The Fall of Rome by Martha Southgate

Author:Martha Southgate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Speed

LONG-DISTANCE RUNNING is largely about pain and the transcendence of that pain. The pain, of course, is obvious the first time one runs anything more than a quarter mile or so. What at first perhaps felt liberating and easy begins to start offering a twinge in the foot there, a tightening of the calf here. As you continue, your lungs begin to cry out for more air, every rock on the roadway becomes an insult, sharp beneath your feet. Your whole body gradually becomes taut as a rubber band, begging only for relief, and then, just when you cannot bear another minute, it comes. You are suddenly above the pain, outside your body, and a strange and fragile joy comes over you. It doesn’t last long, and you cannot force it to come. But the effort toward it is one that brings me back to running day after day after day.

When you run competitively, another element enters the picture: simple fear. The fear before every race that this will be the time that your legs give out, this will be the time that everyone runs past you, this will be the time that you throw up before you finish. Humiliation. Pain. Loss. This will be the time. One has to transcend that, too. It’s not really something one can explain to the boys. They have to find their own way through it. All I hoped to do was to offer the Bryson boy some assistance.

He took me up on my offer to work with him individually, although he kept a wary attitude. He always did what I asked, but I felt he was holding something in abeyance, some fear or concern regarding me. We worked around it, but it remained, present and undeniable. Still, I found that working with him was a source of great pleasure. His initial poor condition was thoroughly eradicated by this point, and he could easily cover the 3.1-mile cross-country course in ninteen or twenty minutes. We were working to bring him well under that—somewhere around seventeen or eighteen. I thought that he had the potential to break our course record of 16:37 by several seconds. I had talked to him about that, and about the potential he had beyond that as well. Gifts are not given to be thrown away. This I know. I tried to impart some of my knowledge of life to him as well in this time we spent together. I told him of how I was accepted into Harvard, my excitement at arriving, and my hard work while there.

“That’s a good school,” he ventured.

“It was. It still maintains a fine reputation, but …”

He looked at me, confused. “But what?”

“Should you be fortunate enough to attend such an institution, Mr. Bryson, I hope that you will realize the pitfalls of a kind of victim mentality that a lot of young men and women like yourself have adopted in recent years. By sticking close to one another and reinforcing each other’s dubious ideals … well, I’ve seen a good many young men like you go by the wayside.

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