songs of experience

Here’s a story I wrote when I was “once a runner.” It was in a column called The Black Spike that I wrote for an on-line running site called Doitsports. Those guys at Doitsports were way ahead of their time! They were blogging before blogging was cool (in fact, they weren’t even calling it blogging back then). I really appreciated the opportunity they gave me to give voice to my thoughts and feelings. Up until then, I had only been able to run my thoughts out, not write them.
Here’s the story:

by Joan Nesbit

Somewhere Around Mile Three
I wanted to wait until all the running magazine articles came out about this year’s cross country nationals before I wrote my version of the story. I wanted to see if they’d get it right. They didn’t. What happened on December 2, 1995, was the greatest moment of my long, and undoubtedly bumpy, running career — and it wasn’t just because I won or that I beat Lynn Jennings (the Boston Globe’s definition of victory) — it was how I won.

After the race the press pried to find out how, indeed, I pulled it off. They asked the usual, “How tall are you? How much do you weigh? How old? HOW old?!” and then, “How do you train? How many miles per week,” etc. I dutifully answered all their questions — the facts, ma’am, just the facts — but couldn’t stop shaking my head, sort of chuckling to myself, because during all this time, my team, my UNC athletes (nine of whom had crammed into Jason’s Suburban that fits six comfortably and drove 14 hours up from Chapel Hill), were banging on the clear plastic press tent screaming, “She’s our coach! Wahoo Carolina! Yeah Joan!”. . . so much so that one press official grumbled, “Someone calm those kids down.” Calm them down? No way! They’re the reason I won. They’re the “how.” Sure, I may have visualized myself running in front and pressing the pace, Mark Nenow-style, but I never could have foreseen what actually occurred that nearly perfect day in December when I/WE won.

The facts were I was 4:52 at the one-mile and 10:0-something at the two, then raced home to a 19:05 PR for 6,017m (an easy PR, eh? 6,017 meters? Why not 6,016m or even 6,018m? Let’s be really nutty and round it up to an even 6,020, OK?). Anyway, the facts say I ran alone nearly the whole way, but the truth is (and there is a difference between facts and truth). . . the truth is, I was carried in that race. My athletes’ cheers, which I heard on every inch of the course, allowed me to transcend the physical and fly — almost literally — up and down and around those Franklin Park loops (yes, Sara Magic, even Bear Cage).

This has happened only a few times in 15+ years of racing. When I won Falmouth in 1984 I remember watching myself from about two inches above my body, thinking, “Damn, you’re running fast,” yet feeling no pain. Then in 1992 at the Olympic Trials in the 3K I had so focused on running 8:52 that I became “one with my splits,” so to speak. In ‘92 my bib number was 701 and the splits I’d figured out to run 8:52 had me hitting 7:01 with 600m to go. Well, I was in such a zone that night, cruising with a pack of five, that when I saw 7:01 on the track clock I thought I would make the team. I didn’t. I got 4th, but I did run 8:51.92, one tenth of a second faster than the time I’d envisioned for a year.

To get back to the Boston story, my version that is, most of the reporters in the press tent stared at me dumbfounded when I broke down in tears and mumbled something like, “It’s not a physical thing. It’s a spiritual thing. Today was a community effort. I didn’t win. WE won.” And when the next question came, “So when did you pull away from Jennings?” I wanted to shake him, like Bill Murray did in the film version of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, “You just don’t get it, do you?!” But maybe some of you reading this might just get it. I don’t believe for a minute this sport is about winning at all costs, big prize money, or fat (”phat” to my runners) shoe contracts. . . or about who’s training under which flawless, new system or any of those temporary, limited — and often limiting — things. I train hard and race even harder for one reason: because I love it. And I believe my athletes screamed their lungs raw for me because they love it too.

Shakespeare once wrote, “The play’s the thing.” Well, I say the race is the thing. Racing fast is its own reward. I pounded as hard as I possibly could that day up in Franklin Park because I wanted to make a statement. It wasn’t the in-your-face statement the press is used to hearing, but more of a *to-the-stars* message from me to my team. I wanted my effort to convey, “Believe. Try. Reach. Strain. Love!” And then, somewhere around mile three, my race became a song. “Halleluiah,” I ran. “Halleluiah,” I sang.