided for massive earthen berms to be built to protect the Morton Arboretum from road noise and, quite ironically it seems, from the hazards of road salt flying off the highway.
The problems faced by the crowds crushing it at Morton Arboretum are in many ways an American phenomenon. Yet true to form, there’s an iconic image right at the entrance to the Morton Arboretum. One of the first trolls one encounters is holding aloft what looks like a giant stone. Below him on the turf grass is a smashed car. The troll is obviously taking out its natural frustrations on the car.
We got up to ride this past Saturday after a fun little Halloween Party in a restored barn with a Haunted House. We took part in plenty of food and drinks, and got home late.
Tarsnakes on the road 
At some point I started to fall away and clawed back onto Sue’s wheel. But soon enough I told her, “Go on ahead,” and smiled at her with a shrug. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Well, duh. It might be time to do something about that, ya think?
So I rolled around like a writhing little gator on the shag carpeting in our bedroom and worked those little hip (hop) flexors like they haven’t been worked in years.
I even grasped my own head in my hands for a minute. Just let the contact between hands and head resonate and carry all the way back through my toes. I was my own compact ball of sixty-year-old energy. Breathing. 
Yes, we ran quite a bit. And yes, we partied sometimes. But never enough to truly hold back our performances.
I definitely recall the track race he mentioned. I had tried to double back in the 5000 meters after winning the steeplechase earlier that day. But my legs didn’t have the zip and my performance fell short, clocking a slow 15:20. With their effort, Central College took the conference track championship after Luther had won it for 17 years straight. I also recall some very bad sportsmanship that day when some of their athletes cheered when our All-American 400-meter hurdler shattered his leg going over the last barrier. Things almost came to blows on the infield between our two teams. They were sick of us winning and likely considered us arrogant. 
In fact there seemed to be a collective chip on everyone’s shoulder in that household. But they had a Golden Boy attitude toward the youngest member of the family, a son that was a junior in high school at the time I met her. When we visited their house during some fall break, my girlfriend started bragging about his basketball skills, intimating that he’d wipe the court with me if I ever played him. So I took that challenge, and beat him 10-2 in a game of one-on-one. I was a damned good basketball player and wasn’t going to take that kind of challenge lightly. 
A cool wind blew off the flat landscape of southwestern Minnesota as we jogged around the course in our bulky cotton sweats and noted that the course was composed partly of cinder trails and grass. That led us to check our spike lengths, because short spikes do not work well on cinders. Only a few teammates by then were wearing the Oregon Waffle racers we’d ordered because the shoes were so popular they were on back order through a running shop in Minneapolis. Such were the early days of the Nike era. 
Three years ago today I visited my father in the hospital for the last time. He’d lived with the effects of a profound stroke for more than 15 years. My mother died in 2005 and that left me in charge of all his affairs, his health and ultimately, the end of his life.
I recall arriving for practice one morning when my cheeks were still flushed from having made love with my girlfriend just minutes before. Then I threw on my running shorts, trotted down the hill from the dorm and showed up for practice right on time. On my arrival, one of the freshman on our team pointed to my complexion and exclaimed, “You just had sex!”
Then for some reason, perhaps to compensate for his inability to play the game well, he felt the need to brag that he’d recently been invited to “be in the movies.” He’d been approached on the streets of Philadelphia, he told us. So we asked him all kinds of questions about the film in which he was supposedly going to appear and as the details emerged, it became evident that the type of film in which he was invited to participate was indeed a porn film.
There was also a famous porn star named Seka scheduled to make an appearance during the evening. That was supposedly the big draw that was going to set the mood for this wild party about to happen.
Despite these past experiences, my reputation as a relatively staid and moral guy was intact by the time I’d entered the work world. In fact I’d earned the nickname The Professor at the marketing agency where I worked simply by accurately spelling the word “pterodactyl” for one of the salespeople who wanted to put one of the flying dinosaurs on a marketing piece.
To create a bachelor party gift for a running buddy that was getting married, I once made a mashup of the movie Pee Wee’s Big Adventure with the porn classic 
Perhaps the most difficult example of “you’re not good enough” is going through a divorce. I know many people that have gone through that experience and with rare exception, it is a bitter passage. The best outcome is perhaps the ability to remain friends through it all upon realizing that you just weren’t meant for each other in the first place. People make mistakes in relationships and everything else in life.
So it takes a considerable boost to the constitution of self to get going again when things in life slow you down or stop you cold.
The lesson here is that the real problem lies not with those who try, or fail. It rests instead with people that have the gall to suggest someone else is not “good enough” in some way. It’s such a common thing that we sometimes take it for granted.
It’s the dismissive brand of “you’re not good enough” that deserves resistance. We experience that brand of cynicism at its earliest stages when grade school friendship and jealousies enter the picture. It’s a sad thing to realize those petty jealousies can turn into political divisions, racism, classism or sexism as a product of childishly tribal instincts.
Instead, they conducted themselves in a specious manner by conducting a hearing that was more a show force. The Senate Judiciary committee was essentially eleven men with their minds already made up against one woman with the courage to stand her ground. The committee even hid behind a “hired gun” female who was doing the dirty work of asking the question. Thus we learned how the “system” really works when it is confronted by a threat to its power. It runs and hides like a bunch of little boys who broke something valuable and don’t want to admit it.
Kavanaugh’s principal (not exactly principled) defense was that his character was being assassinated by the nature of the accusations. But that deflection still didn’t legitimately answer the question: “Did you attempt to rape her? Have you lied about it?”
Gut check time
Here comes Halloween, the night when thoughts of death and hauntings swirl around the minds of millions of people. As a Hallmark Holiday, it may not be taken all that seriously. But as a seasonal celebration with pagan and religious origins it owes its history to All Hallow’s Eve, the annual time to remember the dead.
Mortal risks
So that’s that. No more pissing around on my part. I’m going to follow my doctor’s orders going forward. Because this past spring, a longtime friend who is also a running coach suffered a scary heart attack out of the blue. He’s been running for fifty years. Didn’t help.
Which is why that moment climbing out of the pool this morning felt so immediate. I knew what I’d do if it were the last workout of my life.
Suffer in joy
We Run and Ride 