Sidelines
Perseverance runs its
course at ILH meetMOST sports look fun. Football? You get to hit people. The long jump? Take a flying leap into a big sand box. Soccer? Kick the ball. Kick it!
Baseball seems like a pretty good time, aside from the getting beaned in the head and the steroids.
Cross country does not look fun.
Many cross country runners look miserable, or at least many of them did yesterday at the Interscholastic League of Honolulu championships.
Cross country runners run, and run, and run. Up hills. Around corners. Down hills. Through cheering crowds. They run all alone, with nothing in their ears but the rhythm of their pounding soles, and their beating hearts and their breath.
It doesn't look easy. It doesn't look fun.
It changes them. The course does. The day does. They start out with bright colors and cheers, galloping out of the gate. But then the heat kicks in, and the hills do, and the pace does. And their faces change. Some look determined, some pained, some blank, fading, lost, like they've gone 12 rounds with Sonny Liston.
"A lot of cross country is all about," says Iolani coach Greg Char, "it's mental toughness."
It looks like it. Char's star pupil, Nicole Anderson, is one of the few who seem unaffected. Anderson runs purposefully and strong, she runs away with the girls race. She makes all this look easy.
"I thought they were right behind me," she says.
"I just ran."
But others aren't as lucky, aren't as good. The cramps close in on them in the final meters. Or in the middle of the race and again with every step. Fatigue descends upon them.
"I want to throw up," a girl says afterward.
One boy staggers and groans in the steps after the finish line. An opponent offers support, and he leans on him, just like the song. Cross country runners all feel the same pain, run the same race. It can take the same thing out of all of them.
It is the end of the season, and it hasn't gotten any easier. Yet here they are, week after week.
Punch-drunk love.
Another boy bends over. His body tells him to bend over, hands on knees. It isn't the best thing to do, but his body won't listen.
"Stand up," the trainer tells him. "Expand your lungs. Put your hands over your head."
The boy tells her of a runner that had collapsed, back on the course.
"Are you serious?"
He was. They bring him in on a stretcher strapped to a cart. They lay him on a table in the shade. They pour water in his mouth and on his head. They measure his blood pressure and take his pulse and put ice chips on his body.
Heat exhaustion.
"We have a lot of that," says Kamehameha coach Steve Jenness. It's one of his guys. "Not our team, actually. But in our league, because we run on a lot of hot Saturday mornings like this."
There is a big crowd, but little panic. You don't want to be niele (nosy), but you can't help but lean in to see if he's OK.
"He was fairly well along into that process," Jenness says of his runner.
But nobody seems too worried. They take every precaution, a team leans over him with concern for minutes on end, with the water and the ice and the stethoscopes, but nobody seems too worried.
"I'm a firefighter," Jenness says. "We had another coach who was, and his dad is even a firefighter, so we we're kind of on top of it, we've seen that before."
At last, an ambulance comes, just to make sure. The lights are in a perpetual dance, flash, flash, flash.
By now everyone's pain has subsided into a joyful fatigue. The cheer has returned, and the light in their eyes is brighter. They even run again, jogging together in cool-down packs.
They were exhausted, they were lost. But now comes the experience of having given all, of having poured yourself empty, and feeling it slowly come back.
The ambulance's back doors slam shut with finality. Its lights still dance, and the ambulance slowly ambles away into the dust, fittingly, up the path, following that white line, along the cross country course.
"We've got to see how (he) gets himself together," Jenness says. "He should be able to get himself back together. It definitely took something out of him."
This sport takes it out of all of them. And yet it comes back. They come back. It doesn't look like any fun, but still they keep going. Still they run. Their ears filled with the rhythm of their pounding soles, and their beating hearts and their breath.
Kalani Simpson can be reached at ksimpson@starbulletin.com