Direct Translation Impossible: Tales from the Land of the Rising Sun by Frisk Chad

Author:Frisk, Chad [Frisk, Chad]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781619612921
Publisher: Chad Frisk
Published: 2014-10-09T21:00:00+00:00

Adventures in Track and Field

One of the best decisions that I ever made as an ALT was to start participating in after-school sports. In Japanese schools, every student is a member of either a sports team or a culture club (options include band, computer literacy, and art). Students are in the same club until they graduate. They practice five to six days a week and end up getting very close to their fellow club members. The first club that I joined was the track and field club.

When I say joined, I mean literally joined. I wasn’t a coach. I did what the kids did, and what the kids did was no joke. They ran. I ran. I ran and I didn’t take it easy, on them or myself. When they ran sprints, I ran sprints. And won. It helped that I typically ran with the girls28. I was often so exhausted after track and field practice that I would bike home, buy dinner at a convenience store, and then pass out without eating it. Around 7:30 PM. I often slept until 6 the next morning.

By the end of my time in Japan I was close with a lot of the kids on the team, but it took time to get to that point. I went once or twice a week for about a month during my first year, until one day a girl asked me, “Why are you still here?” I found other things to do for a while after that.

But I kept going back.

My most vivid memory from track and field practice is of The Endless Relay. The Endless Relay is a hellish thing. I don’t remember the exact specifications, but I do remember that you have to run some ungodly number of 125-meter sprints in a short period of time. A month or two before I left the school, I was running track on the day of an Endless Relay. “Would you like to join us?” the kids asked innocently. “Hey, yeah, sounds great,” I said.

It was not great.

The running was miserable. Some people may have vomited. In between sets the ground looked like it was littered with dead bodies. I think I may have blacked out for a period of time. Eventually we finished, but the coach may have called it off early to avoid littering the ground with actual dead bodies.

When everyone peeled themselves from the dirt and gathered for the daily see-you-later speech, a weird thing happened. People29 started bursting into tears. Other people got up and made impromptu speeches about how much they loved each other. We sat there for five minutes basking in whatever brain chemical it was we were basking in. “This,” I thought to myself, “is what a collective runner’s high feels like.” It was crazy. I’ve been a member of sports teams for my entire life but have never experienced anything like that. I guess that’s what happens when you do the same thing with the same people every day for three years.

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