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[at-l] again: if you just substitute "hike" for "run"



If you just substitute "hike" for "run", this could describe any day hiker,
section hiker, or Godluv'em throughhiker who ever hit "the zone" hiking....

THEY RUN AND THEY RUN...
 
This is the season of the lonely sport.

It is called cross country.

The glory and the glamour are on the gridiron. The guts are out on
the course where the cross country meets are run.

Football players perform in front of thousands of frenzied,
shrieking fans in plush stadiums. Their rib-rattling efforts are
cheered on by long-legged, short-skirted cheerleaders. They are
outfitted with the best equipment plastic, rubber, and jersey can
provide.

Their every hang-nail is ministered to by a battery of trainers,
physicians, and surgeons. Sports writers give them flashy names
like "Tank" and "Animal" and "Roadrunner", and pour out reams of
purple prose, quoting faithfully every belch and grunt, while radio
and TV casters describe their every move in breathless decibels.

The football player gets the stats and the ink and the homecoming
queen.

The cross country runner gets leg cramps, seared lungs, and the dry
heaves.

Most cross country meets are about as well attended as a
refrigerator auction in Siberia, or the commission of an act of
hari-kari.

Cross country runners have no equipment problems. They put on
shorts, maybe a t-shirt, and some shoes. If you're really sporty,
you wear a headband to keep the sweat out of your eyes.

Football players hear the swelling crescendo of 70,000 voices
screaming to score. Cross Country runners hear their own rasping
breathing, the pounding of their blood in their head, the crunching
rhythm of their own footsteps . . . and a little voice whispering
taunts, asking maddening questions: "Only three more miles,
spaghetti legs, only three more miles . . . will you make it? Or
are you gonna quit? Come on, lie to your legs some more; tell them
just one more hill then you'll sit down and rest."

They call it the loneliness of the long distance runner. It is an
apt phrase. For the runner has only one other companion in each
race . . . his name is pain.

They draw elaborate patterns of X's and O's in football, they send
out scouts, they use computers, and they draw up game plans more
complex and involved then the D-Day invasion of the beaches at
Normandy.

But the strategy in cross country is simple and brutal. You go out
and run and you run until you think you simply cannot take one more
step, you run until it feels like your head is a hornets' nest with
its own population explosion and your lungs are on fire and your
heart is a beating jackhammer fast and your stomach is churning
with nausea and your legs weigh 400 pounds apiece and you're
wondering seriously about your own sanity, wondering why the name
of exhaustion you ever answered the starter's gun . . . well, you
run until all of this happens . . . and then you run some more.

Cross country runners perform in no plush stadium. Their course may
be laid out over a golf course. Or through a park. Or over plowed
fields. Up the hill, down the hill, across the reek, through the
trees, around the briar patch, watch out for (ouch!) rocks.

They have no marching bands, no flash card sections. Their
cheerleaders are the birds and the squirrels, which, startled but
curious, watch in head-tilted puzzlement as this strange creature
which walks upright goes galloping on in his underwear.

Those who coach the lonely sport will tell you a cross country
runner needs: (a) endurance, (b) mental discipline, (c) a high
threshold of pain.

And a cross country runner himself/herself may find it difficult to
tell you why he runs, just as the mountain climber may find it
difficult to tell you why he scales the summit. Or tries.

But one put it this way: "Finishing first is a great feeling, sure.
There is nothing like being first through the chute. But I'd still
run even if I finished dead last every time.

"I guess it's because you get to know yourself . . . the hard way.
You run and you get tired and you push yourself and you get a
second wind and a third and then you're just going on guts, and
when it's really tough, when you feel like you've had the spit
kicked out of you, why it's like you're not part of your body
anymore, it's like your up above watching yourself . . . it's
almost like everything is stripped away clear down to your soul, and
it's all there for you to see."

I guess I just like to look. So I keep running . . ."


Have an affirming day,

=====
Sloetoe


   "I strive to be the man my children think I am."

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