Once A Runner…

How I Got to Here…

So, yeah, I started running fairly seriously some time in 1970 when my dad was in Vietnam for his second tour. I also played baseball and tried out for football. I wasn’t very good at either sport, though I really enjoyed baseball. I was tall and skinny and not very coordinated. Running became more my thing, but that was before Frank Shorter won the marathon and Dave Wottle’s amazing finish in the 800 finals in Munich, so the storied “Running Boom” of the late Seventies was still a few years away at that time. For most of my peers back then, running was sort of just something that we did as part of playing an organized sport, never really a sport unto itself.

Johnston Junior High School, which apparently no longer exists in Anniston, Alabama, didn’t have a track team when I attended, so mostly I just ran lap after lap around the athletic fields with some kid whose name I will probably never remember. It’d be nice to remember that kid’s name some day because he had come from some school up North where they did promote track and cross country and he really encouraged me to see things differently and just run.

I didn’t actually run track until my eighth grade year in Kirby, Texas (outside San Antonio), where I ran the quarter-mile at Kirby Junior High School. I broke Brad Palmer’s school record (59.9), set the previous year, and Gilbert Encarnacion — if I recall correctly — returned me the favor the following year, lowering my 59.7 mark to 59.5.

At Judson High School in Converse, Texas, I ran the mile and cross country (usually two-mile road courses back then). I lettered in the mile my junior year when I placed fifth in the District 29AAAA meet with a 4:42. My regular running buddy, Danny Busheme, ran a 4:30 and finished second to Wayne Becken of Roosevelt High School to qualify for Regionals. Along with most of the distance runners from the track team and the cross country team, I also ran in local fun runs and events sponsored by the San Antonio Road Runners and was an SARR member for several years.

Though we had no official cross country team my sophomore year, Tony Lozano, Burt Richardson, Mike Terry, Danny Busheme, and I were permitted to run in the Region IV cross country championships in San Marcos, Texas. The following two years, Judson High School earned a trip to San Marcos by winning back-to-back District 29AAAA championships in 1974 and 1975.

My brother, Darrell, (a half-miler and a member of the cross country team) and I almost didn’t get to go to Regionals in my senior year. The coach threatened to throw us off the team for training every day — he caught us doing an easy run the day before the first cross country meet of that season. As it was, I ended up quitting track that year because that cross country coach became the head track coach. His training methods were stuck in the past, based on hard interval work at race pace and supposedly designed for “peaking” for every meet in the season.

Danny Busheme, Darrell, and I had learned from Tony Lozano the Lydiard system where our training was carefully structured for peaking for an intended target race — in our case, the district meet, the most important meet of our season. The situation became intolerable when it was made abundantly clear that any compromise must be all on our part and none on the coach’s, so Danny Busheme and I walked away from the program altogether. Darrell stayed, and I think he might have been the smartest of us three for doing so, but I just couldn’t pull tractor tires with the off-season football players when I knew I should be out on the roads building an endurance base. I still ran some on my own, though, and I had plans to run in college, but that never happened.

When my dad retired from the Army, there were five of us kids at home with me being the oldest. Going away to university wasn’t going to happen and even a local college was going to be rough on the budget. The Army still had the Vietnam-Era G.I. Bill back then, and I decided a four-year hitch was worth getting college paid for by my Uncle Sam. That four-year hitch turned into a career that lasted almost 21 years. I went through most of my Army career still believing I was a runner, and there were several years in there when I worked pretty hard to prepare (not really training, but at least putting in mileage) for road races — mostly 10Ks — and I also ran the Mule Mountain Marathon (from Bisbee to Sierra Vista, Arizona) in 1994. I barely finished that marathon, but I finished it.

I was posting maximum scores on my Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT) for most of my last several years in the service. Prior to that, I was mostly interested in just doing the minimums for push-ups and sit-ups to save most of my energy for the two-mile run. Yeah, kind of stupid, but I was a runner. Push-ups and sit-ups weren’t the part I liked to put my effort into. And, yeah, there were more than a few times when I just wasn’t in good enough shape to do very well and was happy just to pass the APFT at all.

To be sure, there were also stretches in there where I fell out of the pack of runners and did very poorly at keeping up any regular kind of running. As a result, by the time I had hung up my Army uniform for the last time and retired, I wound up about 24 pounds heavier than I was when I enlisted. After two years working overseas and then returning to the States to go back to school full time and finally get a degree while also working a full-time job, I was even worse off. Inertia had set in and the weight piled on as my conditioning deteriorated badly.

After earning my degree, I started running a bit again and made it through a few 10Ks here in Georgia, but a knee injury sidelined me in July 2002. Since then, I’ve done very little — only a little walking for a while during several different periods of time before stopping again. And that has further complicated matters. Three days before my 50th birthday, I rummaged around until I found the bathroom scale, dusted it off, and stepped onto the damned thing. I weighed 206 pounds — seventy pounds more than I did when I graduated high school!

So, my early birthday present to myself was to start a real diet. Not a quickie weight-loss diet — I’m talking a complete change in eating habits. No more processed foods. Only lean meat or fish at every meal with fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables. A little over a week later, I’m down a few pounds — largely water loss since I have also cut my salt intake to the bone, I don’t have my usual headaches in the morning, and my wife reports that my snoring isn’t waking her at night.

For my birthday, I bought a new pair of shoes and I started a walk/run program — a whole lot more walking than running at the moment, to be sure, but a good start nonetheless. I’ve been at that for five days now. If I can keep my wits about me this time, unlike in 2002, maybe I can keep my impatience from taking me too fast or too far too soon again and I can avoid an injury.

The problem is, naturally, that my mind remembers how it feels to fly and my body is still grounded, unable to soar as I once could. Of course, I like remembering that I once did because I’ve got — no, I need — to believe I still can some day — not as fast or far as when I was young, but just being able to really run again and just keep on running is my dream now.

One year from now, I want to be running around White Rock Lake in Dallas with my brother, who’s still out there running 5Ks at a 7-minute+ pace practically on the eve of his 49th birthday.

He’ll probably smoke me, but I can’t think of any better way to help him celebrate his 50th birthday next year.