Facing the Finish Line
Wrestling with the past and future of an athletic identity
Personal narrative by ANDREW WISE
It’s about 12:30 a.m. according to the clock on the microwave. I’ve been lying in bed at the Black Bear Inn, a seedy, beige, crumbling motel in Salem, Oregon, for two hours, eyes shut, trying to force my heart rate to slow down and my brain to stop churning. Neither organ would cooperate.
This is the seventh time that I’ve slept at the Black Bear the night before a championship race. I’m in my fifth and final year running long distance for Western Washington University. In that time, I’ve gone from barely belonging and surviving the day-to-day existence required of a collegiate distance runner, to being in charge of defining that same work ethic and trying to talk other guys into working just as hard.
That is, I guess, a fairly standard progression, the exact sort of arcing metaphor that is supposed to make sport meaningful. I’ll be slotted into the volumes of nice stories that my coach tells recruits when they come to visit campus. Years of training and racing and holding together tattered tendons and shaky nerves will be consolidated into a neat set of times, getting steadily faster. This progression is a product, he’d tell them, of the carefully cultivated training recipe put into practice by this particular program.
But in this moment, lying in bed at the Black Bear, staring at the microwave clock, trying to remember the moments along the way that punctuated that progression is like grasping at smoke. The edges of those mental images are softening, and already they’re starting to slip away.
That’s because distance running has been this omnipresent entity that has shaped every aspect of my day since I showed up in Bellingham as a scrawny, stubborn freshman. I got to spend years falling asleep to visions of races to come, of the strength that would surely come with another year of hundred-mile weeks and repeats on the track. Now, there’s this cliff looming closer with each passing day, and the edge of that cliff is at the finish line of tomorrow’s race.
I have a sudden urge not to sleep at all, to savor and stretch every second between now and that finish line tomorrow. But recklessness didn’t get me here. The strangeness of distance running as a pursuit lies in its simplicity. There is little in the way of revolutionary technique or technology that could ever fundamentally change who any of us are as runners. Progress in this game is achieved through impossible quantities of mundane, unpretentious, barely perceptible work — molecule by molecule.
And that is, perhaps, what’s most torturous about the night before a distance race. The future is predetermined by the past. Even within that past there is no single moment that nudged fate in either direction. It’s like a combination lock with thousands of little metal wheels lined up in a row; one for each day of training. If the teeth stick in the tumblers and it fails to come free, it could be any one of those thousands of wheels turned a notch too far.
But those days are all past, their positions fixed. This is it.
I finally fell asleep because I was able to find some comfort in the impossibility of perfection, that the best I will ever be able to do, distance running or otherwise, is try to string together as many good days in a row as I can.
The cliff still looms, but there’s no sense spending too much time starting off the edge. It seems much more sensible, at this point, to go at it full-speed, launch off that edge with everything I’ve got, and trust in my ability to land.