Track and Field Blogs - Luke Humphrey

A lot of people asked me within a couple days after Boston, "What's next?" I really tried to shy away, because in my mind, retirement was the first option. I really want to talk about is the fire and desire to become the absolute best you can.

As I eluded to, I was pretty bummed after Boston and really had no desire to go through the cycle anymore. However, after a few days, the depression really turned into anger and frustration. Over the last?year and a half I have gone through an amazing transition as a runner. I have been consistant, realized what I truly need to work on, how to stay healthy, and?most importantly, train at a new level. It just hasn't translated into anything spectacular on the roads. Training is a funny thing. Sometimes you run races that seemingly come out of nowhere and tank the ones?you thought you could crush. AND- when you really lay it on the line, success or failure is only a breath of difference.

What got me out of my funk was this passage from Once a Runner (I don't mean to write as if I am speaking from the written word of God, but it just clicked.)

"Quenton Cassidy's method of dealing with fundamental doubts was simple: he didn't think about them at all. These questions had been considered a long time ago, decisions made, answers recorded, and the book closed. If it had to be reopened everytime the going got rough, he would spend more time rationalizing than training; his log would start to disclose embarrasing information, perhaps even blank squares. Even a self-made obsessive-compulsive could not tolerate that. He was uninterested in in the perspective of the fringe runners, the philosopher runners, the training rats; those who sat around reading abtruse and meaningless articles in Runner's World, coining yet more phrases to describe the indescribable, waxing mystical over various states of euphoria that the anoited were allegedly privy to.

On the track, the Cassidy's of the world ate such specimens alive.

Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes. They came, when they did, quite naturally and was content to enjoy them privately. He ran not for crypto-religous reasons, but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a tenth of a second, by an inch, by two feet or two yards, than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province). If he could conquer the weakness, the cowardice in himself, he would not worry about the rest, it would come. Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed, strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge. Such rites demand, if they are to be meaningful at all, a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.

Anything else that comes from the process was by-product. Certain compliments and observations made him uneasy; he explained that he was just a runner; an athlete, really, with an absurdly difficult task. He was not a health nut, was not out to mold himself a stylishly slim body. He did not live on nuts and berries; if the furnace burned hot enough, anything would burn, even Big Macs. He listened carefully to his body and heeded strange requests. Like a pregnant woman, he sometimes sought artichoke hearts, pickled beets, smoked oysters. His daily toil was ardous; satisfying on the whole, but not bounding joyous nature romp described in the magazines. Other runners, real runners, understood this quite well.

Quenton Cassidy knew what the mystic-runners, the joggers, the runner-poets, the Zen runners, and others of their ilk were talking about. But he also knew that their euphoric selves were generally nowhere to be seen on dark, rainy mornings. They primarily wanted to talk it, not do it. Cassidy very early on understood that a true runner ran even when he didn't feel like it, and raced when he was supposed to, without excuses and with nothing held back. He ran to win, would die in the process if necessary, and was unimpressed by those who disavowed such a base motivation. You were not allowed to renounce that which you never possessed, he thought.

The true competitive runner, simmering in his own existential juices, endured his melancholia the only way he knew how: gently, together with those few others who also endured it, yet very much alone. He ran because it grounded him in basics. There was both life and death in it; it was unadultered by media hype, trivial cares, political meddling. He suspected it kept him from the most real variety of schizophrenia that the republic was then sprouting like mushrooms on a stump.

Running to him was real; the way he did it the realist thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made hime free."

I am a runner, will always be a runner, and it's the only thing I really understand. There is no retirement, no such thing. To be done would only mean that I had quit.

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