Go Where the Hurdles Take You

Part II: In My End is my Beginning

“It seemed to him as if the river had something special to tell him, something he did not know yet, which was still awaiting him.”
-From Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Three months after my high school graduation, I entered Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA, about a 90-minute drive from my house. I think it would be fair to say that I was unhappy every day of the two and a half years I spent there. Much of my discontent had to do with the fact that I missed the hospital. And I didn’t know how to explain the whole experience to all these new people. I never felt like, if I truly opened up, people would get it.

The academic culture at F&M dismayed me. Even though I had attended Malvern Preparatory School – a private school with high academic standards – classes had been easy enough that I could do well without putting forth a great amount of effort. So I had never been forced to question the value of an education. My mindset had always been, go to class during the day, then go to practice afterward. The only thing that ever changed was that basketball practice became track practice. But school was kind of just there. I didn’t like it or dislike it.

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But at F&M every course was hard. Intro level courses required hours of homework nightly.

So I found myself needing to figure out who I wanted to be as a student, who I wanted to be beyond college. I had always told myself that I’d become an Olympic-level track athlete or professional writer. I liked to hurdle and I liked to read, so both possibilities seemed practical to me. But now, they both seemed far-fetched. I was at a Division III school, so what were the chances of me ever running professionally? And I was struggling in my English classes, reading archaic poetry and Victorian fiction that made my eyes glaze over. So what were the chances that I’d become a writer?

Even though I hadn’t felt close to most of my peers at Malvern Prep, I felt like they knew me. They knew my story. They had seen all I had accomplished, and were aware of how far I had come to accomplish it. Not just Children’s Hospital and aplastic anemia, but also quitting basketball to run the hurdles, finding my athletic identity, blazing my own path.

Three months later I was a college freshman surrounded by strangers who knew nothing of my story. They believed in alcohol like I believed in CHOP. They believed in studying like I believed in hurdling. There was never any chance that I would fit in there.

But I really don’t think Franklin & Marshall was all that different from any other college. From what I can tell, drinking and studying are the primary options everywhere.

The only A I earned in my time at F&M was in an introductory level Philosophy course. It was the most nonsensical stuff I’d ever heard of, but it was the only stuff that made sense to me. The professor claimed you couldn’t assume that just because the chair you were sitting on was the chair you were sitting on, the chair was real. That made sense to me. He was making a point about impermanence, about how, because nothing lasts forever in its current state, nothing is what it seems to be. Everything, including ourselves, may have a temporary identity, but that’s all it is – temporary. So no, that chair is not a chair, and you are not yourself, and nothing that is happening is happening. That made sense to me. Because I had faced the reality of my own impermanence less than a year earlier, it made perfect sense to me.

I took a semester of Calculus. I didn’t even need to take a math to graduate. But I had taken Pre-Calculus in high school, so I figured Calculus would be no sweat. It was trouble-free for the first month, which consisted of Pre-Calculus review. But it all went downhill from there.

I took an interesting course called the History and Philosophy of Science (HAPOS). It was a humanities class, not a science class, which is why I thought I’d like it. I did okay – a C+ I think. Unfortunately, the course emphasized history and science much more than philosophy.

I took Latin one semester because I thought it would be easy (I had had a year of Latin in high school). It wasn’t easy. Instead of dropping it, I stopped going to class. I only meant to miss one class, but one became two, two became three, three became a month. I saw the professor running one day out on the track before practice. I didn’t realize it was him until he had come right up on me. We made eye contact and I felt myself thinking Oh shit, and I might even have said it out loud. He gave me a quick glance that said I’m gonna fail your sorry ass as he kept on running.

Or maybe I was just imagining his reaction. I hadn’t gone to class often enough for him to even know who I was.

I hated school. To this day I have dreams that I’m running to class but can’t find the right building, can’t find the right room. I have dreams that I’ve signed up for three classes but only go to two. I’m forever haunted by all those classes I skipped, all those classes I dropped. I despised the fact that after all I had learned at Children’s Hospital, I was now being forced to measure my personal worth by my performance in these classes.

I studied a lot actually. I studied all the time. My favorite subject, my only subject, was the hurdles. I didn’t just want to do well in the hurdles. I just didn’t want to find ways to improve in the hurdles. I wanted to understand the hurdles, as an art form, as a means of self-expression, as a path to self-discovery. I couldn’t imagine life without the hurdles. I lived for the next workout, the next race.

This was back in the day before there was an internet – before YouTube and all that. I subscribed to Track & Field News and sought out the hurdling photos. I’d study them, analyze them, compare what those hurdlers were doing technically to what I was doing. I bought a copy of Ken Doherty’s Track & Field Omnibook – a monstrous coaching manual for all the events in the sport. I read the section on the hurdles, studied the workouts, and incorporated many of them into my own training.

The hurdling section included a T&FN interview with world record holder Renaldo Nehemiah, and another one with his coach, Jean Poquette. I soaked in the knowledge from both men. Nehemiah spoke of the importance of rising to the occasion, of knowing how to compete fearlessly. He talked about the feeling of running over the hurdles – the feeling that the legs never deviate from the sprinting motion. I dreamed of being able to hurdle like that. Poquette broke down all the workouts that he had Renaldo do as a high schooler. Demanding hurdle-endurance workouts, half-miler type workouts.

The hurdling section might have been a total of ten pages. I read those ten pages over and over and over again. I also purchased a copy of The Hurdler’s Bible by legendary coach Wilbur Ross, read it from cover to cover, memorized the Ten Commandments of Hurdling that appeared in the opening pages, read about the careers and styles of great hurdlers from the past, analyzed their technique, digested all of Ross’ workouts and drills, started to envision creating my own workouts, my own drills.

My sophomore year I became real good friends with a wrestler down the hall from me named Joe Habib. Wrestling was a Division I sport at F&M, although all other sports competed at the Division III level. Joe had been a stand-out wrestler in high school. He told me he had never lost a match, and that he had won state titles in his weight class two years in a row. In college, he was dealing with the same problem that I was dealing with, except on a much larger scale: at this level, everybody was good. After dominating high school opponents, Joe now wasn’t even the top wrestler in his weight class on the team. Competition was fierce, and practices were brutal. He often came back to the dorm after practice looking beat-up, beat-down, frustrated with himself for not proving himself to the coach, and angry with the coach for not giving him a fair opportunity to excel.

Joe and I had many long philosophical conversations about sports, we spent many hours listening to each other’s stories about that day’s practice, that day’s workout, our athletic goals, how we were holding onto them, and how they were slipping away. These conversations served as much more than mere venting sessions, or even therapy sessions. I found that they validated my viewpoint that my passion for hurdling, and my total immersion in it, was just as valid as any of the academic passions, ambitions, and hopes of any of my peers.

What I realize now is that I was engaged in an experiment. I was trying to pursue an idea that was evolving in my mind but that still hadn’t fully taken shape. The idea was that the attempt to fulfill one’s athletic potential can serve as a road to self-discovery, inner awakening, and ultimately fulfillment of one’s destiny. So, even as I grew increasingly aware that I would never be a great hurdler like the ones I read about in Track & Field News and The Hurdler’s Bible, I knew I had to keep hurdling, that I had to continue following this path. My experience at the hospital had informed me that I had no other choice, and I felt like the answer to the two-fold question, “Why did I get sick, and why did I get better so quickly?” could only be satisfactorily answered by continuing to give my life to the hurdles.

Inspired by my conversations with Joe, and by my own explorations in the world of hurdling, I began to grow convinced that hurdling was more than an event in track & field, that it was in fact, an art form, no less so than painting, sculpting, singing, playing an instrument, or any other creative endeavor. For me, hurdling’s appeal had to do with much more than just winning races. There was an aesthetic aspect to it. To run a hurdle race was to express oneself artistically. I felt like I was becoming a better person through hurdling, that it was enabling me to be more genuine than I otherwise could’ve been. In my mind, I was an artist, not a mere athlete.

What I liked most about hurdling was that it was a rhythmic event. At F&M back then, we practiced on a wooden track in the winter. Indoor tracks nowadays have synthetic surfaces, but back in the day we ran on the boards. You’d think that a wooden surface would’ve been hard on the legs, but it was quite the opposite. Wood gives. Wood is pliable. That indoor wooden track at F&M was, is, and forever shall be, my favorite track for hurdle workouts. Hurdling on that surface brought out the percussive, primal qualities of the event. Hurdling on those boards, I could hear the bass of each footstep as it echoed through the converted warehouse. When landing after clearing a hurdle, the lead leg boomed and the trail leg boomed right behind it. I loved that sound.

I knew, by how hurdling made me feel, that I was on to something big. I knew I had to continue to pursue this path, even if I didn’t know where it was going to take me. Especially because I didn’t know where it was going to take me. That was where the fun lie – in the not knowing. I didn’t care if my path differed from that of my peers. I didn’t need for them to believe in my dream. Good grades that would lead to good jobs that would pay good salaries was all well and good, but that’s not where my heart was. I had to figure this hurdling thing out.

A girl who lived down the hall from me was a very good artist. Margaret could produce good work in a variety of media. Sculpting, painting, drawing, photography. She had an artist’s mind, an artist’s way of looking at the world. Curious, inquisitive, open. I remember her once talking about visiting a farm and commenting on how adorable the cows were. How could you ever eat a burger, she asked, after you’ve seen a cow up close?

When I told Margaret of my belief that hurdling, too, is an art form, and that I, like her, was an artist in my own way, she quickly and wholeheartedly agreed. All athletes are artists, she said, but the competitive aspect masks that fact. “You do the same things that artists do,” she said. “You study, you learn new things, you try them out, you practice so you can get better. How are athletes not artists?”

But not all of my peers were so supportive. And again, that didn’t bother me, as long as they stayed out of my way and let me do my thing. I remember one time I was skipping rope in my room. Not a cool thing to do, I agree, when considering I lived on the second floor of the house. That year, I lived in a two-story building off-campus with about twenty people in it. We called it a “co-op.” The “cooperative” part was that we all had to chip in with keeping the house clean, preparing meals, and other duties. It was a nice place to live – away from the madness of dorm life.

One of my best friends, Steve Elias, lived on the floor below me. I liked Steve a lot because he was one of the few people who didn’t subscribe to the notion that earning a bunch of money after graduating was the ultimate goal in life. But still, Steve was more practical than I was. He spent most of his time studying. When a group of people was going out to party, Steve was the one who’d stay in to do work. In the shallow sense, he was a nerd, but in the real sense, he was his own person.

So, when I was skipping rope on my floor, I was skipping rope on his ceiling. I don’t remember why I was doing it. Maybe it had snowed and I couldn’t run outside. I was trying to do sets of 200 skips without stopping, which can be pretty darn tiring. I was close to completing a full set when Steve walked into my room and said something like, “Dude, dude, what are you doing?”

He could see what I was doing, so I really didn’t want to answer him. And I was angry at myself for not remembering to lock the door. I was hoping he’d just shake his head, say “What a nut,” and go away. But he didn’t. Instead, he playfully grabbed at the rope, prematurely ending my set.

I went crazy. I yelled “What the f*ck did you do that for?” I took hold of both his arms and pushed him out of the room, then slammed the door behind him.

Even now I couldn’t tell you what made me react so violently. I was in athlete mode, where the workout is all that matters. I was known as being a laid-back guy, so Steve’s expression of shock and fear didn’t surprise me as I pushed him out. He had never seen me this way, and certainly hadn’t been expecting me to get so mad. Otherwise he wouldn’t have touched the rope at all.

After I calmed down, I walked downstairs and knocked on his door to apologize. He said it was cool, don’t worry about it. But he also took advantage of the opportunity – as a senior talking to a sophomore – to drop some wisdom on me. He told me that I had to look at the bigger picture of my life, that I needed to take myself seriously as a student. “What are you going to after you graduate? You can’t make a living running track.”

At the time, the comment hit home, like an arrow to the heart. I nodded, conceding, and walked back upstairs. I felt embarrassed. I felt like the lie I had been living had been exposed. I had been basing all my behavior – my disregard for my classes, my immersion in the world of hurdling – on the belief, however remote, that I could, in fact, make a living running track. That I could, one day, become an Olympic champion, that I could, one day, save the world through hurdling. The reality was, I was wasting my parents’ money. Studying infrequently, skipping a good amount of classes. And because I had dropped a couple classes in previous semesters, I wasn’t even a sophomore yet in terms of credits earned. What was I in school for? I had no sense of direction. I had no clue what career path to take. So when Steve said “You can’t make a living running track,” he said the exact thing that I had been denying since my first day of college, and that I could no longer deny.

The reality was also that I wasn’t fast enough, could never be fast enough – no matter how hard I worked, no matter how sincere my love for hurdling was – to make a living running track. I never finished that jump-rope workout.

I remember one time I was walking back to the co-op after stopping by the student center to check my mail. This was during spring break of my junior year. By this time, it was quite clear that I would never be but so good as a hurdler, and I had already unwillingly resigned myself to that fact. The sun was shining, the trees were blooming, a soft wind was blowing. The campus was deserted except for the spring-sport athletes. Robins chirped, bees hummed. The campus, I realized, was beautiful when all the people were gone.

As I walked alone, I found myself asking, Is this all there is, or will it lead to something more? I was referring to my track life. I knew that my collegiate career was winding down. Due to my grades, it was very unlikely that I’d be returning to F&M for another year. So I basically had a month left of competitive track. Is this all there is? There was no bitterness in the question, no feeling that the sport had betrayed me. I just wanted to know. The answer that I heard in response was something along the lines of, It is something unto itself, but it will lead to something more. Because I was in such a serene frame of mind, I trusted that voice. Yes, I understood, all this hurdling will lead to something more. I didn’t need to know what that something was.

Though I clung to my dream as long as I could, the warning signs appeared early and often. When I first started out on the F&M team, I was the fourth-best hurdler on a team with four good hurdlers. By sophomore year, through hard work and unwavering faith in myself, I moved from fourth to first, but even then I was only good enough to barely make it to the conference finals. I finished last in the finals. So I was the eighth-best hurdler in a Division III conference, and with a personal best of 15.63 over the 42’s, I wasn’t even close to making the qualifying time of 14.90 for nationals.

Meanwhile, at some of the bigger meets, I was getting an up-close look at what the true ballers looked like. I remember one indoor meet at Penn State, the winner of the high hurdles was a monstrous dude from Frostburg State in Maryland who looked like he must’ve been a linebacker or fullback on the football team. I remember thinking, there’s no way, if I trained for a thousand years, I could ever beat this guy.

At the end of that sophomore year, at the conference championships, there were two athletes – one a quarter-miler, one a hurdler – who ran for Susquehanna University, who also served as proof that being able to really run fast was first and foremost a matter of talent. The quarter-miler, whose name, I believe, was Mike Spangler, ran with a beautiful, graceful stride. I know it’s cliché to say he ran like a deer, but for real, this guy ran like a deer. Long, bouncing, effortless strides that just swallowed up ground. I think I overheard him telling someone that he was just returning from a bout with mono, but you couldn’t tell by how he ran. When watching him win the quarter-mile, pulling away from the other competitors with that purely poetic stride, I thought to myself, Man, how does he run like that?

The hurdler, Jeff Walden, if I recall correctly, was very tall – about 6-3 – and had a very efficient hurdling style. With my own technique, I was having a lot of trouble with hitting hurdles, especially with the foot of my lead leg, the knee of my trail leg, and the ankle of my trail leg. Being a little under 6-0, I could never seem to get up and over the hurdles cleanly. Over the 39-inch hurdles in high school, my height was perfect to clear those. But when the hurdles were raised to 42 inches at the college level, I was clobbering hurdles right and left.

I remember watching Walden’s race in the prelims at the conference meet – his heat followed mine – and being captivated by what I saw. Walden didn’t hit a single hurdle. Not only that, but he seemed to be so in control of his body, of his speed between the hurdles, of his negotiation of each hurdle. What stood out the most was that he was clearing the hurdles at a different angle than everyone else. Instead of being very horizontal and “skimming” the hurdles the way I had been taught, and the way that all the greats from the past had done, Walden, with his height, was able to look down on the hurdles, and basically seemed to be running downhill.

While I realized that his height gave him an advantage, it occurred to me that I had never seen anyone hurdle that way. Even the world-class hurdlers who were 6-3 or so still hurdled in the horizontal style – extending the lead leg and snapping it down, then whipping the trail leg in front. As with Spangler, I saw in Walden a superior athlete.

Many years later, the memory of Walden played a major role in my decision to ultimately stop teaching the old-school horizontal style of hurdling, and to begin teaching what I refer to as a downhill hurdling style. It’s less effort-ful, more fluid, and is simply more natural.

I doubt that either Spangler or Walden have any memory of me whatsoever. But they both have served as great influences in my belief in the importance of fluidity and ease of motion, as opposed to power and force, in sprinting and hurdling.

When I dropped out of F&M at the end of my third year, having earned only enough credits to be a sophomore, I assumed that my track career was over. As is often the case with athletes my age, I wanted to continue competing, but could find no viable way to do so. I lived at home for a couple years, working full-time at an office job, and I tried that first year to train on my own. I’d head out to the local track after work and run some sprints or go over some hurdles. I ran in a few open meets during the summer, but my times were slow, and I had little motivation. Without a consistent competition schedule, my training also remained inconsistent. The open meets were boring. Maybe three or four other hurdlers, of varying levels of ability, would show up. We were all just trying to keep training, to stay in track shape.

So, the following year, I played a lot of pickup basketball games in a park near the place where I worked. That was a lot more fun than training alone. When playing games up to 16 points, where my team had to win to stay on the court, the level of intensity was high enough to make me feel like I was still a competitive athlete. And I had never stopped liking basketball, so I didn’t find myself missing track.

But working the office job got to be so monotonous that I could feel my soul deflating. Two years of clerical work were enough to convince me that I needed to go back to school. Initially, when I had first left F&M, I had vowed that I was done with school, that I would never go back, to any school. I didn’t believe in the educational system, and I had decided that I would no longer try to change myself to meet society’s standards. If I couldn’t be accepted for who I was, then I’d rather not be accepted at all.

But two years is a long time. I noticed that, despite my disdain for school, I hadn’t lost my love for learning. I read all the time. Mostly fiction, much of it literary. At the job, I could be found during breaks and lunch reading novels by Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, William Faulkner, Ernest Gaines, Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, Toni Morrison. When co-workers saw me reading they’d ask what it was. I’d show them the cover, and they’d give me a funny look, asking, “Is that one of them deep books?” I’d nod, and that would be the end of the conversation.

I was feeling trapped. All these books were expanding my mind, making me think more profoundly, yet I had no one with whom to share my thoughts or bounce ideas off of. I had to go back to school.

I decided to go to the college down the road from my parents’ house. Cheyney University – a small, predominantly black institution in Cheyney, PA. It was literally a five-minute drive from home. So I lived with my parents and commuted to school every day. I had no intention of running track. I just wanted to finish school and earn a degree. Cheyney took some of my credits from F&M, but not all, so I entered there as a second-semester sophomore. I was twenty-three years old.

One day in the fall of my first year there, I walked out to the track for a quick workout. I hadn’t stepped on a track for over a year. As soon as I passed through the gate and looked upon the red oval, I felt a sense of welcoming. I felt like the track was saying, Hey Steve, glad you’re back. We missed you. It was a strange, comforting feeling. A few stray hurdles were sitting against the fence beside lane eight. Against my own better judgment, I set them up and did a few drills before starting my workout. Running over those hurdles, even at a slow speed, I felt like I had to try out for the track team. I still had some races left in me.

I had no rationale for wanting to resume hurdling. I had exhausted all of the practical, external reasons. Though Cheyney’s team was small (about ten guys) and walking on wouldn’t be a problem, it was a Division II school, which meant the competition would be even tougher than that which I had faced at F&M. There was very little chance that I would ever finish in first place in a race ever again. There was a zero percent chance that I would ever be the victorious champion I had been in high school. I’d be on a team with athletes who were all faster than me. Why would I want to put myself through that? Why couldn’t I just go to my classes, grab my diploma, and move on?

That’s what my dad wanted to know. When I broached the news to him that I wanted to run track again, he glared at me. He felt that my focus on track had had a lot to do with my failure at F&M. So he had told me, when I decided to enroll at Cheyney, that this was my chance to get my life together. And I had assured him, initially, that I had no plans of running track. At the time, I had meant it. But then I’d made the mistake of walking out on that track, setting up those hurdles….

So Dad reluctantly gave his consent, warning me that I better keep up my grades if I wanted to stay on the team.

I did well in the two years I ran track at Cheyney. Didn’t really do any better than I had at F&M, but I enjoyed the experience much more. I loved my teammates – hanging out with them, joking with them, just being a part of the group. And I was no longer putting any undue pressure on myself to be a great hurdler. So I could actually enjoy practice sessions and meets. Plus, the learning process that had begun at F&M continued. A new, much longer edition of The Hurdler’s Bible came out, and I read that from cover to cover.

But losing all the time was no fun. Taking up permanent residence at the back of the pack in every interval workout was no fun. While I loved running over hurdles, the fact that I wasn’t competitive at this level made me wonder why I kept going out there. Most people my age, of my ability, had hung up the spikes by now. I was doing very well academically, was working as a writing tutor in the tutorial center, and the idea that I might want to be a teacher for a living was beginning to take shape in my mind. The tutoring work made me realize that teaching was something I could see myself doing. I liked helping people. I liked the feeling that came from collaborating with a student to turn a piece-of-crap rough draft into a solid essay. I found myself wanting to do it on a larger scale.

So the hurdles were moving toward the background in order of importance, and my motivation to continue training was dwindling.

Worst were the bus rides home after poor races. Even a short two-hour ride felt like an all-day slog. During one particular bus ride, after an indoor meet in Connecticut, I was staring out the foggy window, watching light snowflakes whirl through the gray sky, lost in my own thoughts as my teammates laughed and joked all around me, reciting lyrics from rap groups like Public Enemy and Brand Nubian. I had run much slower than my personal best and hadn’t even made it to the finals. I had gone all the way to Connecticut for one garbage 8-second 55 meter hurdle race. I could’ve stayed home.

I was doubting myself, wishing for a way out of this sport. Maybe you could coach. The thought came to me. And it lightened my mood. I had  accumulated a lot of knowledge over the years. I was planning my own hurdle workouts all the time. I understood the technical aspects of hurdling more than any of my coaches ever had. And I liked helping people. Yeah, maybe I could coach.

***

In Part Three of “Go Where the Hurdle Take You,” I will discuss my early years as a coach. Part Three will appear in next month’s issue of The Hurdle Magazine.

***

Note: The title of Part II – “In My End is my Beginning” – is borrowed from a line in the poem Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot.

 

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